The Secret Texts

by Holly Lisle

  The men did not exchange the bows customary of landsmen—they simply nodded, one captain to another. Acknowledgment that in their own worlds, they were both kings, and thus spared the posturing of lesser men.

  Aouel turned to Dùghall. “I can see now who you are. I would love to hear someday how these last hellish years have been so kind to you.” He looked like he wanted to say more in that vein, but he held his silence for an instant, then added, “Sixty of the men I count as ours. They hold eighteen prisoners. Three of those are lieutenants, one is a master sergeant, and one is Crispin Sabir.” The corner of his mouth quirked into a tiny smile as he said that. “He shall not make a happy prisoner.”

  “No,” Dùghall said. “He won’t.” He shook his head in amazement. “I would not have thought sixty Galweigh loyalists existed in all of Calimekka.”

  Aouel said, “I’m not sure sixty did. Some of these abandoned the Goft Family when it joined forces with the Sabirs. Some came home from the Territories and found everything changed. We’ve been gathering this counterforce for some time, waiting for an opportunity to rejoin the Galweighs, and uncertain if any true Galweighs still existed. Two days ago, one of the lieutenants let slip that we would be dropping by night into Galweigh House . . . and suddenly the loyal Sabir troops began having accidents while they trained, or becoming sick at their meals, or getting into trouble in their off-duty time.”

  “And now we have both a defensive force and a few bargaining chips,” Kait said.

  Dùghall said, “Does Crispin know how many of us held this place?” He shook his head and answered his own question. “If he had known that, he would not have needed such a force.”

  “He didn’t know who or what you had in here. He thought to prepare for the worst that he might face.”

  Dùghall nodded. “Let’s bring them in, then. The dungeon cells are clean enough, and if your men will post guards—”

  “I’ll handle it. We planned for this as much as for everything else. One moment.” He stepped out onto the portico and whistled. The circle with prisoners in the center transformed itself into a thick-walled line with soldiers to either side of each prisoner, and soldiers at both front and back.

  Kait watched the formation begin moving forward. “Lot of women in there,” she observed.

  “A lot of people dead in the city—and food is scarce and money worth next to nothing. Keeping a fighting force becomes harder by the day. Those who stay are those who have nowhere else to go, and no one else who might need them now that times are so hard.”

  “I don’t like bringing them in here,” Ian said quietly. “What if, among those you have judged loyalists, there are traitors? What if, when they come through the doors, the sides switch again and we find that we have opened the House and put ourselves in the hands of our enemies?”

  “I vouch my life on those who have joined me,” Aouel said.

  “Ulwe said they were on our side, too,” Kait reminded him.

  Still, watching that line of soldiers and prisoners marching toward her, she felt a faint cold chill on the back of her neck, and sensed a rogue twisting in the ropes of fate. Crispin Sabir, she thought, would not go quietly into prison—and Crispin Sabir had the means to make a great deal of noise.

  • • •

  Ulwe stood outside the ring of soldiers. “Father,” she said quietly, “I have come.”

  She looked at the man, the beautiful creature, who was her father. His lean features and light eyes had marked her own face—she could never doubt that he was her father. Looking at him, she could see no external mark of the cruelty and the evil that she had felt inside. How easy it would be to love him. How easy to trust him. If only she could not see what he was, she could be his daughter joyfully.

  Briefly she cursed the Seven Monkey People for teaching her to walk the road and hear its stories. Blind and deaf to the truths it told, she could have run into his embrace and said, Papa, I have waited so long. On her long trip across the sea, that was the way she had envisioned this meeting. She had never thought to see her father bound in shackles, and certainly had never thought that she would be relieved to see him so.

  “Ulwe,” he said quietly. “My beautiful daughter. I did not realize you had grown so big.” She saw his eyes fill with unshed tears, saw him swallow and look away. “You look very much like your mother. She . . . was beautiful, too.”

  “I had hope we would meet . . . better than this,” she said, trying hard to find something to say that was both true and kind.

  He looked back at her and his smile was self-mocking. “I seem to have overplanned for the occasion.” His eyes flicked around the ring of soldiers, then down to his hands bound in metal bracelets, and he sighed.

  The soldiers were watching the two of them. Ulwe stayed well back of their line, sensing their wariness even of her—of the uncertainty she introduced. They feared that she would somehow incite her father to rage; that she would try to cause a diversion that would allow him to escape; that she would suddenly draw a weapon and charge the nearest man in a futile attempt to rescue him herself. So she stood very still and kept her hands where everyone could see them, and did not look at anyone but her father.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t reach you in time,” he said. “I’m sorry I was not in the harbor waiting for your ship when it arrived. I’m sorry that you were taken hostage, that you have had to suffer for my sake. It was for that reason that I sent you away.”

  “I know,” she said. “I . . .” She had so many things she could not tell him. So many things she dared not even hint at. She could not let him know that she had not been taken hostage—that she had come willingly to the Galweighs because she wished to avoid him. She looked at the ground and said, “I have been well treated. I am well treated still. And they have promised me that they will not hurt you.”

  Crispin laughed at that—bright, merry, genuine laughter. “How kind of them to tell you so. Dear Ulwe, perhaps they care enough about you that they did not want to fill you with dread. Or grief.” The laughter was gone from his face, replaced by pain and regret. “They will kill me. They must, or I will find a way to kill them.”

  “They believe you will fetch them a good ransom.”

  “They believe wrong. None at Sabir House would pay for my life. Not now. Not the way things have changed. My own brother, I suspect, will dance before the gods on the day my death is announced to him.” He smiled slyly, and she caught the first sign of the other Crispin—the one who was not her father, but was instead the murderer, the torturer, the lover of power and pain. “Still, I should like to see them try. The negotiations would be . . . hilarious.”

  “I won’t let them kill you.”

  “Ulwe, chepeete, don’t let them kill you.”

  One of the other prisoners said, “Parat, is she truly your daughter?”

  “Silence, Sergeant,” a guard said.

  Her father looked at the sergeant. The man wore a different uniform than those of most of the rest of the soldiers. He and four of the other prisoners wore solid black, not black and green and gold. Something about the severity of those black uniforms, something about the looks in the eyes of the men and the one woman who wore them, sent a warning alarm through Ulwe’s gut. She wished she dared rest her fingertips on the ground to hear what it had to tell her—she wanted to know why those soldiers looked different; she wanted to know why their eyes alone of all the prisoners held no fear. Crispin told the man, “She is my true daughter, my chosen heir.”

  One of the guards turned to Ulwe and, not unkindly, said, “Go back to the House now, child. This is no safe place for you.”

  Ulwe nodded, though she didn’t want to leave. She had other things she wanted to say to her father. But Kait would let her speak to him again, she thought. Kait had promised that they would not kill him unless they had to—and he was sitting peacefully, letting these guards do what they wanted with him, offering them no threat. “I’ll come to talk to you,” she told him. “I pr
omise.”

  Her father shook his head. “Never pass up the opportunity to say good-bye, daughter. Something I learned when I was younger than you—we have no promise that we will meet again. Do what they want you to do—escape if you can. No matter what they’ve told you about me, no matter how many lies you’ve heard, remember that I came for you as soon as I could.” His voice grew softer. “And know that I love you.”

  She bit her lip. She wanted to cry, and indeed several tears escaped from her rapidly blinking eyes and rolled down her cheeks. She was the reason he was a prisoner. His chains were her fault. And she believed him when he declared his love for her—he didn’t know her, but he had made a place in his heart for the person he thought she was, and he truly loved that person.

  “I’m sorry this happened, Papa,” she said. “I pray we have long years yet to come to know each other.”

  She turned away, and began to walk toward the House.

  “Tell me good-bye, Ulwe. If you don’t, there may come a time in your life when you regret that.”

  She turned back, feeling a lump in her throat, and said, “Goodbye, Papa.”

  “Good-bye, Ulwe.”

  She turned away and began to trudge toward the House, fighting to breathe around the sudden lump in her throat, hating her weakness and her childishness.

  The man who had gone to Dùghall and Kait and Ian to declare peace stepped out onto the great stone landing and whistled.

  Behind her, the guards began shouting commands and threats.

  “Up on your feet, you!”

  “Stand still or I’ll run you through!”

  “We’re marching to the House, and the one of you who steps out of line or trips or coughs or so much as looks at me wrong dies for the privilege.”

  She walked faster—she did not wish to be in the way of the moving column. She did not want to be the cause of any man faltering or tripping; she did not wish to be the agent, however accidentally, of any death. She heard the first tramping of feet, the cries of the wounded being carried forward, the rattling of light shackles, and she bolted up the steps and into Galweigh House, thinking only of being out of the way.

  But as the soldiers moved their prisoners up the stairway and into the House, something happened within the column. Someone shouted, and Ulwe heard cries of pain, the clank of chains, and thuds. Beneath her feet, the cool white stone reverberated with nearby pain, and cried out with fear and anguish and sudden death.

  She saw the black-dressed soldiers fighting, shackled and weaponless though they were—they were using the chains that bound them as their armor and arms. One fell, a sword through her chest, and her red blood pooled on the white stone like a rose on snow, but locked in her dead embrace was a man in green and black, his neck twisted at an impossible angle and a chain around his throat and his eyes staring unblinking into the realm beyond the world. Two of the warriors stood back to back, swinging their chains in blindingly fast arcs, kicking with their feet at any who dared approach. Their chains caught the blades stabbed in at them, and for a moment Ulwe thought they would succeed, but the guards saw that they were the greatest threat and charged them in a mass.

  And they fell, crying out in pain, and bleeding, and their cries turned to bubbling gasps, and they, too, died.

  The air in Galweigh House grew chill. It seemed to swallow the sounds of fighting. It blew out the torch lit in the moments following the defeat of the Sabirs by the Galweigh loyalists, and threw the grand entry hall into darkness. Then, in the lightless, airless horror it made of the hall, faint lights appeared—bloodred lights that seemed at first to be candles lit within the bodies of the fallen, and then became fires that blazed inside their cores, and at last changed into suns that devoured flesh and bone and hair and blood and left only neat piles of cloth to mark the spots where warriors had given up their lives.

  “Ahh,” something whispered in her ear, and she would have screamed, but it passed by her, and she froze, fearing that if she made a sound or moved a muscle, it would turn and devour her as it had devoured the corpses.

  “Ahh.” A soft whisper, but that whisper was no sound of her world; instead, it echoed of the charnel house, of the funeral pyre, of the burial mound and the cold dark crypt.

  Slowly, slowly, so slowly she could barely feel herself move, Ulwe slid into a crouch. She splayed her fingertips against the polished stone, and shut her eyes tightly, and sought the roadvoice.

  And heard the hungry thoughts of uncounted dead who rose against the living, who sought those they called enemies, and grappled with them, and lifted them into the air. They longed for the flesh of their living enemies and for their blood, but magic constrained them—they could do no harm; they could neither maim nor kill, but only remove.

  She had only an instant to decide, and only an instant to act. She leaped to her feet and raced back to her father. “I love you,” he had said, and above all else she had felt the truth of those words. “Papa!” she shouted, and threw herself into his manacled arms, though the spirits of the dead had surrounded him. She clung tightly to him, and he to her, as the chill fingers of ghosts tried to pry them apart—and when the dead things left off and lifted both of them into the air, they held each other tighter.

  Whispering, hissing, seeking for ways to break the oath that bound them, the spirits of Galweigh House stole away with their captives—out of the House, across the long swards of green, over the wall, onto the road that lay beyond Galweigh House and out of reach of the boundaries of Dùghall’s spell. There they deposited them, and then they retreated.

  Ulwe opened her eyes.

  She and her father lay on the floor of the jungle. The earth beneath her spread hand quivered with coming death. And the protective wall of Galweigh House lay to the west of them; it’s great gate, which would have kept them safe, now closed against them.

  Chapter 36

  The litters arrived for Ry and Jaim and Yanth promptly at the tolling of Dard—three fine open-sided seats with extendable mud ramps, each borne by six sturdy locals, which answered the question of who was expected for dinner. Ry had seen the litters in the streets before, and knew them to be for hire, but in his guise as a poor commoner, he thought he would be best to walk in the mud. Now he got into the litter with gratitude; how pleasant to ride instead of slogging, to be above the mud and the mire instead of right in it.

  He and his two lieutenants rode to the bay, where a fine longboat nestled against one of the little docks, brightly painted in blue and red, with the top strakes and the high, arching stemposts carved with fanciful beasts and gilt. All the men waiting to row them to their dinner date were human, but the reptilian smell of the Keshi Scarred was strong on the wood and on the oars. Ry wondered if the fact that they were greeted by only humans was simple chance, or an attempt to hide the presence of the Keshi. He and Yanth and Jaim rode in silence, seated on the central thwart with eight rowers behind them and eight in front, two to each oar.

  As he had expected, they rowed out to the ship he had identified earlier as the Peregrine. He reminded himself not to slip and use that name under any circumstances. He and Yanth and Jaim had discussed their options and decided that they would best serve their own interests by feigning ignorance of the true identity of the ship, at least until they could find out why the captain had sought them out.

  A slender, dark-haired human woman greeted them as they clambered up the allus ladder and onto the deck. She bowed deeply in the fashion of the Wilhenes, and said, “Salanota. I am Katanapalita, your servant for this evening.” Her accent was thick, markedly Wilhene. “If you have for needs, you have only for asking—I will do all I can.”

  Ry watched her carefully. She added no innuendo to that the way the captain’s concubine had earlier. He bowed in return and answered her in the primary Wilhene dialect, Tagata. “Our needs will be light, and our gratitude plentiful.”

  Her face lit up and she answered him in her native tongue. “You speak Tagata? It’s been so long s
ince I heard it.”

  Jaim bowed and spoke in turn, also in the Wilhene dialect. “My friends and I once spent some time touring your fair city. We were there when the cherries were in bloom and every street was pink with their blossoms. It was quite lovely.” His Tagata was, if anything, better than Ry’s.

  She smiled broadly. “There is no place more beautiful, I think; now that I have seen so much of the world, I am sure of it.” Her smile became wistful. “I had a little house near the Temple of Winter Passing—I could hear the waterfall through my back window and watch the priestesses as they tended the sacred gardens.”

  Ry did not ask why she did not go back—people who made their lives on the sea often did so because something in their past had driven them from the land. Few wished to be reminded of what they had left behind. Instead he said, “I hope you have such joy again if that is your wish.”

  Her smile held gratitude. “Let me take you to the captain’s dining room. She awaits you now.”

  The three men glanced at each other, surprised. She?

  Katanapalita’s back was to them, though; she did not see their reaction. She led them across the bleached stone-polished deck and down a gangway. Ry noted little places on the ship where the wood bore scars of previous fittings, where something new clearly adjoined something much older. The ship had been refitted recently—the work had been done by skilled shipwrights, but he saw a few places where corners had been cut, and most of the changes he could identify were cosmetic in nature.

  Katanapalita led them to doors carved with fanciful beasts and heavily embellished with gilding, and stopped. “You must leave your boots outside,” she said. Ry noted a rack built into the wall, scuffed from much recent use—this rule hadn’t been created just for the three of them. He nodded, pulled off his boots, and slid them into one of the slots. Jaim and Yanth, after a barely perceptible hesitation, followed his lead. When they stood in their stockinged feet, she ushered them into a captain’s dining chamber unlike anything Ry had ever seen. The table, built into the floor and with the traditional rim around the edge to keep plates from sliding off in high seas, had nonetheless been made to look like something that would have been at home in any of the great Houses of Calimekka. The wood, hand-rubbed to a beautiful sheen, was inlaid with as much detail and delicacy as the puzzle-box he’d received earlier that day—tiny patterns of leaves and flowers formed a border around the scene of a village nestled in the mountains. Every leaf of every tree was complete with veins and edges; each tiny person on the inlaid streets wore a different expression and a detailed outfit, and carried out a different task. Their flowing white hair had been worked in ivory, their iridescent skin in rare, black mother-of-pearl; they were not representations of humans, but were Scarred of the sort that Ry had seen sitting at the table with the Keshi earlier that day.