“How many eggs, milady?”
She repeated herself. The anger bubbled up faster than she expected, taking her by surprise. If he knew what she really was he wouldn’t talk like that.
She suppressed her rage. She wasn’t what she really was, not anymore. She wasn’t the Chosen Bride. Nobody was going to come to her for prophecy. She was just another anonymous customer and the chicken-man would have forgotten all about her by the end of the day. And that was good.
The chicken-man seemed faintly disappointed that she didn’t want to play along, but he didn’t mind taking her money.
“Here without your boss today?” he said, handing over a box of eggs.
“That’s right,” said Csorwe, with an unbidden swell of pride. “I’m picking up breakfast.”
Back at the boardinghouse, she fried the onions in a pan over the fire, and scrambled the eggs in with them. The result was not perfectly beautiful but perfectly delicious: creamy eggs jewelled with golden onion. She ate her portion from the pan. Sethennai appeared as she was mopping up the scraps with a crust.
“I didn’t know you could cook,” he said. He was still in his nightshirt, with a silk scarf wrapped around his head.
“You ought to eat yours or it won’t be good,” she said, holding out his plate.
He blinked at it and rubbed sleep out of one eye, as if unable to comprehend the form the morning had taken.
Csorwe was pleased that he didn’t ask questions. She didn’t want to explain that she had done kitchen duties in the House of Silence. She would rather Sethennai think this was just a natural talent. He ate all of it, anyway, and seemed to like it.
After breakfast, he was much revived, and asked Csorwe all about her conversation with the chicken-man.
“Oshaarun will serve you well here in town,” he said. “But of course when we get home it will be necessary for you to speak the language of my city as a native. I happen to think Tlaanthothei is a beautiful language, so I was thinking I would teach it to you myself. Have you ever learned any other language?”
“Oranna the librarian tried to teach me,” she said, uncertainly. “So I could read the old books.”
“Ah,” said Sethennai. His eyes narrowed in private amusement. Until that moment, Csorwe had all but forgotten that he too had met Oranna, that she’d spied them working on some scheme in the library after hours.
She watched him carefully, wondering whether he’d say anything more. With each day that passed in Grey Hook, the House of Silence felt less substantial, as if the first fourteen years of her life had been a lotus hallucination. She didn’t know how it might feel to talk to Sethennai about everyone she had left behind, whether it would make them real in her head again, whether that might be a good or a bad thing.
“The Unspoken One has been worshipped in many tongues over the centuries,” Sethennai went on. “Although it prefers to see them plucked out. Ironic, really. Did you make progress with your lessons?”
Oranna had not had much patience with her as a pupil. It wasn’t that Csorwe hadn’t tried, but the warmth of the library had made her sleepy, and her mind had wandered.
“I can do verbs in the present tense,” she said. If Sethennai thought it was worth trying to teach her something, she wasn’t about to admit how useless she had been. “The queen sleeps in the castle, the servants bring the message to the master.”
“Oh, good,” said Sethennai. “If you’ve learned to put up with that kind of nonsense, the battle is almost won. Well, come and sit by me. We’ll begin with the Tlaanthothei alphabet and go from there.”
* * *
After a time, a letter arrived for Sethennai, written in cipher and containing a note of credit.
“So I do still have friends in the world,” he said, and winked at Csorwe.
They left the boardinghouse and rented rooms above a wineshop. Ciphered letters arrived for Sethennai once or twice a month, as his friends in Tlaanthothe kept him informed of the activities of his enemy.
Csorwe discovered that the enemy’s name was Olthaaros Charossa, though Sethennai almost never spoke it out loud, and even then in a low voice, all six syllables infused with distaste. This was the usurper wizard who had brought about Sethennai’s exile.
While Sethennai schemed, Csorwe studied. Three days a week they spoke nothing but Tlaanthothei at home, and it came to her more easily than she had expected. It was good to be able to speak Sethennai’s own language to him, although she still didn’t understand his jokes.
At Sethennai’s prompting she spent some of her saved wages on clothes. Her existing wardrobe was a pile of mismatched tunics and leggings, acquired secondhand and threadbare from the Grey Hook market. The dress she had worn up the stairs to the Shrine was folded neatly away in a drawer that she never opened.
Sethennai had offered no guidance, so she had to guess. All Sethennai’s clothes were brightly patterned, though ancient and much mended. Csorwe considered dressing to match, and rejected the idea. She would look like a housecat trailing after a tiger.
She had never chosen her own clothes, and didn’t want to make a spectacle of herself. It had been so much easier to be the Chosen Bride and just have Angwennad bring her the right habit for every day of the calendar. In the end, to escape from the tailor’s shop, she chose some plain tunics and a lamb’s-leather coat.
Sethennai was in a good mood when she got back to the apartment. “I’ve bought myself a present, too,” he said, beckoning her inside. “Come and admire yourself.”
The present turned out to be a mirror of real silvered glass, hanging on the wall of their sitting room. Csorwe had never seen such a thing. The Prioress of the House of Silence had strong views about personal vanity, so the novices and acolytes had been confined to small mirrors of polished copper.
She tried not to appear too fascinated by the new mirror, or by the weird spectre of her own clear, true-colour reflection. Grey skin, grey freckles, and yolk-yellow eyes were obscured by an overgrown mop of black hair. It turned out that her nose was slightly hooked, which she liked. The points of her milk-tusks poked out at the corners of her mouth.
With a jolt she realised that she might now live long enough to get her adult tusks. They didn’t come in until you were fifteen or sixteen, so she had never imagined what they might look like. She stared at herself for another second, then folded up the feeling and put it away, like the dress, in a safe place where she didn’t have to look at it.
She had chosen the new clothes well. She looked smart, but more to the point she looked like anyone you might see going about their business in the streets of Grey Hook, any one of a thousand couriers and apprentices. There was no way anyone could detect that she had ever been over the threshold of the House of Silence.
“Well?” said Sethennai. She realised she had been staring, and stepped back, shoving her hands into the pockets of her new coat.
“Think I need a haircut,” she said.
* * *
On her fifteenth birthday, to mark the end of the first stolen year, Sethennai gave her a dictionary called The Various Tongues of the Echo Maze, for the Traveller.
Around this time she lost her milk-tusks and gained a Qarsazhi tutor named Parza. He was an exile, full of sorrow for his homeland and even more irritable with Csorwe than Oranna had ever been.
“The Qarsazhi are difficult people,” said Sethennai. Csorwe had grasped this much. Qarsazh was an empire spread across many worlds, ancient and rich and huge enough that they had heard of it even in the House of Silence.
“Parza is particularly difficult,” Sethennai went on. “But don’t worry about him. You need to learn their ways but you don’t need him to like you.”
Csorwe had only ever heard of Qarsazh as a place of cruelty and corruption, but Parza was a sleek, small, affected person, with copper-brown skin, a neatly pointed beard, and very smooth grey hair, which he wore in a single coiled braid. His other traits were coffee drinking, homesickness, a delicate stomach, and
religious devotion, although it was hard to tell which of these were the ways of Qarsazh and which the ways of Parza.
Csorwe made slow progress with Qarsazhi. The words were difficult—half-jagged and half-elusive—and Parza was openly disdainful of her clumsy pronunciation. But Sethennai needed her to learn, and she owed him her best efforts.
Alongside Parza there came a whole programme of study, and a whole succession of tutors—most of them eccentric, some certainly criminals. Csorwe had more than languages to learn. She learned to navigate the city. She learned to cook eggs the proper Grey Hook way, with hot pepper and pickled cucumber. She learned to fly a cutter, and to fight: first unarmed, then with knives, and finally with the sword.
Grey Hook was a strange place. One day she saw two people kissing on the Bridge of Flies, in public, where anyone might see them. One afternoon she fell asleep in the courtyard and got a sunburn the colour of basalt. She learned to understand the city at night, its voices, its cries, its distant music. She learned how to eat mealworms, how to speak her mother tongue with the Grey Hook accent, how to run and climb and creep through the battered streets, and how to wrap her hands for a fistfight.
From the old crooks and soldiers who were her tutors, she learned about the hungers that live in the heart of every city, and she was educated in the threat, the promise, and the scientific accomplishment of violence.
* * *
There were a few other expatriate Tlaanthothei in Grey Hook, mostly tall and dark as Sethennai was, all with long tapered ears. But their neighbourhood was on the other side of the city, and Sethennai was not interested in associating with his countrymen.
Instead, he had adopted the pseudonym “Dr. Pelthari,” and taken a job as a medic with the Blue Boars, a mercenary company whose barracks were just across the square from the apartment.
Csorwe wondered at times whether he missed Tlaanthothei food and habits, the way she occasionally missed cabbage soup and plainchant, but if he did he never showed any sign of it. He hadn’t explained much to Csorwe, but she understood that he had been thrown out of Tlaanthothe, that his enemies had lied and conspired and whipped up public feeling against him. He still had his friends, who sent him their coded letters from time to time, but any Tlaanthothei stranger could be an informant for Olthaaros Charossa.
When Csorwe turned sixteen, Sethennai gave her a sword of folded Torosadni steel, and requested that she be allowed to join the Blue Boars’ newest recruits for sparring practice.
She had dreaded this. It had been so long since she’d had to deal with a class of her peers. She imagined the Blue Boars would all know each other. They would have their own team jokes and they would not be happy to meet an interloper.
To begin with it was actually worse than this. She wasn’t the only Oshaaru or the only girl, but she was the youngest and smallest, and it was irresistible to the Blue Boars to treat her as a kind of mascot. But they soon learned that she was also the fastest and least merciful, and that she had been training for longer than most. Once she tripped the enormous Corporal Valmine on his face during training, they started to take her more seriously.
The Blue Boars all wore their hair long on one side, and shaven on the other. After a few months they took Csorwe to the company barber to get hers done to match.
She got home that evening to find Sethennai absorbed in one of his ciphered letters. Only when she brought him a glass of wine did he look up at her and notice the change.
“Joining up with the Boars permanently?” he said, after a second. There was an odd expression on his face, veiled as usual by ironic amusement. Csorwe stared back at him, and realised with horror that he might be upset with her—that it might be possible for something she did to wound him.
“No!” she said. “No—they were all getting theirs done—didn’t think you’d mind—”
“Why on earth should I mind?” he said, shifting effortlessly into cheerful bemusement. Csorwe couldn’t tell whether she was imagining a bitter undercurrent. Surely he didn’t think she might leave him to become a mercenary?
Occasionally, yes, she thought it was a shame they couldn’t just stay forever in Grey Hook. It was a shame she couldn’t spend the rest of her life exploring the rooftops and making new omelettes and memorising verb forms with Parza.
Still, she knew they were leaving sooner or later, and she was used to living with a deadline on the horizon. She liked Valmine and the others, but it was only thanks to Sethennai that she had these years at all.
“The Boars are a very respectable company,” he added. “And I suppose if you prefer to run with them—”
“I don’t,” she said, with vehemence, almost angry that he could think her so ungrateful. “I’m not joining up with them. They treat me like a baby anyway.”
This was true, Csorwe reminded herself, recalling now with shame that she had let Valmine carry her around on his shoulders after they’d got their haircuts.
“Well, if the soldiering life calls to you, far be it from me to stop you, although I must warn you it’s quite likely you’ll lose a limb,” he said. “But you do know we aren’t going to be here forever.”
“I know,” she said. There was no future for them in Grey Hook, and it was no good getting settled here. “Tlaanthothe.”
He smiled at last. It was an immediate relief. The tension went out of Csorwe’s body like tea leaves uncurling in water.
Beyond the Gate of Grey Hook, far away across the Maze, Sethennai’s city still waited for him—and for her. This was the purpose for which she had been chosen and trained. One day, maybe soon, they were going home to defeat Olthaaros Charossa.
3
The Curse-Ward
A LETTER ARRIVED ONE day when Sethennai was travelling with the Boars, and Csorwe was suffering once again from the pluperfect subjunctive.
“Must you be so slow?” snapped Parza. “You cannot travel to Qarsazh and talk like this, unless you want them to think you are a barbarian and laugh in your face. Again. We covered this last week. If-only-I-had-travelled-to-the-town,” he chanted, tapping the cover of his lexicon in time with the words. The point of his beard bobbed up and down like a bird pecking at a worm.
“If only you had stayed at home,” she muttered, baring her tusks at him behind his back. Her adult tusks had come in over the last year. Nearly full grown, they still ached at the roots sometimes, and Parza’s lessons seemed to make them worse. She ignored Parza’s hiss of displeasure as one of the maids from the wineshop knocked at the door with the post.
The letter was bulkier than usual, a heavy packet of waxed paper, tied with several loops of string and sealed with a lump of unstamped beeswax. The name Belthandros Sethennai was neatly inscribed on the front.
Csorwe spent as long as she could tipping and thanking the maid. Parza was supposed to leave in a quarter of an hour and she was prepared to scrape every minute of freedom that she could.
“Stop wasting time,” said Parza, from the sitting room. “I will not leave until you can recite it perfectly. I have all day.”
“Wonder why they kicked you out of Qarsazh,” said Csorwe under her breath, and stalked back into the room with the letter in her hands. “I have to deal with this,” she said. “Might be important.”
This wasn’t exactly a lie. She often helped Sethennai with his correspondence. It was good practice in languages for her. If this one was ciphered then she couldn’t actually read it, but opening the packet and filing the contents in Sethennai’s cabinet might save her from Parza’s example sentences for another thirty seconds.
Parza huffed and shuffled his papers, but he wasn’t about to interfere in Sethennai’s business. Csorwe sat down at the desk with the packet and began snipping through the strings.
As she cut the final strand, she realised what she had missed. Sethennai’s letters were always addressed to Pelthari. Nobody here ought to know his real name.
“Oh, shit,” she said.
“Such language,” said Parz
a, clicking his tongue. “But I suppose if Dr. Pelthari will encourage you to associate with street persons—”
Csorwe barely heard him. Her pulse began to race, beating out a rhythm of dread against her breastbone. She shoved the packet hastily away as the beeswax seal began to peel of its own accord, flaking off in shards and turning to dust.
Behind the wax seal, there was a sigil worked on the paper in some red-brown pigment, a spiral of interlocking curves that squirmed on the page. Looking at it was like biting into a peach and finding several worms wriggling inside.
“What are you—” said Parza, coming up behind her. “Sorcery,” he said, in a low harsh voice she had never heard from him before. “Mother of Cities, this is a house of corruption—”
“It came in the post, Parza,” she said. She shoved back the chair and stood up, not taking her eyes off the packet. She controlled her breathing as she had been taught, making a physical effort to damp down the panic that rose in her. Was the packet going to explode? She knew so little about magic—what should she do?
Parza was praying in Qarsazhi, stumbling over the couch toward the door. She ignored him.
The letter was unwrapping itself. The leaves of paper unfolded with a dry, leathery sound, like scales on sand. There was a strong smell: hot metal, scorched hair, and—something else, something Csorwe hadn’t encountered for years. A whisper of incense, a shadow of lotus.
“By the gods—” said Parza, now flat against the front door of the apartment and wrestling with the handle. “Run, you blind fool, don’t just stare at it—”
Csorwe did not want to see what was inside the packet. But how could she explain herself to Sethennai if she let the apartment burn or explode or whatever was about to happen?
With a calm that startled her, she returned to the table where they’d been studying, and sized up Parza’s lexicon: a slab of leather and parchment as thick and heavy as a paving stone.
The Unspoken Name Page 4
