by Kate Elliott
Footsteps scraped on earth. He turned. A woman walked into view from underneath a tunnel woven of interlaced leaves. Of middle years, she had a bountiful figure wrapped in a patterned taloos covered by an undyed work shirt. But she only looked Keshad up and down with a measuring smile in a manner very like that of the second ginny lizard, and stood at the edge of the clearing to wait. Others appeared, exactly like loitering shoppers who canvass the market with no intention of buying. About twenty people filtered into the courtyard, strung around the clearing like so many jewels about an old granite-skinned widow’s neck. He sensed a few standing concealed within the drowsy growth. A young pair sauntered up to lean on the sun-warmed stone rim of the fountain. Arms crossed, the lanky girl with luxurious hair and a lazy smile looked him over in a way that made him shiver. The youth, wearing only a kilted wrap around his hips, settled beside her; he nudged her foot with his and whispered into her ear. She narrowed one eye almost to a wink as if promising Keshad his heart’s desire. When she shifted her buttocks on the rim, her long tunic, cut high, slipped to reveal a sleek flank. He flushed, and her companion snickered, but after so long in the south he had almost forgotten that Hundred women were the most beautiful of all, dark and lovely, although this one could have used a little extra flesh to round her curves.
Hundred women were the most beautiful of all—except perhaps for the captain’s wife—and he looked down to hide his face so none of these, vultures all, could feed on any scrap of truth his expression might reveal. A steady step crunched on rock. When he looked up, there was Zubaidit striding barefoot around the curve of the fountain. She had grown since he last saw her, and even then she had been tall. She wore a tight, sleeveless, short jacket and a knee-length wrap of plain linen kilted low around her hips, leaving her brown belly bare. A jewel gleamed in her navel. She was well muscled, like an acrobat, and her skin glistened with oil and sweat, just as if she had come from exercise.
She saw him, and halted. Her eyes flared with surprise, while her left hand curled into a fist. A purpled bruise mottled her left cheek. Aui! Had they been beating her?
When she did not acknowledge him, he said nothing, and when he said nothing, she shrugged a shoulder and twisted to look behind her. Everyone swiveled heads as the tiny silver-haired woman who had let him into the inner court glided into view. She walked with a pitter-pat step that made her seem dainty, but her shoulders had the square stubborn cant of a swordsman’s.
The lanky girl coughed, and her friend smirked.
“Are you the Hieros?” Kesh asked without preamble.
“I am,” said the old woman.
“I am here to pay off the debt of Zubaidit.”
Bai looked at him, gaze dark and intense, and her eyelids flickered as if she were sending him a message.
“By what right do you claim the right to act in her favor?” demanded the Hieros.
“Blood right.”
The statement was a formality, so she dismissed it and went on. “Show the tally bundle.” A young woman in an orange taloos unrolled a bundle of sewn-together sheets. Holding each end of the scroll, oldest to newest, forced her to open her arms wide.
“A tremendous debt,” remarked the Hieros with a caustic smile. “Her purchase price, and the usual debits for lodging, drink and food, clothing, training as a hierodule.” She ran a finger from top to bottom of each flat tally stick as she traced the account of Zubaidit’s service at the temple. “Set against these debits, and in addition to the favor she accrued through her regular duties, she earned favor by comforting the gods-favored worshipers. Against this, additional training costs to the temple.”
“ ‘When a person sells their body into servitude in payment for a debt, that person will serve eight years and in the ninth go free.’ That’s what it says on Law Rock.”
She raised an eyebrow. “No assizes will rule in your favor, not when legitimate debt has accrued on an account.”
He had known she would say it, but the distraction had allowed him a moment to calm himself, to ask the necessary question. “What is the tally?”
The Hieros grinned exultantly. Indeed, her smile was almost ecstatic, and he supposed she had long years of practice, as old as she was. “Thirty cheyt, seventy-one leya, and nineteen vey.”
One thousand eight hundred and seventy-one leya.
The number dizzied Kesh. He stumbled to the fountain, sat down on the rim, and rested his head on a hand. When had he gotten so tired?
The lanky girl whistled appreciatively.
Her friend chortled, nudging her foot again. “I heard that one of the merchants of the Greater Council bought her only son the best stallion from the best herd off the grasslands and fitted it out with bridle and saddle trimmed with silver and gold—that was the price! Thirty cheyt! For a horse and gear! Can you imagine? And then it threw the fool, and broke his neck!”
“You’ve cheated me!” said Bai with a kind of parched hoarseness, as though her throat had been rubbed raw. Kesh looked up. She’d fisted her hands, as if ready to punch back.
He was genuinely shocked by the debt—he’d expected a similar price to his own, maybe a little more—but he’d known something like this might be coming. But what matter if the temple was cheating Bai? He raised a hand, thumb and three fingers curled and touching his little finger to his lips. Obedient to their childhood code, Bai subsided, turning her back on the Hieros.
“That’s a staggering amount,” he said to the Hieros. “Is that the full measure? Are there any other costs you aren’t telling me, or that you mean to add on afterward?”
As her face relaxed, he glimpsed how she might look in the moments after satiation: a true devotee of the Merciless One, content only with the complete surrender of her victim.
“That is the measure in full, as of this meeting between us, now,” she said graciously. “We’ll set whatever coin you can offer today against her account. Next year, you can pay another installment.” And another and another, she meant, an endless procession of hopeless payments that would never catch up to the galloping pace of debits.
“No, Kesh,” said Bai urgently. “Keep whatever you have as seed coin. Come back when you have the whole thing. Don’t waste it out like this. I know what it means, that you’ve come today. You must use it as we spoke of before.”
At her words, he bent, splashed water on his face, and stood. The dizziness had fled. It was a relief, in a way, knowing that the sale of the Mariha girls would not have come close to covering the whole no matter what. The temple was cheating Bai, that was obvious, but it was also true she had no legal recourse given her circumstances, and neither did he, no matter what that reeve, Joss, had said. Knowing it had come to this, knowing he had made the right choices all along, made it easier to give up the treasure to free Bai.
He met Bai’s gaze. She lifted her chin defiantly as he crossed his forearms at his chest, wanting to crow in triumph.
All done now! Finished.
He had won that which he had sworn to do years back.
He nodded at the Hieros. For the first time, doubt flickered across her proud face. “By the gate you’ll find a litter,” he said. “Have it brought here.”
“Rudely spoken, to command me as though I am your slave,” she said, but she believed herself safe and so she remained amused. At her command, four young bodies hurtled away. Another dozen people pushed to the edge of the clearing, come to watch. Probably the news was all over the temple by now.
Bai looked down at the ground for all the world like a shy bride, yet her stance betrayed a body honed and strengthened by hard exercise. It disturbed him. She had changed utterly since the day she’d been sold away from him, little sister and older brother on the auction block of Flesh Alley with aunts and uncle looking on dispassionately as they mouthed each rising tally, as the bidding went higher. Bai had been a thin stick of a thing, first clinging to him, then sobbing and wailing as the servants of the Hieros dragged her away. Twelve years ago.
&n
bsp; He had lost the desire to revenge himself on his aunts and uncle. They were meaningless; like the old ruins to be found along every road, they mattered nothing to the caravan of life that must proceed on its way to its next destination. He was so close to success that he felt tears, and gulped them down, and shook as with a palsy. He knew suddenly and with complete conviction that the litter would be gone or the treasure vanished. How could he have left it alone? Had he really been that stupid?
But after all here it came, swaying raggedly with four bearers off-step and ungainly as they crunched over the gravel to set the litter down in the midst of the open space, about halfway between the edge of greenery and the centerpiece fountain. As Kesh approached, everyone except Bai and the Hieros backed away.
“The payment.” He hooked back the curtain, reached in, and grasped the first thing his hand came to, which was a braid. He tugged.
She came unresisting, as she had all along, and stepped out into full sun. She raised no hand to shade her eyes. Her body was hidden beneath her only piece of clothing, a voluminous cloak woven of a silverine cloth. She blinked several times as the light struck; that was all.
Breaths were caught short, or taken in hard. Several people skipped back, and one voice whimpered in fear.
“A ghost!” whispered the Hieros, crossing her forearms away from her chest to ward off the ill omen.
“Touch her. She is no ghost.”
He pulled the cloak back, each wing over one of her shoulders, and heard their moans of fear and gasps of surprise—and their sighs—as her body was revealed, as pallid as marble, as smooth as goat’s milk and as creamy. Her hair both above and below was as pale as a field of harvest-ripe grain. Her eyes were not natural eyes. They were cornflower-blue. Demon-blue.
“What I offer, you must accept,” he finished.
Bai grinned in a way that terrified him suddenly. She leaped across the clearing like a cat, halting in front of the Hieros. With a laugh, she slapped her, a crack across that old face.
“Bitch! I’ve been waiting to do that for twelve years!”
No one moved.
Without lashing out in her turn or even losing her temper, the Hieros spoke. “Do what impulse tells you, Zubaidit, but it will make no difference in the end. You are meant for the Devourer. You will see.”
Bai spat onto the pebbles. Grinning with a vicious glee, she tugged her slave bracelets from her wrists and dropped them on the ground.
“I’ll meet you at Leave-taking Pier,” she said to Kesh. She dashed away into the greenery under an arched lacework of flowering vines. In her wake, the two ginny lizards rattled away into the undergrowth.
No one spoke, and no one moved, all in thrall to the vision standing among them, no stunning beauty, not like Captain Anji’s wife—nothing so pallid could truly be deemed beautiful—but a thing of horrible and irresistible fascination. A whirlpool into which all are dragged and can never fight their way out. She was an evil thing, and Keshad knew it, but he did not care. He was rid of her, and by this means had gained everything he cared about in the wide world: his freedom, and his sister’s freedom. The temple could take care of itself.
The Hieros shook out of her stupor. She glided up to them and circled the slave as she would circle a poisonous snake. She hitched the cloak up and looked over the slave’s backside, and after a long moment she reached a hand and, after the merest hesitation, brushed her fingers over a forearm. The slave did not even flinch, only stared unseeing toward the green tangle of a witch hedge.
“Where did you get her?” the Hieros asked.
“At the edge of a desert so vast you cannot imagine it.”
“I can imagine a lot of things,” said the lanky girl, giving a lazy and lustful hum.
“Shut up!” hissed her companion. He was not laughing, but staring at the slave as if a hammer had hit him.
“A desert of stone and red sand. She was wandering, lost, as mute and blank as you see her now.”
“Insane!” The Hieros ventured to pinch the lean curve of that hip. If the girl felt the pull of those fingers, she showed no sign.
“But compliant!” he said hastily. That she might be insane had often occurred to him over the course of the journey. It was the only reasonable explanation.
“How do you know she is compliant? Did you go into her yourself?”
As Bai had, he spat on the pebbles, and the Hieros flinched away from him with a look of such anger that he shivered. She will seek revenge.
So he smiled, to taunt her. “You know what they say. It’s bad luck to spit in your own trading goods. Men—and women—will come to see if they can bestir her. And even if they can’t stir her, if she remains as limp as a puppet in their arms, they’ll still come.”
“Oh, yes. I can see it.” She rubbed her hands, but he couldn’t tell if it was the thought of caressing that white flesh that bestirred her, or the thought of so many worshipers waiting at the gates for the chance to gaze on—or touch—this living ghost with her demon-blue eyes. “Better than any aphrodisiac, indeed. I acknowledge that this covers her debts.”
“I want Bai’s accounts bundle, properly sealed and marked off.”
The Hieros stepped back to face Keshad. She was truly a devotee of the Merciless One. He could see it in the set of her face, cold and cruel and passionate, devoured by the goddess until not even her soul was her own.
“You have earned an enemy today,” she said as if these were the kindest words she had ever spoken, “and you will come to regret it, but you are correct that this payment cannot be refused. Take what you have paid for. All will be sealed legally.” She smiled gently, but her eyes were like stones in that handsome old face. “Be sure that if I ever have a chance to repay you for taking from me my most valuable hierodule, I will do so swiftly and with pleasure.”
“Do what you must.” Kesh’s limbs were loose, his jaw relaxed, and his heart calm, now that it was over. “As I did.”
PART SIX: WOLVES
28
THEY HAD LEFT Kartu Town and the desert far behind. They had escaped the Sirniakan Empire. Now, after many days traveling over the high Kandaran Pass, the caravan halted at a wall and border crossing guarding the road into the Hundred. In the Hundred, they would find good fortune, or disaster. Shai just didn’t expect things to happen so quickly.
At the border crossing, a huge eagle carrying a man landed in their midst, frightening the horses and astonishing even the Qin soldiers who could not, Shai thought, be astonished by anything. After consulting with the eagle rider, Captain Anji commanded his troop to take control of the border crossing. The fight that ensued blew over quickly when the border guards realized it was their own captain who was corrupt. They surrendered to the authority of the eagle rider and handed over their captain at spearpoint. After this, in accordance with an agreement reached between Anji and the eagle rider, half the Qin company galloped north along the road to a tiny way-station village where, so they were told, a smaller caravan had come under assault by bandits. Shai rode with them, under Tohon’s supervision.
The Qin slaughtered the bandits with the efficiency of a wolf pack cutting out and bringing down the weakest deer. Two men suffered slight wounds, and were roundly ridiculed for their lack of skill.
“They’ll ride as tailmen tomorrow!” said Chief Tuvi, laughing.
The soldiers dragged the dead bodies into rows, clearing the commons so the big caravan coming up behind would have space to settle in for the night.
None of this amused the new-made ghosts of the slaughtered bandits. They were angry, all right; no one liked suffering violent death. At dawn they were still angry, milling around the commons shaking their fists and cursing and weeping, and pissing on the living, not that ghosts could actually piss, but the gesture both comforted and infuriated them—an impotent defiance. They clustered in great numbers around the wagon where the prisoner—their co-conspirator who once called himself a captain—was kept under guard, but since ghosts are fixed
to the earth, they had no way to reach him, who was concealed within the bed of a covered wagon, raised up on wheels.
As Shai went to get a drink of water at the rain barrel, well away from stacked bodies, he pretended not to see the commotion the ghosts made. Thwarted of their prey, the ghosts churned through the open ground and wandered among the merchants, servants, and slaves they had so recently terrorized, but this unworthy audience was oblivious of the wisps haunting them. Captain Anji prowled the caravan as the two caravan masters argued over who should take precedence and in what order wagons and carts should be shifted into a new line of march. Now and again Anji sidestepped to avoid a misty stream of ghostly rancor. Crude men, these Hundred folk. Civilized ghosts had better manners, although their language was just as bad. The corpse of a youth lay beneath the huge tree growing on one side of the open ground, but his spirit had fled, leaving the husk. At least someone was at peace today.
On a cleared space of ground, the eagle rider set a bone whistle to his lips and blew a shrill blast. Shai slurped from the ladle, saw Mai watching the reeve. Seeing Shai, she came over. North of the border, she walked openly as a woman.
“What do they say?” She took the ladle from his hand, dipped, and drank neatly.
“What do who say?”
She hung up the ladle from its hook. A pair of drops stretched off the curve of the cup, parted, and fell onto the glassy surface. Drip. Drop. “The ghosts.”
“What are you talking about?”
“These bandits. Are their ghosts saying anything?”
“How would I know?”
She looked at him. He hated that look. She had changed since they departed Kartu Town and she became a married woman. He had always been her trusted older uncle—even if only by a few years—yet now he felt he was the younger one. “I know you see ghosts, Shai. Anji knows it, too. You admitted as much to him out in the desert. Anyway, you’re a seventh son.”
“What does that have to do with it?”
