All the hairs on my body stood away from my skin. My heart pounded loudly, and by its efforts chased back the drug mist until it was a shroud wrapped about owkahen’s disclosures. Under my shield, awkwardly, I reached out and tried to disperse the mist. I had foreseen this moment: the stone like frozen ocean deeps and the straw-strewn corridor and the two of us, naked, weaponless hips brushing, his arm about my shoulders, as we assayed the climb out of the bowels of Dey-Ceilneeth. But I had not seen the “how” of it: owkahen shows me only fragments of what is coming to be, not always how the thing takes shape. What it showed me then by way of the wraithlike mist wrapped around the schematic of my days caused me to shiver and pull him closer.
“The wehr-rage. Sereth, do you feel it?”
He nodded. “It is a pity the guard had no weapon. I would rather fight my battles with sword. It is less taxing. Perhaps the next ....”
The next was not long coming, but yielded no weapons to us, for the ossasim and their wingless siblings are well-armed by nature and only strap blades about them when in ceremonies concerning their human kin. Three ossasim, two wingless, skidded down the tall, narrow staircase, to fall lifeless at our feet.
It had been so smoothly done that I had not noted them until they had started to tumble, but Sereth sank down on the stairs, shaking his head savagely. His chest was heaving, and the hand that held the torch shook. “Curse this drug, and these ... things,” he muttered.
I blinked back tears.
“Sereth, there must be hundreds of wehrs in Dey-Ceilneeth. We cannot fight them all. Please ...”
He glared up at me. “Please what, Estri? Leave Chayin sunk in Wehrdom’s slime? We owe him more than that, no matter what he has come to feel about us. If by our actions we have driven him to seek elsewhere for what comfort we could not provide; then whose fault is that? I told you, long ago, that we would one day come to contest over you.”
“Over me? Sereth, you do not understand.”
“I understand what he wants with Mahrlys, what he sought in her arms.”
“It is not just that.” I stepped over the tangled corpses and sat beside him on the narrow stair, though every nerve in my body pleaded with me to flee, though my hands shook and my mouth was dry as the Parset Desert.
“Sereth, you lump us together; Chayin and me, and call us lacking in compassion and ascribe that trait to the Shapers who sired us; but when it counts, you do not see. He is his father’s son: Raet was a ... being to whom Wherdom would have been irresistible. He and I are cousins, it is true, but my father’s folk would not condone such as this.”
He snorted, and pushed to his feet. “Estri, some intelligence has been at work here, and what it has wrought sickens me. I could not care less whose hand was turned to the task, but you can be sure your father and my predecessor did not raise a hand against it.”
“And you will?”
“Watch me.” His breathing was regular. His eyes were clear. I did not doubt him, but only matched him up that odd staircase, which could be best climbed diagonally, for the height of each step was uncomfortable to the stride and the breadth would not support a human foot other than lengthwise.
“Sereth ...”
“Estri, I know what I can do and what I cannot. I am not unaware of what the time will and will not provide.
Down!”
And I threw myself upon the stairs as a wind ruffled my tangles and with a rushing noise a winged wehr dived feet first, talons gleaming, at Sereth from the vaulted dark above. He cast the torch. It rolled down a dozen steps, the light from it dancing crazily.
He had no footing there, on those stairs barely the width of my hand. He pressed back against the wall, and the dark shadow whirled and dived again, but he was rolling upon the steps when the wehr struck the wall, and on the thing’s back before it recovered from the concussion of striking unyielding stone.
Mind skills take a moment, or two, or three, to bring to bear. He had not had them. They grappled, rolling down the sheer staircase. I heard the whooshing sound, even as I leaped to follow, and reached without looking up into the wehr-awareness that hunted me, not caring that all of Wehrdom might enter into battle with me through that door I had opened. No, I did not care, only assayed my descent, searching my pursuer’s nature. Then I saw through its eyes, saw my flight, sensed its dive, talons, extended ready to plunge into my back and dash me against the wall. I felt its urge to gut me. Then I severed its optic nerves, and threw myself left.
My shoulder hit the leftward wall of the stairwell with a crunch, echoed almost immediately by the thud of the blind wehr striking the stair headfirst.
I rubbed my shoulder, shaking, deep in the wehrthought, and threw a blast of outrage into that buzzing network that stopped the wehr-converse as if it had never been. In that silence, I could not promulgate the deafening effect I had used previously.
So I withdrew from the quiet, disturbed that Wehrdom had so easily come upon a countermeasure.
“Estri,” rasped Sereth, reclaiming the torch, “you are going to have to kill swiftly. There is no subtlety in war. There is sometimes quarter, but not this day.”
“Have we declared war?” I panted, taking his hand and by it gaining my feet.
“We are considering it.” He grinned, a grim and momentary flashing of teeth.
It was then, while still the edges of my mind brushed Wehrdom, that I heard the other sound, the trumpeting that echoed through Wehrdom’s ranks, but I knew not what to make of it, and had many other more pressing concerns.
When we had gained the entrance to Dey-Ceilneeth proper, eleven ossasim and fifteen of their wingless kin lay dead in the lower dark.
“This way,” grunted Sereth, and I recalled that while I lay with Eviduey he had walked Dey-Ceilneeth.
We did not speak upon the way to Chayin, did not exchange even conjectures as to where he might be found. That was as clear to Sereth as to myself. Owkahen offered up that information with a glib smile and unmistakable anticipation.
Upon the way to Mahrlys’ chamber we killed a black ossasim, but it was not Eviduey. That was all, though Wehrdom growled so deep and loud I felt it through all my shields, as one might feel a motor humming beneath one’s feet.
What we did see, however, was two groups of ossasim fighting among themselves.
“What think you?” I hissed the query.
“Quiet!” said Sereth, flattened against the wall where the corridor branched. Then: “Now.” And we slid past the corridor’s entrance unseen.
“I would give this whole continent for a sharp blade,” he grated, glowering back the way he had come, at the corridor down whose length lay those quarters we had been assigned.
I wondered what the chances were of our belongings remaining in that chamber, then dismissed it, thinking that I could soon attempt to shape him a blade—manifest one from its molecular constituents. But in my heart I knew I would not, that this was no battle to be won by steel or stra, the green metal from which Se’keroth had been forged. And suddenly I saw the blade, and its bearer, and the blade exploded into light, and fell spinning down a sheer cliff face. Then a whelt’s visage peered at me, silver beak aclack, and I snapped my mind shut and faced what lay before us: the rushed door leading to the keep of Mahrlys-iis-Vahais. We had been immured long enough for it to be replaced.
I touched his arm, cautioning. Under his shadowed cheekbones, a muscle twitched. The sound of his teeth grinding whispered in the corridor.
With his hand upon the wood frame of the door, he hesitated, and drew back, and stood very still, his eyes upon his feet. Then he ran his hand over his brow, and tossed his hair back from it, and turned upon me a look of such self-consuming agony that tears filled my eyes and my vision swam.
“Ci’ves, you are free with advice. Give me some now.”
I thought of what lay before him. I searched for encouragement, but my mind was as empty as a tidal pool when its sea has become only a memory scoured on the rocks.
They had been of one flesh for years. Between them lay such blood debts as could hardly be counted. I said only: “I, too, love Chayin.”
And he nodded and tried the door, which gave to his touch.
The cahndor lay with a red robe draped over his shoulders, and Mahrlys-iis-Vahais hunkered down between his legs, her head on his thigh. About lay the remains of a feast, the silver dishes glowing soft in the oil lamp’s light.
As we slid within and closed the door behind us, he looked up, his hand on Mahrlys’ black-haired head.
Sereth slammed the wooden bar into place. Mahrlys-iis-Vahais sobbed, raised her head, bared her teeth, and growled, her eyes rolling.
My flesh-lock froze her. I could not take a chance that through her linkage Wehrdom might converge upon us before we were ready. In her terror at finding herself imprisoned in her own body, unable even to blink her eyes, was a warning for Wehrdom which I wished them to receive. I gambled that her plight would stay them. But I wondered, as Chayin unsteadily rose and faced Sereth, who leaned, arms folded, against the door, whether danger to any individual might constrain such a whole as Wehrdom showed itself to be. Up from the floors below, and through the windows and riding the air and by way of my sensing, I chronicled the wehr-rage. From all about I sensed things dying: within the forests and in the maze and in the sky and all through Dey-Ceilneeth the ineluctable massacre we had triggered by slaying the guard wehrs waxed, screeching. Once started, the wehr-rage would continue until the wehrs lay exhausted. This I knew. Chayin had eloquently warned us previously. But we had not heeded him. Behind my eyes hung a film of blood lust that threatened, even though I was its quarry, to enlist me. I looked at the cahndor through that red haze, and all traces of compassion, of love, were burned from my heart.
I only noted his uncertain steps and his faraway, inward sight as he struggled to make sense of what he saw in the face of the wehr-wind.
The membranes cloaked his eye, unmoving, protective. He looked at us, at our bruises, our lacerations. Weaponless, naked, befouled, we faced him, and he blinked, and rubbed his right shoulder, and croaked:
“Sereth. I thought ... She said ...” Then he ceased, and his fingers found his chald belt and toyed there, and he seemed to shrink smaller.
The silence made my ears ache. They measured each other.
“Release her,” growled the cahndor at last, of Mahrlys.
“Chayin,” Sereth murmured. “Tell me what you thought. Say something, anything, that will absolve you of blame.” He was calm, laconic. I found need to sit, and sank to the floor. My legs would not hold me.
“Release her. She is mine.” Chayin glowered.
“Chayin, I would hear what owkahen has been whispering in your ear, and what you make of it.”
“Then release her. I have taken her in couchbond. You have Estri ....” And he blinked, and looked away, and it seemed that he shuddered.
“Estri, do it,” said Sereth to me, pushing away from the door to ease his way warily toward Chayin.
I did, but only after I crawled over to her and made it very clear in a whisper what I would do to her if she so much as coughed.
“Where were you?” Chayin roared suddenly. “Why do you not bear Se’keroth if you went to reclaim it?”
“I come to you dressed only in my own filth, bearing heavy wounds, and you talk to me of fantasy. How is it that your sensing has so utterly failed you? Or is it that you would prefer not to believe that your couch-mate has deceived you?” Sereth spat that term, which is one not bandied lightly about on our western shore. “Your couch-mate,” he continued, while, amazingly, from Mahrlys’ huge green eyes silent tears ran in a steady stream, “drugged us, immured us in those dungeons beneath, and worked this art upon us.”
And very slowly, arms held away from his body, Sereth turned full around. When he again faced Chayin, he added: “Is Wehrdom’s wine so heady, are her thighs so soft, that you and I will enter the circle over it?”
It is a rhetorical circle, that of which he spoke, and its meaning is a fight to the death.
“Say something, wehr,” I hissed. But she only sat with those silent tears.
Chayin wheeled on his heels and strode to the wall and slammed his fist into the ruby hangings there. From without came a howl, and then another, and the sounds of flight and pursuit.
“Do you not realize what you obstruct?” came Chayin’s tortured query. The bunched muscles slid on his back, his hands crumpled the hanging, and with a vicious yank and he wrenched it from its hooks, unveiling a window that overlooked Dey-Ceilneeth’s maze.
“No, I do not,” said Sereth and I together.
Mahrlys then attempted to rise. I cautioned her as to the inadvisiability of such a move, and she sank back.
But Chayin had seen, and he strode to stand between us.
“No, you do not,” he mimicked savagely. “What powers here contest, what might be gained, does not at all concern you. The wehrs offend you. That is enough for you both. I can smell the death on you. You have judged and now would mete out their fate. Little is it to you that this culture, as old as that we call Silistran, fights its own battle to survive.
“We came here, we upset a balance, we must restore it.”
“Are you telling me,” said Sereth, “that you can excuse what your creature has done to us with her own hands? On what scales are you weighing us, that after all we have shared, Estri and I sum less than this saiisa whose legs you will split a few times and then discard her as you have all others?”
“No, by Uritheria, under whose wing I yet stand, no! Sereth”—and he stepped close, and I saw tears of frustration there—“I tried to tell you. Sereth, there is a thing here that must be done, and that thing has determinedly sought me. There is a schism in Wehrdom. Curse your unwillingness to hear what does not suit you: there is a struggle here, and it is one best viewed from the distance of evolution, and you will not hear that! Wehrdom seeks renewal before the doors of Othdaliee close for a thousand years. It was that reason that Wehrdom courted me—”
“You are right, I will not hear that,” said Sereth. “Not because I do not believe it, because it does not matter.”