The Well of Darkness Read online

  “Sharam, I told you to leave the others—” Obilin’s voice.

  “I did; I am telling them; they aren’t—” Sharam.

  Obilin’s voice again, menacing. “It is your doing.”

  The sound of bronze striking bronze, then Tarani’s voice.

  “Too slow, Obilin. You fleason,” she spat at him, and, had I not been quite so busy, I would have shuddered at the contempt and power in her voice. As it was, I found myself listening more carefully.

  “I would kill him with my own hands, and then destroy myself, before I would allow you to command me as Molik did!”

  The howling came closer, stopped abruptly.

  “There,” I heard Obilin say. “You may have the mindgift, whore, but Sharam knows his animals. They are his, not yours.“

  “Are they?” Tarani’s voice said, then: “Attack”

  The second dralda stopped worrying me; I pushed the dead one away, relieved beyond words to be free of its musky smell, and watched three dralda stalk Obilin and Sharam as Tarani, sword and dagger both ready in her hands, backed through the line of animals toward me. The big, wild-looking dogs were silent except for skin-tensing growls.

  “No,” Sharam shouted, pointing at me with one hand, Tarani with the other. “They are the prey. Attack!”

  The dralda stopped, looked back at us, hesitating.

  “Attack, I said!” Sharam yelled, and grabbed the nearest one by the fur at its shoulders. He lifted, pulled, tried to turn the animal, then howled in pain as powerful jaws closed on his wrist.

  That seemed to decide things. I caught a glimpse of Obilin backing away from a lunging dralda—but I was moving, myself, by then.

  Tarani was right behind me; we ran west along the road. I was trying not to listen to the noise behind us—yelling, snapping, chewing.

  Or the sound beside me—sobbing.

  A shape loomed up in the dimness of the road; Tarani and I skidded to a halt and crouched back, ready for another fight.

  “No!” a scared voice cried, while the shape backed away hastily, hands upraised. “I came to meet you. Carn? Tellor’s caravan?”

  “You were supposed to be at the joining,” I said.

  “You didn’t find enough people already there?” the voice asked sarcastically. “You’re lucky I stuck around when I saw who else was waiting for you.”

  True, I thought.

  “All right,” I said. “Now what?”

  The faceless man dragged us into the reeds, where a small, damp clearing had been cut away. Another man waited for us there, and the two of them exchanged clothes with us.

  “The usual plan,” the first man said, “is for us to step back out on the road and pretend we’re you. I think we’ll change that plan, considering.”

  “You’ll have to hurry,” the other man said. “There’s a river crossing about an hour west of here. Take it, and go straight north—no roads, mind you, directly north.

  “That’s the only way you can hope to find Tellor’s caravan by dawn. He knows you’re coming, but he won’t wait for you.” They slapped us on the back, and pushed us out toward the road.

  “Good fortune,” followed us as a whisper.

  16

  It was nearly dawn before Tarani and I spoke again. We had located Tellor’s caravan and were watching the bustle of camp-breaking.

  “Do your clothes fit well?” I asked.

  “They fit,” she said. “They smell vile.“

  I had already noticed that.

  “Vleks,” I said. “I don’t think we can look forward to a fun trip.”

  “I prefer the company of vleks,” she said drily, “to that of Lords or dralda.”

  “Thank you, Tarani,” I said, and she looked at me.

  In the growing light, I could see the lines at eyecorners and around her mouth—they seemed to be a fixture now, worn in by the strain of the past few weeks. I wanted to smooth these lines with my fingertips, but I held back.

  Time, I reminded myself. Give her time.

  “Why do you thank me?” Tarani asked.

  “Your work with the dralda saved us,” I said. We both knew that wasn’t what I really meant, so I stumbled on. “Thank you for what you said to Obilin.”

  She drew into herself, holding her shoulders, and turned her face away. “What I did to the dralda—it destroyed them,” she said in a small voice. “And as for what I said to Obilin, I spoke in anger—”

  She stopped, caught her breath, started again.

  “That is untrue,” she said. “I meant what I said. Molik was—was filthy inside. Thymas was sweet and kind and joyful—but he felt desire only, and that for—not for me, but for the image I allowed him to see. Being with him was more pleasant, and did not involve my gift, but it was not—not basically different from what I had done for Molik.”

  She snapped around to face me, her dark eyes shining in a way I had never seen before but I would never forget.

  “At last I have been touched with love, Rikardon. I shall not permit any other kind of touch.”

  I leaned toward her, wanting more than anything to hold her against me, just to hold her. But she stepped back and laughed shakily, deliberately lifting the intense mood.

  “And in that line of thought,” she said, “perhaps it would be best if those on the caravan believe me to be a man.”

  I forced myself to think instead of want, and I considered her suggestion.

  “We’ll be on the road for a long time,” I said. “A sustained illusion would drain your strength, and we may need it later.”

  She jumped at that. “You mean Obilin—surely not!”

  “No,” I said, praying that I was right. “I mean Worfit.”

  “The roguelord from Raithskar,” she said, nodding. “We will need to pass through Chizan, which he controls now.”

  “And your skill will help us there,” I added. “So—” I looked closely at the people moving in the melee of bawling vleks. “It seems there are female vlek handlers,” I said. I smiled at her. “But do wear your scarf,” I cautioned her. “There must be fewer dark-headed handlers than female handlers.”

  “As you say.” She pulled a soiled and wrinkled scarf from her belt, made a face when she sniffed at it, then arranged it over the short, silky fur to hide it. Then she adjusted her weapons—nobody traveled the desert in Gandalara unarmed, so they weren’t out of place—and threw back her shoulders. “I am ready,” she said.

  We went down to meet Tellor, who turned out to be a large man, beefy with muscles, with a rough and physical sense of humor. A joke was met with a roaring laugh and a backslap that, often as not, sent you face-first into the sand. After acknowledging our arrival, appraising Tarani’s body with inoffensive appreciation, and turning us over to the vlekmaster, he never spoke to us.

  Tellor mastered the caravan. That is, he had contracted with a number of merchants to move them and their goods across the desert. This particular caravan was made up of only very rich merchants, who brought not only goods for sale, but retinues of servants and “sales help”—men and women who would sit within a circle of goods at the markets and talk price to prospective buyers. There were also mercenary guards and us—the vlek handlers.

  The vleks were goat-size, with spindly legs, dull minds, and unpleasant dispositions. They were the means for moving trade goods, the poles and distinctly colored awnings that marked a merchant’s market territory, food and water for the whole caravan, sleeping pallets, feed for themselves, and personal travel supplies for Tellor, the merchants, and their people.

  A vlek couldn’t carry more than about a hundred pounds of stuff on its back, but two to four of the creatures could be harnessed to deep-bedded, two-wheeled carts and the load in the cart could be, perhaps, a third heavier than the total weight manageable by the vleks individually.

  If I had had the time to think about it, I would have expected the caravan to be heading for Iribos, the closest Refreshment House to Eddarta. Since Carn had mentioned Va
sklar and Stomestad specifically, I would have assumed that the Fa’aldu slave route led from Iribos north and east to the big Refreshment House at which we had left a wounded Thymas on our first approach to Eddarta.

  I would have been wrong, so I was just as glad I’d never thought about it. Tellor’s caravan was bound on the northern route, aimed directly for Stomestad. A map would have shown it as ten man-days from Eddarta, and normal caravan travel (vlek-speed) would have stretched the time to the two seven-days Carn had mentioned. But this caravan was so big that there were more carts than usual and a lower vlek/cart proportion, so that the animals tired quickly and the wide-based wheels of the carts slowed us down.

  It took us twenty-two miserable days to reach the Refreshment House at Stomestad.

  In all that time, Tarani and I had little time for speech, none at all for privacy. For the first few days, the work was borderline interesting, as learning any new job can be. But once it became “routine”—that is, as soon as we could perform all the required tasks with dependable competence—it became only work—nasty, hard work.

  I had hoped that familiarity with vleks would give me an appreciation of some positive quality I hadn’t yet seen in the animals.

  Not a chance.

  Vleks bawled and bucked and did their best to bite the handler when they were harnessed, loaded, unharnessed, unloaded, fed, or penned in the ridiculous pole-and-rope enclosure that was thrown up every night. They never seemed to be quiet. At night—well, there were over a hundred of them crowded in together, nearly half of them female. For vleks, the odds were that at least five females would be in season at any one time.

  We didn’t get much rest.

  The trip wasn’t made more pleasant by the two-legged company, either. Vlek handlers are—to put it kindly—a lower-class crowd. Had I been alone, I might have enjoyed their rough humor and foul language. That, in itself, didn’t bother Tarani; she had traveled with caravans before, though not in just this way. What bothered us both was that most of the women who became vlek handlers were the type who didn’t object to being the prize in the nightly mondea game.

  We were informed of this tradition on the first night.

  Tarani objected.

  So did I.

  It took five nights of her refusal and my bruises to convince the other handlers that we were atypical—and, at that, we were never quite sure they were convinced. So we stayed close together at night, and only one of us slept at a time.

  The snatches of rest, brief as they were, brought me pleasant but unremembered dreams that always left me feeling better—calm and almost happy, at least until the needs of our situation made themselves felt. Tarani, too, seemed to waken twice at each rising: once from sleep, and again from an open-eyed daze. But Tarani’s face revealed a fleeting expression of fear before she moved on about the day’s business.

  I asked her about it once.

  “It is nothing, really,” she said. “I have dreams which are … odd. Fatigue and tension, doubtless, are causing them.”

  She didn’t invite further discussion, and I didn’t press the issue. I didn’t want to discuss her dreams either, because I thought I knew what they were.

  It was obvious these weren’t the ordinary sort of nightmares—waking from those would have produced relief at the realization they were only dreams. It seemed to me the dreams, in themselves, were not the problem. Rather, Tarani was disturbed by the fact that she was having that particular kind of dream—she had said “dreams”, so it wasn’t one dream, repeating itself.

  I‘ll bet it‘s Atonia, I thought to myself. Trying to assert control? Or just remembering? I should think that, for a Gandalaran, dreaming about a world two-thirds covered with water would be a distressingly alien experience.

  Like me, Tarani quickly shed the after-effect of her dreams, and we were both kept too busy to think about it much.

  We reached Stomestad at last. Tellor called out the ritual request for shelter; the symbolic cloth gates were opened; the vleks were led in.

  Stomestad was the largest of all the Refreshment Houses, but by the time Tellor, the merchants, and all their people had settled into the four-bed cubicles that lined one long wall of the courtyard, there were few sheltered beds left. Those were assigned by lottery to the rest of us; since the caravan would stay in Stomestad for several days, chances were, nearly all of us would get at least one night’s sleep indoors.

  Neither Tarani nor I won the first lottery. I was disappointed, but when I looked around to commiserate with Tarani, I couldn’t find her anywhere in the crowd gathered outside the Refreshment House entrance. I panicked (wondering who else was missing) until I caught a flash of movement at the edge of my vision. A familiar white shape was just sinking out of my line of sight, around the corner of the rectangular, walled enclosure of Stomestad.

  A hand tugged at my sleeve. I looked down to see a small boy, dressed in a child-size version of the long white tunic that the Fa’aldu always wore in their dealings with travelers.

  “Sir,” the boy began nervously. I smiled; he grinned back at me and went on with more confidence. “If it pleases you, sir, the Respected Elder invites you and the lady to speak with him privately.”

  I remembered the boy from our earlier visit—he was a nephew of Vasklar, the “Respected Elder” in question.

  “Thank you, Hil,” I said, and the boy beamed at the sound of his name. “We will come quickly.”

  The boy ran through the opening in the salt-block wall that was the only entrance to the compound. I ignored the curious stares of the crew, who had been too far away to hear what the boy had said, and headed around the corner.

  Tarani was playing with Lonna—catching her in the circle of her arms, “letting” the bird slip through and spread her wings to fly, then catching her again. When I appeared, the play stopped, and Lonna took to the air. Tarani came toward me, looking puzzled.

  “Still no sign of pursuit,” she said.

  We had seen Lonna frequently during the trip, but caution had dictated that the bird not join us and make us even more noticeable than we were already. But Tarani had been in continuous contact with Lonna. At first the news of a clear backtrail had been good; then it had begun to worry us.

  “I do not like it,” Tarani said, emphatically. “Indomel must know, by now, that we are both gone. Granted that he cannot know where we are, I would expect him to search every possible route from Eddarta.”

  I shrugged. “He has the Ra’ira,” I said, “and you proved to be little help with learning how to use it. Maybe he’s just decided to cut his losses and be glad you aren’t in Eddarta, stirring up trouble.”

  Her eyes narrowed.

  “Do you believe that?” she demanded.

  “No,” I said, and laughed. “Listen, I’ve got good news and bad news.”

  “I beg your pardon?” she said.

  At last a permanent contribution to Gandalaran culture, I thought. A cliché joke.

  “The bad news is,” I said, “that we lost the lottery.”

  She groaned.

  “The good news is, Vasklar just sent for us.”

  Tarani brightened. “Then we won’t be expected to maintain this—” She slapped her arm. “—fleabitten disguise any longer.”

  “Not if I have anything to say about it,” I promised.

  Lonna dropped down to hover in front of me for a moment. I stroked her breast feathers gently, careful not to pull them in the wrong direction as the thick muscles beneath them moved with the slow rhythm of her wingbeat. The bird dipped to Tarani for a similar caress, then took to the sky.

  I shaded my eyes with my hand to watch her go, until her white body was indistinguishable from the cloud layer.

  “Lonna remembers Keeshah,” Tarani said quietly, slipping her hand into mine. “Her image of you is always blended with that of the sha’um.” She paused. “Rikardon, will Keeshah return?”

  We seem to know each other so well, I thought. I forget that I hav
e to tell her some things before she knows them.

  “When this happened to my—to Markasset’s—father, his sha’um never returned from the Valley.”

  “But surely that is rare?” Tarani said. “Thymas talked of this once, and he said that the sha’um are gone for a year. Among the Sharith, they believe the sha’um stay in the Valley long enough to see their cubs born and sheltered to a certain age. But no one knows. Those who return do not remember—or at least do not speak of—what occurred in the Valley.”

  “Did Thymas say that they always return?” I asked.

  “No.” Sadly, pressing my hand. “This must be very hard for you, my love.”

  I reached for her then. She came into my arms, but I could feel her trembling. As the seconds passed and the overwhelming need we’d shared in Carn’s cellar didn’t reappear, she relaxed and returned my embrace.

  Too soon for me, we stepped apart and went to see Vasklar.

  The Elder was truly old, his headfur dark and patchy. He was scandalized when he saw us, and he sent children scurrying to the bath-house to prepare tubs scented with dried herbs. They were small tubs, little more than big water troughs made of rough tile. Compared to the deep, ceramic-lined tub in Thanasset’s home in Raithskar, they weren’t much.

  Compared to twenty-two days in the unwashed company of vleks and their handlers, it was paradise.

  When we were clean and wearing borrowed clothes, Tarani and I joined the Stomestad family at their huge dining table in the inner courtyard. It was a privilege shared by few non-Fa’aldu; I owed it to Balgokh, the Elder at Yafnaar who had helped me and taken a liking to me. He had spread the word to the other Refreshment Houses. Among the Fa’aldu, I was a celebrity. Tarani—known to them before this as the dancer and illusionist—was welcomed on my account.

  At dinner, I recounted the edited story of my arrival in Raithskar, wherein Markasset had lost his memory, mended his loose ways, and helped his father, and had been rewarded with the steel sword, recovered memories, and a new name. The Stomestad had heard it before, but they received it with as much show of pleasure as when I had first told it. I dared not look at Tarani, sure that she was gaping at me in amazement. She had heard part of the story in a different version; she thought I was a Visitor.