Wraisau said something that sounded like a curse. Then, in Saiduan, “Taigan is not a sanisi. And he shouldn’t be a woman again for a season yet.”
“You know he can speak Saiduan?” Driaa said, in Saiduan. “They didn’t send these ones along for their looks. Though they are terribly pretty. For cannibals.”
“We’d be pretty, too, if we danced around in circles all day singing to plants and fucking each other,” Wraisau said.
“Your most fervent desire, I know,” Driaa said.
“One can dream.”
Roh found their wry tongues and loose manner confusing. It wasn’t at all like he imagined they’d be from books. “Aren’t you deadly assassins?” he said.
“I apologize,” Dasai said. He leaned forward. Despite his small stature, his mean face and the deep tenor of his voice got their attention. “No doubt we all have much to say to one another. But perhaps not on this pier? We have traveled many days.”
Wraisau bowed, finally. Roh stood a little straighter. Maybe the Saiduan would be less rude. “Of course,” Wraisau said. “I apologize. Things are difficult. I suggest you all stay close. Foreigners are often kidnapped in Anjoliaa. They do like pretty boys, especially.” He looked at Roh.
“Thanks,” Roh said.
The sanisi procured them bears and supplies and led the party overland around the base of the big plateau and out onto a dusty flatland. Roh marveled at every moment of it. The sky looked bigger here, vast, like the world went on and on forever. They trekked for two days across the flatland and entered a wide valley cutting through a low rise of smooth-topped mountains. Rice paddies and red grass fields draped the valley and the gentle base of the mountains.
It took another week to cross the valley, and as they turned north, the weather became cooler. The trees were different: tall and many-limbed with leaves the size of Roh’s head, their bark rough and knotted, the color of burnt cream. He had no Dhai name for the trees, because they didn’t exist in Dhai. Most of the vegetation was that way the farther north they went: familiar, but other. The grass was tall and leathery, brown-gold, or topped in bunches of dark seeds.
Roh had expected to see more evidence of fighting as they traveled. Wasn’t Saiduan under siege? But the landscape was pristine, virtually untouched. They passed a few small villages and towns lined in red stones, but no one came out to greet them or challenge them. Stranger still, the plant life here was somewhat tame. Roh spotted what must have been a herd of walking trees in the far distance, but the roads and undergrowth were clear of snapping, deadly things. Driaa still burned the area where they slept every night, but the sanisi seemed remarkably unconcerned about being eaten by plants in the middle of the night.
“Where’s the fighting happening?” Roh asked Wraisau.
“What?” Wraisau said, “Disappointed not to see us gutted and laid out?”
“Why would I want that?” Roh said.
Wraisau frowned. Driaa said something to him sharply in Saiduan, too fast for Roh to make out.
“The fighting is farther north,” Wraisau said. “They haven’t reached us here yet. We just abandoned Caisau to them and retreated to Kuonrada.”
“With luck, you can stop this before we must move again,” Driaa said to Roh, but her tone was bitter.
“Why don’t you want us here?” Roh said. “We’re fighting the same enemy. We should be friends.”
Wraisau grinned and glanced over at Driaa. “You must admit,” he said, “he grows on you.”
“It’s dumb talk,” Driaa said.
“It’s the way we all sounded before the war,” Wraisau said.
“I never sounded like an illiterate Dhai,” Driaa said.
“I can read,” Roh said.
“Ze means you lack wisdom,” Wraisau said, using the Saiduan pronoun for ataisa to refer to Driaa. “But to be honest, I could do with some company who has a little more hope than sense these days.”
When they arrived in sight of Kuonrada, it was high autumn in Dhai, but here, the trees had already shed their leaves, frost covered the ground in the morning, and a cold wind came in off a tangle of craggy mountains framing the city. From a great distance, Roh saw a massive glacier wedged into the maw of the mountains above the city from which sprang the cold, clear river their caravan followed.
Kuonrada was a mountain city, a city built for cold weather and defense. It was the first big city Roh had seen since Anjoliaa. The defensive wall reared a good fifty feet above the grassy plain, an impassive face to the dark city.
As they crossed over the threshold of the stone gate and into Kuonrada, Roh rode up near the front between Nioni and Dasai, just behind the sanisi. The ground beneath them was bare stone, worn smooth. The city buildings, too, were of stone fit with the same precision as those of the defensive wall. Where were the famous living holds of Saiduan?
The city felt as old as the mountain. Its residents wore much darker colors than those in Anjoliaa. Instead of sandals, they wore boots and heavy coats lined in fur. Their hair was braided back in three long braids, one on either side of the head, another along the top, knotted with dark ribbons. They seemed taller than their southern counterparts, darker-skinned.
Passers-by stopped to stare at them. When Roh looked up, he saw the open wooden shutters of the apartments above. Veiled children peered out at them.
As they approached, the great gates of Kuonrada opened.
Roh kept pace with Chali and Dasai through the gates and into the main yard of the keep. At the bottom of a double stairwell that led up to the main door, a tall, thin man stood. He was dressed in a black ankle-length tunic stitched in silver, the sleeves wide, the collar high. He wore over it a short coat lined in white fur. His white hair was wound around his head and pinned close. Behind him stood three young men with shaved heads, dressed in drab gray tunics and short coats. They kept their gazes averted.
“Ora Dasai,” the white-haired man said as the riders entered the yard.
Roh handed off his bear, and he and Nioni helped Dasai dismount.
“It has been some time,” the white-haired man said. He held out his hands and clasped Dasai’s forearms without permission. Roh winced at it, though Dasai didn’t protest. The sanisi had largely kept their distance from them while traveling. But now that they were going to be among so many people who tried to touch him without asking, Roh was suddenly uncomfortable.
“Keeper Takanaa,” Dasai said in Saiduan, inclining his head. “I trust all is well in the house of your Patron?”
“As well as can be expected. Come, my assistants will bring your men inside. The Patron asks that you dine with him tonight.”
“Of course,” Dasai said.
Takanaa showed them into the hold and through many broad corridors, finally stopping at a great hall that ended in a hub, with six rooms facing a central foyer that boasted plush chairs and low tables at its center.
“These are your scholars’ quarters,” Takanaa said, “and your shared lounge. Does it please you?”
“Very much,” Dasai said.
Takanaa unlocked each of the doors. Roh and Kihin chose a room together. Roh was disappointed to see two narrow beds inside and a simple stone fireplace with banked coals. Two scuffed trunks.
“A little bare, isn’t it?” Kihin whispered.
“Maybe the others are better?” Roh said. Not even a temple drudge would be expected to sleep in such spare quarters. There wasn’t even a window. Roh searched for something to put onto the fire and found more coal and a few logs. He discovered candles in the trunks and lit a few to give them light to unpack by.
After Takanaa left, Roh went to look at Dasai’s room. Chali stood outside the door, and moved aside as he approached. Dasai’s room was much the same as Roh’s.
Aramey came up behind Roh. He was a beefy man in his forties, with a generous grin and broad hands. Unlike the others, he wasn’t gifted, but he had been a student of Dasai’s for two decades.
“It seems we’ll ha
ve to do something worthy to receive better quarters,” Aramey said.
“No one of our number,” Dasai said, “is naïve enough to think that anything we are given will come without consequence. I urge you all to accept no gifts, and make no oaths or promises. Breaking such things is a grave crime here. If there is a situation you find confusing, please refer whoever is speaking to you to me.”
“We heard this four times on the boat,” Roh said.
“And you will hear it forty more times if need be,” Dasai said. “Accept no gifts, Rohinmey.”
Roh opened his mouth but closed it again at a look from Chali. Roh had argued with everyone but Aramey the entire trip.
A few hours after dark, a man dressed in a long purple robe and short black coat appeared at the door of the sitting room. He knocked politely, even though they had left the outer door open. Behind him was a small bald man, dark but with the features of a Dorinah, whose forehead looked unnaturally flat.
He introduced himself as Ko and invited Dasai to supper with the Patron.
“This novice will act as my assistant during supper,” Dasai said to the Saiduan, waving a gnarled hand in Roh’s direction. “Is this acceptable to your Patron?”
Ko bowed. “Of course. I will escort your scholars to the shared dining hall for their supper with our local scholars.”
Roh and Dasai followed after Ko through wide-ribbed corridors, some of them lined in mirrors. The halls of Kuonrada bore none of the sinuous lines and circles of Oma’s Temple. Dasai shuffled slowly beside him.
There were no frescos, no tapestries. The stones making up the halls were nearly as tall as Roh, set with the close seams of the outer walls, and when not covered in mirrors, the stones were carved into scenes of violent, frenzied battles. Roh walked past a carving of a vicious wolf a head taller than him goring the life from an armored body.
“Beautiful, aren’t they?” Dasai said.
“Who are all these battles with?” Roh asked.
“The Dhai,” Dasai said, “and the Talamynii, before us.”
Roh gazed at the carvings again. The brown, green-eyed Talamynii, the “children of the white wolf,” had tamed the wolves of the continent, wolves half again as big as dogs, their more docile counterparts. But even they had not been able to stand up to the Dhai armies, four thousand years before.
Ko took them through a number of passageways, down a hall lined in black-clad sanisi – more than Roh had ever seen – and halted outside a cavernous room without windows. A tall, lean man stood speaking to two other men a pace between the table and the far wall. Two sanisi stood at either end of the table. A massive table of polished dark wood stood at the center of the room. There were four place settings of crystal. The dozen chairs ringing the table were carved in fearsome faces and padded in deep green velvet.
“It has been some time,” the man said.
He could not have been much past forty. Roh thought maybe he was one of the Patron’s sons, sent with apologies for his father’s absence.
“Patron Alaar Masoth Taar,” Dasai said.
“Ora Dasai,” the Patron said.
The Patron stood a head and shoulders taller than Dasai, slender of waist and shoulder, not thin but knotted, wiry. If the Patron were two decades younger, Roh would have called him beautiful. Time had worn the beauty, made it hard and handsome, not pretty. His heavy beard covered terrible scars on the lower half of his face.
“I trust you met with no ill luck,” the Patron said.
“None,” Dasai said, “though I heard it said we were in good fortune to arrive whole.”
“You were.” The Patron’s gaze moved to Roh. “And you have brought another.”
“My assistant,” Ora Dasai said, gesturing for Roh to come closer. “Rohinmey Tadisa Garika, a novice parajista. Excellent dancer. Competent fighter.”
“You have trained with Ora Kimey?” the Patron asked.
Roh barely remembered the correct tense for addressing a Patron in Saiduan and was certain he botched it. Why did there have to be so many titles and honorifics and polite ways of speaking?
“I am the student of one of her students, Ora Ranana. Ora Kimey has retired to Clan Osono,” Roh said.
The Patron’s gaze lingered, as if he were evaluating a dancing partner or a sparring opponent, sizing up their skill.
“Please be seated,” the Patron said. “I’m afraid all is not as well prepared as it should be.”
Roh was startled to see one of the sanisi move forward and lay out six loaves of various types of bread in all different shapes and hues. He never imagined sanisi serving a Patron or his guests. They were assassins, not servants.
The sanisi brought out small bowls of other things – some kind of green slurry that looked like spinach or seaweed, diced fruit coated in cayenne pepper, and twelve kinds of fish dishes: fish heads, fish tails, cubed fish, dried fish, pickled fish. Roh couldn’t figure out what types of fish they were, but the smell made his stomach turn.
Roh waited until the Patron ate. He took a slice of bread and slathered it with the various condiments. Roh filled up mainly on bread and the seaweed-spinach mixture and the spicy fruit. To his horror, Dasai partook of each fish dish in turn. Roh tried not to gag.
He knew from his classes on Saiduan culture that drinks were served after the meal, not during it, but he hadn’t thought about that before eating the spicy fruit. His lips burned and his eyes watered.
The Patron glanced over at him and laughed.
“You’re an adventurous boy,” the Patron said. “I see why Ora Dasai brought you.”
“How much information have your scholars found?” Dasai asked. Roh noticed he had stopped eating or drinking anything.
“Little,” the Patron said. “We have a piece from the Book of Miracles that’s very similar to your Book of Oma. We found some older historical pieces, but they all dated back just eight hundred years. What we need is far older.”
“You realize,” Dasai said, “that finding a two thousand year-old text telling us how the invaders come through, and how to stop them, is highly unlikely.”
“Of course,” the Patron said. “But if there was ever a time for miracles, this is that time.”
The servants took away the still nearly-full trays. Then they brought out the watered wine and liquor. They placed four different types of glasses in front of Roh. One short and round, one tall and slender, one tall and fat, and one goblet with a long stem. Roh waited to see what the Patron did, but thankfully, the servants poured them each drinks into what Roh presumed was the correct glass.
Roh tried the amber liquid in the goblet first. Two sips, and it already made his head fuzzy. He saw Dasai watching him closely.
“If all goes as it has, we should be able to last the winter here before they assault our position,” the Patron said. “You’ll have until then to find some record of how to stop these people. It’s been done before, when the Dorinah insect-witches were turned back. They nearly spawned their way across this continent during the same rising that swept us here. It was the Dhai who were turned away that time.”
“We’re better at dancing than fighting now,” Roh said, and then covered his mouth. Perhaps he was a little drunk.
“Yes, let’s speak of happier things,” the Patron said. “Do you dance the three genders?” the Patron asked.
“Our five and your three,” Roh said. “Yes, I dance them. I was one of Ora Ohanni’s best dancing students.”
“I have a party of dancers in residence,” the Patron said. “There is a particular piece that requires six female roles, and only four of my dancers are comfortable with those steps. They are mostly variations of kanik and morasha forms, with some vonov, which is much more fluid. Difficult to learn but satisfying.”
“Oh, I know those! They’re–” Roh began.
“I do not want this project to interfere with your work, Ora Dasai,” the Patron said, speaking over Roh. “Three hours in the mornings, perhaps. The performance is
the day of Para’s Ascendance. After that, she begins her descent from this world once again. We will begin to feel her presence less and less with each passing day.”
“I’m certain it will not impact his work,” Dasai said. “I only hope he can bring you pleasure.”
Roh had a difficult time hiding his surprise. After years of saying no and keeping Roh bound up in boring classes and shuttered away from everything, Dasai was going to let him join other dancers for Para’s Day of Ascendance? He wondered if the trip to Saiduan had made Dasai a little mad.
Dinner ended several hours later. Roh was nodding off into his dessert liquor when Dasai told him it was time to go. The Patron had talked a long time. Roh thought he would regale them with tales of battles and conquests, but mostly, he talked about building bridges and roads that halved the time it took to reach remote outposts. Roh found all the talk about taxes and the overseeing of government officials tedious.
The servant, Ko, reappeared to lead them back to their rooms.
“May I take your arm, Roh?” Dasai asked. “It is a long walk.”
“Of course,” Roh said. He offered his arm, and Dasai took it. They walked several steps behind Ko.
Roh said, in Dhai, “Why did you agree to have me spend time with the dancers? You never let me do anything.”
“The Patron does not make requests. He orders.”
“It all seems so rude,” Roh said.
“It’s meant to be,” Dasai said. “Imposing one’s physical presence, one’s desires, on another is a demonstration of power. It’s meant to remind you that your body belongs to the Patron of Saiduan.”
“How can people live like that?”
“One learns.”
“I couldn’t live like that.”
“Couldn’t you?” Dasai said. “I am not so sure.”
“You knew he’d ask me about dancing. It’s why you brought me to dinner. You want me to tell you if I learn anything, don’t you?” Roh said. “You want to know what they’re saying about us.”
Dasai stared at the back of Ko’s head. “We are being kept together like animals,” he said, “to ensure we learn only what the Patron has to tell us. Your presence elsewhere gives us a better idea of how things are moving around us. You understand?”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 22
