The Hidden Fire (Book 2) Read online

She pulled her hand away. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  As before, they were brought to Aiyan’s stump where Thurlun waited with an older, weaker Ilven man. “My bargain still stands, Candy,” Thurlun said. “Kill this man and you all go free.”

  He laid his arm across the slave’s shoulders. “This one isn’t going to make it. He’s going downhill fast. He’s going to slip soon, and he’ll be croc food when he does. You would be doing him a favor.”

  Aiyan met Thurlun’s eye. “Then you should let him rest.” To the man he signed, ‘Be well.’

  “If that’s the way you want to play it,” Thurlun growled, “then I’ll up the bet.” He turned to Guppy, nodding toward Kyric and Lerica. “Shackle them. And make them the foremost haulers.”

  Lerica’s eyes widened and she made a start. For a moment Kyric thought she would bolt for the jungle. Thurlun drew a pistol and pointed to the marksmen in the trees. “Bad idea, girl.”

  Guppy fetched the makeshift anvil and the others held them while he finished with the rivets. As Ral led them to the river, Kyric heard Aiyan say to Thurlun, “Have you managed to get my locket open yet?”

  Ral placed them at the head of the line, and they pulled the nets in all morning without a word. Kyric soon learned that ankle irons were more than an inconvenience. He couldn’t take a wide enough stance to use his full strength and it made the fishing all the harder. When a big lakka got loose on the bank and flopped near him, jaws snapping, he tried to leap away and tripped on the chain, Ral’s quick thrust with his spear saving him from a vicious bite. And the shackles hurt. They dug into his ankle bones, and the pain got worse as the day went on until it was a quiet little torture that never let up.

  When Guppy came down with a keg to water them, Lerica said, “So much for jumping the moat tonight.”

  “Not at all,” Kyric returned. “I might not get a running start, but I’m sure I can still swim in these irons. But first we have to think of a way to run the crocodiles off.” He wiped his forehead on his sleeve. “I need to speak with Aiyan. He must have some sort of plan. He must.”

  “What do you expect him to do,” she hissed at him, “break his chain and kill all of these men? He can no more do that than we can. These bastards are professional slavers and they’re good at it. There’s something about his history with Thurlun that’s making him join in this contest of will. And he will lose.”

  She leaned in close to him, speaking in a harsh whisper. “You don’t know what this man did in Aleria. If Aiyan doesn’t give in, he will kill us all.”

  She pulled back and looked him in the eye. “Tell me, what was your father like?”

  “I never knew him. I never had a father.”

  She made a grim face. “That’s why you don’t see it. The way Thurlun and Aiyan act with each other. We need to speak to the Ilven and see if they’re really unwilling to fight.”

  A distant shout from upstream echoed down the river, followed by an answering call from Pacey in his treetop post. A wide four-oared boat, bigger than a whaleboat, rounded the bend. A handful of Terrulans huddled in the middle while a few more pulled at the oars. A tall, broad-shouldered man stood over them in the stern, a heavy falchion in one hand, a weapon that was as much cleaver as sword.

  Thurlun came striding out of his hut. “It’s about time,” he shouted. He called to Pacey, “How many do they have?”

  “Uh, nine I think. Yes, I count nine.”

  Thurlun went stiff. “What? Only nine? I’ve lost seven since they set out. We’re barely breaking even on slaves.” He shook clenched fists at the sky. “Goddess damn it to hell!”

  They beached the boat near the huts and unloaded the newly-capture slaves. They appeared to be Ilven except for a skinny teenage boy who had swirling designs painted on his chest. Besides the big guy there were three other guards.

  Thurlun marched up to them. “This will never do, Breed,” he said to the man, who looked part Baskillian and part Alerian. “Are these all you could find?”

  Breed was extraordinarily composed. “We found a new hamlet, but it was nearly empty,” he said with a slight dialect. “The Ilven are getting better at hiding.” His face was like stone. He hardly showed any expression when he spoke.

  “I hired you to be a tracker. Track them!”

  Breed didn’t move. “I did. That’s how I found these. But the whole tribe is splitting up, going different directions, and you told me to be back in five days. So here I am.”

  Lerica nudged Kyric with her elbow. “I don’t like this one,” she whispered. “He’s the only man that isn’t afraid of Thurlun.”

  Thurlun took a step towards Breed. “Then you’ll be going out again, very soon. Use tomorrow to get ready and be off at first light the next day. Don’t come back until you have at least twenty.”

  Breed walked away and Thurlun called to Ral. “Get the new ones shackled and put them on the second net. We’ll see if we can get both nets going at once.”

  “We could use a third hand in the boat,” Ral said.

  “Try the new kid with the body paint.”

  With both nets going and two teams of pickers at each net, the harvesting of halos at the tables became the bottleneck. When Ral selected two men from the haulers to go help at the tables, they hung their heads, as if their time had come to an end.

  The skinny teenager was dead within an hour. The dingy was beyond the middle of the river, where he and the other two boatmen had laid the second net and were curving back with the loose end for the haulers. Despite the shackles, he vaulted the gunwale with one hand and swam for the opposite bank. The shackles must have slowed him more that he expected, his stroke becoming an awkward dog-paddle. Pacey’s first shot struck him between the shoulder blades, and he simply rolled over without a sound and sank. The crocodiles scurried into the water.

  Thurlun ran over when he heard the shot. When Ral told him what happened he only said, “Shit. There goes another set of irons.”

  At the end of the day, Kyric saw that the water keg had been left sitting out. He went over to Ral, who seemed to be the most decent of the guards, and asked him, “Do you mind if I give Aiyan some water. Guppy forgot to do it at noon.”

  Ral looked at him suspiciously. “Be quick about it. And if you try anything clever, you know what.” He waved to the one-eared sharpshooter who manned the tree above them. “Keep an eye on this one.”

  The water keg held little more than a quart, and Aiyan drank it dry. “Unseasonably warm today,” he said.

  Kyric dropped to one knee. “I’m going to get you loose tonight. I’ll wait till midnight and swim the moat. Lerica warned me about the alarm device in the tool shed. There must be something in there that can cut this chain.”

  Aiyan didn’t look at him. “It’s not worth risking the crocodiles. Besides, I overheard Thurlun talking to Pacey. They’re going to keep a night watch from now on.”

  “Then what should I do?”

  “I will get us out of this,” Aiyan said, at last meeting his eye. Kyric was shocked into silence. The spark of the warrior no longer shone there. There was a flame, but it was a dirty, smoldering red fire, not the flame of the spirit — a deep twisted anger that reminded Kyric of the madman Aiyan had been the night he met him.

  “But it might take a few more days.” A darkness passed behind his gaze then, like black smoke from the fire. “He will call me by my name. And he will acknowledge my knighthood. He will in the end.”

  “This is what it’s about? Are you mad? Your Colonel Thurlun has lost all direction, and if you somehow beat him at his game he will kill you for it.”

  “No!” said Aiyan through clenched teeth. “He will not kill me.”

  “Aiyan,” Kyric whispered urgently, “if you have a way out of this, please do it now. You have nothing to prove here. What has this to do with the Knights of the Flaming Blade? There are no men of the dragon’s blood here. You cannot let a personal matter take precedence over the noble purposes of your
order. You are the most remarkable man I have ever known. What was it you said to me at the games? I need you to be the knight I know you are. If you can escape, do it tonight.”

  Aiyan lifted his manacled hand. “I’m sorry, Kyric, but right or wrong, the only way I can find out of this is through my battle of spirit with Thurlun. But it must build before it can break.”

  “Hey!” called Ral, “I didn’t say you could have a conversation. Get in queue for the island.”

  Kyric didn’t have any more to say anyway. He began to turn when Aiyan murmured, “You know, when you sit here in one place all day, you can see the island move.”

  Kyric turned back. “What?”

  “Yes, it floats. It’s wedged against that big tree on the other side, but it still has some room to drift.”

  Kyric shook his head. “How can an island float?”

  “It’s made of peat. I thought I recognized the odor. They have floating islands of peat in the lowland lakes of Oriana. I’ve seen a few that were even bigger than this one. I’d have thought you knew about them.”

  Later, after they had eaten their fill of angel ray, Lerica tore the cuffs off her trousers and wrapped them around her shackles for padding. Kyric wandered among the Ilven, looking for Rolirra. When he found her, she nodded, knowing what he would say. He said-signed it anyway.

  ‘I am ready to go with you to the rainlands.’

  CHAPTER 11: Dreamlands

  They passed through the opening in the dream tree and stepped into an underground cavern. “There are many ways leading from these caves,” said Rolirra. “Most of the ways are known. I’m looking for a narrow tunnel.”

  A hole in the roof of the cavern was open to the sky and sunlight shone through. Rolirra found her tunnel and led them along a dark passage that ended in the soft light of dawn. They went out to find themselves standing on the banks of an enormous river. It was miles across, so wide that it flowed with dozens of currents and counter-currents.

  “This is the world river,” Rolirra said. “The bending forest lies on the other side. I think that would be the easiest way to go.”

  “It’s a far swim.”

  “Oh, we must not attempt to swim it — to swim in it is to be lost in it. We must find another way to cross.”

  Kyric turned to her. “This isn’t the first time you’ve spoken of needing to find things. Do you mean that there are things already there to find, or is this your way of saying that we need to create them, to dream them up?”

  She shook her head at him. “You still think of this side as the dream and the other as real. It is all real, Kyric. And the answer to your question is somewhere in-between. We cannot truly create anything, but we can find it, we can make it so, if the potential for it exists. The wings I found in the desert of light, you could never find here.”

  He smiled helplessly. “So what are we looking for?”

  “Sometimes it is not so much a thing as it is a being.” She waded into the river. It was brown and muddy and completely opaque. She waded in up to her waist and cocked her head low to the water, listening. She slapped the surface with the flat of her hand, then again, and again, beating out a rhythm on the river.

  A pair of creatures broke the surface a hundred yards out, twin waterspouts rising from their blowholes. They dove and leapt, swimming quickly into shore. They were very much like dolphins, but wider and more flattened, with oversized flippers, rather like wings, and a very broad tail.

  Kyric waded in with Rolirra and the creatures circled them slowly. They didn’t have the bottle snout of a dolphin — a lump for a nose and a mouth with teeth made their faces look all too human. Their dark eyes shone with intelligence and for a moment it seemed that they were smiling at him. Rolirra lay alongside one of them, holding on to it by the flipper and the dorsal fin. Kyric mimicked her, and soon as he took hold, off they went.

  The power of these beings was overwhelming. They plunged along relentlessly, and Kyric held on for all he could. Suddenly the cross-currents ran in every direction. It felt like the creatures were swimming in a wide arc.

  “They’re turning back,” he called to Rolirra. “They’re not going to take us across.”

  “Hold tight,” she called back. “Don’t be afraid.”

  He let go and struck out for the far bank. “Come on,” he yelled to her, “this is the way.”

  With a cry of frustration, she let go and came to swim alongside him. At length they came to the shore, but no forest lay there. They were on an island that bore a massive stone city. A square island in the middle of a square lake, the outer shore jammed with houses and temples, how the ruins in the jungle might have looked in the distant past.

  Rolirra wrung the water from her hair. “At least I know where we are.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “I guess I panicked.”

  She shot him a reproachful glance. “I am a skilled and experienced dreamer. You must learn to trust me. If I tell you it is so, then it is so.”

  They wandered silently into the city, the paving stones warm on Kyric’s bare feet. He was surprised to see the buildings standing painted in shades of red, gold, and lavender. He had supposed in his ignorance that the ancient Terrulans lived in cities of bare grey stone like the city of Aeva. Huge palaces towered over him that had collapsed to rubble in the real world. The other side of the dream as the Ilven would say. He simply couldn’t think of it like that. It had to be another plane of power, like the spirit realm that was the source of the weird arts. Magicians delved into their own realm, the plane of the Essa. This was another layer. A term from one of the Eddur kept coming to mind. The battleground of dreams.

  And what kind of change would it bring in him if he started thinking of his real life as only part of a dream?

  There was no evidence of any people, no furnishings in the houses. The streets and porticos echoed the silence of the city.

  “We should go to the Temple of the Dreamers,” Rolirra said.

  Kyric shook his head. “Is there a Temple of the Warriors? After our last travels together, I would like to find a weapon to carry.”

  “No temple,” she said. “I will take you to the Palace of the Hunters.”

  He followed her through the broad avenues, and past squares where mournful fountains sat dry. A stiff breeze whistled though narrow alleys and filigree gates. Kyric saw something move in the corner of his eye and turned sharply, but nothing was there.

  “Do you ever run into other dreamers when you go beyond the dream tree?”

  “Certainly, in realms such as the sunset coast. There are many pleasant lands, but I fear that we must walk in lonely and dangerous places to find our way. And who would do that without purpose?”

  “Rolirra, how did you learn to make your way here, on this side of the dream? How old were you when you started?”

  She looked surprised. “From the day I was born, I imagine. Like the other side, you don’t remember much from your first years. Learning is the same way. You learn the ways to the lands and how to find things from your parents, aunts and uncles, brothers and sisters. When you get older, we have teachers. That is what I do. I am a teacher.”

  “Can you teach me as we go? You know that I had never been to the dreamlands before you drew me here. Before this, my dreams were . . . “ He didn’t know how to say it.

  “What I teach to my people,” Rolirra said, “you already know. I would be afraid to make this journey without you. Many dreamers who try to reach these far realms get lost and are never seen again. Their hearts often turn dark on the other side; they become anathema to their families. But whenever I become lost, you always find a new way and bring me back. Even when you got us lost in the world river, you brought us ashore close to home. It could have been much worse. Most who get lost in that river come out into some form of hell.”

  The Palace of the Hunters was a gigantic log house, gilded in copper along all of its seams. Less grand than its neighbors, it sat in a grove of silk-cottons behi
nd one of the towering temples. Inside lay an altar of skins, horns, claws, fangs, and skulls of jaguars, crocodiles, pygmy elephants, and other game animals.

  A tangle of weapons lay before the altar. Kyric dug through the pile but could only find a tiny bow used for hunting monkeys. He discard it in favor of a shortsword and a heavy spear slightly taller than himself. Rolirra selected a quiver of javelins and a pair of knives.

  The weight of the spear across his shoulder felt good to Kyric as they crossed the square of palaces. The wind blew harder, and little whirlwinds rose with the dust of the square. Once again, Kyric thought he saw someone watching him from behind the corner of a temple, but when he turned his head they were gone.

  “Are there ghosts on this side of the dream?” he asked Rolirra.

  “Not in the way you mean it,” she said.

  A translucent figure came out of one of the palaces. Kyric could see that the man was dressed in purple robes and a feathered headdress, and he could see right through him. The figure walked with the measured step of one performing a ceremony.

  Kyric turned to Rolirra. “Then what is that?”

  “One of the faded lost,” she said in a voice edged with fear as well as sadness. “Like those I spoke of before, only long dead on the other side, and near to passing away on this side. He must have been a powerful dreamer to remain in the world all this time. And if he has been lost for so long he is surely insane. We must avoid him. If he passes into you he can become a part of your inmost self and infect you with his madness. I wonder how he found his way to this land.”

  The being seemed to notice them then, and started to drift in their direction. Rolirra kicked dust into one of the little whirlwinds and it flew upward, spreading into a cloud that hid them momentarily. “Let’s move along quickly,” she said.

  They ran from the square, and into a street lined with temples, leaving the lost one behind. The Temple of the Dreamers was a huge onion dome that sat on the ground across from the egg-shaped dome Kyric had seen in his waking life. Along the upper part of the dome, oval windows covered in fine filigree stared out at the dreamscape like veiled eyes. They passed through an archway and a maze of columns to reach the inner chamber.