Sunmaster, page 13
His gaze traveled to the horses, and some part of his mind that could work through the zjhala discounted the idea that there were dozens of people in any of the tents. The Shenryalans had a lot of horses per person. Never fewer than two, and often three or four. He counted the horses very slowly, wishing they would hold still, although they weren't really moving that much. It was just that concentrating was hard. Usually by now he would have come up with a stupid plan, but his mind felt miles away.
There were at least forty horses. That could mean as many as twenty or twenty-five people in the camp, or as few as the ten he could see. Rasim sat down, finding it too hard to think and stand at the same time. Maybe that was how Desimi felt all the time.
He was immediately ashamed of himself, and also thought he was very funny. Giggles started to rise in his chest and he clamped his mouth shut, trying to muffle them, which meant his shoulders shook with suppressed laughter, which made his head rattle and hurt even more. Master Usia and Sesin would be worried about him, with all the blows he'd taken to the head, but he couldn't do anything about that right now.
Split the difference. Call it fifteen or seventeen people in the camp. That meant there were at least that many people studying sorcery without their leaders' knowledge. The girl he'd noticed was practicing witchery right now, in fact. Shaping the earth, making sculptures. Horses and riders, tents and fires, pictures of the world she knew. Rasim, with effort, stopped giggling and got to his feet, weaving his way over to her side.
She had a square face and a set jaw like the older woman, although that might have just been concentration. She edged back as he approached, wary, and Rasim shook his head, which hurt. "I just wanted to see what you were doing. I can't do that." He gestured at the shapes she'd made with earth witchery, then shook his head again. "Who taught you?"
The girl's glance skittered toward the older woman, who watched them both with an eagle's intentness. Rasim followed her look, winced, and sat down gingerly. "Your grandmother?"
"My mother!"
Rasim had obviously offended her without meaning to, and tried not to think that was funny, too. Head injuries made strange things amusing. "Sorry. Your mother taught you? I'm Rasim. Sorcerer-child," he added, because that seemed to be what everybody wanted to call him, and he wanted her to understand he was introducing himself.
After a suspicious moment, the girl said, "Darracha, daughter of Alsari, granddaughter of Nirjeran," and stared at him expectantly.
"Darracha." Rasim thought she wanted him to give her his lineage, too, and after a moment, tried, "Rasim, son of the Ilialio, grandson of Ilyara," which seemed to satisfy her. He would have to tell the others that, when he got back.
If he got back.
He put that thought away, or tried to, and nodded at her earth-working. "Your mother taught you?"
Darracha hesitated, glancing toward the stern-jawed woman who must be Alsari. The older woman nodded once, and a thrum of distant relief ran through Rasim. She must think he intended to teach Darracha his witchery. Well, the girl was probably the only one young enough to learn, although through the fuzziness in his head Rasim suddenly wondered if Alsari had started learning magic as an adult. He'd have to try to ask.
"Sorcerers," Darracha said carefully, slowly. "From afar."
"Like me?" Rasim asked. "Brown, with dark hair?" It took quite a lot of pantomime and naming of colors before either of them understood each other's answers, but then Darracha reached out to capture the end of one of Rasim's bleached curls in her fingertips.
"Yellow. Orange. Brown, like earth, not like…" Her hand fell to one of her own braids and she said a word that Rasim thought meant 'night,' which he decided made sense. Night was black, most of the time.
Yellow or orange hair almost certainly meant not-Ilyaran, though. There weren't many redheads in Ilyara, and even fewer blonds. "Brown-skinned?" he asked, then turned his hand over, showing the lighter color of his palm. "Or more like this?"
She tapped his palm, and Rasim sagged. He wasn't surprised. Northerners had magic, historically, and he'd seen their recent command of ice witchery in Ilyara itself. They'd worked wood and metal, too, back in the day. He wondered, for the first time, whether some seed of Northern magic had been kept alive all along, taught in secret, or whether they'd rediscovered their power more recently. He thought it might matter, but his head felt too thick to figure out why. Instead he said, "Who made the zjhala?"
Darracha had been wary, before. She shrank in on herself now, shaking her head in a small, violent motion. Rasim lifted his hands, trying to take the question back. He hadn't meant to scare her. "Never mind. Show me your sorcery?"
She reached for the earth she'd shaped, rebuilding a falling-apart horse sculpture. Rasim tried, with everything he had, to feel her use of witchery, the way he almost always could with Ilyaran magic. But even though he watched the magic work in front of him, he felt absolutely nothing from it, and had no idea if it was his lack of sensitivity to stonewitchery, or the drug thickening his skull. Or maybe just the pounding headache and tiredness, which seemed like they would be enough on their own. "I can't do that," he said again. "It's good."
Surprised pleasure darted across Darracha's face, before she gestured. "You do something."
"I can't."
Impatience replaced the delight in her expression. "Do your sorcery."
"I can't," Rasim repeated. "The zjhala. I can't even find my own nose." He tried, and if he went slowly enough, he could connect his finger to the end of it, but if he used any speed, finding his face was a triumph. Darracha laughed, and Rasim winced but chuckled too. "I honestly don't know how to teach you if I can't show you with my witchery. I can tell you what it feels like." Somewhere in there confusion filled Darracha's eyes and he realized he was speaking Ilyaran.
Rasim groaned and with some effort, turned toward the closest adults and yelled, "Does anybody speak Ilyaran? Or at least Northern? Honestly," he said under his breath, "we really need proper language lessons in the guild."
The woman he thought of as their ringleader exited the tent he'd been kept in, her mouth pinched with irritation. "Even if I could get to my witchery I don't know what I could show you," Rasim yelled in her direction, still speaking Ilyaran and not caring. "There's hardly any water around here, except deep! I can't feel stone well enough to do anything but hope with it anyway, and I haven't even practiced with sunwitchery so there's no way I'm trying to teach somebody that! I might set the whole steppe on fire!"
Possibility itched at him, with that idea. A big enough fire would make enough smoke for his friends to guess that's where he was, because Rasim caused disaster wherever he went. Nasira, for certain, would assume an unexpected wildfire on the steppes was his fault.
Of course, if he brought up a lot of water at once, the Seamasters might notice that, and Milu might even notice the disturbance of the earth when the water rose, if they weren't too far away. So really all he needed was his witchery. Which the ringleader here knew, and wasn't going to let him have access to. He put the thoughts aside, but didn't let them go entirely. Something like them might be the chance he needed. He turned back to Darracha. "Who made the poison? Bayar lived, you know."
He assumed she did know, but her eyebrows flickered downward. "Bayar? Bayar is—" Her gaze twitched toward the older women, then locked on the ground. "Bayar is no problem of mine."
Even through the thick stupidity in his head, Rasim felt like he'd hit on something that mattered to this young woman, and dropped his voice. "How long have you been out here? Bayar returned to the tribes. I brought him home."
Darracha's shoulders tensed, the muscles in her neck going tight, although she tried to hide it. Rasim lowered his voice even more, wishing he spoke her language more fluently. "Someone using a shaman's poison tried to kill him the night after he came home. He lived because of Ilyaran sorcery." He felt like he was stretching the truth, but enough of it was true.
The girl's hand reached out and seized his wrist, squeezing the bones together with painful strength. "Teach me that," she whispered. "Teach me to make people live."
"I can't." Rasim emphasized the words. "Even if I wanted to. I don't have the skill. If you brought me back to the Gathering, though, our healers would teach you."
For an instant, hope light Darracha's eyes, so she clearly understood enough of what he'd said, even if he felt like he'd butchered it. But it faded as quickly as it had come. She shook her head sharply, and with obvious effort, didn't look toward her mother or the ringleader.
She was afraid of them, Rasim thought. Maybe she had always wanted sorcery of her own, or maybe they'd told her she would study it whether she wanted to or not. Either way, she was afraid, and he knew she wouldn't risk herself to help him. He couldn't even blame her, not really, but a trickle of curiosity made its way through the drug-induced distance in his mind. "Have you even been to the Great Gathering, or have you been out here on the plains?"
A trace of wistfulness, as brief and thoroughly denied as the hope, crossed Darracha's face. "If you can't teach me, leave me alone." She turned her back on him deliberately, and after a moment, Rasim rose, still feeling thick and clumsy.
The man emerged from a tent, carrying a mug to Rasim. He looked gloomily into it, said, "Zjhala?" to the man, and got a nod in response. He took the mug, because they were going to make him drink it one way or another and he preferred not to have his nose pinched and the liquid poured down his throat, but he did say, "I can't teach you if I drink this," as if it might make a difference to this captor, when it hadn't before.
"Then you'll die." The man didn't sound particularly concerned, and Rasim, staring up at him—not very far up; neither of them were very tall—realized something that he should have understood before. He'd seen nearly a dozen people in this camp. He could identify them. Odds were poor that he could find them if they rejoined the larger gathering, but if he saw them, he would be able to identify them.
They had never intended to let him go. They hoped he could, and would, teach them, but as far as they were concerned, his fate had always been to be left cold and lifeless on the endless plains.
Dimly, through the fog of the drug and his distantly aching head and the various dull fears he faced, Rasim finally clawed his way through to the idea that might get him out of there in one piece. Just a few days ago, he had accidentally summoned a dragon.
He wondered if he could call one on purpose, this time.
CHAPTER 16
Rasim lifted the drug-laced drink to his lips, making a show of sipping reluctantly while trying to make his thick mind race through a plan. He'd been unbalanced. That was why the dragon had found him. It had been drawn to the untapped sun witchery within him. But now everything about him was unbalanced, his spirit barely attached to his body, and his magic entirely out of reach.
Even he didn't think that sounded like something that a dragon would respond to.
His captor, not fooled in the slightest, tilted the bottom of the mug upward, spilling the drink into Rasim's mouth and down his chin. He choked and swallowed, coughed, and knocked the mug away, tears streaking down his cheeks as he wheezed through liquid in his chest. His captor raised a threatening fist and Rasim glared at him, wet-eyed. "I was drinking. You didn't have to do that."
"You were—"
Once more, Rasim didn't understand the actual word, but he'd heard that tone and similar accusations often enough that the word itself hardly mattered. Indignation exploded through him. "Of course I was scheming! You're going to kill me! I'm drugged out of my head, not stupid! You'd be scheming too!"
As fast as the clarity of anger came, it was gone. For a moment there, though, Rasim had felt whole again, like his spirit and body were actually connected. Maybe if he could lose his temper again, he could use that connection to call a dragon or work witchery or anything that would get him out of there alive. But although he was still angry, it didn't connect the way it had in those few seconds of outrage. He wiped his eyes and staggered away, wondering if Darracha would talk to him again.
Instead he found himself face to face with her mother, whose stern face was as threatening as a storm at sea. "Keep away from my daughter."
Rasim threw his hands in the air clumsily, narrowly missing hitting the older woman. "I can't teach anybody if I stay away! I can't teach anybody if I'm drugged! I can't teach anybody if you're all going to be stupid!" As he fought his way through shouting the last words, he realized he was outraged again, almost connected, and yelled, "Help!" with all his heart and soul.
The sound barely even seemed to reach his own ears, never mind rolling out across the plains like it might have done if he could have put sky witchery behind it. It seemed muffled, like shouting into a particularly hot Ilyaran afternoon sometimes could. It felt like the air itself suppressed the cry, muting him. Rasim dropped to his knees, too wrung out to keep his feet anymore, and saw a terrible, smug smile crawl across Darracha's mother's face. He said, "Oh," stupidly. "You're a sky witch."
His voice hadn't just seemed muffled. It had been. Shenryalans had sky witchery of their own, but he couldn't imagine Oyun or any other shaman offering this hard-smiling woman the chance to learn it. "Who taught you?"
A little to his surprise, she crouched, bringing her face close to his again. "No one. I stole the sorcery." She went on for another few sentences with a glint of satisfaction in her eyes, apparently aware that her explanation far outstripped his ability to understand. Then she rose, leaving Rasim alone in a boneless puddle on the grassy steppes floor. The earth trembled, reminding Rasim of the thundering hoofbeats across the plains, but he couldn't even bring himself to lift his head and look for rescue. He felt like the pieces were all right there in front of him, scattered but providing an answer, if he could only put them together correctly.
Instead he detached from his body altogether once more, floating upward and looking with sympathy down at the poor lump of himself on the ground. He hadn't drunk quite enough zjhala to make the spirit journey happen instantaneously this time, but he'd apparently had enough for it to happen. Darracha stood, looking toward his unconscious form with concern, but someone called her name and she flinched and returned to her duties. Rasim felt a pull back toward his body and resisted it for a moment, trying to get a good look at everything around him.
He just wasn't high enough to get a feel for the landscape, but he at least tried to memorize the faces and clothes of the people in the camp. If he did get away, the more details he could remember, the easier it would be to identify them. A few more men had come out of the tents, but Darracha was the youngest person there besides himself. This group didn't have the feeling of a family, but the tension-ridden air of people who were together out of necessity, and aware that being noticed could spell their doom.
Several of them, including the woman who'd spoken to him first and seemed to be their leader, were arguing. About him, clearly: they gestured and pointed in his direction with increasing unhappiness, until the earth shook hard enough for them to scowl at it. The woman crouched, putting her hands against the ground, then frowned and shook her head. Rasim couldn't hear what she said, and doubted he'd understand it if he did.
The tug back to his body strengthened, and he thumped back down into himself again, waking groggily. His head still hurt with that drug-induced distance, and he hated it. Pushing up to his feet seemed too hard, so he lay there, cheek in the dirt, feeling the earth's vibrations. He hoped they meant there were whole herds of Shenryalan riders out looking for him, although that didn't seem very likely. He was going to have to rescue himself. He said, "Help," again, thickly, but there wasn't any kind of power behind it at all.
The earth rumbled again, and the horses started moving away in a nervous group. Then one leaped into a gallop and the others followed like they had only needed a prompt to do so.
In their wake, the ground heaved, breaking apart in huge dark chunks. People and horses alike screamed, although the horses were at least out of the breaking earth's path. The ringleader woman fell backward, then scrambled to her feet, trying to escape as a massive, stone-sided snake rose from the broken earth.
It reared up and up and up, torn dirt and grass roots rolling from its slate-colored skin as it powered itself high into the air, then slammed down with a plains-rattling crash that completely flattened a tent. It slithered forward, great jaws gaping, and swallowed a screaming man effortlessly.
Rasim didn't know if it was astonishment, fear, or the drug that kept him lying on the ground just gaping at the vast beast. It was clearly like the stone snake he'd encountered in the Northern mountains, but it was unlike that other terrible creature, too. The Northern snake's skin had been boulder-like, rubbing against each other and dropping grit and stones, like the mountain itself shedding rocks. This monster had overlapping scales, but they were deep stony grey, edged in places with iron red. Somewhere far below them, Rasim thought, the bedrock must be made of stone like that, layers and layers of dark rock and traces of iron.
It destroyed the camp almost entirely in seconds. Rasim caught glimpses of some of his captors running. No one spared a thought for him. The great snake rose up again, lashing toward the escapees, then spat a spray of bad air after them before diving back into the earth. Huge piles of torn-up ground surged around it as it dove, and its tail wriggled in the air a moment before the rumbling of the plains faded. Rasim sat up, staring wide-eyed at the hills and holes around him, and at the ugly evidence that not everyone had survived the snake's attack.
He'd yelled 'help.' He hadn't asked specifically for anything in particular to help him. Maybe imbalance was imbalance, and beasts of magic responded to it.
