With no smoke hole and with the flap shut, it was dark inside the felt tent. Lipoksha brought in a lamp along with the brazier atop which the hemp seeds would burn. The lamp smelled odd. After a moment, Rhavas realized it was burning sour butter rather than olive oil. He sighed. Yes, he was among barbarians.
But they, at least, give me this chance, he thought savagely. That is more than my own folk did.
With gesture, Lipoksha had him sit crosslegged on one side of the brazier. The Khamorth shaman took his own place opposite Rhavas. Rhavas' knees creaked; the enaree took the posture for granted. There wouldn't be room for stools in the nomads' tents, Rhavas realized. When Khamorth sat, they sat on the ground or on carpets. Of course they would be more limber than the average Videssian.
Lipoksha gave Rhavas a seated bow. Rhavas inclined his head in return. Gestures of respect had their place before any struggle. The enaree nodded to himself, satisfied that Rhavas had given honor for honor. Lipoksha took from his belt a small sack. Even in the dim, flickering lamplight, Rhavas saws that it was made of leather. Videssians probably would have used linen instead. But the plainsmen used almost exclusively the products of their flocks and of the hunt. The only cloth they had was the wool they spun and what they got from Videssos by trade or theft.
The shaman undid the rawhide cord that held the sack closed. He murmured a few incomprehensible but rhythmic sentences. A prayer of sorts, Rhavas thought. Then Lipoksha poured the seeds in the sack down onto the hot brazier.
A cloud of smoke rose and filled the tent. It stung Rhavas' eyes and made him cough. The smell wasn't unpleasant: spicier and more pungent than wood smoke. But he wouldn't have cared to be trapped in a tight place with a smoky campfire, and he didn't much care for this, either.
He tried to breathe as little as he could. Lipoksha, by contrast, inhaled noisily, sucking in great draughts of smoke. Then Rhavas made himself do the same, even if he felt as if his throat were on fire. Whatever power the smoke had would not help the shaman without helping him.
A foolish grin spread across Lipoksha's face, almost but not quite the grin he might have worn after too much wine. Rhavas found it hard to maintain the hatred of the world that had sustained him for so long. His body felt lethargic, while his mind was more interested in itself than in anything around him.
His will, though, still drove him. He pointed at Lipoksha, sitting there on the far side of the brazier. "Curse you," he said.
He could see the curse leave his fingers. It was as if he existed on two planes at once, the normal mundane world and the world of the spirit, the world of power. He saw the curse fly toward Lipoksha, and he saw the shaman's spirit sidestep it so that it went on out uselessly into the void.
"Is that all you can do?" In the spirit realm, Rhavas had no trouble understanding the Khamorth. Lipoksha's spirit-self waved contemptuously. "Here is a curse with bite."
Behind Rhavas, something growled. His spirit-self whirled, though his physical body sat unmoving. A great wolf advanced on him. Fire blazed in its eye sockets; its teeth were jagged as old saw blades. He knew without being warned that it would eat his soul if it could—and it could.
"Begone!" he cried. The wolf's tongue lolled out. It laughed a doggy laugh at him and padded closer, the fire in its eyes burning brighter. "Curse you!" Rhavas said, as he had when he aimed death at Lipoksha. But death had missed then, and it missed now. He was not sure the spirit-wolf lived, not as the material world understood the word.
The wolf's jaws gaped wide, wide enough to swallow Rhavas at a gulp. Lipoksha's spirit-self giggled. "Good-bye, little man. Good-bye, little fool," he said gaily.
Rhavas wondered if he could run. But, he sensed, as in the material world, so here: a lone wolf could always outrun a lone man. He ran, then, but at the wolf. It reared back in surprise. "Skotos take you!" he roared. "Darkness eat you forever!"
And the wolf was gone.
Lipoksha stopped laughing. Rhavas' spirit-self turned back toward the shaman. "I did not think you could do that," Lipoksha remarked.
"Life is full of surprises," Rhavas said. "You called on your powers, and I called on mine. Here is another taste of them, and see how you like it!" He shouted out the spell he had used in the High Temple, the one that would have brought light if used with Phos' name but sent blackness across the world when made with Skotos'.
Again, that blackness flowed from Rhavas' hands. Here in the spirit realm, it seemed more alive, more aware than it had in the material world. It streamed toward Lipoksha's spirit-self, as if to drown him in darkness. As Rhavas had against the shaman's summoned wolf, Lipoksha stood his ground. A drum appeared in his hands. He beat out a rapid, intricate rhythm. The leading edge of the darkness writhed. He was trying to seize control of it for himself, maybe even to turn it back against the one who had sent it.
"Skotos!" Rhavas whispered, both his spirit-self and his physical body. He pointed toward Lipoksha, he turned his will toward Lipoksha—and the darkness obeyed him.
As it engulfed the shaman, Lipoksha let out a startled, frightened wail. Above it, or perhaps behind it, Rhavas thought he heard—imagined he heard?—a dark, cold laughter. The enaree might have heard—or imagined?—the same thing, for the wail from out of the darkness rose to a high, desperate shriek. And then it was gone, gone forever. The laughter? There on the spirit plane, the laughter rolled on forever, as eternal and resistless as the tide.
Little by little, Rhavas came back to himself, or found himself once more in the material world alone. Was there a difference? He could not have said. The hemp fumes still clouded his brain. They still clouded his eyes as well. But there was no mistaking the corpse that slumped down on the far side of the brazier from him for a living man. No man alive could have achieved that boneless posture—and luckless Lipoksha's bowels had let go, adding a fresh stink to the pungency of the hemp fumes in the felt tent.
Head spinning, Rhavas crawled to the tent flap. His fingers were clumsy on the rawhide lashings that held the flap closed; he had to fumble at the knots before they finally came free. When they did, and when he saw daylight again, he wished he had a shield to protect his eyes from the sudden and unexpected brilliance. No, he was not Phos' creature anymore.
Kolaksha and several other Khamorth waited expectantly outside the felt tent. When they saw Rhavas emerge, their faces were comic studies of astonishment and dismay. "Where Lipoksha?" the chieftain demanded, as if that weren't, or shouldn't have been, obvious.
"In there." Rhavas pointed back to the tent. He also added what was, or should have been, obvious: "Dead." His eyes adapted to the light outside, a bit at a time; he was not doomed to be an owl, then, and blind by daylight. He added one thing more, the first thing on his mind: "I'm hungry."
Kolaksha spoke in his own language. One of the other plainsmen shouted. A woman, gold hoops in her ears and bracelets jingling on her wrists, hurried up with a wooden tray piled high with roast mutton and unleavened wheat cakes and a drinking horn that looked to have been shaped from a real cow's horn. She seemed very ready. Maybe Lipoksha would have been hungry, too, had he come out.
Rhavas ate like a starving wolf. The Khamorth flavored mutton with mint, not garlic. It was strange, but it wasn't bad. The butter on the wheat cakes was going off, or had gone. That plainly didn't matter to the Khamorth. In Rhavas' famished state, it didn't matter to him, either. The horn held something thin and sour, but at least as strong as wine.