Chapter Thirty-nine

IF THE PLAN HAD GONE perfectly, Jochi would now be descending on Qutula’s camp with three thousand of Tayy’s own horde. The attack would have drawn off Qutula’s forces, leaving his small cohort free to rescue the princess.

Tayy’s part of the plan had gone smoothly enough. Mangkut had led him to the tent where he promised they would find Eluneke. “Prepare yourself for a shock,” he had warned them with a smirk. “She is not the beauty you remember.”

Tayy wanted to hit him, but he couldn’t afford the commotion. “Bind him, and cover his mouth,” he whispered to his companions. “Then tie him to a tree for his master to find.”

Mangkut’s eyes widened in terror. For betraying him, Qutula would surely have him killed as slowly and horribly as the prince had threatened. He gathered breath for a shout to rouse the camp but Tayy was there first, clamping a leather-gauntleted hand to his mouth. “There is more to this plan than you know,” he whispered. “Be quiet and you may yet live. Make a sound and my companions will happily crack your ribs like a pigeon and draw your struggling lungs out through your backbone before they go to their own doom. Don’t think Qutula will help you to a swifter end when he finds you.”

Mangkut nodded to show that he understood. Tayy didn’t trust him, but before he could draw another breath, one of the Qubal rescuers stuffed a cleaning cloth for his sword into his mouth. Another secured a thong between Mangkut’s teeth to hold it in place while a third tied his feet. They had never released his hands; Tayy left them to complete securing their prisoner and slipped under the tent cloth.

He didn’t see her at first. When he did, he couldn’t control the instant recoil.

Eluneke covered her distorted face and moaned softly into her hands. “Don’t look at me,” she whispered. “Leave me here—you have to go. He means to kill you.”

“I’m not going anywhere without you,” he promised, and cursed himself at the hesitation in his voice. Eluneke still had the general shape of a woman, but her face had been grotesquely transformed into the features of a frog. Thin strands, a travesty of her own thick dark hair, fell across large, protuberant eyes and partly covered the mouth stretched in a debased parody of a grin. Her hands, where they tried to hide her features, were mottled green and brown, her fingers gnarled and covered with warty yellow knobs of skin.

From the first time he had set eyes on her in Toragana’s doorway he had loved her natural beauty. He loved her spirit more, however, and had accepted her totem animal long ago, conversing with the king of the toads and carrying Eluneke herself as a toad near his heart. But in all their past encounters she had chosen the form she wore; he found it impossible to accept the shape Qutula’s demon had forced on her.

Eluneke watched him through her fingers and wept when it must have appeared to her that he could not look at her face. She flinched when he reached out to hold her.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Her fear of him pierced his soul like a dagger, but he refused to be deterred. “I’m getting you out of here; Bolghai will know what to do when you’re free.”

“I can’t. The demon . . .” She bobbed her head like a toad, refusing to accompany him while she urged him to his own escape. “Go, while you can.”

“Not without you.” Patience, he told himself, and was rewarded with her hand, tentatively reaching for his.

“Not so fast there, toad lover!” Between them, the form of a serpent materialized, fangs dripping vaporous venom.

Instinctively, Tayy pulled his sword, but the viper swirled away in a mist when he struck at it, leaving nothing behind but the hissing bark of its laughter.

“What difference does it make whether you still want her?” the creature hissed in his ear. “You’re here, aren’t you? Soon enough you’ll be dead, and I’ll be free.”

His sword raised, Tayy whirled, tracking the sibilant voice. But the viper drew its insubstantial neck out of reach.

“Frankly, I didn’t think you’d be such a fool,” it taunted.

Tayy brought his sword down in a slicing move that should have severed the head from any material beast, but it slid right through the vaporous scales.

“That wasn’t very friendly.”

Before he could pull his hand back, the serpent found the thin bracelet of flesh exposed between the prince’s riding gauntlet and his coat. Grinning, it sank its dripping fangs into his flesh. Venom pulsed fire into the wound. When the viper withdrew, one sharp tooth remained in the wound, lodged between the bones.

“No!” Eluneke screamed.

The effect of a demon’s sting didn’t always parallel the creature whose form it embodied. This time, Tayy realized, it did. Already his arm had begun to blister and bleed. His heart beat in strange rhythms and his breathing came in short, rapid gasps. He didn’t have much time and, alerted by the sounds of struggle, Qutula’s warriors had come boiling through the door of the tent.

“Ugly, isn’t she?” Qutula stood smirking in front of him, his clothes hastily tied and his sword held carelessly in his hand.

Swaying on his feet, Tayy painfully raised his sword and charged, though he knew that the desperate action hastened his own death. It scarcely mattered now. Jochi hadn’t come, and there were too many against his handful of guardsmen. But he could defend Eluneke until he fell. He moved in, feinted left, and cut Qutula a slashing blow that left his sleeve dangling but did little more than scratch the arm beneath.

“You son of a bitch!” Qutula snarled, and struck back.

Tayy intercepted the blow. Their swords slid blade against blade until they came to rest in a clash of cross guards. The prince’s arm trembled, blood-choked from the serpent’s bite and swelling with blisters from the venom. His sword grew impossibly heavy, but damaged muscles refused his commands to disengage.

Where was Jochi? Around him, weapons rang against each other as Tayy’s small raiding party held off the tide of the opposition. Though Qutula’s forces vastly outnumbered them, they had limited their approach to the doorway, so far at least not thinking to unmake the tent around them and so come at them from all sides. They might go on like that until their arms tired; eventually the prince’s small cohort would stagger and the overwhelming numbers against them would triumph. But Tayy wouldn’t be there to see it. He fell to his knees, blind and breathless, the pain in his arm so overwhelming that he hardly knew if he still held his sword.

Qutula’s blade followed him down. “Your line is dead,” he said, “You have no place here anymore.” Then he plunged the sword into the prince’s undefended back.

Tayy fell, arms spread on the dirty carpets, his life’s blood adding to the stains that already crossed them. The last sounds he heard were Eluneke’s sobs, mingling with the keening wail of his hounds somewhere out on the grasslands and the beating of drums in the distance. Too late to save the prince’s life, Jochi had arrived. It had been too late since the serpent had struck, of course. He couldn’t breathe: couldn’t find the air to fill his lungs and his last sucking breath seemed to be leaking away with the blood flowing from the wound in his back.

His mother was frowning and he waited patiently for the scolding that didn’t come. She was dead, of course, and he was long past the age when she might correct him like a child. He would have liked to know what had displeased her so, but lacked the energy to ask. But he easily went into her arms when she offered them, and laid his head against her heart the way he had as an infant. How he had missed her. Chimbai was there too, looking thunderously angry. He said nothing, however, and might have sighed, but Tayy’s senses were fading. . . .