Dafydd ab Hugh - Jiana 02 - Warriorwards

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WARRIORWARDS
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this
book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely
coincidental.
Copyright © 1990 by Dafydd ab Hugh
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions
thereof in any form.
A Baen Books Original
Baen Publishing Enterprises P.O. 1403 Riverdale, N.Y. 10471
ISBN: 0-671-72019-8 Cover art by Larry Elmore First printing, October 1990
Mr. ab Hugh is not available for personal correspondence,
but letters of comment may be sent to
4216 Beverly Blvd. #177, Los Angeles, CA 90004
Distributed by SIMON & SCHUSTER 1230 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y.
10020
Printed in the United States of America
the mind builds a maze and the body runs through it
like a rat
every night in our dreams we escape the maze
like a dream of birds
There is no maze. We are free
even from dreams of freedom
Vani Bustamante December 23, 1989
"Before the Beginning"
Toq grinned, barely able to contain himself. The order surrounded him, waiting
for him to speak.
"Sleeping Tifhiz ..." Toq giggled, then continued, "Sleeps. And sleeps!! He
wakes not. I am the only and the one. It's mine! You can't have it."
The others satd nothing, kept their heads bowed as Toq continued. Pieces of
the boy-god spilled onto the ground. "Some of you opposed my succession. I
forgive you all, though regretably I must destroy the lot of you."
He gestured sadly, every inch the regal, all-forgiving godking. Five minor
deities flickered and tore apart as the abyss entered their souls.
Some who remained blubbered in fear, prostrating themselves before Toq. Two
held their subservient posture in proud silence, twitched nervously and
strained. Only Magadauthan Full-of-Oceans seemed at ease.
Magadauthan knelt serene, unmoved by Toq's rhetoric or authority. The albino
boy-god chewed his lip, unable to think of anything diabolical enough to
temper Magadauthan's arrogance.
"The rest of you motley pile of dung—you too, Water-belly—shall be given much
time to regret your inability to recognize my claims earlier, when that
soon-to-be-damned Snoring Tifhiz pretended to this seat." He turned his eyes
in disgust, waved his hand and the order departed swiftly, all but one.
2Dafydd ab Hugh
"Have you chosen to stay and apologize, Magadan than?" asked Toq without
looking up.
"Oceans are deep," rumbled a voice like crashing waves.
Toq raised his head and glared furiously. "What is that supposed to mean?"
Bubbles formed on the boy-god's alabaster skin, blisters of hatred that burst,
spewed venom across the floor to etch channels in the marble.
"I know what you intend," said Magadauthan. "I know her that tears your
pride."
No need to specify the woman in question. Toq puffed up like a furious air
bladder. "Then you also know what that thing did to me!"
"You did yourself, new boy."
Toq raised a fist, but checked his first, violent reaction. Magadauthan was
crafty. Tides would freeze before the Goddess of Oceans tempted destiny
without a backup plan. "This is a challenge," Toq marveled. "You challenge
me!"
"Piece to piece."
"Spawn to spawn. Winner break all."
She looked up, eyes black as the vasty deep. Magadauthan's face was
unreadable, even by Toq the boy-god. Toq grinned nastily, spoke quickly before
She could. "I'll not make the same mistake, you wet slut. This time, I'll take
Jiana Analena herself, against herself. Her own nature will destroy her! A
test she'll foil!"
After a pause, Magadauthan Full-of-Oceans smiled. "You have spoken . . .
lord." She swirled her blue-grey cloak and flowed from the meetroom.
Toq stared after her departing form. A nasty suspicion bubbled in Toq's
stomach that he had been taken. . . .
Chapter I:
Prophet and Lass, a balance in the sheeting
A long, mournful cry settled across the tent-khayma; the wind, crying for the
dead past: toooooo looooong, whoooo? bego-o-ne. The sound smothered the slave
girl, wrapping around her mouth like a shroud, catching at her breath like a
black silk veil.
Did he hear? Will he wake?
Radience crept silently with utmost humility, as she had been taught, into the
tent, the khayma of the Caliph of Dokamaj Tool. The walls of the khayma puffed
slowly in and out, and creatures too tiny to see clearly scurried at the edges
of her vision.
Radience held the weighty bowl of candied mushrooms close to her left side, so
her left arm would be able to help, too. The bowl was one of the lead pieces,
ugly and heavy. Most of the girls could not carry it. Not even with two good
arms.
Pressed against her side as it was, the bowl also offered excellent cover for
the long dagger, sharp as a needle, as the sins of Arhatman.
Bodies pressed against the khayma walls, scratching with their claws, weeping
to be let in. It was their breath that puffed the canvas, their pushing that
billowed the tentwalk to a moist crawl.
/ won't be humiliated anymore. I won't!
But there she was, at the door to the Caliph's bedchamber. How had she come so
far, without passing the intervening distance?
4Dafydd ab Hugh
Radience pushed through the beaded metal curtain; a lifetime of skulking to
avoid the Overman allowed her to pass through with not a clink, not a single,
silver tone. Behind her, the furry things she could never see chittered and
nipped at her heels.
The Caliph was asleep, laid upon his furs. His arms were folded as if in
death, his head tipped against the luminous, alabaster resting block. Some
said the glyphs on the side of the block were the Caliph's eyes, when his eyes
were shut.
Ripples rolled across the alabaster, radiating out from the Caliph's sleepy
head. The block ticked with each ripple, like the mandibles of a stingtail
clicking together.
The slave girl stepped closer, her teeth chattering until she gritted them.
She rolled the weight from back foot to front foot, for she had been taught.
Holding her breath to not flutter his eyelids, she leaned over and studied the
face of the man she would kill.
The Caliph's eyes were wide open. Radience waited in silence; he often slept
this way. She allowed one hundred heartbeats to pass before she dared breathe.
But if his eyes never shut, she wondered, when do the glyphs watch me?
She put her good, right arm under the grey bowl and used her left to steady
and guide. She lowered the candies to the chess table beside her master, so
carefully and slowly that a watcher would have wondered if she were merely one
more statue the Caliph had collected.
"Is she another stone Rakdare, carrying the waters of life to the Underdwell,
to buy her dead brother's soul back?" Who spoke? demanded Radience. Silence
was her only answer.
A lifelike Tooquo san Toq, masterpiece of the divine Tokogare, glared at
Radience across the dozing body of the man who owned both statue and slave.
The statue's eyes were alive, cold and watchful. She shuddered and looked
away, almost catching the brittle flicker, the bricker of a tiny creature.
Stone statues in a traveling khayma! The man was a beast, but the Caliph's
word was the roar of the wind and
WARRIORWARDS
5,
the bite of the sand. The male slaves broke their backs lugging the thing
along the caravan route. But Radience had enough worries, plotting to kill her
master.
"She's plotting to kill her master!" screamed the non-voice that Radience
could not quite hear. Radience slapped the side of her shaved head, knocking
the voice loose to fell upon the ground and shrivel. She put the bowl down to
free her arm, then slid the heavy, businesslike dagger out of her robe.
Moons gone by, an old foot-soldier of the Elect had idled in the kitchen. A
fat, randy kitchen maid caught his flirting fancy, and he tried his luck.
But a schemer with hollow cheeks, greased hair, and a withered arm whispered
sins and wickedness in the old maids eart lies about her fancied soldier. She
knew her pans and pork, this kitchen maid, but her wit was not known to dim
the moons with its light. She believed every word and spurned the bold rogue.
The soldier was a philosopher. "If it is not one maid, then it is the other,"
he mused. But he meant the daughter of the vine, and he swilled down three
bottles, tumbled in a stupor.
When he woke, thought Radience, he found the long, hard dagger missing from
between his legs.
She held it in her hand now—in the whole, right hand—a dagger towards the
heart of Hal'Addad, Caliph of Dokamaj Tool. She fought the shakes out of her
arm, doubts and worries sent by Arhatman to tear at her decisiveness.
Tiny snakes like long, black hairs fell from her body and slithered across the
floor. Snakes or shakes? she thought, then pushed the question deep into the
lair of her stomach.
Radience heard a footscrape across the room, and the Caliph's eyelids
fluttered. Witt he wake from the sheer savagery of my thoughts? It was only
the wind, the bodies, fluffing the walls of the khayma.
The Caliph was Lord of the Wind. He was Hal'Addad fain Kerat bin El
al'Sophiate, Lord of the Wind and the
6Dafydd ab Hugh
Five Sands, Prince of the Waters, Caliph of the Elect from Qomsheh to Yazd to
the oasis of Deh Bid, Master of Arts and Letters, and Caliph of the Elect of
Dokamaj Tool.
"Snakes!" shouted the voice. "Snakes and quakes and rakes!" Radience gritted
her teeth, thinking / will not surrender to terror, agony, and despair this
time, and to hell with the Overman!
She lowered the tip of the flat, steel blade until it kissed the Caliph's
saffron robe, just left of his sternum. Then she suddenly remembered she was
looking down upon him and moved the point to the other side, where his heart
actually lay.
She inhaled deeply, sucking the iron of the blade up into her own heart, but
her muscles turned limp, and her bowels contracted. An invisible thing sank
its needle teeth into her ankle.
Her heart beat like Horsemen at a fast trot, with an extra thump as one of the
brutes stumbled.
The step scraped again, heavily. She looked up.
The black eyes of the stone Tokogare glared at her, his hand outstretched as
if to stay her arm. Was he bent like that just a moment ago? she marveled. It
did not seem possible. He looked different.
She looked down at the Caliph, symbol of her enslavement, and even brought her
tiny, left arm up to help hold the wooden hilt, hoping the sight of the limb
would give her courage to thrust. But a loud, grinding scrape drove her eyes
back to Tooquo san Toq, warrior king of the First Men, ten thousand turns
dead.
The statue did move. It moved again as she watched it. It clutched at her,
seized a sleeve!
Radience backed away, losing her balance in astonishment. The juggernaut
lurched forward, still clutching her sleeve. It tottered off the pedestal,
gnashing stone teeth like an avalanche. As Tooquo's foot impacted the canvas
floor of the khayma, the world shook and boomed hollowly.
Radience stared full at the stone face and saw the malevolent glitter of the
dusty, carven eyes. The crowds whooped and laughed around her, laughing at the
cripple, laughing
WARRIORWARDS 7
at the poor little girl not even fully one of the Elect. Never do it, never
make it, never 'mount to nothing—
"Damn you!" she cried, more fury than fear. She flipped the dagger and thrust
it at the statue's chest. Her hands numbed as she struck a stone wall. She
dropped the knife; it shattered like a glass goblet full of thick red wine.
She remembered—why doesn't he wake up? why don't I wake up?—but no, she
remembered nothing. Sleep, black sleep, gripped her stomach and even the
brickers were dark.
Radience woke from nothingness to find . . .
Did I dream it all?
She lay on her own mat, in her own khayma. She pulled at her dress; it was
dry, and her feet were clean of mud. The night smelled old, waiting for the
dawn.
Late, she thought. Too late to still be abed! The Overman would draw stripes
on her hide. Still alive . . . the bastard's still alive. I failed, even in
the dreamworld!
She leaned over, hyperventilating, and felt her throat constrict. A moment
later, she lost what little she had eaten for supper. Then she wiped the bile
from her mouth and shuffled away, through the flap and into the paling night,
toward the kitchen khayma a dozen strides away.
She felt the pallor in her cheeks replaced by a warm flush of shame and
humiliation. 7 am a slave, she thought, 0 and a slave I am. I will murder the
bastard, she promised. Perhaps tomorrow.
She clenched her teeth so hard that she locked her jaw, and could not open her
mouth for an hour-
2
Jiana stood still, listening for the swordsman. He was as silent as a horse on
cobblestones.
The man was heavy, his breath labored. He shambled back and forth on the
wooden floor, which creaked and complained beneath his metal-shod feet.
He slid closer in a lunge. Jiana parried easily, even blind, and flicked her
own blade toward his face.
8
Dafydd ab Hugh
Tugga grunted and lost his balance, stumbling back another two steps. Jiana
pressed, anticipating His every twist. Blindly, she nicked him again and again
as the crowd pressed closer.
She smelled their sweat, the stench of their hot breath. They hungered for a
good cut. So many, so many were the crowd that the floor shifted and rolled on
its pontoons.
Tugga sucked in a gasping breath, and Jiana felt rather than heard the slice.
She took one giant-step forward, letting her weight roll with the waves,
carrying her own Wave.
She felt the ineffectual slap of the top third of Tugga's sword against her
upper thigh. But her own Wave bowed like a palace arch as she reached over his
arm, pressed the tip against his chest, and thrust.
Had Wave been bare, Tugga's blood would have slaked its thirst. Even with the
point guard, he whooped with pain as the hard blow struck his sternum. He
called blood and urine upon Jiana and her ancestors.
Jiana slowly ran her finger under her blindfold, removing it with an elegant,
studied motion that the audience loved. They began to chant: HU-hu-hu-hu
HU-hu-hu-hu. . . . Her stomach tightened, and she swallowed bile.
"Champeen takes it in two," said Maqtan. "Lay them out, boys, big ends first."
"Hi, hi!" cried one fat woman, as she gathered her winnings from the teakeep
of the Squatting Dog. "She's invulceable, that's what she is I says."
Maq said nothing, but toted the ledgers. He smiled, and Jiana thought he must
have covered the house edge.
Silently, he handed Jiana her fourth-share. It was a bit more than the price
of a Bay Bay dueling permit, an errand she dared not neglect. Two miserable
days spent white-washing public buildings was enough. Dueling with an expired
license was a serious offense, and had not Judge "Tan Tan" Dutillai as much as
told her she would sure be jugged next time?
"Good call, that blindfold," said Maq, admiring his cut.
"What next, do I have to tie my hands and hold a bucket of horsefeed between
my teeth?"
WARRIORWARDS
9
"It'd bring in the chums."
"Face it, Maq. No one wants to duel me anymore. Soon they won't duel at all
but just surround me and wait for me to walk across the waves."
Then the ghouls, the watchers, the lurkers would not come, and Maq would let
her go as cheerfully as he had booked her, two moons back.
Then what? Who hires a hero?
Jiana held the long, day pipe steadily, keeping the tremor out of her hands,
breathing deep. She held the glowing taper to the bowl, drawing long—long and
hard though it bit at her throat like sand in a whirlwind. Violence crackled
through her body, turning eyes to fire and toes to ice, black hair to grey
embers and bold blood to cold ocean.
Peering through the smoke and the buzzbees (were they there? sure, were they
there?) He looked at her taut face, His black eyes peeking through a placid
smile, waiting for the tindersmoke to ignite her stomach. He: Tong Aouyong,
the Tunk, supreme high something-or-other muckety-muck of one of the thousands
of TRUE successors of the Old Ways, the First Men, the Ti-Ji Tul. He says.
At least he baths and doesn't drool, she thought. At least the son of a
bachelor actually seems to know more than I and packs a mean pipe, but—
The world became a bend, Focus Number One at the Tunk (for precision, at his
smile), Focus Number Two at Jiana, She Herself. She leaned a gentle back,
leaning back, taking the tip of the clay in her mouth once again, drawing deep
of the thousand thousand thousand thousand magic sandsmoke.
The shapes in the roof-thatching stepped off, came alive, came off and into
the air: dancing triangles, squares interloving a circle, spinning a child's
hoop, banking and rounding, so round, so bridge. The shapes (their hooves
crashing, flashing sparks against the wooden planks of the Floating City)
stepped off, turned to longs and shorts as she drew again on the long, white
clay pipe, turned to faces jeering, laughing—
10
Dafydd ab Hugh
* * *
—Caterwauling, "hey, girlie," growled Maq from behind the bar, "wanna drink?"
Jiana ignored the patronizing term. Maq was what he was.
"If I start drinking, 111 wind up walking another day on these blood-slippery
pontoons without a stamp on my permit."
"You gotta do that every moon?"
"Yeah, it's a twenty-eight day curse." She smiled at Maq's puzzled frown as he
looked up, feeling it sail over his head.
"You going out?" he asked. "You better shave."
Jiana blinked, and a fat troll sat across from her in the smokey hut, smoking,
puffing on a great clay pipe, intelligent eyes like bright buttons watching,
looking through the windows of her soul—but another blink and it was gone— she
was with Maq in the Squatting Dog.
Jiana gingerly pulled her right boot on, trying not to rub the tender scab
below the knee. It had taken a long time to heal this far.
"Maybe I'll just grow it all back."
"Fuck no! It's distinctual. Want me to shave it?"
She smiled, wincing as she put weight back on the leg. She looked dubiously at
her cloak, still soaked from the pitcher of ale, cheaper than strongtea.
"Give me your coat. It stinks outside."
"There's been some waves, and you got that bum knee."
"If I can walk home after a dozen of your Baby Boilers, I bet I can get to the
Bureau of Duels and Marriages. Anyway, even after the stamp I have a copper
claw for the ferry."
"Well, at least let me shave your head."
Jiana closed her eyes and slowly ran her fingers along her scalp, feeling the
rough stubble that surrounded the long, black strip of hair in the middle.
"I like doing it myself," she whispered towards the ceiling. Maq would
understand. She never let him shave her. His hands shook (and he was who he
was).
WARRIORWARDS
11
Jiana cupped her hands over her face, and tilted her head back. She reveled in
the bubble of privacy formed by her tented fingers, warmed by her boozy
breath. Then the conversational jumble pierced the peace like a bagpipe
joining a quiet flute.
/ am a billboard, she thought, cold denunciation razoring through contentment.
I'm a sword-whore. 1 have a headache.
I see horses, cheered, a thousand thousand . . . Too many thousands, she
feared. No more thousands. Jiana inhaled deeply from the water pipe, holding
the smoke in her lungs as long as she could.
"Do you see souls? or horses?" Sure and it must have been the Tunk who spoke,
but the voice was lost from whence it came, coming from now here and again
there, and mostly from Jiana's own stomach.
"Well—honest, no, they just look like horses. Should I be seeing snakes?"
Jiana started to inhale again, changed her thoughts and put the stem down; she
had already flown too far and worried about finding her way back.
"Snakes?"
"I mean souls. Why did I say snakes? I drove them out. I drove Tooqa the
Nameless Serpentine out of the water and out of this sphere. Where is It now?
With Toq in his wretched ivory city? Is my God hissing with Sleeping Tifniz?"
'"You re babbling. Let the talker go. Give your stomach over to the listener
for a while."
"What should I listen to?"
She wished her eyes worked. She wished she could see the Tunk, for she thought
he might have shrugged,
"What should you not listen to? The buzzbees, the water waves lap lapping
against the planks, the cre&king of the timbers. Your heart beating. Your
stomach thinking. That voice inside of you—what is its name?"
"Jianabel. Haven't heard her much lately. Haven't heard her at att for nearly
a futt turn."
"But who is the One who makes the grass green?"
12
Dafydd ab Hugh
"Perhaps she needs listening to."
'"You're a sword-whore, not a billboard!" A familiar familiar would have
laughed.
"O Jianabel, you have such a gentle and understanding view." The Voice was
silent, but Jiana heard her own thoughts, filling in for that separate part of
her. "1 call the coin the way it falls," Jianabel would have rejoined. As it
was, she did not need to; Jiana answered from her own Wolf Self.
"What do you see? Now?" asked the Tunk. He asked in Jiana's dreamtime as she
drifted armless and legless in the timeless.
Saw herself step to the window in answer; saw herself naked, fling wide the
shutters. Saw the pane, frozen sugar as if spun by a candy spider. Pushed she
did and out it popped, to fall to the cobblestones and brittle into a thousand
thousand thousand thousand pieces.
"Bricker it is," she snarled, thinking of her coiling god the Nameless
Serpentine. "My (Tunk), my teacher, what is this crumbly bricker I've been
smoking?"
But already through the window, already leaning way, way out the empty,
looking down, down, down the distance. Sill presses against her stomach,
gouged by the latch, splinter in her wrist. Slowly stretching until fingers
grip sill, sharps of pain through the knuckles, feeling center now panting
over three and twenty man-stands, three and twenty times, say, six feet
equaling well more than one hundred twenty to fall. Strains, pulls back at
last, too late; overbalanced; falls. . . .
Slowly do the fingers give.
Strange, She thinks, how not to be afraid; strange to look Old Death the
Barber in the eyes, if eyes is the word. Old Him that I shit on so many times
and laughed at, and not to feel fear. What's on the other side? I don't care.
I just don't care care,
Slips. Fingers slip.
• Sees cobblestones. Harder than a prince's heart, she thinks. The fingers
slip.
Falls—a long moment heart in mouth, light as a feather, gossamer ladder.
Ground rushes up. Hands outstretched,
WABBJORWARDS
13
reaction, bypassing even the stomach and a scream rips out of her face like
skin torn from the skull.
March march marches time to the beat of a snail drum. First the hand strikes,
savage wrench up the arm culminates in a horror of pain at the elbow tells her
att she needs to know that her arm has shattered.
But still her body pushes down, feeling as if it is pushing up 'gainst a
cobblestone ceiling. Now the arm folds under her and the horror rushes up to
her shoulder.
Face strikes, the moment slows yet further. First the left then the right,
feels the front teeth smashed, snapped clean out o/jaw. Jaw, faceplate of
skull collapse inward.
The body has its own agenda, momentum pushing back and over, folding body in
half to snap neck like a poorly-made sword with too much carbon. Bibs snap one
by one by one, though that surely is the least of hers.
Thighs counter-rotate to grind kneecaps into powder.
(BUT—she reached around and bit his neck, not quite hard enough to break the
skin. She ran her tongue lightly across the fold of flesh stretched tight by
her teeth.
Dilai took hold of her buttocks, sinking his fingers inside, touching the
tiny, black hairs. Almost despite his intentions, he grew excited, and rubbed
himself against her thigh.
She spat out the powder and kissed him again. He responded, and their tongues
entwined. At the edges of her hearing the trumpets sounded, still tod feint,
but louder than before. Closer, the circus turned back. A memory? Of the
future?)
Coughs, spits, drags again oh the pipe, looking again at tent walls and a
figure in the smoke.
"What do you see? Now?" he asks again—or is it the first time still?
"One future, from many; not mine I think. Another's, or another's present.
What do you see?"
(BUT SHE SEES—She was inside of him, even as he was inside of her. The future
memory continued. She looked out through Dilai's eyes, heard with his ears the
warpipes that called him up, called him out.
14
Dafydd ab Hugh
He rises. Rises up out of his body. Rises up, the him-ness of it; looks
down—Jiana my love, farewell—my time— learned what it is to have, learned what
it is to lose.
Rising, rising above her (me) and what was once mine. Rising, and across the
room, they stretch out their hands to me. Pipes, I hear you! I hear them!
In the end, in the last days. In the truth. Rising, and I walk across the
room, drifting in smoke, drop in the ocean. She is behind me; Dilai is behind
me.
The door opens, and I pass through.)
"I see certain," says the Tunk, "war woman on road to Ruoy Oudin, meeting the
eyes of slave girl."
"What slave girl? What are you talking about?"
"Not know, but you will, when meet her. She very important. Your next step."
"There are no slaves in Bay Bay."
"Slaves everywhere. Get goose out of bottle. She your next mountain."
"There are no mountains in Bay Bay."
"Mountains everywhere," corrected the Tunk.
A cold drizzle fluttered from the sky, iron sky, as Jiana pushed through the
real, wooden door onto the sidewalk. Despite the rain, the ocean was calm. She
felt no need to hold the rope rail, even after the tea and ale she had
slugged.
Dilai. Dilai, silky hair spun black like a spiderweb of a glistening coal
gossamer.
Dilai, get out of my stomach. I didn't want this. . . . I only wanted you. /
only wanted to taste your lips, your spity your cock, all of you. Drink you,
in. Breathe your air, laugh at your foolish japes and read wretched poetry at
you.
I didn't want love, you fucking bastard serpent.
She walked the plank, headed for one of the public walks.
"Thirty-two turns old today," she said, "and a shit day it is, too. Thirty-two
is twice sixteen. Do I remember when I was sixteen? I stabbed a sergeant. And
four times eight,
WARRIORWARDS
15
but that was in the wolf time, lost now. Thirty-two, happy birthday to me."
There was no answering, hectoring voice. Jianabel was conquered. The entity
that once infested her stomach, living with her like two snakes coiled, was
gone. Or, as fat Toldo would say, the schism in her personality was healed.
Either way, it made for a lonely monologue.
"Thirty-two, and today." She stretched, rubbing the hurt from her
still-healing leg, and stared at the water.
Black, silky hair looked back, though the ocean was far too dark to reflect.
It was Dilai ... or was it the mouse, Dida? So easy to confuse the two: Dilai,
the aristocratic, polished decadence of Bay Bay's third oldest family; and
Dida, rough, home-woven, innocent naif, an over-excited puppy.
Jiana wrapped her arms around her stomach, trying to hold the images inside.
"Bastards," she prayed.
3
"Fuck the license," Jiana snarled.
The sun sank into the waves, and she abruptly decided to leave Bay Bay, City
of the Floating Dead. Her future was as grey and formless as the iron sky. She
stopped in the busy thoroughfare and leaned against the railing, causing the
walkway to tilt alarmingly on its pontoons. A fat merchant took a stumblestep
and swore.
"Hup!" cried the man, "You move or whut?"
"Sorry. I was just thinking ..."
"Nah, nah, you no think. You soldier-boy, girlie! You police! You a footgrab,
you whiteface marine!"
"Look, I said I was sorry. 1 want to go back that way. Get out of my way, will
you?"
"No, you from get outa my way! You go that way, go to end! Go!"
He stepped forward and butted her with his potato-sack belly. Jiana reached
for Wave, but caught herself Her permit did not allow duels with unarmed
louts.
16
Dafydd ah Hugh
"That was a gimmie, you spherical thug. Now get out of my way and out of my
life."
"You from get out, get out that way, or whut? Or whut, hunh?"
Grinning like a demented leper, the man eagerly thrust himself at her again,
trying to butt her another blow. Jiana stepped nimbly aside, and the man
sprawled against the rail. She put her foot against his tailbone, and gently
pushed.
The rail was old and sea-worn; it splintered easily, and the man tumbled into
the sea. Jiana stalked away, not even checking to see if he could swim.
"What," she answered decisively.
She side-hopped to another floating walk, and followed it to the courtyard of
a hostelery. Jiana slowed her pace and trotted south towards the Eagle
Causeway that led to the Prince's Drillgrounds, across the bay on dry land.
The city reeled and staggered in the swells from an offshore squall. The
buildings swayed like drunken sailors, and the walks twisted and slid
treacherously. Jiana shuffled tike a pro; she had lived in the Floating City
nearly eight turns, hating every hour, every moment.
Some buildings were bright with color, splashed with paint and dye from a
hundred faraway lands, purchased from the ships that prowled the harbor by the
sun and the moons. Most buildings were grey and scored, stripped by the raging
winds and salt spray, torn asunder by centuries of neglect. Derelects and
drunkards made homes in the worst of them, seizing their tiny islands from the
armies of the apathetic.
Jiana scarcely glanced at the murals and paintings, works of art, obscenities
scrawled in haste and despair; she had seen them all before. She trotted, eyes
half shut, and soon found herself across the Prince's Causeway, on the
upper-class landfill island between the mainland and the Maze.
There were a dozen stables there; she could buy a horse. Or she could change
her mind and buy the bloody license, as she had every moon for four turns.
Yeah. That was my World's Dream. YeoA, fuck Dilai. Fuck Dida.
WARRIORWARDS
17
Fuck Toldo and Prince Alanai. Traded blood for shit. Now who hires a hero?
For a year following her remarkable adventure for the World's Dream, she lived
like a princess. But then Alanai grew silent and depressed, and withdrew into
his palace. His band of heroes drifted apart, and Jiana discovered that being
a hero had a downside.
What could she do? Certainly not the army; they would treat her either with
awe or with sadistic abuse, and she would surely feed some colonel a yard of
his own steel within a moon.
Jiana freelanced for a while, drifting from job to job; but she was expensive,
and how often did a spice merchant need a true hero to guard his warehouse?
Broke and proud, she found Maqtan. Her name was enough to drag in the bored
and sated, a few of them at least. For some moons, the Squatting Dog was the
tearoom to frequent.
Dilai found her again. They took up where they had left off, but she was
restless. She did not want his money, and he wanted for nothing. Soon she was
back at the Squatting Dog, but the crowds were not. Maq kept her on to
diminish his lifedebt, and she began dueling clods and foreigners for action
on the side.
Jiana slogged through the mud of the landfill, her eyes fixed on the stables,
far in the distance. She might reach them by the time darkness was complete,
if she made no stops along the way.
"Slave girls on the road to Bay Din. ..." But what did he mean? Two weeks had
passed since that smokey night in the Tunk's house, and the Bay Din road was
full of mud and pilgrims, as usual. She saw the first stars, and began to
hurry.
As Jiana ran, she put a hand on Wave; it was securely wrapped around her
waist, looking more like a belt than the twisting, razor-sharp sword that it
was.
As she touched the sword, a spark of memory contracted her fingers. The taste
and pain of every kill she had ever taken flashed in her stomach. She saw them
18
Dafydd ab Hugh
hovering in the air around her, their eyes watched mournfully from sunken
sockets in bare, bleached skulls. They worked their broken jaws as if trying
to speak; but no sounds came forth. Jiana ignored their pleas.
She saw an inn across the street, the Jackanape. It was unfamiliar, but she
began to thirst.
"I ought to stop in for a moment, just to ask around about slave girls in Bay
Din. A drop. Maybe just one drop. ..." She trotted on by, licking her lips.
The stables did not look noticibly closer.
(But what was the dream? She had dreamed it last night. It was a horrid dream,
and He, Toq, the blooded boy-god, was in it.
(So what had he said? What about casting his shade three times? Three times,
thrice before—before—no, it was gone.)
Jiana passed under the Great Arch of Lilies, black stone frosted with the
white flowers. The arch carried the Ruoy Mava Cemetery across the five great
thoroughfares of Bay Bay. Jiana slowed to a cautious walk, for the Cenotaph
was dark and evil, filled with footgrabs with queer ideas.
She passed the Hung Stallion Tavern and then Knicker Pickers, low dives both,
and resolved to stop at the next teahouse for a tightener.
A deep, still eddy from the canal passed around three sides of the Pregnant
Bull. Jiana paused on the walkway, and stared down into the blackness, drawn
by an irresistable curiosity. Something was down there; she knew it.
Slowly, like an old wound pulling open again, she began to realize why the
building and the pool looked familiar: it was where an old lover of hers,
Tawn, had sunk to his death, clutching to his breast the stolen chest of gold
he would not loose.
She stared at the rippling, oily water, and an icy chill crawled along her
spine. Something was under the water, and it was rising.
Tawn? Come back to accuse with silent eyes and pointing finger?
Tiny, white things broke the surface; they rose higher,
WARRIORWARDS 19
and Jiana gasped as she realized they were bloated, water-bleached hands.
"No!" she said through clenched teeth, anger overwhelming fear. She clutched
her sword hilt and thumbed aside the catchlock. "You are dead, bucko, and that
is how you are going to stay!"
The hands rose higher, and they were not the hands of Tawn after all. Instead,
they were the hands, then the arms of a little girl.
She rose slowly from the waves, her long, black hair dripping down her face
and back.
Jiana bit her lip, and dropped her hand nervelessly to her side. She tried to
speak, but the words caught in her throat.
The little girl smiled, and her teeth were all filed to points. The Wolf Hour
struck.
"I'll never be very far," laughed Jianabel, spitting out water. "And you'll
always be mine!"
"Where the hell have you been?"
"Yes, my dearest sister; hell, indeed."
"Like it? You're going to stay there."
"It's tolerable," said Jianabel, stifling a yawn, "but I'll be ever so glad
摘要：

WARRIORWARDSThisisaworkoffiction.Allthecharactersandeventsportrayedinthisbookarefictional,andanyresemblancetorealpeopleorincidentsispurelycoincidental.Copyright©1990byDafyddabHughAllrightsreserved,includingtherighttoreproducethisbookorportionsthereofinanyform.ABaenBooksOriginalBaenPublishingEnterpri...

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