by Martha Wells
Ilias shifted uncomfortably. He was imagining the hapless settlers lured out and caught in a cave-in somehow, being slowly fed on by guls while he and Giliead and the traders waited and wondered. It made him want to leave for the pass now, this moment, no matter how stupid or suicidal it was. “You really think they could be alive?”
Giliead was silent for a long moment. “No. Not really.” He pushed off from the tree trunk, looking off into the gathering darkness.
* * *
There was an old trade road that went up through the pass, and the construction of the city had made it well-traveled. It wound gradually up through the grassy hills, past sparse stands of trees. The morning sun was bright and the day promised to be warm; it still didn’t look anything like godless curse-haunted territory and Ilias could understand why the settlers had been lulled into believing all would be well.
Laodice, her husband Macchus, and three other men accompanied them, along with the Chaean Tolyi.
Giliead was walking at the front with Laodice, and Ilias heard him ask, “Was there any word of strangers visiting the city? Any newcomers moving in?”
“We heard of no one, but then we only saw the Taerae once a year ourselves.” Laodice looked up at the cliffs above them, frowning.
Ilias found Tolyi walking beside him, and gave her a brief smile.
She smiled back, and said, “The Chosen Vessel is your brother?”
“Not by blood,” he told her, “I’ve been with the Andrien family since I was a boy.”
“I see.” They walked a little more, and Ilias kept his eyes on the brush, though it was an effort. Tolyi was far more interesting to look at. Then she said, “It surprises me that you’re both so young.”
Ilias managed not to throw her a wary look. He suddenly suspected that her walking with him had nothing to do with his personal attractions. He shrugged, tugging on his baldric. “We’re older than we look.”
“Not that much older.” Her voice dry, she added, “I have a son older than you, I expect.”
This time he did look at her, but incredulously. “Really?” He had thought she was only a little older than Giliead’s sister Irissa, at most. She did have the bearing of an older woman, but he had thought it was because she had an important duty as a trading factor.
“Really.” Her look was a little amused, and a little flattered. “And I know Syprians keep their boys close. Especially pretty, marriageable boys.”
“Not that close.” But Ilias looked away, scanning the scrub off the trail and giving himself a moment to think. “Chosen Vessels don’t marry. Not often, anyway.”
“But he takes his younger brother—”
“Older,” Ilias corrected automatically, then swore silently at himself. You idiot.
“Older brother, I see.”
“What are you saying, Tolyi?” Ilias was obviously losing the subtle battle, he might as well bring it into the open. “Do you think we’re lying about Gil being a Vessel?”
“No!” Startled, she stopped, catching his arm to pull him to a halt. “Not that at all. I can see he’s a Vessel.” She regarded him seriously. “I don’t doubt your word. So I’d like to ask you how long you two have been doing this, how many of these hunts have you been on?”
Ilias took a deep breath, pressing his lips together. It was an honest question, and he wouldn’t lie to her. “This is the second. The first was...not long ago.”
“Oh.” She lifted her brows. They looked at each other for a long moment, and by mutual consent both started to walk again.
“Will you tell the others?” Ilias asked her. His heart was pounding. It was hard enough having this much responsibility. Having this much responsibility but with the added burden of the traders looking at Giliead as if he didn’t know what he was doing would be just that much worse.
“No,” she said quickly, “No.” She threw him a wry glance. “I’m sure some of them have guessed already, but it wouldn’t do any good to say it aloud.”
Ilias suppressed a wince. They walked along for a time in silence. Or at least Ilias tried to keep silent. But he finally had to ask, “What did you mean when you said that you could see Gil was a Vessel?”
She took a deep breath, and seemed to consider before replying. “I’ve met several Vessels, here and in the Chaean islands, when they come to make treaties.” She looked up, her face set and sad. “He has that look, the fey look. Fated.”
Ilias didn’t reply to that. He knew what she meant, but he had never seen it. Maybe he had lived with it so long, he couldn’t see it. “We’re young. But he knows what to do. He’s been waiting for this all his life.”
* * *
They followed the road up through the hills, until the ground grew rocky and the mountain’s brown stone shoulders started to rise up on either side. The pass turned into a winding gorge, a few hundred paces wide, with a shallow stream cutting through rock and yellow grass and low scrubby brush.
Walking ahead a few paces, Giliead came to an abrupt halt. “Stop,” Ilias said without thinking, shifting the bow off his shoulder. Somewhat to his surprise, everybody did. Laodice and Macchus and the others warily scanned their surroundings, though there was nothing obviously threatening. A few tall trees threw some welcome shade on the road and the stream. The ground was sandy and rocky, and mostly bare of scrub or anything that could be used as cover, up to a hundred paces away. On the far side of the road, nearest the gorge wall, boulders and the remains of an old rockfall lay scattered. Ilias couldn’t hear anything but sparrows and rainbirds chirping and the hum of insects.
Giliead cocked his head, turning deliberately toward the stream and the stone cliff face far on the other side. Ilias followed his gaze, stepping up beside him. “You see it?” Giliead said softly. “Right below that pointed grayish rock, in the shadow, there’s a ledge.”
Ilias squinted. The dappled shade of the trees, the shadows, the striations of the rock all made it hard to... There it was. “I see it.” Crouched in the crevice, barely visible, was a man-shaped creature. It was a little like a rock monkey, but taller, and too skinny, and there was something about the way it sat, watching them, that was not at all animal-like.
“That’s a gul.” Laodice spoke quietly, stepping up beside Ilias. “Where there’s one, there’s others. They hunt in packs.”
“One to lure travelers off the road, the others to kill and eat,” Tolyi added, her face grim.
Uneasily fascinated, Ilias reached for an arrow. “Kill it?”
As if it had heard him, the creature faded back into the shadow, vanishing. Ilias grimaced. “It doesn’t matter,” Laodice said, absently giving Ilias’ shoulder a squeeze as she turned away. “They know we’re here, anyway. There’s too many to kill them all.”
Giliead lifted a brow, exchanging a look with Ilias. Next time I’ll know not to ask, Ilias promised him silently.
“How did you see it up there?” one of the younger men asked Giliead.
“I didn’t see it. I felt it looking at us,” Giliead told him. He didn’t bother waiting for their reaction, following Laodice as they started down the road again. Ilias moved after him, feeling his back prickle and knowing they were all looking at each other in that way he was growing to hate. You asked for a Chosen Vessel, he thought, bitterness settling in his stomach. What good would it do to be a Vessel who couldn’t tell a gul was looking at him? Just because Giliead had never done it before...
“If all curselings were created by wizards, what wizard created the guls?” Tolyi asked, breaking the uncomfortable silence.
Giliead glanced over at her. “The Journals don’t say. As far as we know there have always been guls in the godless territories, especially the mountains. As long as there have been gods.” He frowned, facing the trail again.
The sun was nearly straight overhead by the time Ilias had a chance to speak to Giliead in relative privacy. They had reached a point where the stream widened into a pool, fed by a waterfall that broke and tumbled down t
he rocks of the cliff face. The pool was low now but the channels it had worn showed it was much deeper in the spring when the rains sent water cascading down a much wider section of the cliff. There was a bridge here, built by the Taerae to keep the trade moving when the water covered the old road’s path.
The bridge was wide enough for a big trade wagon, with stone pilings and wide seasoned planks. A ford would have probably worked just as well, but Ilias was beginning to think the Taerae had had more coins than sense. Laodice called a halt there to refill their waterskins, and Ilias moved to join Giliead, who was standing on the bridge looking further up the road.
“How did you feel the gul looking at you?” Ilias asked quietly. The rush of water down the rock would cover their voices but he still kept his back to the others.
Giliead shrugged a little helplessly. “I don’t know. It was like it was trying to touch me, from all the way across the gorge.” He looked away again. “I think it might have something to do with the way guls shapechange to lure people away. Maybe they see inside our heads, and because I’m a Vessel I could feel it doing that.”
It made Ilias uneasy. The seeing inside heads thing was not a comfortable thought, but it would explain why the guls were able to take shapes that were familiar to the people they were trying to lure away. But at least Giliead had demonstrated to the traders that he was a Chosen Vessel. A young Chosen Vessel, but a Vessel nonetheless. That was one less thing to worry about.
* * *
The sky was at the edge of twilight when they reached the city.
Ilias stopped next to Giliead as the gorge widened out, the sparse trees and scrub brush giving way to rocky ground. There was a natural gap in the gorge wall, the entrance to another canyon that had been closed in with a wall of cut stone blocks, stretching up a whole ship’s length. A log gate was set in the wall and the trail signs and Syrnaic characters for “Taerae” were carved into the blocks above it, touched with paint that was already faded a little from the wind and sand.
The old road curved through the open rocky flat, disappearing as the pass wound away. A new branch of it, lined with stone, turned off and led through the open gates.
It would have been a welcoming sight, after the long walk up the pass, except for the silence, and the unattended wall. Cineth’s gates stood open, but there were always at least two sentries there, even though there hadn’t been a Raider attack on the city for decades. “See anything?” Ilias asked. Uneasy prickles were climbing his spine, and there was something cold and empty about those open gates, the glimpse of painted pavement he could see through them, the silence that hung over the place. The birdsong had stopped when they had left the trees and the stream behind, but the quiet hadn’t been oppressive before now.
Giliead frowned absently, studying the ground. “Just a... Huh.”
Distracted, he moved away, parallel to the wall, pausing occasionally to kick at a rock or scrape his boot over the dust. Ilias followed at a distance, the others trailing more cautiously behind. He knew Giliead wasn’t following tracks, but the invisible traces that a wizard’s curses left behind.
After a short distance Giliead found a footpath that ran along the city wall. It led through a scrubby grove of trees, to the edge of a shallow pit carved out of the hillside. Giliead stopped, studying the pit, brows knit.
When Ilias drew even with him he saw why. In the center of the pit was a large stake, driven deep into the dirt. Chains with manacles hung from it. “This is interesting,” Giliead said, brows lifted. He turned to regard Laodice and Tolyi. “Did you know about this?”
“No, and I don’t understand.” Laodice came to stand beside them, her expression incredulous. “It’s for punishment, I see that, but...”
“They just left criminals out here to starve?” Macchus asked, dubious. “It’s a little mad.”
Ilias understood their confusion. They couldn’t see what Giliead must be seeing. And he thought it was likely that they hadn’t known about it. The trees and tall grass blocked it from the road, and the footpath wasn’t well-traveled.
“It stinks of guls and curses,” Giliead said, watching them carefully. “No one chained out here starved. I doubt they lasted the night.”
Macchus swore. Tolyi and Laodice exchanged a look of startled disgust. “Their reasons for secrecy seem more clear now,” Tolyi said with a grimace.
Ilias shook his head. No lawgiver worth the name would have permitted this. If one had tried, she or he would have soon found themselves deposed by the town council or the Chosen Vessel. Of course, the Taerae hadn’t been burdened with a Chosen Vessel, not having a god to choose one.
“What would happen?” Laodice asked, her face tight and angry. “If this was done inside a god’s territory?”
Giliead let his breath out, exchanging a narrow look with Ilias. Ilias could tell he didn’t think the traders had known about this either, and that was a relief. Giliead said, “It would leave.” He started back along the path toward the city.
If a god left its territory, the city and the villages around it would lose the protection from curselings, lose the services of the Chosen Vessel to defend against wizards; they would have to disperse.
Ilias lengthened his steps to catch up to Giliead. “Would a god really leave for something like this?” he asked, low-voiced. The only mention in the Journals of a god leaving that he could remember had been when the people of the town had killed its Chosen Vessel.
Giliead threw a look back at the traders. He snorted. “I have no idea. And I’d rather not find out.”
They reached the open gates, the others following. On the far side the road opened into a surprisingly large plaza, and the buildings under the looming cliffs were elaborate, with narrow pillared porticos and entablatures carved with rosettes. All the decoration was painted with touches of red, green, purple, yellow. As the traders fanned out in a loose circle, watching the doorways cautiously, Ilias stared; he hadn’t been expecting anything so ornate. Then he realized these buildings were only façades, carved and built on the cliff faces, with the doorways leading back into the rock.
“The place was honeycombed with caves already,” Laodice explained, seeing his surprise. “That’s why they chose it. They camped in them when they first came here to look for the gold.”
Ilias shook his head, not sure he had heard right. “They what?”
Giliead lost his air of abstraction, turning to stare incredulously at Laodice. “They camped in caves in godless territory? In a gorge full of guls and curselings?”
“That’s what I said,” Macchus put in, keeping his gaze on those empty dark doorways. “Bunch of crazy people.”
“It was hardly wise,” Tolyi admitted. “But they were able to mine the gold, and they came to no harm. At least, so they said.”
Ilias glanced back at her, hearing the skepticism in her voice. “You think they lost people before this, and just never told anyone?”
Tolyi shrugged. “They knew to use the guls as a method of execution. And it seems unlikely that of all the people they brought up here, no one fell victim to them, or anything else, before this happened.” She lifted a brow at Laodice. “The traders take many precautions, but they lose people.”
Laodice nodded, her mouth set in a grim line. “A few a year. If we lost more than that, we’d drop the route and look for trade somewhere else.” She added, “We’d argued about this before, Tolyi and I, but now I’m beginning to think she’s right; there must have been some warning of this that the Taerae ignored.”
Oh, lovely, Ilias thought, exasperated. Giliead flung his arms in the air, a silent gesture of frustration at the general stupidity of some people, and crossed the plaza toward the largest façade.
Three steps led up to a narrow portico with columns and a broad square doorway. The painted carving was all very fine, with stylized figures of miners carrying lumps of rock, and the letters for “Taerae” repeated over and over again. Ilias’ mouth twisted, though he didn’t comm
ent aloud. He was beginning to form an even more cynical picture of the Taerae. He vaguely remembered learning the name of the family who had first settled Cineth from one of the poet Bythia’s stories, but he couldn’t recall it now. Whoever they had been, they had paid more attention to placing their new city well within a god’s territory than to carving their name over every public building.
Thias, one of the younger traders, took down a bowl lamp hanging from the portico and began working with tinder and flint to light it. Ilias stepped to another lamp, standing on tip-toe to look into it. There was still olive oil – good olive oil, by the smell – in the bottom of the red glazed pot. He went to the dark doorway where Giliead stood.
The daylight only reached far enough to show them the red, black, and white swirls of a mosaic floor and the red walls of the foyer. Past that the blackness was like a solid wall. With no windows, no atrium, nothing to let in light and air, he couldn’t imagine living in it. Ilias could see where the portico had been built onto the front of the cave, where stuccoed blocks and mortar joined raw stone. The air inside was cool, carrying a hint of incense, rotted food, and more olive oil.
Thias and Macchus brought the lamps, Giliead took one, and they moved forward into the dark house.
Past the foyer, the rooms were a warren of caves, the walls smoothed with clay, with paint and carving. The pools of lamplight gave them glimpses of fine furniture, carved silverwood and cedar, sheepskin rugs, fine pottery lamps and water jars, a delicate alabaster wineset on a low table inlaid with polished stones. At first it was all sterile, and Ilias had no sense of this having been someone’s home. Then they moved from the public rooms to the private, and the lamp caught a loom still warped for a half-completed green and blue blanket. A child’s beaded rag doll lay on a cushion, an unrolled scroll on a side-table, someone’s sandals with a broken lace at the foot of a couch. A cup of water and a half-eaten seedcake, flies buzzing around it in the stillness. Ilias felt his skin creep. Giliead stopped, looking down at a discarded shirt draped over a stool. It was small enough to belong to a girl or a young boy, and the sleeves were stained with dirt. He asked, “How many houses did you go into?”
