“Bah! I didn’t think you were a man to call a fortnight too far, merchant.”
“When it takes me that much off my route, aye. Too far. You know where I’m headed, Qaraashe.”
“Of course.” The stranger wheezed again. “T’will save you a few days on your journey, yes. But what happens when you find that legend and dark tales have less than I to deliver?”
“Not legends.” Taltaz slumped something large and heavy over the side of the cart. It did not touch Rahlizje, but the wagon’s creaking protests and the rocking shift to accommodate the added weight made her stomach turn. She thought she moaned, but she couldn’t be sure. “I think you know this, healer.”
“Hmm, perhaps. My knowledge does come at a price, yes?”
“I don’t mean to pay you for a truth I found on my own.” Taltaz turned and nodded at the aged figure. “I’ll return. You’ll have the last few things I asked after?”
“Tanned and stretched and glistening, yes.”
“Good.” The merchant left the side of the cart to climb onto the driver’s bench, and Rahlizje convinced herself that the ancient stranger must not have said what she’d heard; it made no sense.
The same wrinkled face leaned toward her, crowding out the light and yet making Rahlizje feel even hotter than before. “If your path is half as long as I see it now, girl, this sickness is the least of your misfortune. Take heed.”
The thief meant to ask what the hells that was supposed to mean, but before she could make a sound, the ancient, tattooed stranger pressed a wooden cup to Rahlizje’s lips. It tasted like water, nothing more, and she couldn’t tell if it moved down her throat so fiercely because she guzzled it or because it was being forced into her. The relief it brought, though, was instant. The cup pulled away, the stranger wheezed again, and Rahlizje lost consciousness once more before the last of the drink stopped trickling down her chin.
They might have stopped in many other towns and villages or none at all. Sometimes, when all was silent but a rhythmic rushing in her ears, she could open her eyes enough to think she saw people looming over the edge of the wagon and staring at her. Other times, the voices fell upon her without warning, harsh whispers rising to cackling screams and falling again into a constant stream of noise. Most of the time, she could not see their faces. On the rare occasion that she did, there were only two or three of them, shadowed, blurred, impossible to comprehend.
The only person of whom she’d been certain was the one-eyed merchant—until the night he climbed into the cart with her, pressed the toe of his boot down onto her wounded calf, and set to tearing off her clothes. Rahlizje spat and hissed, fighting him off with all her strength, however little, before a brief moment of lucidity returned. There was no merchant in the wagon with her. The only pressure on her wound was her own fingers digging into her swollen calf, and she’d pulled so forcefully on her garments in her feverish craze that she’d torn both fabric and her own flesh. Taltaz, she saw, still sat up front at the reins, though he’d turned back to watch her with a darkening frown above his one good eye.
That was when she knew she could trust her own senses no longer. That was when she stopped fighting, if only for a little peace.
The burning heat in her leg had faded to a dull reminder, but Rahlizje knew that was only because the rest of her body was failing her. She could not drink enough water, no matter how frequently the merchant offered it, and there seemed no middle ground between always being parched and imbibing so much that it made her vomit. She did not sleep, but she was never fully awake. Taltaz took to soaking bread for her in water or watered-down wine, just to get her to eat, and even that did not stay down for long.
Her body felt at war with the elements, and they with her. With chattering teeth, she shivered under the warm summer sun in the back of the wagon, even under the merchant’s bedroll and the horse blanket and her cloak. At night, she cried out, stifled by the heat of the merchant’s campfire so close to her skin until she realized it was merely her own blood boiling inside her. That was, of course, because she still lay in the cart, moving on the road again in daylight or under the stars or both, covered in a crust of dried sweat beneath the next coating of it on her slick skin.
Their progress seemed to slow at some point, though everything was slow to her now. One moment, she thought she saw the rising crags of jagged black mountains all around them, which melted away to a sprawling green valley the next time she opened her eyes. When again she found a few mere moments of her wits returned to her, she saw the merchant’s face again.
Taltaz dabbed at her glistening face with a rag, and she pushed him away. “That’s enough,” she croaked, her voice as dry and withered-sounding as another voice she could barely remember. Something about blue dots in folds of wrinkles.
“Aye, if you want your face to freeze like that before morning.”
Rahlizje blinked at him and tried to focus on the man’s one eye. “Stop.” A heavy weight pressed against her body, and she pushed what looked like yards of blankets off of her. “I’m not dead yet, merchant. No need to bury me—” She grunted when the full weight of those heavy blankets returned.
Taltaz held them there and shook his head. “This storm’s a swifter predator than your sickness, woman.”
The heat was almost unbearable, but then Rahlizje noticed the white powder frosted in his frozen beard; the fur-lined cap he’d shoved onto his head; the gloves laced tightly up his arms over the thick padding of a coat she’d never seen. “Because I’m worth nothing to you dead. Is that it?”
His lips twitched before he dabbed at her hairline again. “Don’t flatter yourself. I can always make use of a body. But I mean to make more coin off your charm.”
Despite herself, Rahlizje grunted in dark-humored amusement. It sounded like she was choking. The merchant paused to eye her for a few more seconds, tossed the rag into the cart, then pulled what must have been another fur-lined cap like his down over her tangled nest of dark hair. She hissed out a sigh.
“You’ll be grateful for the warmth again soon, thief. Don’t kill yourself before then.”
His footsteps crunched away from her until they were swallowed by the gust of wind buffeting the wagon. Rahlizje saw nothing but gray and white, though she could not feel the cold sting upon her face. Storm indeed. The cart lurched forward and rolled slowly through the blizzard, and she drifted away into sleepless, sweltering oblivion.
Chapter 11
When she found herself shivering again—and yes, admittedly grateful for the cover all those blankets provided—the storm had passed. Or they’d passed through it. Taltaz no longer wore the fur-lined cap, though Rahlizje caught glimpses still of the strange coat over his shoulders. The wagon jostled her in one endless, repetitive motion, like waves breaking on the coast at some beach she’d seen for a day, years ago, before her livelihood had forced her to keep moving.
Now, though, they seemed as far away from those glistening pink sands and warm, salty air as they could get. The jagged, stony crags of the mountains she’d thought she’d seen through her fevered journey were now reality. Morning sunlight flickered through the leaves of the few trees growing along the mountainside, and it blinded Rahlizje whenever the mountain pass turned them eastward before bending back toward the north.
The next time she noticed the light around her at all, it was at their backs, casting a long shadow across the black-gray stone rising beside them as the merchant’s horse led them up a narrow path along the cliffs. Then, eventually, they entered an even narrower pass, where all direct light disappeared entirely within the cold funnel of rough black rock penning them in on both sides. Wind whistled through the passage, cutting straight through the thick pile of blankets Rahlizje hadn’t moved since the merchant had warned her about the storm. The uneven path jolted her where she sat as the horse and the wagon and its passengers climbed even higher in the shadow of the mountain, the crunch of rock and the groan of the wooden wheels echoing tenfold around the
m.
Rahlizje did not like where they were headed. Not that she knew where that was or what they would encounter when they arrived, but her skin prickled under the closely settling darkness, and she did not think it was the cold or the fever haze. Something here felt … alive.
Perhaps she dozed off again long enough for the sun to have carved its way over the narrow passage and toward the western horizon. Perhaps it still hadn’t risen high enough to spill into the breadth of only a few yards between the cold, looming, monolithic walls of black stone on either side of them. She supposed it didn’t really matter, after all; time had deconstructed itself for her under the sickness and the raging fever and her decision to stop struggling against it all.
As soon as she had this thought, the narrow pass opened ahead of them into what might have been considered a courtyard. This one, though, was made entirely of the same black stone in these mountains, not formed by man but by some higher design of nature. The route they’d traveled had to lead to something, but the only thing here within the courtyard surrounded by jagged walls of rock was a tree.
The thing looked both dead and ancient—bone-white bark twisting like a gnarled claw toward the clouded gray sky. It bore no leaves or signs of budding life, and nothing else grew. Nothing else could grow, surely, from beneath the black stone that served as the floor to this naturally formed clearing. And yet, the tree had managed it for quite some time.
Once the wagon stopped just inside the circular chamber open to the sky, Rahlizje saw the long, crooked slashes marking their way up and down the white trunk. Sap had oozed from these cuts and dripped down the aged bark, no doubt freezing quickly in the bitingly crisp air bordering on frigid. But it was unlike any sap she’d seen on any other tree. It was black, glistening in the dull light like heated pitch yet unmoving. She could not say why, but it looked like blood.
The wind howled again through the passage behind them—a low, cold moan—and yet the silence here within the courtyard was incredibly unnerving.
Taltaz’s horse stomped a hoof against the stone beneath them with a loud crack and snorted. She did not think the beast was dumb enough to have startled itself with the sound, but it was smart enough to feel what Rahlizje herself felt here. This place held something that crawled across her skin but which she did not understand. If this was where the merchant had planned to bring her all along—if this was where they’d find some temple witch the man thought might take an interest in a wounded, hobbling, festering thief—there was far more to this place than a tale to frighten children. It frightened Rahlizje, and not much did.
Something fluttered thickly behind her in the next gust of wind. She shifted round as best she could, craning her neck over the siderail of the cart to see a man in a black cloak moving toward them. The cowl was pulled back from his face, exposing long brown hair braided with beads and silver trinkets. A line of black kohl—or perhaps the resin from this long-bleeding tree, Rahlizje did not know—ran from the top of the man’s high forehead down to the tip of his nose. The line picked up again at the center of his bottom lip and trailed down to the underside of his chin before disappearing beneath his cloak. She would never have heard his approach but for the edge of his cloak whipping about his ankles in the wind; the man took step after slow step toward them across the black stone on pale, bare feet.
“You took your time,” the man said, gazing only at Taltaz.
“I have my reasons. But I’ve come.”
The man stopped just a few feet from the front of the wagon, and the horse snorted again. “Reasons, merchant? Or excuses?” He remained entirely impassive as he regarded his visitor with small, calculating brown eyes.
“I don’t design excuses, priest.” Taltaz jumped down from the driver’s bench, and even as he landed a mere foot in front of the black-cloaked stranger, the man he’d called a priest made no move to step back or provide the merchant with more space to maneuver. Frowning, Taltaz sidled past the priest toward the back of the cart, where he could turn freely and reach over the side of his wagon into his stacked provisions.
He didn’t look at his prisoner. If Rahlizje had to guess—and she always did, with the merchant of Gethlem—she’d have said he did not want her to see how much this strange, silent, unmoving priest unsettled him. The man in the robe unsettled her too, but she did not have the strength to try hiding it, nor did she have anything else to lose. Taltaz had already cracked her secrets wide open and spread them out in front of her, and Rahlizje had already been caught.
The merchant pulled a medium-sized crate from beneath one of the canvas coverings and turned again toward the priest. The package was clean, unmarked, and no doubt contained many more secrets than Rahlizje had the stomach to know.
“And the clay?” The priest accepted the package and raised an eyebrow.
“I’ll have it next time.”
“You were asked to have it now.”
Taltaz placed a hand on the wagon’s siderail beside him in an effort to look unaffected. Rahlizje saw his fingers clench around the underside of the rail. “You’re more than welcome to leave the temples and search for it yourself. The woman I knew no longer has access to it, seeing as she’s dead. But I’ll find another way.” When the priest merely offered a cold, appraising stare in reply, the merchant cleared his throat. “Will the High Priestess see me?”
The stranger’s gaze flickered up and down Taltaz’s figure before he gave a curt nod and turned with the crate in his arms. Rahlizje wanted to see where he went—how he’d appeared from nothing but solid stone and how he would disappear into it again. But she could not turn her body any farther. What little strength this rare moment of lucidity afforded her was fading quickly.
“Water.” Despite her parched throat and the harshness of her voice, the word echoed a little in the stone courtyard.
Taltaz’s shoulders tensed, then he made toward the driver’s bench again to pull down the waterskin. Even as he offered it to her, he would not meet her gaze.
She drank as much as she could before nodding. As her head started swimming again and she felt herself fading away beneath the fever, she glanced quickly at Taltaz and cleared her throat. “This is Arahaz?”
That finally made him look at her, and his good eye twitched before he dipped his head.
“You mean to leave me here, then?”
He pressed his lips together, swallowed, and briskly rubbed his wiry black beard. “If the High Priestess thinks it—”
“You wished to see me?” The woman’s voice was low, soft, and yet commanding enough to echo in the courtyard until everything fell still.
Taltaz turned to face the woman and slowly dipped his head. Rahlizje thought it was as close of a bow as the man would ever give, and she struggled to see the newest addition to their tensely waiting party. “Aye,” he said.
The woman wore the same black cloak as the priest who’d greeted them first. Her feet were also bare, her hair long and black and matted with so many tangles of braids and silver beads and what looked too much like tiny bones. Heavy kohl lined her eyes, thick and smeared enough to make Rahlizje think the woman had never bothered to remove it from her own face. It only lent an extraordinary contrast to the impossibly white hue of the woman’s flesh. Beyond the bare feet, the only visible skin was this new stranger’s stoic, calculating face, which was nearly as white as the ancient, dead-looking tree rising from the courtyard’s black stone floor.
The woman Rahlizje could only assume was the High Priestess did not look at the wounded, fevered thief in the back of the wagon. She merely tilted her head and blinked slowly at the merchant with heavy, kohl-blackened lids. “I heard you do not have that which was requested.”
“It’s true.” Taltaz took a respectfully hesitant step away from the cart. “If I could speak to the dead, I would have asked where to find it myself. But I will find it before next I come round.”
“See that you do.” The woman lifted her chin and did not move further. “Is that a
ll?”
“No. I’ve brought something else with you in mind.” He turned just enough toward the wagon behind him that his outstretched hand could not be mistaken for anything but a gesture at Rahlizje.
The thief closed her eyes and let out a slow breath, hoping not to fade away into the fever again before she saw for herself how this played out. It was one thing to know from the beginning that the merchant of Gethlem meant to sell his prisoner into the hands of another captor. It was something else entirely to experience it in progress.
The High Priestess’ gaze flickered toward Rahlizje for no more than a second before she turned her half-closed eyes to the merchant. “What makes you believe I would be interested in such a thing?”
Taltaz tilted his head. “Just a feeling.”
“Yes.” The woman drew in a long, steady breath through her nose. “And the hope that I might pay you enough to alleviate the trouble of it.”
There was a very long pause, punctuated by the wind howling again through the narrow pass behind the wagon. “Aye.”
The woman stepped toward the cart, headed not for the merchant or his wares but for the crippled thief buried within woolen blankets at the back of the wagon. For the first time, Rahlizje was considered and acknowledged, though she could not have expected this version of it.
Quicker than the thief could predict, the High Priestess’ hand shot out to take a firm grip of Rahlizje’s bottom jaw. That hand was so incredibly cold, Rahlizje almost sighed in relief. She did not resist the force of the woman tugging her face first to one side and then the other; she was already too weak for it, and at this point, she did not see a way out of what lay in store for her—whatever that happened to be. “Is she hale?”
“Without a festering leg and fevered blood, aye.”
When the woman turned Rahlizje’s head a final time to make the thief face her, the wounded prisoner found enough remaining defiance to look up into the High Priestess’ eyes. They were a brilliant, vibrant blue, eerily offset by the thick smudges of kohl and the unnatural paleness of the woman’s face. One thin eyebrow twitched almost imperceptibly, then the woman released Rahlizje’s jaw and turned once more toward the merchant. “And what price have you set upon a clear conscience, Taltaz?”
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