It raised itself on the angle of the rock, scuttled down a couple of feet so it was hanging almost upside down on the wall above them. Ringil watched in fascination as two long, fin-fronded limbs coiled about in dark silhouette behind its head. He could hear them rasping as they sought purchase on the top of the block.
He cleared his throat.
“Just stay where you are,” Seethlaw murmured. “If it wanted to hurt you, it already would have.”
The akyia claw-walked its way down the wall of rock until it really was suspended upside down almost within touching distance of Ringil’s head. It brought with it the salt waft of its body, the fresh blast of ocean water overlaid with more fragrant elements that were curiously similar to Seethlaw’s scent. Its hair hung in its eyes like the strings of a wrecked fishing net until, with a motion that was startlingly feminine, it lifted one hand from the rock and swept the strands back behind its head. A nictitating membrane flickered up over the left eye, the circular lip of muscle around the mouth flexed in and out like an iris, and Ringil, staring up with a crick in his neck, saw concentric rings of teeth lift themselves briefly erect and then lie down in the throat again. He swallowed hard, fought down the terrible sensation of vulnerability that crawled in his face and scalp. It wasn’t a stretch to assume the akyia could bite open his head as easily as a Yhelteth fisherman’s machete taking the top off a coconut.
From deep in the thing’s throat came the same glutinous chittering he’d heard earlier. It cocked its head back and forth between man and dwenda as if puzzled by the juxtaposition.
Out of the corner of his eye, Ringil thought he saw Seethlaw nod.
Then, rapid as a fleeing lizard, the akyia whipped about on the rock and was gone, back over the top in a succinct thrash of pale curves and coiling rear limbs. Ringil heard it scuttling away somewhere above them.
He sagged with relief, heart thunderous from the shock of that last sudden move.
Wished he’d been carrying some kind of weapon.
FUCKING, SOMEWHERE, ON COOL, DEW-DAMP GRASS IN A RING OF mist-shrouded standing stones, under stars he did not recognize. There was a flavor to it, a raw abandonment that stung him like a blow across the mouth—Seethlaw sprawled naked and ivory white on hands and knees before him, panting and snarling like a dog as Ringil crouched and thrust into him from behind, hands hooked in and hauling on the hinge of the dwenda’s bent body where hips and thighs met. A shivery sense of exposure came and went through his flesh, as if the standing stones were silent but tautly aroused spectators who’d paid to watch what the two of them were doing. Ringil, feverish with lust, reached around for the dwenda’s cock, found it stony hard and pulsing at the edge of climax.
The feel of it slipped the final leashes on his own control; he heard himself growling now, saw himself as if from a height outside the standing stones, hammering madly against Seethlaw’s split buttocks, pumping the shaft in his hand until it kicked against his grip and the dwenda howled and clawed in the grass and Ringil came in his wake, as if in answer to the call.
And sagging, and collapsing forward, like a burning building coming down into the river, hand trapped beneath the dwenda’s body as they went down, still frantically milking Seethlaw’s cock into the wet grass, face pressed hard between the broad pale shoulders, laughing and sobbing and the tears again, icy this time, as they spilled onto the dwenda’s skin.
ACROSS LOW HILLS UNDER A SKY THICKLY CARPETED WITH STARS, THERE was a road of black stone built for giants. Its surface was broken and weed-grown underfoot, but it extended for a full fifteen or twenty yards on either side of them. Walking it, from time to time they passed under pale stone bridges higher than the eastern gate at Trelayne. Off to the right, there were clusters of towers gathered on the flanks of the hills like sentinels. Ringil’s eye kept sliding out to them. There was something wrong with the architecture. The towers had no features, were as basic and flat-edged as a small child’s drawing of buildings, only taller, so tall they looked stretched beyond any humanly useful dimension.
“Does anything live in those?” he asked Seethlaw.
The dwenda cast a long glance at the towers. “Not if there’s any other option,” he said cryptically. “Not from choice.”
“You’re saying they’re prisons?”
“You could argue that, yeah.”
For a while, Jelim walked with them on the road, but it was a Jelim that Ringil had never known. The moody good looks were changed, weathered into something older and wiser than Jelim had ever had the chance to become. He looked, Ringil thought vaguely, like a successful young shipmaster, well traveled enough to have grown wise, still not aged enough to seem weary. He chatted away with coffeehouse aplomb, smiled often, and touched Ringil with an open confidence that belonged in some fantasy mural Grace-of-Heaven might commission to go with his bedroom ceiling.
And how’s your father keeping these days?
Ringil stared at him. You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.
Saw him in the street a couple of months back. Jelim frowned, reaching for the misplaced memory. Over in Tervinala, I think it was. But you know how it is, neither of us really had the time to stop and talk. Remember me to him, won’t you? Tell him I miss all those fireside debates we used to get into with him.
Sure. I’ll do that.
At some point he couldn’t clearly recall, Ringil had given up arguing with his ghosts.
Anyway, this time the ground felt a little more solid. The tenuous image of cheery evenings around the hearth with Gingren might creep in, but it stood no earthly chance of gaining any real foothold in his head.
Still, when Jelim leaned across and tousled his hair up, kissed him casually on the neck as the other Jelim always had—it hurt. And when the alternative left him, no farewell, just a slow fade, exclaiming Come on, guys, let’s up the pace a bit, shall we, laughing and striding forward first into transparency and then into nothing—when that happened, something ached in Ringil the way it had when he first faced the dwenda and the blue storm it was wrapped in.
Later they camped under one of the huge pale bridges and Seethlaw summoned a fire out of an ornate, broad-bottomed flask he carried. Whatever was in the vessel burned with an eerie greenish flame, but it radiated a comforting wash of heat out of all proportion to the size of the thing. Ringil sat and watched shadows leap about on the pale stone support pillar behind the dwenda.
“When you summon the storm,” he said slowly. “How does it feel?”
“Feel?” Seethlaw gave the impression he’d been dozing. “Why would it feel like anything? It’s power, it’s just . . . power. Potential, and the will to deploy it. That’s all magic is in the end, you know.”
“I thought there were supposed to be rules to magic.”
“Did you?” The long mouth bent into a crooked smile. “Who told you that, then? Someone down at Strov market?”
Ringil ignored the sneer. “It doesn’t hurt you? The storm?”
“No.” A look of dawning comprehension. “Ah, that. The regret, is that what you’re talking about? This sense of loss? Yes, he always talked about that, too. It’s a mortal thing, as far as I can tell. The aspect storm is a warp in the fabric of every possible outcome the universe will allow. It gathers in the alternatives like a bride gathering in her gown. For a mortal, those alternatives are mostly paths they’ll never take, things they’ll never do. At some level, the organism seems to know that.” He?
It was a passing curiosity. There was too much else. The sadness Jelim had left behind still clung around Ringil’s heart in creased folds.