The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  The thief flushed and frowned, and suddenly no one was laughing. He stood there for a moment looking like a man who wanted to fight, but with all of the Gyru’s men still hidden in the trees, he would have been a fool to start anything. At last he shrugged and said in Shombe, “Yeah. I’ll take your four and a half ros.” He added in Pethca, one of the backcountry dialects of Iberan, “And I hope your balls rot off, you stinking whoreson.”

  No flash of comprehension showed in the Gyru’s eyes. He opened a small leather purse that hung at his waist and with a smile counted out four silver ros and two small coppers. He dropped the coins into the leader’s outstretched hand, bowed slightly to all the thieves, and, still smiling, beckoned Hasmal to follow him. The thieves who’d dragged him into the woods let him go.

  For only an instant, Hasmal considered running. But in the trees above him and from the thick underbrush all around him, he heard the soft murmurs and faint movements of the Gyru’s friends. He felt their stares, and he could almost feel their arrows piercing his body as he fled. Better to live, he thought, for tomorrow may bring freedom—better to live a hard life than to die an easy death. He stumbled a bit—his hands bound behind him threw off his balance, and his nakedness made fighting his way through the thorns and scrub brush and needle-edged palmettos more of an adventure than any man deserved.

  He followed, wishing that he were a stronger man, or a faster or a braver one; wishing that he might suddenly be set free by a miracle or an act of the gods, knowing that he wouldn’t.

  He had only one pleasant thought that he could hold on to. At least he was well away from the woman who would have been his doom.

  Chapter 8

  The great square of Halles fluttered with ribbons and pennants and jangled with tambourines and mamboors and cymbals and gongs. The thronging lower classes danced in long, snaking lines up the broad main avenue toward the ancient obsidian tower in which the Dokteerak Family—and this year the members of the Galweigh wedding party who had already arrived in Halles—waited and watched. Kait thought the tower was interesting; it was certainly an artifact in that it predated the Dokteeraks and most, if not all, of the other structures in Halles, but no one would mistake it as the work of the Ancients. Where their structures, built almost entirely of white stone-of-Ancients, soared in delicate arches and pinnacles and bore no designs on their smooth, translucent surfaces, the Halles tower had been built out of black marble, with each stone dressed to fit perfectly against the rest and the topmost stones carved into fantastically hideous winged monsters. Time had marred them and worn some of the detail from them, but the pocks and moss only accented their terrible teeth and the mad expressions in their eyes. Who had built the tower? Kait looked down at the rabble below and thought their ancestors were unlikely candidates.

  The crawling sense of blindly seeking evil that had set Kait on edge at the party the night before had, if anything, grown stronger. The entire city reeked of it. But her senses were dulled and the tension of pending Shift had been sated, and she was able to push the awareness of that evil to a dark corner of her mind, where she could ignore it. Having eaten a huge meal before she left the embassy, Kait wanted nothing more than to sleep; the inescapable weariness that always overcame her after she Shifted held her in its unrelenting grasp. But she had to stay awake; further, she had to be charming when what she wanted most was to rip out the throats of the lying Dokteerak bastards who surrounded her.

  The paraglese, Branard Dokteerak, short and fat, with his long hair greased and twisted into beribboned ropes, walked over and leaned on the balcony next to Kait and didn’t attempt to hide the fact that he was looking down the neckline of her dress to see her breasts. She kept her irritation hidden—after all, her purpose in attending the ceremony and wearing the revealing dress and associating with the lying, double-crossing connivers was to allay suspicion and to give her Family time to come up with a suitable revenge. Nevertheless, the paraglese was a loathsome toad and had Kait been able to do it without causing an incident, she would have hurt him.

  “Lovely girl,” he said, smiling up at her. “You’re called Kait-ayarenne, aren’t you? Daughter of Strahan Galweigh, if I’m not mistaken.”

  Kait hoped she appeared sufficiently flattered by his attention. “I am,” she said, “though I must admit I’m surprised that you heard my name mentioned at all. I’m far too junior a diplomat to have been brought to your attention by my Family.”

  “And far too exquisite a creature to have escaped my eye.” His smile stretched, making his resemblance to a toad startlingly exact. “I confess that it wasn’t in your role as diplomat that I heard your name. I saw you at my party last night, and thought that you looked very lovely, and I asked one of your people who you were so that I might come over and make your acquaintance.” His smile vanished, and he shook his head, eyes suddenly downcast. “Unfortunately, before I could find a mutual acquaintance who could introduce us, I was called away to attend to a dear cousin who was taken ill—”

  “Idrogar Pendat? I heard that he died last night.”

  “Sadly, you heard right. His death came unexpectedly—he was a strong man, and in the prime of life, and though he had been ill, no one realized how terribly near death he was. My physick says he had some weakness in his heart, and that the heat and the dampness of the air here became too much for him.”

  “I grieve with you in your time of loss, and commend your cousin’s spirit to Lodan that she may treat him with kindness,” Kait said. That was the expected formula; she managed to say it as though she really meant it, however. She discovered to her amazement that she was enjoying the interchange; not speaking to the paraglese as such, because he disgusted her, but knowing the truth behind the lies that he told her and pretending that she didn’t, and acting a part that made her someone other than who she was in order to deceive him. Unlike her lifelong charade to be human, she shared this charade with everyone around her. All of the people atop the tower were pretending—well, with the possible exception of Tippa, but Tippa was an idiot. Sweet, but an idiot.

  For Kait, the conversation with the paraglese was a revelation. The creation of a Kait that did not exist—the living lie that had made most of her existence a study in guilt—now served a purpose. Through the years of pretense she had learned to act, and acting was part of diplomacy. And through diplomacy she could serve her Family and bring honor to the Galweigh name.

  The paraglese smiled again, but sadly. “You are as kind as you are beautiful. Which makes me all the sadder that when I returned to my party, I discovered you had already gone.”

  She nodded, and conveyed disappointment of her own. “The regrets are mine. But I had no choice. A few of your guests were bothering my cousin Tippa, as you have no doubt heard. I only attended the party as her companion—I had no choice but to take her home.”

  For one unguarded instant, she saw shock in his eyes. He hid it quickly with another oily smile. “The three guests have been apprehended, and are now in our care. The Gyru-nalles have plotted against the Families for years; this time, however, they were careless enough to get caught. All three of those so-called princes are to be executed today as part of our entertainment. The insult to your cousin—my future daughter—cannot be tolerated.” He gave her a long, thoughtful look and added, “But I had no idea you were the one who took her home. The men, when we . . . ah, questioned them . . . they mentioned a terrifying Galleech of a woman who frightened them away from dear Tippa, but neither I nor anyone else could recall such a woman at the party. And seeing you now, I fail to see any resemblance to the Galleech.”

  The Galleech was one of the five Furies, goddesses who predated Iberism—she was blue-skinned and fang-toothed, with ruby eyes that shot fire that consumed her enemies. She strode through the myths of Ibera like a one-woman plague, laying waste to all that enraged her.

  Kait said, “I’d hardly compare myself to the Galleech, though I do have a bit of a temper.”

  The paragle
se responded with a cocked eyebrow and a half-smile. “Evidently.” He chatted only an instant more, then excused himself to visit with other guests.

  Bemused, Kait watched him go. When he found out she was the one who stood down the three princes, the musky scent of attraction he had emanated while talking to her had vanished, replaced by a faint sweat stink of fear. Interesting. She wondered what the men had seen and what they had said that would create such a response in him.

  Down in the square, the tail end of the parade came into view, and the peasants who lined both sides of the avenue began to cheer. Easily a hundred parnissas in the purple robes that they alone could wear on the day after Theramisday marched forward. On their shoulders the foremost carried a litter, and in the litter sat a woman wrapped all in cloth of gold. The new carais of Halles, the woman who had by oracle and lottery named the city’s new year, waved to the cheering hordes. Kait leaned forward on the balustrade, interested in spite of herself. The choices of the gods in picking their caraisi never ceased to be surprising.

  This woman appeared to be tiny and ancient.

  Beside Kait, someone chuckled. “Wait until you hear what she named the year.”

  She turned to find Calmet Dokteerak, who was to be her cousin’s husband within a week, standing at her shoulder. He was as clearly Baltos—with his white hair and ice-blue eyes and flat face and short, stocky body—as Kait, tallish and slender and dark of hair, and eye, was Zaith. He didn’t yet look like a toad, but Kait could see signs that he would one day. A perfect young copy of his father. Kait tried to imagine herself married to such a man to seal an alliance, and she had to swallow her revulsion. Thank all the gods that her branch of the Family lacked the status to make such marriages an issue.

  She smiled. “We’re almost Family already. You wouldn’t keep me in suspense, would you?”

  He winked at her. “I think I could be convinced to tell you . . . if you gave me a little kiss. Seeing as we are almost Family.”

  Like father, like son. The other Kait, the dangerous Kait, stirred in her sleep, dreaming of the slaughter and destruction of men who deserved it. The Kait who had won her place as a diplomat, however, smiled broadly and said, “I would have given you a kiss without the excuse. I think my cousin is a very lucky woman.” She leaned toward him and gave him a brief but passionate kiss on the lips.

  He flushed an amazing shade of red and rewarded her with a smile that almost made him likable. Almost, but not quite. “The new carais is a pig farmer,” he said, staring down at the procession that wended its way ever closer. “And she named the year My Glorious, Enormously Fat Pig Abramaknar.”

  Kait’s laugh was genuine. “Oh, no! A pig year. That’s embarrassing . . .” She flashed a wicked grin at him and said, “But we had worse once.”

  He had regained his composure. “Do tell.”

  “Four years ago a girl of fifteen became our carais. On the day she added her yearname to the lottery, she’d had a fight with her brother. Her name was so terrible our family parnissa said all the parnissas lobbied the oracle to see if they might discard the name and draw out another. But of course they couldn’t.”

  “Really. I’ve never heard of parnissas wanting to change a name before. What was it?”

  “Now we just call the year Miracle Sword, but his full name was My Shit-Breathed Brother Gamal’s Penis, Which He Has Named Miracle Sword, and Which I Hope Turns Green and Falls Off Because Gamal Is an Asshole.”

  Calmet giggled and his ears turned red. “I can see where they would want to change that—yes.”

  “That isn’t the worst of it. The parnissas had a terrible time deciding which god ruled over the year. They finally loaded him off on poor Brethwan in his dark aspect, and decided he was to be an ill-omened year. We were all glad when he passed, not least of all the carais. She got tired of being linked in everyone’s mind with the omens and Brethwan-Dark and her brother’s penis. Probably especially that last.”

  “I should think so,” Calmet said vehemently. “At least with a nice fat pig, you know the omens will be good.”

  Below, the parnissas had finished their instructions to the new carais. Now the crowd began to chant, first softly, then louder and louder. Kait caught what they were saying and winced. They shouted, “Bring them out! Bring them out!” Traditionally, on the day after Naming Day, the parnissas executed criminals in public as a symbolic sacrifice of evil, to destroy evil influences for the coming year. The sacrifices were real crowd-pleasers, too, as the increasingly wild calls below demonstrated. Kait hated them, and had almost always found reasons to avoid them. But she wouldn’t be able to escape the spectacle this time; if Calmet hadn’t been at her elbow, she might have managed to slip away unseen. The paraglese’s son, however, showed no inclination to move on to other guests.

  “We have some excellent sacrifices,” Calmet said.

  In the street below, first one horse-drawn cage and then another rolled into view. The cheering grew louder.

  “You have a lot of people in there.” Kait could make out at least ten in the first cage; the first blocked the second so she couldn’t see how many it held, but she guessed it would carry roughly as many as the first—why crowd one cage and not the other? Her stomach knotted; she’d hated the sacrifices in Calimekka, but usually only one or two criminals were offered, and they had always done such evil things that Kait had to admit their deaths served justice. But twenty people . . . she didn’t know how she could force herself to watch twenty people die, no matter what evils they had committed.

  “This isn’t many at all. Last year we did almost a hundred, most of them by drawing and quartering. The people would be disappointed by such meager entertainment if we didn’t have something really special for them this year. You talk about good omens . . .” He shook his head, bemused. “I didn’t think we would ever find anything like this again. And after the slaughter in the Blamauk Quarter last night . . . but you wouldn’t have heard anything about that . . .”

  He didn’t finish his thought. In the square below, a dozen mounted guardsmen in the blue and gold livery of the Dokteeraks rode out from their station at the base of the tower; their black stallions pranced to the blare of trumpets. The horses wore not saddles but gleaming black harnesses that looked like they had been designed for drawing the plows of the hells’ damned. To either side of the twin line of horsemen marched armed pikemen in squares five wide and five deep. The people in the square cheered louder.

  Kait thought about feigning a fainting spell; it wouldn’t be that hard, and she would be able to escape the gruesome spectacle that was about to play out in front of her. But any action of that sort would draw attention to her—and the wrong sort of attention—and one thing Kait had learned early in her life was never to draw attention to herself. She would stand fast. She would witness the sacrifices. And she would remind herself that the time she stood pretending to be a part of the crowd atop the tower was time that her Family was using to plan the destruction of the traitorous Dokteeraks.

  Below, a sudden gust of wind swirled down the street, blowing leaves and trash toward the tower, and several things happened at once. The guardsmen’s horses reared and shied. Their unexpected movement threw several of the pikemen to the ground, causing localized uproars. And a familiar, terrifying scent, borne up to the top of the tower by the gust, reached Kait’s nostrils. She froze.

  “Who are your sacrifices?” she asked quietly, though she already knew—if not by name, then by ties that ran deeper than mere blood.

  Calmet grinned at her. “I can’t spoil the surprise . . . but this is going to be marvelous.”

  It wasn’t going to be marvelous; it was going to be worse than anything Kait had anticipated.

  The Dokteerak guardsmen had gotten themselves in order and were awaiting the arrival of the cages. Conversation atop the tower had died; the representatives of both Families aligned themselves along the balustrade so that they could watch the proceedings. The exception was Kai
t’s uncle Dùghall, who appeared suddenly at her left shoulder.

  She looked at him hopefully. “We have to leave?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I thought I would watch the entertainment with my favorite niece.” He smiled when he said it, but she sensed, or maybe just smelled, warning in his demeanor.

  She forced herself to smile back. “You know your companionship always brings me pleasure.” She glanced over at Calmet and was startled to find him moving away from her. For just a moment, anyway, she and her uncle were far enough from the others on top of the tower to have privacy.

  He turned and stared down at the crowd, to all appearances as enraptured by the unfolding spectacle as the rest of the Family spectators. In a voice so quiet that she could barely hear him with her own extraordinary ears (a voice which told her more than words ever could have how severely her secret had been compromised) he murmured, “I heard from the elder Dokteerak what this is to be. And while I don’t know what I know about you, Kait, I know what I suspect. We can’t leave for any reason; our every move is being watched. Are you going to get through this?”

  She followed his lead, pretending to focus on the three princes she’d pulled Tippa away from the night before; pikemen were binding their arms and legs, one limb per horse, to the modified harnesses the stallions wore. She said, “I’ve spent a lifetime maintaining appearances. I’ll do whatever I have to do.”

  The screams and pleas for mercy from the three men echoed louder in the square than the jeers and shouts of the delighted crowd. The head parnissa stepped up on a dais and gave a signal, and the crowd fell silent. “Paraglese,” he shouted, and his voice filled the square and boomed up to the tower, “on this first true day of the year of My Glorious, Enormously Fat Pig Abramaknar, I ask you what you say to these men.”