Natanial grunted and bound Anavha’s arm. “I took you for a foppish Dorinah man,” Natanial said, “but this is something else. Not all men in Dorinah are treated this way.”
“Zezili loves me.”
“She hurts you.”
Anavha’s face felt hot. “Sometimes… sometimes that’s all right. Sometimes I deserve it. I even… I even like it, sometimes.”
“Some do,” Natanial said. He knotted the makeshift bandages. “I will grant you that. But far more common are those who fetishize the abuse they endure because living under the alternative is too much to bear.”
“Don’t tell me what I feel.” Tears burned Anavha’s eyes again, and for the first time in a long time, he hated himself for it. Hated to cry about his own life in front of a stranger. “You don’t understand anything.”
“I understand more than you know,” Natanial said. “Come, we need to go on. If this is Aaldia we have a much longer distance to travel back to Tordin.”
“Aaldia? How do you know it’s Aaldia?”
“The stars,” Natanial said.
They traveled all night. When Anavha collapsed, Natanial carried him, lifting him up over his shoulders as if he weighed nothing. And perhaps he did not. He was no one, of importance only to Zezili, and then only if he pleased her. Natanial carried him because Zezili would pay for him.
Finally, Natanial came to a stop. He set Anavha back on his feet. The moons had risen and nearly set.
“What is it?” Anavha asked.
“Lights,” Natanial said. “Stay here. I want to make sure it’s safe.”
“Don’t leave me!”
“Anavha.”
“Please!”
“Stay three paces behind, then. Laine’s bloody spit.”
Natanial crept across the broken grass and onto a worn path. He called out in Tordinian. An answering call came from the house in another language, one Anavha didn’t recognize.
Natanial yelled something else, then returned to Anavha. “There’s a village two miles further on,” he said. “We should find a tavern and a room.”
“So we are in Aaldia?”
“Yes.”
“How did we get here?”
Natanial cocked his head at him. “You took us here, you tell me. Let’s just hope it’s our Aaldia.”
“What does that mean?”
“You really have no idea? Has no one trained you?”
“Zezili would never let the Seekers take me. Never.”
Natanial swore again.
When they walked down into town, the moons were high in the sky, and Anavha was exhausted. His armed throbbed and his feet ached. He would give much for a warm meal and a bed.
Anavha expected the tavern they entered to be a loud, raucous affair, full of drunks and people selling their bodies, but even from the outside, this place looked different than a tavern in Dorinah. The town was very small, just one main street. It was paved in clean oblong stones, their seams filled with sand. One half of the village was built into a broad hill. The few buildings with two stories all had their first nestled within the ground, windows and broad doors peering out into the streets. The roofs were flat, not sloped, and Anavha saw a few figures glance down at them from nearby roofs where milky blue fire burned on long poles. Insects buzzed around them, their bodies blinking green, then white, then blue, each as big as Anavha’s thumb. They rested on doorframes and hitching posts, giving the whole street a merry glow, as if it were decorated for some festival.
Natanial stepped into a large two storied tavern at the far end of the street. Anavha gasped as he disappeared into a black shroud. Natanial poked his head back out. “It’s an illusion. To keep out the bugs. Come in.”
Anavha stepped gingerly forward. “Illusion?”
“A parajista-trained door, hexed into place. It will admit you, just not the bugs. Aaldians have the best tricks. Come on, it’s warmer in here.”
Anavha took Natanial’s hand and stepped through. He smelled jasmine and cloves. A small crowd was gathered at the far side of the room, attention rapt on a figure standing on a low dais, surrounded by misty multicolored spheres. The figure was tapping and moving smaller floating spheres and dragging them through the air into the larger ones. As the smaller spheres touched the larger spheres, the small ones disappeared. The room was still but for the low murmur of appreciation when a sphere disappeared, or a collective gasp when the manipulator chose a new orb.
Anavha was drawn to the game. Natanial went to a broad opening in the far side of the room that looked like it opened into the kitchen. A dark woman with a lean face and stout form gave him a warm smile as she wiped her hands on her apron.
The person on the dais was, Anavha assumed, a woman, like the proprietor. Anavha wasn’t sure, as his vocabulary gave him just two choices. The woman was lean and dark, with expressive hands. Her low brow was furrowed in concentration as she selected another small sphere. Anavha could see no pattern to the game – the larger spheres were scattered widely just outside her arm’s reach, so she had to lean out to place them. The small red scattered spheres were all inside the sweep of her arms. He thought the object of the game had something to do with colors, at first – matching the small purple to the large purple – or maybe it had to do with size, but the only size discrepancy was between small or large sphere. His inability to understand what was going on actually made the game that much more interesting.
“It’s a game that the Aaldians play, with doors,” Natanial said. “Each projected sphere is a door. Each of the pieces on the board matches one of the doors. They have to choose which piece goes with which door. An old game, but even the young people play it. It’s part of the entrance exam for government officials.”
“But how is it played?”
“It’s something to do with mathematics,” Natanial said. “It takes a long time to master, unless you have a head for it. It’s calculating the distances between the doors, I believe. Certain ranges of numbers are assigned colors, and the color corresponds to the pieces on the board.” He waved a hand. “Not my talent, alas, but Aaldians have a particular passion for numbers. It makes them very good tradespeople. They are mad for this game.”
“Do you travel to Aaldia a lot?”
“I am Aaldian, originally. I was born here, anyway.”
Anavha looked at the small, black-skinned people around him, then back at the broad, bronze-skinned Natanial. He was uncertain what to say to that. Surely there were Saiduan people born in Dorinah, but they were always Saiduan. No one could be a citizen in Dorinah without… looking like someone from Dorinah. “You don’t look like it,” Anavha said.
“If you’re born here, you’re Aaldian,” Natanial said. “My mother looked more local than my father, though, to be sure. Just so happens I look more like him than her. You can’t always tell a person’s parentage in their face.”
“How many languages do you speak?”
“Eight.”
“Eight! There aren’t that many languages in the world.”
Natanial laughed. “Sheltered Dorinah child. There are three languages in Dorinah alone – high Dorinah, spoken by your priests and empresses; low Dorinah, spoken by most everyone else; and Daj, the patois the dajians speak. Dhai has two – Woodland Dhai and Valley Dhai. Saiduan has seven – let’s not get into that. But it’s a big country, and with those kinds of distances, it’s inevitable that languages proliferate. Tordin has at least five, and Aaldia, though it recognizes only one common language, has five provinces with very distinct ways of speaking that language. And we have not even discussed the southern continents, like Hrollief, or the eastern kingdoms–”
“I’m foolish, then,” Anavha said. “Does that please you?”
“You’re not foolish,” Natanial said, glancing over at the woman playing the sphere game, frowning as the crowd drew a collective gasp as another sphere winked out. “You’re just ignorant. The wonderful thing about being ignorant is that it can be resolved very easily. Foolishness
cannot. Once a fool, always a fool.”
Anavha turned back to watch the game too. Only three large spheres remained, but there were over two dozen smaller ones left. As he and Natanial watched, the woman chose a small gray sphere, and flicked it into a large one over her left shoulder. It winked out. A hush descended over the crowd.
She hesitated then, fingers hovering over the final pieces. Then she plucked out a small sphere and popped it into the larger one at her right.
The misty spheres all turned purple. The crowd howled; some hooted, many groaned. The misty game burst apart. Anavha wondered what parajista had conjured it. Like the bug screen on the door, it all had to be some elaborate gifted invention, though he had never seen a jista in Dorinah do anything like it. The look of defeat on the woman’s face was so palpable that it gripped Anavha’s heart.
“She chose wrong,” Natanial said, rising.
“What happens?”
“They play again tomorrow. Lucky for her, this was a casual game. She wasn’t playing for an entrance exam, or the fate of the world, or anything like that. She’ll try again. Come. I got us a room.”
Anavha followed him upstairs. “I’d like to learn that game,” he said. There was something about the complexity of it, the geometry, that captivated him. It was easy to lose yourself in a game like that.
“We have more urgent places to start with your education. On the upside, it’s a long way back to Tordin. I’d prefer we didn’t rely on your spotty ability with your gift to get us back. There are few things I distrust more than an untrained jista.”
“Why would you teach me anything? Aren’t I a prisoner?”
Natanial hesitated, his hand on the banister. “I have seen the fear in your eyes before,” he said. “I know what can be achieved when knowledge replaces fear.”
“You think I’ll become a killer, like you?”
“Not at all. I’m an artist. The killing has its purpose. There’s a greater goal. Come, I asked the matron to send up a medic for your arm. I’d prefer you didn’t lose it before I delivered you to Saradyn.”
“Zezili will come for me.”
“I don’t doubt it. Saradyn won’t either.”
“Am I worth a lot, you think?”
“Likely more than Zezili will pay.”
“I don’t think so.”
“It won’t matter at all if we’re in the wrong world,” Natanial said. “Until then, let’s work on your mathematics, and your Aaldian. You may need both before the world ends.”
Anavha thought that an odd thing to say.
7
Harajan was a city of faces, a wintry Saiduan city far enough south of Kuonrada to give the retreating Saiduan army some comfort that the Tai Mora were not nipping at their heels. Maralah entered the city of faces showing her most fearsome one; a graven expression she had seen on broken statues of Patrons from the early days of the Empire, when the Dhai who once ruled what would become Saiduan still held out in small groups on the frontier. Over the centuries the Dhai were slowly eradicated and enslaved. Now the Dhai were returning – or, rather, a darker version of them, from some other world.
She supposed there was a great cosmic irony in that, to find her people slaughtered by those with the same faces they’d destroyed over a thousand years before. But mostly it wearied her, because in the end, it did not matter what face an enemy wore – an enemy was an enemy.
As she and her brother’s army stumbled into Harajan during one of the worst winters she could remember, she kept the same expression, though few had cause to see it inside her snug furred hood and wrap.
She bore that expression all through the winter, until the false spring, when her brother started to hack his guts out and Taigan still had not answered the messages she had sent. Some part of her worried the missives were being intercepted by the Tai Mora. But the part that knew Taigan suspected he was merely resisting, and would resist until she compelled him through the pain of the ward.
The army was hungry, as were the civilians, but the Tai Mora advance had halted in the face of the weather. The weather, for all its horror, gave her a comfort she had not known in seven years.
Now the weather was lifting.
“You promised him Taigan would come,” Morsaar Koryn, the second-in-command of her brother’s army, said.
Maralah found him not with the army, nor with her brother, but in the scullery baking bread. He wore a stiff leather apron better suited to the butchering of ubel – the giant bear-dogs of the tundra – but his hands were nimble as they pinched and kneaded the dough. This was a man with long practice at an oven. She remembered some half-story Rajavaa had told her about Morsaar starting out as the assistant cook for the army when he was very young. Morsaar was a slim, wiry man, his hair braided back and twisted up into three tights knots on the top of his head. His most arresting feature was a long scar that stretched from the corner of his left eye and parted the upper edge of his left lip. She had known him when he was still unblemished, but had to admit the scar made him interesting as opposed to ugly. Infused weapons didn’t make scars like that, which led her to wonder what man he’d tussled with in their own ranks to earn that bit of interesting.
The only other person in the room was tall, handsome Kovaas, one of the sanisi she now counted among hers after the schism in Kuonrada. She trusted very few now, less every day, and she admitted that seeing his broad, glowering face here in this sea of misery soothed her. If she lost the sanisi, she lost control of her mastery over those in the hold, and then she lost control of what remained of the country. She needed every one of them.
Kovaas seemed bemused, at best, by the baking.
Maralah came to the end of the long stone table as Morsaar began to shape his first fist-sized loaves, pinched at the ends to resemble almonds. Maralah knew that shape well – standard issue for the army.
“Don’t we have cooks for that?”
“We are short a cook,” Morsaar said. “He fled during the night.”
“Then he will have no better luck leaving than Taigan has had in arriving,” Maralah said. “The weather is bad. He couldn’t cross between here and Anjoliaa.” It was not a lie, precisely. It was an assumption.
Morsaar cut a neat slit in the side of his first loaf and tucked a pickled olive inside. She admired his long, deft fingers. For the first time she considered what it was Rajavaa found so attractive in him. He took up a wooden cutout of a leaf and pressed it firmly into the top of the bread, smoothing the edges of the raised dough with a finger. Perhaps Rajavaa loved this – a neat attention to detail. An exacting concentration.
“I don’t see why he can’t take a ship up the coast,” Morsaar said. He placed the first loaf on the baking slab and pinched out another blob of dough to begin the next. Behind him, the big oven blazed merrily, emitting a slow heat.
“There are any number of things he should do,” Maralah said. “What I can’t tell you is which one he’s chosen.”
“Do you own him or not? You told Rajavaa he was yours.” This loaf came out lopsided. He mashed the dough into a ball and began again.
“You mean the Patron. I’m as troubled as you are, Morsaar. The Patron told me he had a year.”
“Illness doesn’t adhere to a neat schedule, no more than the satellites.”
“Is there any other mundane thing you’d like to explain to me, as if I’m a child at your knee?” she said. “You forget your place.” It was a trick often employed by men years her junior, to explain to her some trivial or obvious detail, expecting her to nod along like some honor-bound wife or slave instead of War Minister of Saiduan.
Morsaar straightened his spine. His fingers ceased their shaping. He peered at her from the corner of his eye. “I apologize,” Morsaar said. “Do you cook?”
“Never,” she said.
“A shame,” he said, “you have the bitter bite of a woman who would do well ordering about a kitchen.”
“I do hope you order your army better than a kitchen,�
� she said. “I know I do.”
“They are much the same,” he said. He patted the loaf into shape and cut it open, inserted the olive. Pressed the leaf shape into the top. There was a preciseness to the routine that Maralah found oddly mesmerizing. Perhaps she should have learned to cook. “Hungry armies are useless armies,” he said, “and we are low on onions and tubers. Bread helps.”
“You’ll need far more than this.”
“The other cooks will be up soon,” he said. He placed the second loaf, and took another gob of dough for his third. “I’m beginning to understand how the Dhai became cannibals.”
“We’re not done yet, Morsaar.”
She heard footsteps in the hall outside, and raised voices. Her hand went instinctively to her infused blade. Kovaas moved to block the door, but it was just Driaa.
“Let hir enter,” Maralah said.
Driaa inclined hir head and strode in. Ze looked worse for wear – hir long coat was tattered, and still damp from the matted snow and ice that had melted on entering the keep. Hir boots were worn. Maralah made a note to direct hir to the pile of gear they’d collected from the few dead they managed to pick up before the Tai Mora.
Morsaar raised his head from his work and smirked. “So the pass is open after all,” he said.
“Spring’s early,” Driaa said, frowning at the growing line of loaves. “Just our luck, no? I intercepted a runner from Shoratau on the way.” Ze pulled a leather-bound pack from hir coat and handed it to Maralah.
“What, they die on the way?” Maralah asked. She opened the case.
“Frostbite,” Driaa said. “They say he’ll lose a leg.”
“Unfortunate,” Maralah muttered, but her attention now was on the missive. It read simply:
Shoratau is fallen. All lost.
“Did you read this?” she asked Driaa. Losing Kadaan and Wraisau and the last of the Dhai scholars would be a blow to her and the people here. The last of their slim hope still rested on that gambit.
Driaa shook hir head. “Why didn’t they send an infused missive? Seems a waste of a runner.”
The Worldbreaker Saga Omnibus Page 63
