Snow, Fire, Sword Page 21

  The Sultan was chanting quietly. No words could be distinguished, but with a strange sensation of awe and shame and fear rippling over him, Adi felt he could understand. The Sultan was begging the forgiveness of the Queen of the Southern Sea, his mystical bride. He was asking for her help. No, he was pleading for it.

  Adi did not want to look at this. It made him feel sick and cold and sorry, all at the same time. He knew why Ibrahim was sneering. He understood Sadik’s look of paralyzed horror. But he also knew that however undignified it looked, the Sultan was doing the only thing he could in the circumstances. A centuries-old link between the Queen of the Southern Sea and the Sultans of Jayangan had been frayed, and it must be repaired, no matter what it cost.

  His low chant filled the atrium, but otherwise there was silence. Not a ripple disturbed the surface of the pool, whose skin shone like a bright mirror. Moments passed, and then the Sultan stopped chanting, though he stayed on his knees. The silence lengthened. There was no answer to the Sultan’s plea; the spirits were silent, the pool absolutely calm.

  After a while, the Sultan slowly got to his feet and waded out of the pool. His back to them, he clambered into the rest of his clothes. Then he turned and, without a word, made his way back to the staircase, brushing past Adi and Sadik without even acknowledging them. His head was bowed, his face was drawn; he seemed to have shrunk inside his clothes. Ibrahim followed the Sultan as he trudged painfully up the same stairs he’d raced down so confidently before.

  Sadik looked at Adi. “That’s it, then,” he said softly.

  Adi stared at him, rage spasming inside him. How dare she! How dare Rorokidul simply ignore the desperate pleas of the one she was supposed to protect! She had appeared to him, to Adi, solely for the purpose of seeing the Sultan grovel in front of her. Witch, he thought to himself. Capricious and disloyal witch. What good are you, what good are any of you spirits? And in a paroxysm of fury, he grabbed a stone lying on the floor of the atrium and threw it into the pool, shouting, “Rorokidul! Spirits of Jayangan! Where is your help, where is your protection?” The stone splashed into the water, breaking the surface the way a mirror shatters in a thousand pieces. He went on, “If you have abandoned us, then we have abandoned you too, and good riddance. We will face this alone, free of your interference!” His words echoed in the atrium, bouncing off the walls again and again. And then the whole place lit up, and veiled faces appeared in all the galleries surrounding the atrium, and the air was full of voices and presences, dimly seen and perceived, yet real enough. In the middle of them, the shattered reflections of the pool came together, re-forming into a pillar of light and smoke that rose out of the water. And as Adi and a terrified Sadik stood there without moving, a woman’s form began to appear, at first dimly, then clearer and clearer, within the pillar of light. Adi knew her at once, though the calmly beautiful face he’d seen in the Sultan’s palace was now distorted with anger. He knew that it was his own challenge that had roused Rorokidul from her vengeful refusal to appear to the Sultan. Now she spoke not a word, but fixed her eyes on Adi and raised her hand high. Sadik gave a little squeak and tugged at Adi. “Let’s go, go, go!” he pleaded.

  But Adi did not budge. “Queen Rorokidul,” he said, head high, “you can turn me to whatever it is you want, but it won’t change one thing about what you have done today. You chose your own pique above the fate of Jayangan. You chose to dismiss your bridegroom without even a reason. Kill me or bewitch me, I care not at all. You have done the Sorcerer’s work for him. You have left the Sultan without protection. And for that it is the Sorcerer who will thank you oh so dearly, Queen of the Southern Sea. Perhaps you don’t care. Perhaps you think he can become your new bridegroom, when he is master of all Jayangan. But he will destroy you, and the sacred places of all your brothers and sisters in the spirit world, for he wants to be master of all. He will turn your world to dust and darkness, Rorokidul, and you will be forgotten.”

  His voice cut like a whip, and the faces in the gallery rustled and trembled in its wake. But Rorokidul did not move, or speak. She was frozen in the light of the pillar, hand outstretched, her gaze on Adi. And it suddenly seemed to him there was a deep, deep sadness in that gaze, a sadness for something far beyond Adi’s reach or understanding. Their eyes locked together for a still moment; then the pillar of light shattered as the surface of the water had done and Rorokidul’s image vanished utterly. The light of the pool faded slowly after her, then winked out and disappeared, leaving the atrium in darkness, save for the dim light seeping down the stairwell from the garden above.

  Adi turned his back and made his way to the stairs, following Sadik closely. Heavily, he trudged up the first steps, expecting at any moment to be struck by a bolt of light, to be frozen where he stood, to be transformed into a cockroach, to be struck in the heart. But nothing happened. Nothing at all, except that they climbed back up, silently, leaving behind the great Atrium of Rorokidul, where once, over long, long centuries, the links of the ancient spirit world and the human world of Jayangan had been made and remade and taken care of. As he climbed, Adi felt the sadness that had been in the Queen’s eyes rise in him like a bitter wave, washing over him with a painful clarity. Nothing would be the same again, he thought. Not for Jayangan, not for the Sultan. Not even for himself. He thought of his master, Empu Wesiagi, who lived and breathed the world of the spirits, who wove their protection into every beautiful thing he made. What good was it now? How could Adi in all seriousness and honesty truly be a part of the world of his master? He would never be a kris maker, for he would never be able to make a kris wholeheartedly believing in its mystical presence, its link to the spirit world—not when the spirits had shown themselves to be both disloyal and useless. They had told them to find Snow, Fire, and Sword, but they had given them no real help in actually finding them. Everything that had been done had been done by humans.

  Sadik reached the top of the stairs. In the next instant, he disappeared from sight, as if he’d been whipped away. Adi, following on his heels, felt, rather than saw, the black figure hurtling toward him. Instinctively, he stabbed upward with his kris and heard a sudden whoof! Then something fell past him down the stairs. Glancing down, he saw it was a hantumu, that somehow he had hit it, and that the blade of his kris was red with blood. Bile rushed up in his throat; his heart raced. He took the last couple of stairs at a run and emerged yelling and screaming into the garden, his kris held out in front of him. But he had no chance against their numbers, and in a matter of seconds he was disarmed and thrown facedown. His kris was kicked away from him; a huge masked hantumu sat on his back and another tied his ankles and wrists together with a thin rope that cut cruelly into his flesh. He could see no one else, but he knew they must all have been taken—Sadik, the Sultan, Ibrahim.

  “No, no, wait, little heart. It won’t do any good. We have to wait. You can’t do him any good, not yet.” Husam was whispering rapidly, desperately, obviously afraid that Dewi was going to fling herself at once on the hantumu to try to rescue Adi.

  “Husam is right,” said Kareen Amar. “We must wait. They’re not going to kill him. Look, they’re binding him—they wouldn’t do that if they were just going to kill him now. We can help him better if we wait and see where they take him.”

  Dewi’s whole being was racked with frustration, rage, and fear. Wild thoughts rolled through her head in confusion. She couldn’t bear to see Adi trussed up like that, but Kareen Amar was right. The hantumu could have killed him—especially as the splashes of blood on him seemed to show that the hantumu who had leaped down the well had come off the worse—but they hadn’t. Why not? It could only be that they were waiting for someone, or something. Perhaps the afreet—or perhaps their master. Why had they trussed up Adi, but not the others who had been with him? And surely—kneeling there, hands tied but head high—that was the Sultan. She had seen him in photographs many times, smiling down in shops and banks and public buildings. But who were the other two, the boy and
the man, whom the hantumu held to one side? The man was as tall as Husam, and dressed like him—he was obviously a desert man. And he had a sword at his side. What was it her father had said—there could be more than one Snow, Fire, and Sword….

  She stiffened. Something was coming. Something whose presence made the heart seem to pause for an instant, the nerves to seize. Something familiar that made her mind feel suddenly hot, that made her feel like jumping up and running away. The afreet was near. She made as if to get up, but Kareen Amar’s hand shot up and dragged her down. The Jinn pinned her close painfully, whispering, “Quiet, quiet, it doesn’t know you’re here, don’t move!”

  And there, suddenly, appearing as if from thin air, was the afreet. It was different—taller, broader, more the size of an ape, and though it was still covered in red and black hairs, and its vertical-pupiled eyes smoldered like burning coals, the features of its face had become finer, the shape of its body slimmer. It fixed its eyes on the Sultan.

  “So, you have come as a supplicant,” it mocked. “What is it you want from us, O ruler of all Jayangan?”

  From his helpless position, lying side down on the grass, Adi felt the humiliation of the Sultan as if it were his own. It even outweighed the fear he felt at the sight of the great demon. The iron of resolve had entered his soul after his confrontation with Rorokidul in the atrium. He would never be as frightened of any spirits ever again, not even ones as ugly and stinking as this.

  “My son, cursed demon!” cried the Sultan. He tried to rise, but the hantumu pushed him roughly down. There was a ripple of laughter, and Adi felt rage surge through him.

  “Your son?” mused the afreet. “Now I wonder. Could it be you are referring to one of those dead things lying on the mountain in the twisted wreckage of the flying machines? It was fun to pull them down, I assure you. It is long since I have had sport like that, entering into those pilots’ minds and giving them such visions of hell that they could not think straight.” It stared into the Sultan’s eyes. The Sultan gave an involuntary gasp, paled, and turned his face away. Dewi flinched, knowing what the ruler would be seeing in his mind: merciless, horrible visions of his son’s fiery death.

  The afreet laughed. “O ruler of all Jayangan, I would love to play further with you, but this I am not allowed to do right now. For my master is doing you a great honor. He will see you. You will talk with him.”

  “Why?” came a hoarse croak from the Sultan. “If my son is dead—”

  “Perhaps you shouldn’t believe everything you imagine,” interrupted the afreet, and it laughed again.

  The Sultan raised his head but took care not to look at the afreet’s face. He whispered, “Do not play with us. Tell me the truth about my son.”

  “Enough! Get up,” said the leader of the hantumu to the Sultan. When the ruler defiantly stayed put, he motioned to the other hantumu, who unceremoniously hauled the Sultan up onto his feet.

  “You will have to learn some manners, little man,” the leader of the hantumu snarled. “You are not the king now. Your reign is over. My master’s is just beginning. You can’t demand anything or command answers anymore. If you behave yourself, we might let you and your family live. Take him down!”

  Two hantumu grabbed the Sultan by the arms and led him, struggling, back toward the stairs that led to the atrium. Two others took Sadik and Ibrahim and pushed them along after the Sultan. But it was the afreet itself that bent over Adi, its burning eyes on his face. It chuckled—a low, snarling sound. “Ah, boy,” it said, “as you were so kind as to help to destroy the protection of Rorokidul with your rude challenge to her, it is fitting you should see the end of your efforts!” And so saying, with an effortless heave, it hoisted him over its shoulder, so that he dangled down, headfirst. Overcome by its stench of burned flesh, by the blood rushing to his head, the numbness where the rope was biting into his flesh, and by the words of the afreet, Adi fainted dead away.

  “Now, Dewi,” said Husam sternly, when all was quiet, “we will not go rushing down there, do you understand? It is no use fighting the afreet or the hantumu if we cannot get to their master first. They will just kill us. Let us reflect. What are our weapons? My sword, your resolve, your knowledge of the world of the spirits, and Kareen’s fire. We will need to use them wisely and carefully, at the right time.”

  “Yes,” said Kareen Amar eagerly, “that is so. Those others have weapons similar, though many more: the afreet’s power fights my own, the hantumu’s swords against Husam’s, and the resolve of the Sorcerer against yours, Dewi.”

  “But we have to help Adi.”

  “We will not abandon him, but first of all we have to deal with the guards at the entrance to the stairwell,” said Husam firmly.

  “That will be easy enough.” Kareen Amar grinned, and her eyes glowed.

  “No, wait,” said Husam, but Kareen Amar was already gone, gliding out of her hiding place. She turned around once—and became a long lick of flame, racing over the grass toward the entrance to the stairwell. The two hantumu on guard only just had time to catch a glimpse of the flame before it divided in two and was briskly on them, setting their clothes on fire, nibbling at the edges of their skin, crackling up into their hair. Panic-stricken, the hantumu ripped at their masks, which were melting on their faces, and beat at the flames that were engulfing their clothes, but it was as if doing so excited the fire, for it burned brighter and brighter, faster and faster. The hantumu screamed and rolled on the ground now, trying to put out the flames. The hideous smell of scorching flesh began to waft over the garden. It was too much for Dewi. She raced out of her hiding place, calling softly, “Please, Kareen Amar, that’s enough, enough.”

  The flames paused in their terrible work over the twisting bodies of the hantumu. They seemed to hover in midair, as if reluctant. “Please, Kareen Amar,” said Dewi, almost crying. “You’ve got to stop. It’s enough.”

  The fire gathered itself together. Sulkily, it formed into the familiar shape of Kareen Amar. Husam ran to them.

  “What would you have me do?” snapped Kareen Amar. “Ask them nicely to move aside?” She bent down over the hantumu, who had gone still. “They are alive, though they will not be able to fight us again,” she said, straightening. “Their flesh will heal. And I am not like the afreet; I have left their hearts and souls intact. Now, if you will stop shedding tears over those wicked ones who would have killed you without a moment’s remorse, then we can go on our way.” She turned very huffily away from them and glided off down the stairs.

  Dewi caught Husam’s eye. “She is right, little heart,” he said. “If you are not prepared to face…”

  Dewi nodded without speaking. She went down the stone staircase, her head and heart full of contradictions and confusion. Husam followed.

  Kareen Amar stopped abruptly. She put a finger to her lips, pressed against the wall of the stairwell, and vanished. Only a scorch mark showed where she had been.

  Husam and Dewi crept down farther. They began to hear the murmur of voices. “Stay here,” Husam mouthed at Dewi. “Let me see if there’s anywhere we can hide.” He drew down his headcloth, so it completely swathed his face, leaving only his eyes showing through a slit. In the darkness of the stairs, he could hardly be seen. Flattening herself against the wall, Dewi watched as he disappeared around a bend of the staircase. There was a little light down there, but not the light she had seen the other day—not a weird, glowing softness, but the thin yellow light of torches.

  Husam was back in a very short while. “There’s a niche, just above the last few steps,” he whispered. “It’s wide enough for both of us, I think, and it’s in the shadows at the moment. There’s a hantumu standing guard at the bottom of the stairs, but he’s not watching up here, just what’s going on down there. Come on. This is our chance.”

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  ADI SLOWLY CAME to, with an aching head, a swollen tongue, and sore eyes. He was gagged, and his wrists and ankles were still tied together; he cou
ld hardly feel his hands and feet now. For a moment, he forgot where he was and thought he was back in the rice paddy, waiting for someone to deliver him from his bonds. Dewi would come soon, he thought, rather deliriously, she will come, and take me to her father…. As his eyes became adjusted to the light, though, and his senses fully returned to him, he remembered what had happened. His heart pounded. No one, human or spirit, would come to save him here. He would have to try to get away on his own.

  He peered around him to try to make out what was going on. It was not easy: The atrium was only partly illuminated by points of yellow light from flickering torches—and by a red glow in front of the now darkened pool, a light that came from the afreet. It was standing guard over the Sultan, who had been gagged and tied to a chair. There were many hantumu in the atrium, spread out at irregular intervals around the pool. He could not see Ibrahim and Sadik at all. Fear fluttered in his chest. Had they already been killed?

  The afreet’s words came back to him like a hammer blow. He swallowed, trying not to think about it. Had his rash words down here really caused the place to become wide open to the forces of evil? Surely the spirits were stronger than that.

  “Sultan of Jayangan!” The booming, distorted voice burst in on the atrium with the force of a thunderclap. Then came the light: a light soft and gentle at first, but becoming stronger and stronger. It seemed to come from a figure who had stepped out of the shadows beyond the pool. Cloaked and hooded in dusky brown, so its face could not be seen, it held its arms out wide, as if conjuring up that very light.

  “Sultan of Jayangan!” came the voice again. “You are welcome here. Are you glad to meet me at last?” The Sultan did not reply, and the figure motioned to a hantumu. “Ungag him so he may speak to me.” The man did as he was told. “Now, Sultan, answer me!”