Sunmaster, page 4
Rasim stared at her blearily, trying to work his way through that. "You mean I'm not a water witch?"
The old lady looked at him like he was thick in the head. "You are now. Touched by the sea herself, weren't you? But when the water god makes you hers, and the fire is long drowned, there is imbalance. So you find a stone god, and with him, maybe balance. But then you kill the water with delzjha—" She turned her head and spat, and Rasim thought of the fine grey dust that had taken his water witchery from master levels to something nearly god-like, but had almost killed him in the aftermath. No one he knew had given the drug a name, but he had no doubt it was what Oyun meant when she said delzjha.
He felt like he should have been shocked that she knew so much about his life, but he'd gone beyond that, somehow. No witchery he knew would tell someone his story, but Oyun's witchery was nothing at all like what he knew in Ilyara. She had learned what she needed to by sniffing his hair, and by casting him into the darkness with her drum and her sickly-sweet smoke and her steam in the sweltering tent.
Although he hadn't spoken, she nodded like he had, and finished what she had to say. "Delzjha is the wisdom-slayer. It makes the power rise, makes it flow, makes it all, before it takes all away. Delzjha kills the water, so the air god rises to balance the stone. Balance, balance, balance, all needs balancing in you. But the water is not dead, only retreated like the tide, and it comes back, back, back. The fear is there, though. The fire cannot burn, and without the fire, water has no balance. Without balance, dragons."
Rasim flinched at her vehemence, then tried to close his mouth again as what she meant hit him. "That was me? I called it?"
Oyun curled her lip. "Call, no, call means intent. Woke, annoy, bother, yes. Call, no." She scowled deeply, wrinkling some of her tattoos into invisibility, then curled her lip again and said, "Call, maybe," grudgingly. "It senses emptiness where fire should be in you. It seeks to fill the void. But no more. Spirit walk brings balance."
"So I won't accidentally call another dragon?" Rasim's voice rose to a squeak and the old woman gave him a sharp grin.
"Accidentally, no."
Rasim groaned and put his face in his hands. "I don't want to call one on purpose, either! I mean, I guess that's better than accidentally, but…" He fell silent, then lifted his head with a sigh. "So I have all four witcheries now. Couldn't you have just told me all of this, instead of making me puke?"
Oyun jabbed at him with her walking stick. "Tell is no good. Must see, feel, be."
"Can we all do this? Not the throwing up part. Using all the different witcheries, or even two of them, for balance."
The old woman shook her head. "Some. Some might. Never all. Sorcery comes from the spiral, the King Horse, the starry gods. Some hear one god easily and need no more. There is balance with one, then."
Rasim closed his eyes, taking slow breaths and thinking through everything the old shaman had said. "So we do it wrong," he said after a while, softly. "We should wait to see what god orphans hear, before assigning them to a guild. Or for our first few years we should study all the magics."
Oyun spat again and Rasim's eyes flew open. "Wrong, right, pah! Maybe you teach child to hear a god, who could never hear it on their own. Maybe giving chance to listen to all gods means they will hear none. Do not doubt what has worked."
He stared at her a long time, wishing his thoughts were clearer, and then, with a touch of the wit he usually prided himself on, said, "How do you do it in the clans?"
The old woman cackled, revealing a few snaggly teeth. "Clever. Clever sorcerer-child. You ask for secrets. Secrets are not for you, boy. To learn secrets, return to old Oyun's tent when your duties to the spiral end, or make peace with never knowing."
"My duties?" Alarm shot through Rasim, distracting him from everything else. "Doesn't that mean I'll be dead?"
"Pah." Oyun made the sound gently, this time. "Spirals spin, gods touch, things happen, spirals turn, gods retreat, things calm. Death is an ending to a story, but not the only one."
Relief turned to cold bumps on Rasim's arms, despite the heat of the tent, but before he could speak, Oyun added, "And restless spirits can always return in another life, if death is the end." At Rasim's horrified stare, the old shaman let go a gleeful cackle, then thumped at him with her walking stick. "Out, out, out. Out of my tent. Rude boy, taking up old Oyun's time. Out!"
Rasim, offended, frightened, amused, and exhausted, scrambled out of the tent into the comparative coolness of the larger one, then stumbled wearily to the door, throwing it open to take a deep breath of fresh air.
The light that met him was morning-bright, and before he adjusted to its brilliance, hands grabbed his upper arms and dragged him away.
CHAPTER 5
His captors dragged him into another tent before Rasim even had a chance to get his feet under himself. They released him with enough violence that he stumbled, and turned to glare at them with righteous offense. "I wasn't doing anything! I would have come with you!"
Their impassive expressions told him they didn't understand him any more than he would have understood them if they'd tried explaining themselves. He inhaled deeply to sigh, caught a whiff of himself, and made an awful face as he caught his own sharp, sweaty stench. Whatever was happening, they should have let him bathe first, unless they were just planning to kill him.
The door behind him was deep orange, almost glowing with early morning sun. The largest tent had a door of that color. Rasim's stomach dropped as he turned back around again, overwhelmed and trying to get his bearings. Two thick central poles, braced in a wheel dug into the earth, supported the tent's top, where another wheel opened to the sky, allowing smoke and heat to drift out. There were beds and furs and chairs all pushed against the walls, making room for half a dozen large benches on either side of the room, all facing each other.
There were innumerable people in the tent, crowded around the walls or sitting on the benches, but two of them sat on magnificent wicker thrones. They were both exquisitely dressed, not so much matching as complementary, with the man in sky blue with white tufts of fur, and the woman in rich, earthy red and brown. The man's throne was piled with glorious soft-looking leathers and soft furs in the woman's colors, and the woman's framed hers in the beautiful blue the man wore. He was handsome and solemn, with a round face and black hair threaded with grey, and she had familiar high cheekbones and a full mouth that was, at the moment, trying not to smile. She was doing a good job of it, too, but Rasim had seen that expression, and the sparkle in similar black eyes, many times over the past several weeks.
"Oh," he said in a small voice. "You're Bayar's parents, aren't you? Hello."
The woman had not a trace of that smile in her voice as she spoke Ilyaran every bit as well as her son did. "I am Irlin, daughter of Sūyin, mother to Bayar, and Great Mare of the Shenryalan tribes. My chosen mate is Bikat, King Horse and father to Bayar."
Rasim whispered, "I thought the King Horse was a god," and Irlin's eyes widened at the interruption. Her gaze skittered to Bikat, then back to Rasim. "It is a title of honor, for no one who cannot carry the honor of the god is worthy of leading the tribes. We do not ask our chief to bear the weight of the god's presence. That is for the shamans."
The relief of understanding washed through Rasim, and he gave Irlin a nervous smile. "Oh. Thank you for explaining. I like to know things." There was someone practically behind the thrones, he realized, murmuring in Shenryalan. He thought maybe they were translating for the larger group in the tent, but he didn't quite dare look away from Bayar's parents to see how people were reacting.
The invisible smile returned to Irlin's dark eyes, but still came nowhere near her voice. "You are Rasim. Tell us more. Name your mothers and your purpose here."
"Uhm." Rasim's voice cracked on the sound. "I don't have a mother?"
A murmur of distress went around the tent, making Rasim certain there was a translator. Irlin's eyes widened in disbelief. "I have heard many stories about Golden Ilyara, but not that their children rise fully formed from the soil. How do you know your lineage and your destiny, if you have no mothers?"
Rasim hesitated with dismay, unsure of how to respond. "Our legends do say the first Ilyarans were born of the sun and the soil, but, um, no, it's just that I'm an orphan. Adopted by the Seamasters' Guild because the river, the Ilialio, brought me to them after the Great Fire. I don't know who my mother was. Isidri is my Guildmaster, though. She's like a mother, sort of." A terrifying, ruthless, untouchable mother that he adored, kind of like the sea goddess herself made human. Rasim swallowed, noticed his hands had turned to nervous bunches, and tried to loosen them as another murmur went around the tent.
"Very well," Irlin said after a moment. "Rasim, heart-son to Isidri, grandson to the Ilialio, tell us of our son, whose name you know."
A breath of relief shivered from Rasim's chest. At least he knew the right thing to say, now. "He's alive. He's fine. He's my friend. We were captives together, and escaped together and my captain agreed to bring him home. They're at the flat-topped mountain at the edge of the Northern Sea, or they were yesterday."
"You claim to come to us as a friend, then." Bayar's father, Bikat, spoke for the first time, in a deep, soothing voice.
Rasim hunched his shoulders guiltily. "I do, yes, and I'm really sorry about the dragon. Are there a lot of those here? I never heard of them, but the old lady, Oyun, said it might have…" He sighed. "No, she said it was my fault, not that it might have been."
A little too late, he realized that possibly referring to Oyun as 'the old lady' might have been a mistake. A silence filled the tent, one that somehow sounded like everyone had collectively stopped to blink at him in astonished insult. One single blink from all of them at the same time, followed by an offended glare from everybody in the tent.
After a very long time, Irlin said, "It reflects well upon you that you admit your fault with the dragon. In normal times, you would have been brought to see us first, not given to the shamans for a spirit quest to quiet your troubled soul. An early rider came to us and spoke of the sorcerer-child who tamed and rode the dragon, though, and Oyun knew she must guide you before the rest of us could be exposed to your dangerous presence."
"I'm not—" Rasim swallowed. "I don't mean to be dangerous."
Bikat's heavy eyebrows rose. "So you admit that you are. Tell me, sorcerer-child, if you are the herald of your people, how can we believe you do not endanger us? That your people are not a danger to us?"
Rasim had a deep, desperate wish that Sunmaster Endat was there. Endat was a diplomat, accustomed to offering adept answers to complicated situations. People shouldn't even be asking someone like Rasim questions like this.
But he was the only one there, so he spread his hands helplessly and shook his head. "I don't think Ilyarans are dangerous to other people, generally. We can be, because we have so much magic, but we're also not, because we have so much magic. We don't need to expand and we're hard to conquer. The only reason we're here—well, one of the reasons we're here is to bring Bayar home. The other is to ask if you've been under any kind of siege or trouble, in case we can help." That, Rasim felt, glossed over the truth so much as to be almost a lie, but if he tried to explain in detail he'd be standing there until dinnertime.
His stomach rumbled astonishingly at the thought, and he realized he had no real idea when he'd eaten last. Probably a snack on the mountainside the day before.
Bikat, however, wasn't interested in a small Ilyaran journeyman's noisy belly. "So you believe that no Ilyaran witch would attack our tribes? Kidnap a boy from his family?"
Rasim stared at Bayar's father a long moment, trying to work his way through the different things he was being asked. "I don't believe Ilyara would do that," he said finally. "I don't believe King Taishm would ever support something like that. But Ilyarans? Maybe. Somebody who'd left the city to make money from their witchery, or been enslaved so they didn't have a choice? A year ago I would have said none of us would ever do that, but I know more now."
Bikat leaned forward, elbows on his knees, like a master about to impart secrets to an eager apprentice. His black eyes were dark and serious in the firelight. "Tell me, sorcerer-child. If you were the leader of a great tribe, a tribe who did not trust outsider magic, and someone using magic took your child, what would you do with the next people who came to you proclaiming their power and wishing to speak with you?"
Dismay churned through Rasim's gut, wiping out his hunger. "I wouldn't trust them at all."
"Indeed. Let me tell you what has happened, Ilyaran sorcerer-child." Bikat straightened from his intimate pose and spread his arms wide, as if he told a story that encompassed all of his people. "Before the last cold season, sorcerers stole away my son. I would have cast off the ways of our people and made war, but Oyun counseled me to wait until the Great Gathering. The stars in the sky and the breath of the King Horse told her he would survive, and through my anger, I waited. The five tribes are gathering now, and Oyun warned us, too, that untrustworthy sorcery would come from afar before Bayar was returned to us."
"Oh no," Rasim blurted. "I'm trustworthy. I am. I don't know how to show you, but I am. I think—I think Bayar will tell you that."
"I do not speak of you, sorcerer-child." Bikat raised a hand and beckoned with two fingers. The broad door in the tent behind them opened again and a dozen grim-faced guards entered, their leather armor shadowed and threatening in the spill of sunlight. They marched straight toward Bikat and Irlin's thrones, forcing Rasim to the side as they came into the supplicant's circle in front of the them. Only then did they step aside to reveal the prisoner they escorted.
For a few seconds, Rasim didn't recognize the disheveled, dark-skinned man who stood there, and then with a shock, he realized it was Sunmaster Endat.
"Sunmaster?" Rasim's voice broke on the single word. He surged forward to hug Endat, more out of relief at a familiar face than great affection, but came up short as guards crossed spears in front of him, blocking the way. His relief fell away into confusion, which was also written large over the Sunmaster's face. "What are you doing here?"
"I might ask you the same thing." Endat managed to sound almost droll. "I sailed for Shenryal weeks ago, remember? We parted ways in Hongrunn."
"Oh." Rasim actually shook himself, remembering. "Right. Wait." Panic spurted through him and he stepped forward, glaring at the guards when they moved to block him again. One of them lifted her eyebrows in obvious surprise, and Rasim supposed foreign near-prisoners weren't supposed to glower at people with weaponry. He shot a glance that he hoped was pleading toward Bayar's parents, and by the flicker of Irlin's expression, thought maybe he'd glared at them, too, but she gestured and the guards let him cross to Sunmaster Endat's side. "Where are the others? Telun? Milu? Pynda? Lars?" He stopped himself before he'd listed everyone he could remember who had sailed west to the steppes, and the rumpled Sunmaster smiled briefly.
"Pynda and the journeymen are here, as is your friend Lars, and the Northman Kif." The master's eyebrows rose a little, as if asking whether Rasim remembered Kif, and at his impatient nod, continued. "Most of us have not been made precisely welcome in the weeks we've been here, but neither are we unwell. But you." Faint dismay creased the Sunmaster's round face. He looked tired, and thinner than Rasim remembered, but curiosity brightened his dark eyes, which was also as Rasim remembered.
He opened his mouth, hesitated, and, because explaining was too much, summarized with a woefully inadequate, "We met Bikat and Irlin's son, and brought him home. Except I got kidnapped by a dragon and left the rest of them behind."
Slowly, line by line, Endat's expression fell into a studied neutrality. Embarrassed guilt rose in Rasim, making him squirm even though he didn't think he'd actually done anything wrong. When Endat finally spoke, his voice was as carefully bland as his face. "I look forward to hearing the details of your adventures. Where is the young prince now?"
"He didn't like us calling him that, but I think some of the riders who brought me here last night went back for him." Rasim cast a glance toward Bayar's parents to see if they showed any signs of agreement, but they were as scrupulously detached as Endat was trying to be.
Rasim thought that was completely unfair. He was in over his head and trying to do his best and nobody around him gave even a hint of whether he was messing everything up or not. Teeth gritted, he said, "I don't understand," to Bikat and Irlin. If they were going to leave him flapping like a loose rope, he would flap. "Sunmaster Endat is one of our king's diplomats, and the other Ilyarans are journeymen witches, like me."
"Sorcerers," Bikat said somewhat dangerously.
"Well, yes. But…friends. Of mine, at least."
"And you would have us trust you," Irlin said in her clear quiet voice. "Because you claim our son as your friend, and because you claim to be his saviour."
"What? No." Heat spilled through Rasim's face. "No, if anybody was his saviour it was Agnet. Another slave in the arena we fought in," he explained. "A Northerner. She did a lot more to keep him safe than I did, for a lot longer. And…yes? I'd like you to trust us?" He wanted to kick Endat and make him do the talking, but if the Sunmaster had been there for weeks and Bayar's parents were asking him questions, Rasim thought there was probably a reason for it.
The reason, he thought, might be that they were setting a trap, because a moment later Irlin said, "Would you have us ignore the advice of our shamans, then, and release these sorcerers you call friends?"
For a moment Rasim had the sensation of falling into the abyss, of a blackness closing over him as he plummeted without control. All he had ever wanted in life was to earn a place on the Waifia. He had never imagined having that wish granted would mean his life would become unending chaos, or that it might end up meaning the words he chose could doom not only himself, but possibly everyone he knew on this part of the continent. He closed his eyes for a few seconds, trying to steady himself against the feeling of being in over his head. Seamasters could always find their way to the surface. Then he took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and met Irlin's piercing gaze.
