The Windsingers Read online

  '...Ki. Now, Ki. Easy. It will soon be over. I am here with you. You are safe. It will soon be over. Trust me.'

  'I'm not a child!' She thought she had spoken the words, but they seemed to have been ripped from her mouth and flung all about inside the creature. They made no sense as they bounced back to her. They rattled bruisingly against her flesh. The red fragments of them tumbled away.

  'Ki. Ki. Ki.' The wizard was reaching for her without words, trying to soothe her soundlessly. 'We do not speak with our mouths. Not within this being. You do not speak at all, but listen to me. No, do not let your mind fly off to puzzle about what it cannot absorb; listen only to me. There will come a moment when you will hear... will perceive a sound. It will not be hearing, but you will know it. The pain we used to summon this creature, the agony you could not voice will come back to you. I caused you to send it forth, but as it issued from you, it is solely yours. Any more than this I cannot explain. I trust to your intuition.'

  Dresh paused to let the rustling of panic settle in Ki's mind. 'You will know it, never fear. You will recognize it as a part of yourself, as familiar to you as your own hand. When you know it, you must seize it. Do not, however, let go of me. Cradle me in your left arm. That's right. Now keep your right hand at the ready. And once you have seized your sound, do not let it go.'

  Ki found that she would obey, despite a searing rage deep within her soul. Time passed, both endless and swift. They flitted on. And now they began to pass other objects in the beast; Ki saw the peal of a dirge bell, and the quivering wail of a child that had fallen down a well. She did not understand how she knew what these strange knobs of light and thorny darknesses were. But she knew them. She saw a tiny blob that was the suddenly expelled breath of a king killed by a friend's treachery. She passed through a terrible palpable orange mist of a man who had been bludgeoned to death in his sleep, but had cried aloud in his dream.

  She nearly missed. She was upon hers almost before she saw it. It was white and yellow and black, angular here and swollen there. It could not be grasped with a hand. It was too large. She flailed at it wildly as it spun toward her, missed, and then, as it slipped past her, abruptly hugged it to her ribs with her whole right arm.

  Ki felt she had thrust her arm into a rapidly spinning wheel. She was flung wildly and swiftly around with her right shoulder as the center of her cyclone. Vertigo overtook her. She clutched her pain and Dresh close to her, trying vainly to shut his eyes and wipe out the dizzying vision of worlds whipping past her.

  She felt the pain slip back into her body, huge at first, and then ripping to the center of her being, growing smaller but more intense, until it rejoined some core within her that she had never before known. When that happened, a floor rose up to slam itself against her head and back and heels. A grey ceiling crashed into place. Dresh did not need to tell her that she had been slammed into a reality.

  Ki lay motionless, the breath knocked out of her. The back of her head and the knobs of her spine had been bruised by the landing. Yet strangely she felt better, complete again. The misty indecision that had plagued her since Dresh had summoned the creature through her had gone. Whatever had rejoined her inside the beast had burned away the fog, returning to her a sense of independent judgment. Once more she was whole. And furious.

  She gathered herself as her breath came back to her, staring at a ceiling patterned with grey swirls. She lifted her bruised head cautiously. It produced no change in perspective. Only when she sat up all the way, lifting Dresh's head with her, did her view change. She was still using his eyes.

  The muscles of his jaw struggled under her hand. She had been gripping him by the jaw rather than by the block of stone, she realized, and had unconsciously retained her clutch. She shifted her hands quickly.

  'Thank you,' Dresh murmured scathingly. 'For a moment I thought myself paralyzed in your death grip.'

  'It would be less than what you deserve. I'll use my own eyes now.'

  'As you will,' Dresh replied indifferently, unruffled by the icy fury in Ki's voice.

  There was a swirling of mist that gradually cleared. Ki blinked her eyes in an effort to focus them. But what had been dull black walls to Dresh's eyes were to her rippling opaque curtains. She could not see what lay beyond them, but neither could she recognize their solidity.

  'Enjoy your view?' Dresh asked solicitously. 'Why don't you just drop me here and trot along in your own independent way?'

  Ki did not respond. She tried to focus her eyes on the wall, but it defied her normal depth perception. The wall was right before her nose; it was an arm's length away; she would have to cross the room to touch it. Pride would not let her surrender, but practicality forced a concession.

  'Much as I would enjoy it, Dresh, I dare not drop you here. But the reverse holds true as well.'

  'What you perceive as my casual abuse of you is but the haste I must make, out of necessity. Ki, if you persist in taking all this personally, we shall never get ourselves out of this.'

  Ki closed her eyes and felt his vision once more rise to her mind. Dresh spoke again. 'We shall have to go on sharing my eyes. A handicap, and not a small one, as you seem to think. I begin to question the wisdom of this venture. I suppose we could have gone to Bitters, and perhaps I could have found a suitable body to usurp. But there is nothing like the comfort of one's own flesh. And, ah, the powers I should surrender by letting them keep my hands and body, to say nothing of my secrets the Windsingers would steal. Well, there's nothing we can do now except continue. Stand up. Let me get my bearings.'

  She rose in silent obedience, though her pride chafed at Dresh's assumption of control. Perhaps she would have warmed to the adventure had she been Dresh's partner; but she was not. She was no more to him than a set of legs and arms to use, like a riding beast or a docile team. The imagery jarred her a bit. What insights would she take back to teamstering? she wondered.

  Dresh surveyed the chamber and Ki observed it with him. It was a contradiction, a room of austere opulence. The dull black walls were as plain as a prison's, the air cool enough to raise the fine hair on Ki's body, but the low bedstead in one corner was strewn with the thickest shag deer hides that she had ever beheld of the peculiar brown-violet shade that commanded the highest prices. Smoothly rolled at the foot of the bed were blankets such as the Kerugi wove from the wool of their mountain sheep, but even the tiny fingers of the Kerugi could not have fashioned such a fine weave. In another corner was a wooden table, and a single backless stool of stark design. She did not recognize the wood, but it glowed mellowly, and she coveted the tall crystal flagon filled with lavender liquid that centered the table.

  'Ah,' Dresh breathed out, well satisfied. 'I haven't lost the touch, Ki. Not a bit. We are not only in her realm, but in her very bedchamber. This room speaks of Rebeke, if ever a room could, with her stark self-denial one moment, and her lascivious self-indulgence the next.'

  'Rebeke?'

  'The Windsinger that stole my parts. A power-hungry witch if ever there was one.'

  But as Dresh spoke, a double image rippled before her eyes. The room as he saw it for her remained, but she saw more - like seeing the pebbly bottom of a pool through one's own reflection. Ki saw a woman. She was tall, and her height seemed the greater for the sweeping mantle of pale green that fell from her wide shoulders to the soles of her bare feet. White anemones peeped from the grasses about her feet, and the sun glanced off the brightness of her flowing hair. 'Rebeke,' the wind whispered as it rustled through the grass and nodding flowers. But this was a woman, no Windsinger she, and as Human as Ki herself. Even as Ki puzzled, the image retreated and faded, until there was only the empty room before her eyes. Dresh was still speaking. Ki wondered if he had intended to share the vision with her.

  '... and therefore the most dangerous of them all. For her self-discipline is such that there is no act she could not force herself to, if she felt it behooved her. No act at all, no matter what pain or self-destruction it in
volved. I could wish it had been another that had stolen my boxes. But I doubt that any could have done it, except her.'

  'Where are your boxes?' Ki demanded. Her spine ached with tension, and with the unaccustomed burden of carrying about a head mounted on a block of stone. She did not relish standing about in the bedchamber of Dresh's enemy. Might she not return at any moment? The sooner Ki reclaimed her cargo and Dresh got them out of here, the better. She didn't wish to indulge his chatter any longer.

  'Patience!' Dresh calmly rebuked her. 'Did you suppose the Windsingers would allow us to enter, reclaim my boxes, and leave? They will be guarded. Or did you suppose that I am such a trifle as to be left about in bits? Did you think to find me stashed under the bed? No, this shall be a delicate game to play. The move is now ours. In this very lack of vigilance, I smell a keener watch than I had supposed. Do we teeter on the edge of a trap? Let us consider that.' But Ki's mind was elsewhere.

  'The rapier!' She shifted Dresh's head into the crook of one arm, with an alarming sway in vision resulting. Futilely she felt at her belt, her stomach sinking with the knowledge that the sheath would not be there. Embarrassment and despair dropped her voice to a whisper. 'I've been a great fool, Dresh. I've left the rapier behind.'

  'And your teapot and Vanilly as well!' Dresh added in mock alarm.

  'Of what use would they be to us?' Ki growled in annoyance at his frippery. 'I tell you that we are unarmed.'

  'And unlegged as well!' snorted Dresh. A teapot and your Vanilly would be at least as useful as your rapier. What do you imagine, that we shall sweep into a room of Windsingers, rapier chopping, to reclaim my body over their fallen and bloody ones? What a child! Do I look like the sort of savage that would kill? The only weapon you shall find any use to you here is already on your arm. My head. So be silent, and let me think what we should do next.'

  'A rapier does not chop,' she corrected him tersely, feeling more than ever like a fool. Dresh's bland assumption of his superiority rasped every inch of her proud spirit. Worst of all, given the circumstances, he was correct. Ki longed to thump his head down on Rebeke's table and leave him beside that lavender flask. Let his scornful words and irritating ways get him out of that! She savored the image before letting logic cool her anger. She needed Dresh to return to her own world. That she was bound to him by her written sign was another tie, and the opportunity to spite the Windsingers at their own game was an added fillip. Make free with her cargo, would they? Her grudge against the Windsingers was longer than her memory, fading back into her father's unspoken hatred of them and a dim feeling that in some way they had contributed to her unremembered mother's early death. Always before, Ki had suppressed her anger and scrupulously avoided them. Perhaps Vandien was right after all; perhaps the time had come to return their stings and insults. Fate seemed determined to lead her in that direction. So Ki expelled her breath in a harsh rush through her nostrils and awaited the wizard's desire.

  SEVEN

  Dainty fingers played curiously over the glittering stones set in the black enamel box. Bare toe curled and uncurled impatiently against the thick feathers of a dikidik hide. Within the white robe of the lowest order of initiated Windsingers, a slender young body fidgeted. Grielea felt the mystery of the box hovering at the edge of her mind, an enigmatic formula based on a mathematical concept just beyond her grasp. Again her fingers played over the stones varying their rhythm by one from the combination just tried. Grielea closed her eyes for a moment, as if by concentration she would feel the auras of the stones hear them whisper to her the setting put upon them.'Rebeke cautioned us not to touch the boxes?'

  The lisping voice was half-questioning and half-amazed at Grielea's audacity in disobeying the Windmistress's wishes. Grielea's eyes flew open, and she glared at Liset in irritation.

  Liset retracted her pale eyes from the dark sparks of Grielea's. The spidery T'cherian body hunched and quivered beneath the white robe. Grielea wrinkled her scaled nose in disdain at Liset's disapproval. Liset's mandibles twitched.

  'To achieve the full rank of Windsinger, Grielea, we must practice the strictest obedience and self-restraint. To rule others, we must first learn to rule ourselves.' Even the clattery lisp of a T'cherian accent could not disguise the piety in Liset's words.

  'Tend to your box. I shall tend to mine!'

  Liset's mandibles clacked in astonishment. She settled her face abruptly. She wished her transformation to Windsinger would proceed more rapidly. Always the sounds and ingrained movements of her T'cherian body shamed her. If only her shell would begin to scale! No doubt that was why Grielea dared to speak to her so rudely. She had no right. Liset knew they were of the same rank of initiation. She had heard the rumors about Grielea. She had been sent to Rebeke as a last resort. Rebeke was well known to be the strictest and most demanding of the Windmistresses. And Grielea was notoriously headstrong; she had spent a full two turns in this grade already! Liset groomed her cowl smooth, and turned back to the large square box before her. So let Grielea play with her box. It would have its consequences. Liset intended to fulfill her instructions meticulously. Not for her the chilling cell and cold gruel reserved for the disobedient.

  Grielea gave a thin smile of satisfaction as Liset's eye stalks swung away from her. She bent again over the box on the low table before her. Her fingers danced over the stones. Nothing. She paused, and then her hands moved again. Another pause. Another combination.

  There was no betraying click of latch. The box sighed silently under Grielea's hands. She glanced over her shoulder. Liset's robed carapace was toward her. The stiffness of the crouched figure with its squat cowl showed Liset's resolution not to participate in Grielea's misbehavior. Grielea smiled mockingly at her back. She turned back to her treasure.

  Silently the box slid up from its base. Grielea set the top of the box in her lap. She leaned over her prize. Her fingers nimbly unwound a long linen wrapping.

  The base was a block of white stone, veined with black and red. From it, rooted at the wrists, two hands grew as gracefully as calla lilies. They clasped each other peacefully, as if awaiting a coffin flower. But a warm flush of life glowed under the olive skin of the hands. They were waiting for their master. On one of the long tapering fingers was a ring. To some it would have seemed a plain, cheap ring of black metal. But to Grielea it fairly shouted the identity of the owner. She stiffened. Was that a light step? She bunched the wrapping back over the hands. She smiled a lynx smile as she eased the top of the box back into place. A brush of her fingers over the stones reset their lock. So he was the stakes they played for... Her grey-scaled brow knotted slightly as she added that to her cache of carefully gleaned facts.

  'You may leave off your vigil now. Retire to your chambers for a rest period. We shall be taking your posts for you.'

  Liset jumped at the sudden voice behind her. But Grielea slowly raised her chin and lowered her eyes. She smiled submissively. 'Yes, Windmistress,' she simpered, and 'Yes, Windmistress,' Liset echoed her. Liset and Grielea hastened from the room, their white robes swirling against the floor. But only one went to her chamber to rest.

  Medie moved into the room slowly. There was no disguising the look of admiration she gave the two enamelled boxes. The smaller casket rested on a small table before a stool. The larger box was on the floor. The room was better furnished than Rebeke's sitting room. Here were hides of rare beasts and birds scattered about to relieve bare feet from the coldness of the highly polished floor. The walls were graced with sky windows, artfully designed living pictures of many parts of the worlds. But the only seats available were the hard wooden stools that Liset and Grielea had just vacated. Medie gave one a glance of distaste. Idly she trailed a long finger across the top of the larger enamel box.

  'How best were this done?'

  Rebeke paused, then settled herself upon Grielea's stool. She spoke slowly. 'The boxes will take skill to open, and patience. Dresh will know that their solving is but a matter of time. He will, I th
ink, hasten here, hoping against hope to recover his body. We could, of course, open his boxes and drain his powers now. But the doing of it might spook the quarry, in a manner of speaking.'

  'You believe he will come here, will try to retrieve them himself?'

  'I do.' Rebeke spoke with quiet assurance.

  'And who would know better what he would do?' Medie dropped the words casually, but they fell into a suddenly silent room.

  'Do you rebuke me with my past?' Rebeke queried softly.

  'No. Not rebuke. I merely wonder at it, as many have before me. You must have known why the High Council chose you for this guardianship. A make or break test of your loyalty. Given a final choice, which will Rebeke take: the Windsingers, or Dresh?'

  'And Rebeke chooses Rebeke.' A tiny chill breeze rose to whisk past their ankles.

  'With no regrets?' prodded Medie. There was no acid in her voice, only an elder sister's interest. In her brown and white eyes there was only concern.

  'Regrets were done with long ago, Medie. Let us use a metaphor. Suppose you had a pet dog that went wild. You would let it go, in fondness, allowing it to choose the life it preferred. But suppose it became vicious, and menaced the flocks of your neighbors. Would not you feel responsible for the situation? Would you not remedy it yourself?'

  'Dresh is no more to you now than a stray cur?'

  'It was only a metaphor,' Rebeke replied with some asperity. She rose and drifted over to a sky picture. In a wooded dell, white anemones had pushed up from the deep mosses. Tall spruce sheltered them from the wide blue skies above. Rebeke breathed deep of their fragrance, standing close to the sky window to receive it. The air of the image felt cool and fresh, recently washed by rains.