THE GOD BOX Page 7

  I saw Meru pull up his mount, turn, and ride the way we had come to see if we had company. For the moment, it looked as though I had best go along with Syndia's plans. Of course, what were her plans? The fantastically expensive caravan, this peculiar box, the boy who called himself Tayu, the fight between the Nant gods over the boy, Heteris's lust for my inheritance, and Olassar's unfinished contract with the Omergunts. On top of all this was the rabid search for me led by Captain Shadows.

  The leathery voices of tawbirds filled the forest as I tried to see beyond the brush into the darknesses beyond, looking for the monsters that lurked there. I could see nothing. I concentrated instead on Captain Shadows. Why was he after me? Would Olassar's box be enough to send him sniffing into the Mystic after me? I didn't think so. It was a clever enough contraption, but Iskandar is filled with more impressive magic. Why must he have this particular piece? It did not make sense.

  Everyone, man, woman, or child, who lived by his wits on the streets and alleys of Iskandar knew and feared Captain Shadows. I have seen more than one head I knew mounted on a pike along the Temple Circle as an object lesson. Shadows was always mindful of expenses in his disposition of our friends, too. Such frills as investigations and trials were rarely indulged. I knew of only one fool who tried to bring a complaint about this to her bloody self, Tretia. After he had been killed, I found his head mounted on a Temple Circle pike the next morning. That was all I ever had to bury of my father.

  I wiped my eyes and looked ahead. Tayu was looking back at me. There were tears in his eyes, too. Could he, indeed, be my brother? At times he seemed to feel what I felt. But I couldn't see how he could comprehend such feelings. I wanted so many of these questions answered now. I looked to Olassar's box, its ivory handle tied to my horse's saddle. I spoke to it and asked, "What do I need right now?"

  The lower left drawer opened. Inside was a slip of paper containing a single word: "Patience."

  I crumpled up the paper and threw it upon the ground.

  "I know that!" The drawer closed by itself. I put the anger out of my voice and tried again. "How then do I obtain patience?"

  The same drawer opened once again. This time the note read: "Put your impatience in here."

  "Bah!" I was about to throw the object into the woods when the Nant guard who had been riding in back reined up beside me and whispered out of the side of his mouth:

  "Take this." He held out his hand and dropped into mine a balled-up piece of paper.

  "What is this?"

  "You dropped it. If Commander Meru had seen this you would have been executed on the spot. To him it would have looked like you were attempting to leave trail markings for the Heterin captain. I think you are, instead, only stupid and careless."

  "Thank you, I think."

  "Don't mention it. If you ever do I will slit open your belly and hang you by your own guts."

  Charming. Simply charming. I gave him my best wan smile as he again fell back in the procession. Commander Meru rode up from the rear, paused to speak to the guard, then paused to speak to me. "We are picking up the pace. Shadows is only an hour behind." He continued up the line, eventually reaching Ruuter. As soon as he did we began moving first at a canter, then at a gallop.

  I don't much like horses. They are unpredictable critters that cannot remember if anyone is riding them or not. Neither am I much of a rider, preferring instead the security of either four carriage wheels or my own feet beneath me. I lost my hat to one overhanging branch and almost lost my head to a second. I placed my cheek next to my horse's neck, threw my arms around it, and held on with my eyes shut.

  I could feel the clods of dirt thrown up by the pair of horses ahead of me striking me in my face. There are many kinds of terror, and I had cultivated the habit of avoiding most of them. But on the back of a panting horse, running at top speed through an overgrown forest, with gods fighting overhead, and who knows what waiting for me, in addition to Captain Shadows sniffing at my heels, all of the terror in my life that I had managed to avoid visited me at the same time.

  Olassar's box was jumping all around, banging the horse, my shoulder, ribs, and thigh. I gripped it with my right hand just as my horse followed the others into a hole in the trees, cutting off almost all of the light. "Help me," I prayed to whatever spirits or deities might be listening.

  There was a warmth in the box. It warmed my hand, then my arm and shoulder, then my heart. A voice came into my head, and it said "I am with you."

  "Great," I whispered. "So what do I do now?"

  An animal screamed loudly, something swatted my face, and the voice said, "Turn over your fear to me."

  "I will, but how?"

  "Just ask me to take it."

  "Please . . . please take my fear. I would be eternally grateful if only—"

  My fear was gone. That sickness that was eating up my heart was gone. I sat up, feeling a new sense of awe about the box. In a flash it had changed me from a sniveling coward to a man who could ride with pride. That was when a branch caught me between the eyes, I saw those marvelous stars of daylight, and as everything went dark I heard the voice say, "I didn't say sit up!"

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  I wandered a dreampath, and half sensed that it was a dreampath I was seeing. There were the dark beams of a ceiling above me, and there was crying coming from the right. Rolling my head to the right, I saw a baby. Its cries ceased and it looked at me. I held out my hand to it, and only when I saw my hand did I realize that I, too, was a baby.

  A face came into view, and I looked to see my father.

  His face was younger but contorted so that I hardly recognized him. Another face came into view. Although it was thirty years younger, I recognized the face of the Nant priestess Ahjrah.

  My father looked first at me, then at my brother, then back to me again. He closed his eyes and shook his head. Ahjrah put her hand on his shoulder and her lips said, "Rafas, it is written that it be a father's choice. You must choose."

  My father's hand touched my cheek, then my brother's. He lifted Tayu and placed the baby in the priestess's arms. As Ahjrah moved out of view, my father cried.

  I awakened and opened my eyes feeling puzzled and sad. When I could bring things into focus, I saw that I was in a crude hut of woven branches and leaves. There was a fire, a pot boiling above it, and strange odors filling the air. There was a face above me, and—

  I closed my eyes again, certain that I had not yet awakened and just as certain that my dream had moved over into nightmare. The face I saw was hairless, wrinkled, gray, and looked as though its features had been arranged by the interbreeding of a bat and a road accident. It grinned at me with yellowish needle points of teeth.

  "Dagata'k? Dagata'k you speak, yes?"

  "Yes, I think so."

  "Think so, good, eh!" It snurfled off a laugh behind its arm. The arm appeared to be webbed to its torso with a membrane. "This is pahmma. Good. You eat. Grow strong."

  I sat up in panic and looked at the creature squatting before me. "Captain Shadows?"

  The creature wheezed out three laughs and shook its head. "Shadows out chasing shadows." The lame joke had the ugly thing in a laughing fit. When it finally calmed, it held out a wooden bowl full of yellow guck. "Eat pahmma. Make you strong. Put you on your feet again."

  The thing dipped a wooden spoon that appeared to be about the size of a shovel into the bowl and thrust it into my mouth. Although I gagged a bit at having the spoon shoved down my throat, the pahmma itself wasn't untasty. Immediately I began to feel better. I took the bowl and spoon. "Let me."

  "'Et you!"

  That, too, had the creature in stitches. I swallowed another mouthful of the squash soup and pointed the spoon at the creature. "What was it you said about Captain Shadows? Where is he?"

  I waited impatiently for the thing to stop laughing. When it did, it said, "Sm
arter you shou'd ask where you find yourse'f, yes?"

  "Very well. Where am I?"

  A deadly serious look came over the thing's face as it held up a clawed finger. "You be where Shadows is not. Good, yes?" Then it went into another laughing fit.

  Obviously my nurse was mentally defective, and I waited somewhat uncomfortably for the thing's keeper to come with a net and drag the creature off to an asylum. Then the creature became serious again and studied my face. Reaching out one of those clawed hands, it slapped my face lightly. "Ah, you are sick, sick. You cannot 'aff?"

  "'Aff? You mean, laugh?"

  "Most certain'y, 'aff. You must be very sick not to 'aff."

  In a panic I remembered Olassar's box. I looked about for it and found it on the hut's floor next to me. I placed my hand on it and laughed.

  "Ah," said the thing. "You 'aff. Much better, more pahmma. Put you on your feet." It pointed at the bowl, and I continued eating.

  The familiar visage of Commander Meru stuck his head through the hut's doorway. "Korvas, how are you feeling?"

  I felt around my ribs, head, and so on, and tallied up the results. "I feel surprisingly good, no thanks to that insane run through the forest. This is due, no doubt, to this excellent porridge." I nodded at the creature. "My thanks."

  "Come out and join us when you are finished, and don't eat too much of that," cautioned Meru as his smirking face left the doorway.

  What nonsense, I thought as I finished up the bowl and held it out to the creature for more. For some reason, holding out the bowl caused the creature to fall backward over itself, its winged arms wrapped around its middle, laughing so hard it could not draw a single breath.

  I watched this spectacle until a sudden urgency hit my bowels with a passion unequalled in my prior experience. I dropped everything, ran out of the hut, and off the edge of a branch into thin air. My frantic grasps at a tangle of vines and Meru's grip on my collar were all that saved me. Whoever these creatures were, they lived in trees. Angh only knows where they do their business.

  "Meru, I am in need—"

  He pulled me up to a flat place next to him and pointed at another hut. "In there. And don't fall through. It's a long way down."

  I looked, and the massive tree trunks extended down and down until they were lost in mists.

  As I closed the door of woven branches and straddled the opening in the floor, I had to agree. Pahmma certainly does put you on your feet again.

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  After completing my business and securing my inheritance, Meru led me to join the others in a huge hut cradled by the branches of a single enormous tree. Inside, the Nant guards stood near the door. In the center of the hut burned a small fire in a carved stone brazier, the pan of which was just above the woven floor. There was a circle of listeners around the fire.

  Syndia and Tayu were seated there along with nine of those ugly bat-winged creatures. Surrounding that circle, the edges of the hut were crammed with more than two hundred of those beings. Although my nurse's possession of any particular sex had been difficult to tell when I had first awakened, the creatures did come in male and female. The females had breasts of a sort, but the entire race struck me as something that had recently been conjured up from a nightmare.

  One of the things—a male—led me to an open place in the inner circle next to Tayu. I sat cross-legged on the floor and placed Olassar's box upon my ankles. I leaned across Tayu and whispered to Syndia, "Where is Captain Shadows?"

  She held her finger to her lips and nodded toward the other side of the circle. One of the creatures was huddled beneath an ornately embroidered blanket. There was an unwholesome-sounding wail, then the critters on either side of the blanketed one lifted the cover from her, for it was a female covered entirely with bright yellow paint. She squatted before the fire and held her clawed hands out before her, saying, "B'essings on us, this fire," she held her palms open toward us, "and on our visitors." I could see that there were huge eyes painted upon her wings.

  She passed her hand over the fire and the flames died down as an image appeared above the flames. It was the full figure of Pagas Shadows. The image was real enough to cause my spine to tremble. My inheritance reminded me that it was there as well, and I again gave it my fear. As I did do, my fear left me. But there was a strange message from the box. It cautioned me, with my newly granted courage, to mind overhanging branches and other enemies of false pride.

  "I am Bachudowah, and my art is before you this orrintime."

  Of the box I asked, "Orrintime?"

  The answer came: "Now; the present moment."

  "Beho'd," she held her arms up toward the image of Shadows, "Pagas Shadows, monster of Heterin Guard, spawn of Zyrchitih, Bitch of Fire." The flames sparkled. Bachudowah held her palms over the fire, and the flames subsided.

  "I see everything, so keep nothing from me; everything I say serves purpose, so hear with ten ears." A milky white membrane seemed to pull over each of her eyeballs, giving Bachudowah a demonish look. The hut grew very silent as a greenish blue cloud formed above Bachudowah's head. The cloud moved until it hovered over the image of Shadows. A piece of it separated and settled around the captain's head.

  The cloud moved on, pieces leaving the main as it passed the Nant guards, Syndia, Tayu, myself, and the creatures sitting with us in the inner circle. A piece of the cloud settled on Olassar's box at the same time a piece settled around my head. There was no sensation.

  Again the main cloud circled the hut, gathering up its pieces. It eventually came to rest above Bachudowah's head. Slowly it settled down upon her wrinkled yellow shoulders, enveloping her head in clouds. A swooshing sound filled the hut and the cloud disappeared up the creature's nostrils. Bachudowah opened her eyelids. Her eyes were silver and reflected light like mirrors.

  She grinned, displaying a set of vicious-looking pointed teeth. "Ah, Bachudowah see many secrets among grounders—you outsiders. Things each of you keep from others. Do you va'ue your secrets? If you do not va'ue them, then we wi' share them. If you do va'ue them, then offer a prize. You, Syndia."

  The Nant priestess closed her eyes and opened them again. "My secrets have no value."

  Bachudowah pointed a handful of claws at Tayu. "You, Tayu."

  The boy lifted his veil. His face still had that vacant look, but he spoke out loud for the first time. "All I know is yours, Bachudowah."

  "You, Korvas."

  "I would keep my secrets to myself. I place a great value upon them and would charge you a great deal—"

  There was a roar of laughter from the creatures in the hut. When it died, the one with the silver eyes explained, "I charge you not to use them, and great va'ue must make you very rich, yes?"

  "No."

  "Then you cannot pay for my quiet?"

  "No—this is blackmail, you know."

  "I did not take your secrets from you; you 'et them go."

  She turned and pointed at the first guard. "You, Rosh." It was the guard sergeant who had warned me about tossing my trash on the trail.

  "I have no secrets of value."

  "You, Icen."

  The large guard smiled and asked, "What do you charge?"

  "Whatever they are worth to keep quiet."

  I thought I saw Icen moisten his lips before he shook his head. "Nothing of value here."

  "You, Meru."

  The guard commander threw a small leather pouch at Bachudowah. The creature caught the pouch, opened it, and poured the contents into her hand. "There are only fifty reels."

  Meru grinned through his black beard. "That is all they are worth to me."

  Perhaps the sum of fifty reels was too little to impress Bachudowah or Commander Meru, but it had my gears turning. The creature nodded and tied the pouch to her string belt.

  Of course, what immediately leaped to mind was, just what was it that Meru
had to hide that was worth fifty golden reels?

  The creature faced the fourth guard. "You, Hara." The fourth guard looked with contempt upon Bachudowah. "You'll get no coins from me. If you can see inside me, say what you will."

  Bachudowah grinned at Hara and turned her head until she faced me. She looked down at Olassar's box and stared at it for half a minute. She closed her eyes, crossed her arms over her chest and, still seated, bowed forward until her forehead touched the floor. "As a'ways, I honor you." I stared at the box as I wondered who Bachudowah saw there.