JOURNEY OF THE SACRED KING III

  JOURNEY OF THE SACRED KING

  Book III

  MY FATHER'S HOUSE

  By

  JANRAE FRANK

  A Renaissance E Books publication

  ISBN 1-58873-823-2

  All rights reserved

  Copyright © 2006 by Janrae Frank

  This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part without written permission.

  For information contact:

  Publisher@renebooks.com

  PageTurner Editions/Futures-Past Fantasy

  First Book Edition

  Duty is where one finds it.

  Creeyan proverb.

  To question is to hesitate,

  To hesitate is to become lost

  To become lost is to die.

  Guild Proverb

  My Dear Alysyn,

  It is extremely important that you return to Havensword. Bring your units into the city. After thirty years, I have reason to believe that the vampire has returned. While I fully understand your reluctance, it is time to put aside your personal concerns. The heir's life is in danger and so is your husband's. Come at once.

  Eshraf,

  Patriarch of the Nethergod,

  Hadjys the Dark Judge

  High Temple, Havensword, Creeya.

  My Dear Eshraf,

  I can't. I simply can't. The proofs you have sent me, do suggest a vampire. But not necessarily the same vampire. I will, however, bring my riders nearer the city.

  Captain Alysyn Larkwind,

  Riders of Hadjysymi

  CHAPTER ONE

  BROKEN RULES

  Arruth huddled under the bushes on the Stalking Grounds, which lay within the wide spread walls of Ishladrim Castle on part of the palace compound made up by the Hadjysheen Temple University, the palace, the ancient libraries, and the High Temple itself, forming a quad on the spire of the mountain like a crown jewel with the city of Havensword wrapped around and beneath it. Hiding was not as easy as it had once been, since the twelve years old's sudden spurt of growth had turned her into a gawky six-footer. The bushes clutched at her like a thousand sharp fingers, catching at her sleeves and pants legs as they wrapped her in their shadows. The scent of pine dominated the air around her, overpowering the lighter fragrances of the wood. Dirt and bits of brush clung to her wavy black hair. She dug her fingers into the moist, black soil, softly breaking the rotted crust of leaves beneath its shallow blanket and disturbing the insects dwelling there, which then skittered away from her.

  The shadows had lengthened with the approach of sunset and the air was turning cold. She did not wear a cloak because the warmth of midday had been pleasant when she fled. A sudden breeze chilled the sweat along her arms and neck. Arruth shivered. Her ears strained for the smallest sound of booted feet. She knew the Wrathscar soldiers were out there. If she moved, they would find her. Her heart drummed loud in her ears, matching the sound of her breathing. She fought to control her panicked breath, her panting; fought hard to breathe as quietly as she could. Yet it all seemed loud in her ears. Arruth had recently reached that awkward stage in adolescent growth, when the rapid changes tended to interfere with coordination so that sometimes it seemed like she was all arms and legs. Arruth had lost much of that street child quickness, which had served her so well all her life, and she was painfully aware of it – it seemed as if her body had to struggle to find a new center of gravity.

  She prayed again that the Wrathscar myn chasing her would not catch her. She desperately wanted to go home, wanted to be back in Shaurone. The grand adventure had turned into a nightmare and she had no one to talk to.

  "And it is my own fault." Arruth covered her mouth with her hands, realizing she had spoken aloud. She froze like a deer, listening, ready to run. She resisted the tears pressing for release at the edges of her eyes.

  Talons had given Arruth and her sister, Jysy, two rules when she brought them to Creeya as her protégés: no stealing and no kissing. They kept the no stealing rule. That one went without saying. The kissing rule did not immediately make sense to Arruth. In Shaurone, less than one in four children was born male and the attitude toward sex was "have a good time." Innocent prepubescent sexual exploration was regarded with affectionate indulgence and the females were the sexual predators.

  Coming to Creeya, Arruth had never seen so many males in one place before in her life, so she had romped through like a sprite in a candy shop at first, which drove Talons to distraction, finally making her very angry. "Creeya is not Shaurone! It is dangerous to just go around kissing strange men. Promise me you will not break the rules anymore." Arruth had promised, but she had not kept the rules. By the time she understood what Talons meant, it was far too late to mend it and she was too ashamed to tell anyone: in Creeya the sexual predators were male. Which was why she was hiding in the bushes.

  The densely forested Stalking Grounds, much of it left half wild to increase the difficulty of traversing it, was for those Assassins' Guildsmyn who were taking the roles of hunter and prey in the training exercises. Arruth had hoped that she could lose Lord Wrathscar and his myn here, but even now she heard them coming closer. Lord Wrathscar was Bryndel's father, soon to be Talons' father-in-law. Weeks ago, in a playful mood, Arruth had kissed him and learned why Talons made the "no kissing rule" – Lord Wrathscar raped her.

  That afternoon, Wrathscar sent two myn to bring her to him, and instead she ran into the depths of the Stalking Grounds, going farther and farther until she was completely lost. Queiggy, the little chief clerk at the Guild Wing of the palace, had once told her there was a secret gate that would let out onto the mountain itself. So, thinking that if she could find it, maybe she could get away, Arruth had plunged deeper and deeper into the undergrowth, heedlessly traveling places she had never been before. Arruth listened. It sounded like there were four of them. That meant more were coming. Why wouldn't he leave her alone? Why? She turned, pivoting slightly on the balls of her feet, ready to spring up and run.

  "Hello, Arruth," said a deep masculine voice.

  "No," her voice cracked, a hoarse breaking sound, and they had her. Wrathscar had anticipated her and been waiting in the Stalking Grounds all along.

  * * * *

  "They ... they raped me," Arruth sobbed to the little pinch-faced healer as he finished Reading her. Solance wore black robes, which made a soft swishing sound as they brushed the tops of his tall boots. He sashed the robe with a length of magenta silk in a curious bow to vanity while his purses and pouches hung from a narrow leather belt beneath it. He was the only healer available in the infirmary annex so early – dawn was still an hour away. His examination room smelled of oleander, caster beans, and rhododendron, although no greenery was present.

  She gripped the wooden edges of the plain, unadorned chair until her knuckles whitened, her legs curled tightly around the bottom, ankles hooked together as if her body could deny the violation by clutching itself. The chamber was cold, sterile, and efficient. A desk and several tables with odd alchemist's equipment covering them: crystals for preserving tissue samples; bottles and beakers and tubes; a small oil burner for heating his concoctions. Many shelves of herbs, chemicals, bottles of powders and books lined two walls. All of it made Arruth that much more uncomfortable. Had any other healer been available she would have gone to them. But only Solance had been present in the healers' ell.

  "Oh, I rather doubt that," Solance said, casually indifferent. "You broke the rules in the first place. Your reputation is well known. I doubt there is a male in Ishladrim citadel you have not at least brushed your lips across. You've enticed them all."

  Arruth choked, stunned by his attitude. In Shaurone they would have placed a mace in her hands
and gone after him, watched as she beat his head in and then cut his ears off so that she could wear them on a cord around her neck along with the tanned sack his balls had hung in. They would never have placed the blame on her. When Talons warned her that Creeya was different, she had never dreamed – never in her darkest nightmares – that it could be this different. This was what Talons had meant by 'the rules.'

  "Considering your reputation. All you Sharani are whores and sluts," he said distastefully, staring down at her. "Lord Wrathscar can have any woman he wants. All of his mistresses are far prettier than you are. Why should he go to the trouble of forcing an over-sized ox like you?" He took a jar of cream from a shelf. "This will take the tenderness out, help the tissues to heal. Try acting like a proper woman and this will not happen again."

  Arruth shrank away from him, her thoughts whirling in terrified, humiliated patterns. A proper woman. Broken the rules. Broken the rules. Broken the rules. A proper woman. I'm not a proper woman.

  "You do want this, don't you?" he asked. "It will make it feel better."

  Arruth snatched the jar from him and fled with a sob.

  * * * *

  "Sharani!" Solance shook his head at Arruth's rapid departure. "The world would be better off without them." He closed his door, then went to a basin and began washing his hands. Solance disliked even being near them, must less having to touch one of them. "Filthy creatures," he muttered.

  The door behind him opened. Gylorean Galee, first lord-lieutenant to the Grand Master, stepped through. Her expensive perfume, called Asphodel, wafted over him. Solance knew she had been listening to the entire exchange between him and Arruth. Galee was an intensely sensual woman with a wealth of straight, glossy, blue-black hair, nut-brown skin, and delicately pointed ears suggesting sylvan blood. She could not afford to have Arruth's story drawing the interest of certain factions. Power and influence in Creeya was a delicate and, at times, precarious balancing between the Guild, represented by the Paladin-King – called the Grand Master – and his three lieutenants; the secular landed nobility with their Council of Lords on which the Grand Master and his lieutenants sat; and the Church led by Patriarch Eshraf. Galee was close to gaining the dominance she needed and refused to see it torn from her grasp by a promiscuous child and a lecherous ally who liked to break his women. They both knew that if forced to it, she would simply eat the child. She allowed her fangs to descend just enough to run her tongue across them.

  That habitual gesture made Solance queasy, though he never dared tell her. To say to her that anything she did made him uneasy was inviting worse. She delighted in torment and torture and, like all of her pawns, Solance feared her. And wanted her. He did not know a male in all of Ishladrim castle who had not, at one time or another, wanted her.

  "Keep an eye on that one, Solance. I don't want anyone taking her accusations seriously."

  "They won't, Galee." Solance dried his hands off on a towel and turned to face her. "I've been sweeping Wrathscar's depredations under the carpet for years. That's why he pulled me out of the gutter and placed me here. Arruth's greatest fear is that Talons will find out she broke the rules. I've found some very interesting tomes on the Sharani. I would love to test the limitations of the Tinkerer's pets." He spoke as if the Sharani race were simply bugs to be placed under glass and examined. They were not human to him; they were 'other'.

  Galee's lips curved into a languorous smile as she tongued her fangs again. "One day you shall, Solance. But only when I am ready to allow it. For now, you can stick to your reading. And be very cautious with this girl. She and her sister were part of the gang that helped Talons defeat Prince Mephistis' Gold Ravens at Armaten."

  * * * *

  Yahni was Sharani, like his sister, Maya. Creeyan born and bred, however. He put up with a lot of teasing about his name because it rhymed with his race. They were womb-twins of a peculiar type, coming from a pod marriage, and it had taken a highly skilled Reader to sort the inheritances and bloodlines out. Most Sharani mastered the kyndi to a fare-thee-well and had from near total to total control of their fertility – so long as they paid attention and did not get careless. Lord Taurlys and his identical twin, Oakwithe, were Sharani on their ma'aram and 'lasah's side and they did two things that outraged the Creeyan aristocracy. First, they got a special dispensation from the Grand Master that adjusted the inheritance laws allowing for their first borns, regardless of gender, to inherit titles and lands as a compromise between the customs of their sire where only males could inherit titled properties and their mothers' Sharani culture in which only females could inherit. Second, they formed what the Sharani called a pod marriage in which the two brothers held six Guildsmyn Sharani wives in common. Then they all forgot themselves one raucous Jarienday and ended up with four children at a single go. Cleatè, the stoutest of the wives, boldly declared she would carry them all and the brothers stood and watched mesmerized as she kyndied with the other four, moving the embryos to her own body. It scrambled the genes in a joyous manner and they all got drunk again.

  Yahni and Maya belonged to Oakwithe and were closer to each other than they were to their other siblings. Yahni became Guild. Maya did not. Like many Sharani males, Yahni was slight of build and agile, lacking in facial hair and delicate of feature, almost pretty. There was a lot of sylvan blood mixed into the Sharani lineages, but it tended to show most conspicuously in their males. He possessed that ephemeral youthfulness of his long lived race and could easily have passed for eighteen despite being twenty-six. Maya and he had one thing that stood out as different in their dark bronze-skinned faces: startling blue-green eyes like pieces of polished chrysocolla, the stone of peace. Women loved looking into his eyes.

  Maya threw a light wool cloak around her shoulders. Mornings were always cool in the far northern mountains. She did a turn in front of the mirrors, shaking out her dark hair. Lord Derryl and his wife, Leslie, adored her hair. She dressed for riding in a split skirt with a sword at her hip, walking a narrow compromise between the customs of her race and those of her birth realm. They were courting her and Maya enjoyed it. The scandal was all over Ishladrim castle. The palace and the grounds buzzed with it. Derryl jested that she would even out-scandal the bedroom legends of Gylorean Galee herself. Now that would be something.

  Yahni watched her, sitting in a corner chair with his ankle propped on his knee and a tiny smile just slightly puckering his mouth. He wore his Guild uniform. In Creeya, and especially the city of Havensword and the Palace Compound, they served as a religious military order and their fighting units were the elite of the elite: Black tunic and trousers with the book and the blade in gold. People tended to think that Yahni was slow because his verbal responses came just half a beat off. But it was usually that he was simply thinking all the time in a slightly distracted manner and taking too many things in at once to sort them out fast enough. He never missed anything.

  There were three branches to the Assassins Guild, each acting independently under the command of one of the three lieutenants, the lords of the Guild: The military wing that they sent out to make the kills fell under the leadership of Gylorean Galee and her commanders; the training wing, which fell under the command of Hanadi Majios; and the clerks who maintained the records and research who belonged to Mohanja Raam. The Grand Master, however, held the true reins of power and a veto over most items and decisions. He could choose to send out anyone he wished from any of them on a whim and did so frequently. Each of the lord-lieutenants had a vote in the Grand Council that oversaw the realm.

  Yahni was in records and research, Mohanja's domain, and was one of Chief Clerk Queiggy's favorite assistants. No one who was not Guild entered the Guild Wing without Queiggy's permission or Mohanja Raam's. "You be careful, Maya. I don't want to see another broken heart. Derryl's a rake."

  Maya snorted. "What if I'm the rake this time, Yahni? I've learned my lesson. I'm just going to have fun. Besides, Leslie is going to be there."

  "Playing triad?"<
br />
  "Maybe."

  Yahni shook his head. He loved his sister and felt intensely protective of her. "Too many folks, think we're toys. Exotics like Lord Channadar and his Fae. They treat us like fetishes. When they get tired of us, they throw us away. You be careful."

  Maya sighed. She did not want to admit it, but Yahni was right. That was exactly what had happened with her previous lover, Karl, and they both knew it. They had no secrets between them. Yahni, possibly because he was male, had never experienced the kinds of difficulties that she had – it seemed to her that only the female Sharani were treated as exotics and then discarded when it grew boring. "I will be. But Yahni, Derryl is different."

  "I hope so."

  * * * *

  Arruth curled up on her bed, pressing herself into the corner of the walls, dragging the blankets around her. She felt depressed and tired. Her sleep had been filled with nightmares of Lord Agasthenez Wrathscar and his soldiers. They had held her open for him. She could still hear him telling them to hold her legs wider, wider, until she felt that her hips would be torn from the sockets. An old glove had been shoved in her mouth and bound there. She could still taste the leather. And then he had entered her and... Arruth closed her eyes, leaning hard against the walls, feeling dirty.

  When they first came to live here the two sisters, Arruth and Jysy, had moved their beds into the same room together, making it as near to the way they had had it at home as possible, finding comfort in the closeness. Their large apartment on the west wing was like having a house to themselves and just seemed to swallow them up after years of living in a crowded extended family home. They had been put on this wing of the palace because they were the heir's protégé's. Talons had not been the heir then, but she was the favorite grandchild of the Grand Master and she had wanted them close. There were three rooms at the top and two at the bottom.

  Jysy entered the room, grabbed a handful of Arruth's clothes, and balled them up. "Get dressed," Jysy said, throwing the clothes at her. "We've got classes."