'I'll bring a meal out myself.'
'No. To the room. I'm going to lay low.'
Fouad gestured. 'Back through the curtain, down the hallway, last door on the left.'
As I picked up the saddlepouches I didn't remind him that I knew the layout from earlier days. I just nodded and went.
The room was indeed small. Smaller, in fact, than I remembered. But it did have the bed to recommend it, plus the tiny table next to it just inside the curtained doorway. I dumped the pouches next to the bed, then unsheathed the sword and leaned it against the bedframe. I shed the harness next. Sure enough, after two days with no burnous, I had paler stripes standing out against the copper-brown of my skin. I looked as though I were wearing the harness even when I wasn't. Leather had rubbed against the slice along my rib, but the annoyance was minimal when weighed against the rest of my body.
My smile was twisted. Nihkolara had said new scars would replace the old ones lifted from me by the mages. It looked as though I was on my way to starting a second collection.
The whisper of a step sounded beyond the privacy curtain. I caught up the sword and leveled it just as the fabric was pulled aside. Silk, Fouad's wine-girl, bearing a tray and carrying a burnous draped over one arm, stopped dead.
I gestured her in, smiling ruefully. 'We're beginning to make this a habit.'
This time she wasn't swathed in cloth or trying to hide her face as she bore me a warning. She wore filmy gold-dyed gauze and a sash-belt of crimson tassels riding low on her hips that accentuated her Southron coloring and lush body. She accepted my invitation, set the tray on the table, then put the burnous on the bed. Fouad is a man who likes color; the gauze was a deep bluish-purple. Bright red in Skandi, now purple here. Whatever happened to subtlety?
Silk was gazing at me, black wings of hair hanging loosely beside her face.
'Thank you,' I said feelingly, and set down the sword again. Fouad had, of course, included aqivi along with food. For just a moment, though, I thought longingly of Umir's excellent meals.
'You are alone?' Silk asked.
I nodded, realizing Fouad probably had said nothing of the circumstances. I sat down on the edge of the bed and dove into mutton stew in a bowl carved of hard brown bread.
'Will you be wanting company tonight?'
It stopped me cold. I looked at her over the spoonful of stew halfway through my mouth.
'Ah,' she said, and the single word contained a multitude of emotions.
'Wait,' I said as she turned to go. 'Silk . . .' But I wasn't sure what I'd meant to say.
Her smile was sad. 'It's the Northern bascha.'
I nodded.
Her mouth twisted faintly. 'All those years … we used to say you would never settle on one woman. But inwardly we all dreamed it might be one of us.' She gestured with one square hand. 'Oh, I know—it wouldn't be with a wine-girl. But even women like us have dreams, Tiger.'
I felt vastly uncomfortable. 'I don't know what to say.'
'Then say nothing. Know only that you were—and always will be—special to me.'
I groped for comforting words. I'd never been very good at them. 'There will be someone for you, Silk. Didn't Fouad say one of the girls just left to get married?'
She nodded solemnly. 'But she was much younger than I, and not so coarse.'
The best answer was suddenly a simple matter of speaking the truth. 'If you were coarse,' I told her, 'I would never have shared your bed.'
After a moment, she said, 'Thank you for that.'
'I meant it.'
She nodded and turned to go.
'Silk!' I stabbed the spoon back into stew and stood up. It took a single pace for me to reach the doorway, and the woman.
She wouldn't look at me. I cupped her jaw, lifted her face, brushed away the tears with my thumbs. Then I bent and kissed her gently.
No passion. No promise. She knew what it was. She knew what it meant. But still she twined arms around my neck and clung. My hands rested lightly on her hips. She smelled, as always, of wine and ale, and the faint undertang of the musky scent she wore.
Silk broke the kiss even as I did. She raised her hands to my face, fingers scraping against stubble. She traced out the sandtiger scars. 'Be careful,' she whispered, and the curtain billowed behind her as she left.
No message came with news of Del's whereabouts in Julah or that anyone had sighted Nayyib. Since I wasn't sitting out front watching the world go by with liquor at my elbow, for a long while I paced the tiny room, fighting back a growing feeling of impatience coupled with desperation. Finally my body explained that it was tired even if my mind was not. I sat down on the bed for a while, spine propped against the adobe wall with my legs stretched out, and tried to invent logical reasons for Del's absence.
It was entirely possible that she was still at the lean-to. Except that it had been twelve days or more since Rafiq and his friends had hauled me off to Umir's, and she ought to have recovered enough to be moved to Julah. Even if the stud hadn't returned, the kid had a horse. He could easily have fashioned a litter using the limbs and canvas from the lean-to and brought her to a healer.
They just kept going around and around in my head, all the possibilities. And the thoughts I didn't want to think. I finally scooted down to lie on the bed, staring blankly at the wood-and-mud ceiling. Alric's questions kept sifting to the forefront of my mind no matter how much I tried to ignore them. I cursed myself for it, cursed Alric, cursed Nayyib, cursed Rafiq, Umir, Musa, and the sandtiger who had attacked her.
What would I do if I were alone in the world again?
More than two years before when I had left Staal-Ysta, believing Del would die from the travesty I had made of her abdomen with my newly keyed jivatma, I had focused on the task of tracking down the hounds of hoolies and their master, to save the village of Ysaa-den. It had given me purpose. It had given me the chance to think about something other than Del, for fractions of moments.
There was, now, nothing else to think about.
I scrubbed at my stubbled face, stretching it out of shape. Then growled long and hard into my hands, needing to bleed off the tension. Finally I took the sword from beside the bed, set it on the bed between me and the wall, and closed my eyes. I did not expect to sleep. But my body had other ideas.
I dreamed of Del, which was much improvement over the skeleton in the desert and the sword I was supposed to 'take up.' I dreamed of Del in all her many guises, sparing no truths of her temperament. She could be cold and hard, faceted like Punja crystal, capable of killing at a moment's notice. She could be sharp-tongued and short-tempered, and there were times her words wounded. But she could also be a soft touch when it came to baby animals and human children, ruthlessly fierce in her tenderness; and, despite a poor beginning among borjuni, passionate in bed. She was woman enough to drive me mad on occasion, because women did that to men; but she also took my breath away with the power of her pride and strength of will.
Silk had said it for me as much as to me: I had never believed it likely I would settle on one woman. Unlike Alric, I wasn't made for a wife and children. I wanted no ties. Nearly two decades as a Salset chula had taught me never to be owned by anyone again; and what was a husband but a man owned by his wife?
Even Alric admitted Lena forbade him things. Who needs that?
And then Delilah arrived in my life, as driven as I to prove herself, if for different reasons, and having no more interest in putting down roots than I did. Except for an enforced stay on Skandi and then time spent on the island off Haziz to regain fitness, we had never stopped moving.
A sudden thought occurred: Now I was proposing to rebuild Alimat and take on students. Which would require me to stay put.
No wonder everyone thought I was sandsick!
I roused from sleep long enough to mutter something mostly incoherent about old men growing soft, then slid down again into the abyss.
Where the bones and the sword waited.
This time the skekton wears flesh, and a face. It is Del, gazing at me out of empty sockets. A hand
