Azure bonds - Kate Novak [118]
The sight touched some memory buried within Alias, a memory she wished had stayed buried. She screamed.
The pumpkin pod closed up, startled or frightened by her reaction. The tendril withdrew into the refuse pile.
Alias swallowed with some difficulty, keeping her eyes fixed on the spot where the tendril had sprouted. When it did not reappear, she began to look around again, though her eyes kept returning to that site every few seconds to make sure her ocular companion had not returned.
The mound was passing over terrain that resembled the plains about Yulash. The sun was on her left and there was a thick, dark line of green across the horizon straight ahead.
If that's the rising sun, we must be heading south out of Yulash, toward the Elven Wood, she thought. Unless I've slept for days again-then we could be anywhere.
The sound of something moving through the garbage made her realize she and the wretched tendrils were not alone. Three figures appeared at the corner of the mound-men, moving in a matching stride like soldiers. A vine trailed behind each man, attached somewhere to his back.
The man in the center cast a long shadow on her and blocked out the sun, so she could only make out his silhouette at first. The sun shone through the light robes he wore-revealing spindly legs, but a powerful torso. He wore some sort of helmet. She could not make out his features, but by his bearing she knew he was Akabar.
The men who flanked the mage were dressed in moldy, torn battle gear. They moved stiffly as they picked their way through the garbage.
"Akabar?" she said softly, but the figure did not respond. "Akabar? What's going on? Cut me out of this stuff."
"I'm afraid I must inform you," the lean figure began in the roundabout speech of the South, "that I am not your Akabar." He broke rank from the two soldiers and knelt beside her head.
He was Akabar. He had Akabar's face, marked with the three blue scholar-circles on his forehead, and Akabar's square-shovel beard, and the same sapphire earring which marked him as a married man. His dark eyes, though, were completely fogged over in gray and patches of listless white swirled through them. The thing Alias had mistaken for a helmet was a cap of vines that pressed suckers against the mage's forehead and into his ears. Dried blood flaked around the suckers.
Her breath came in short gasps as a scream tried to claw its way up her throat. She found the strength to ask, "Who are you?"
"I am Moander," said the thing that was Akabar, "the most important being in your world."
In a smooth, gentle motion he lowered his body into a cross-legged sitting position and waited for his prisoner to stop squirming. Having exhausted herself in a futile effort to pull away from the mound of garbage, Alias finally lay still. She turned her head away from Akabar's body and kept her eyes squeezed tight, "Oh, gods," she moaned.
"Just a god, singular," Moander replied. "The only one that matters. Hold on, you have something stuck to your chin. Let me get it."
Akabar used the sleeve of his robe to dab at a fleck of garbage near Alias's mouth. He used too much pressure and pushed her head backward into the spongy bed of compost. It was as though he were unaware of his own strength.
"There. Much better. Now we can talk."
"You're not Akabar," Alias whispered, still trying to convince herself, but not wanting to believe it.
"Not really, no, but I'm all the Akabar you're going to get for a while. Might as well make the best of him. By rights, he should have died of fear, being the first human in this millennium to behold my godliness. How he survived I'll never know. But that kind of luck shouldn't be tampered with, so I left his body in better shape than the others.