22

Bayang

Bayang liked the Sogdian hatchling, so she hated to see Roxanna wallowing in self-pity and doubt. The Sogdian hatchling was insecure and brash, but she shouldn’t be punishing herself the way she was. However, Bayang also had a more selfish reason to see Roxanna cheer up: If Roxanna did not act more like her old self, they might never survive. Indecisiveness would kill them as surely as a storm would.

Bayang wracked her brains to come up with something that would comfort Roxanna, but unfortunately she drew a blank.

It was Upach who knew how to take her mistress’s mind off her faults. “What happened, Lady Scirye?”

Bayang was glad to see that Roxanna listened as attentively as the others while the Kushan girl told them about her battle with the hag.

Bayang shook her head admiringly. The more time she spent with the human hatchlings, the more she had to admire their courage. They didn’t seem to know when they were defeated. “You not only beat her, but you captured her as well.”

Roxanna regarded Scirye with awe. “Many brave people have tried to defeat Amagjat over the centuries, but you’re the one who did it. Now I see why Nana chose you.”

“And she did it all on her own. It’s worthy of an epic,” Kles almost crowed as he sat on his mistress’s lap.

Scirye hugged her griffin to her. “It’s nothing like that. I was scared the whole time.”

Bayang curled into a tight ball for warmth so that she resembled a coil of scaly rope. “If you could take any epic hero and ask him or her, they would tell you they were terrified too.”

Scirye shifted uneasily. “And I was lucky.”

“Here, let some of that good fortune rub off on me,” Koko teased as he leaned forward and brushed his paw against the sole of Scirye’s boot. “I could sure use it.”

“You’re hiding something,” Leech challenged.

Still on Scirye’s lap, Kles looked up at her. “They need to hear the rest.”

Scirye shifted uncomfortably, glancing at her hand where Nanaia’s mark was. “I think She sent my sister to warn me while I was asleep.” And she told them about the dream.

“To wake from a dream and find yourself facing Amagjat.” Roxanna gave a shudder. “I would have been shaking in my boots.”

Scirye tried to deflect the Sogdian girl’s admiration: “Well, maybe you can help us figure out what Amagjat was using on this belt. When her hand got stuck in the bag, she touched something on this and pulled free.”

Setting down Kles, Scirye fetched the belt and laid it among them.

Leech looked at all the beads, charms, pebbles, carvings, shells, and feathers tied to it. “But which one? There must fifty of these things.”

Hair, scales, and feathers touched as the friends bent over to examine it together. Some of the carvings were from bone, others from ivory, ranging in style from elaborate to simple.

Bayang tapped a claw against her muzzle as she studied the belt. “Some of these might be trophies rather than real magical charms.”

“But how can we tell?” Scirye wondered.

Kles glanced at her. “Did Nanaia say anything about them?”

Scirye drew her eyebrows together, screwing up her face in concentration as she tried to bring up every detail from the dream. Searching through her memories was like trying to catch hold of smoke…when suddenly she found something.

“It’s hard to recall everything in the dream,” she admitted. “But there was something about an otter.”

They carefully inspected the belt again, but though there were plenty of bears, foxes, and seals, they didn’t see an otter.

“You know how dreams are,” Bayang said charitably. “It’s impossible to remember everything accurately.”

Scirye’s shoulders slumped. The moment she had said it, she had been so sure it was the otter.

“All right,” Bayang said. “What area of the belt did the hag try to touch when she was reaching into the bag?”

Now that the belt was lying flat on the rug instead of around the hag, it took Scirye a moment to orient herself. Biting her lip, she tapped a patch on the right side. “There, I think.”

“Hmm,” Kles said. “Let’s assume that the hag has had the bag a long time; then she would have had the charm too.”

Leech nodded. “Otherwise, the bag would have been worthless to her because it would be too deadly.”

“And let’s assume there’s some wear on the charm she uses all the time.” Bayang indicated the more-or-less realistic carvings. “So, for instance, these seem too new.”

Scirye ran her eyes along the charms and then back again, squinting at a small oblong quartz. She had taken it for just another bit of stone, but when she examined it by imp light she could see faint markings on the sides. Even when it was new, she might not have recognized it as an otter…and yet the more she looked at it, the more it suggested the sleek body of an otter in motion.

“What about this?” she asked, pointing. Her fingertip brushed it and briefly she was swimming through the sea, the water breaking around her head and fanning out behind her in a V like a sketch of wings. Nothing could hold her, not the waves, not the seaweed, not the sharks. Untouchable. Absolutely free. “It’s this one,” she said with more confidence.

The griffin touched it gingerly and snatched his claw back. “Yes, I think you’re right.”

“It’s animal magic. Sometimes otters have to hunt in dark waters,” Bayang declared. She used a paw to pantomime a creature sliding along. “A bear charm might give you the strength of a bear. So maybe an otter charm gives you some of its elusiveness. Spells can’t hold you and at the same time you have some of an otter’s ability to hunt in the dark.” The dragon stroked her muzzle. “Hmm, I wonder if some of the other belt charms let you cast spells too,” she mused. “Like the one that let her put us to sleep?”

“When she saw I was awake, she had some sort of magic that made me almost give up fighting,” Scirye remembered.

“Which one did it, though?” Bayang wondered as she scrutinized the belt. “Maybe if we recognized what animal a charm was, we could figure out the magic behind it.”

“But which ones have power and which are just decorations?” Roxanna asked. “Some of the carvings might be ornaments taken from her victims like trophies.”

“It’s too risky to experiment on our own,” Leech warned. “We should leave it until we can ask a wizard.”

“Good luck finding an honest one. Most of them would take a powder with it.” Koko raised a paw. “I vote to sell it. I bet it’s worth more if we broke up the belt and sold each of the thingamabobs separately.”

Kles launched himself into the air and then pounced upon the belt, his hind paws gripping it firmly. “It’s the Lady Scirye’s by right of conquest.”

“I don’t know if I can handle that thing on top of having the goddess hovering over me,” Scirye confessed nervously.

“Do you have a pouch, Lady Roxanna?” Kles asked politely.

Upach got up and began limping over to a basket. “That’s right; that’s right,” the ifrit grumbled. “Make me run around when the cold’s got my rheumatizz acting up.” After rummaging around inside, she produced a leather pouch that Scirye could hang around her neck.

Scirye took the precaution of pulling on her leather gauntlet before she picked up the belt’s leather thongs. Even then, she was careful not to touch any of the charms as she slid it into the pouch that Upach held open for her. “Thank you.”

“I think a little bitty thing like you is already carrying too much of a burden to add something more,” Upach said gently as Scirye slipped the pouch’s strap over her head and around her neck.

After tea and a brief meal, they debated what to do with the hag. The problem as Bayang saw it was that they did not dare destroy the bag and possibly release the hag again. Koko, with an eye on being able to store an infinite amount of loot, wondered if there was a way to destroy the hag so they could keep the bag for later use.

“Well, I suppose we could give you an axe and send you in to take care of her,” Bayang said.

Koko waved his paws back and forth. “No thanks.”

Scirye glanced uncomfortably at the bag. Had it twitched? “I don’t think I want to share the igloo with Amagjat either,” she said.

As it turned out, no one did, so they decided to drag the bag outside.

“If you still trust me,” Roxanna said humbly, “I’ll go first.”

“Of course we do,” Scirye said.

Getting down on all fours, Roxanna crawled to the igloo’s opening, where a fringe of icicles now hung. Many of them had been broken off and lay half-buried in the snow. The ones that remained were long and slender like crystal knitting needles.

“The moisture from our breathing must have condensed here,” Roxanna said, indicating the fringe and then pointing at the stumps. “And these were broken off by Amagjat when she entered.”

When they threw back the fur flap and emerged from the igloo, they discovered that the winds were dying down. Since the frozen ground made it too hard to bury the bag, they set it in the shelter of a boulder, and began to stack rocks all around it. Then, at Upach’s suggestion, they heaped snow on top so that it was indistinguishable from the surface.

After that, they returned inside to wait out the storm and get what rest they could, but with the memory of Amagjat still fresh in their minds, that proved impossible.

No one was able to sleep for fear of the hag just outside the igloo, and Scirye was afraid the creature would haunt her dreams for a long time.