Here, some of Ashe-Katarion’s ancient architecture had survived the attentions of the years and the insatiable demand for cut stone. A broad fountain stood in the center, dusty dry now, watched over by a weathered stone god with arms spread in an attitude of benediction. Erosion had blurred his features until he was unrecognizable. Uneven flagstones still floored the rest of the yard, with hard, wiry grass pushing up through the cracks between them.
It was here, in this hidden yard, that the last true servants of the gods waited. Jaffa approached the wicker chair set beside the fountain and fell to his knees, head lowered.
“Welcome, child.” The figure in the chair was cloaked and hooded, despite the spring heat, and her hands were swathed in white bandages. Her voice was desiccated, cracked and dry, like the very voice of the desert.
“Holy Mother,” Jaffa said, keeping his eyes on the broken flagstones, “I have news from the council.”
“You bring more than news, it seems.” There was a dusty sound from the cloaked woman that might have been a laugh. “Onvidaer, bring me our guest.”
There was a startled squeak from behind Jaffa, and the shuffling of sandals. The Grand Justice remained in his attitude of obeisance, sweat beading on his face. “I am sorry beyond words, Mother. I did not think—”
“Rise, child,” the cloaked woman said. “No harm has been done. Now let us see what fish our net has caught.”
Jaffa got to his feet and turned, weak with relief. Standing behind him was a young woman of fifteen or sixteen, scrawny and stick-limbed. Her skin was smudged with the filth of the slums, and she wore only torn trousers and a dirty vest. Her hair hung in thick, greasy clumps.
Onvidaer had one hand on the girl’s upper arm, holding her still without apparent effort. He was a young man, only a few years older than his prisoner, but lean and well muscled, with the copper-gray skin of the Desoltai. He wore nothing but a loincloth, showing broad shoulders and a muscular chest to good effect, and his face was round, almost cherubic. His other hand held a thin-bladed dagger.
“She followed Jaffa,” he announced. “For some time before he came here. But she has reported to no one.”
“Such a ragged little alley cat,” rasped the woman in the chair. “But what house does she belong to, I wonder?”
“No one,” the girl said. Her eyes were full of defiance. “I’ve done nothing, I swear it. I never followed him.”
“Now, now,” the woman said. “Cool your anger. Were I in your position, I might do better to beg for mercy.”
“I don’t know who you are, or . . . or anything!”
“We will find out the truth of that soon enough.” The hood turned. “Summon Akataer.”
A huge shadow detached itself from the wall behind the old woman, resolving into an enormous, hairless man in leather breeches and straps. He gave an assenting grunt and wandered out through the rear of the square, where empty doorways gaped into long-deserted apartments.
“Now, child,” the old woman said. “Who sent you here?”
“No one sent me!” she said, jerking at Onvidaer’s grip. “And I’m not a child.”
“All men are children of the gods,” the old woman said, not unkindly. “And all women, too, even little alley cats. The gods cherish all their children.”
“Just let me go.” There was desperation in the girl’s voice, and Jaffa had to harden his heart. “Please. I won’t tell anyone anything—”
She stopped as the huge man returned, accompanied by a skinny boy of eleven or twelve years in a white wrap. The boy was as bald as his giant companion, with solemn features and bright blue eyes. He bowed to the old woman, nodded politely to Jaffa, and turned his eyes to the girl.
“We will find out what she knows,” said the old woman. “Onvidaer.”
The girl threw a wild glance at the knife. “Please. You don’t have to hurt me. I don’t know anything—I swear—”
“Hurt you?” The old woman gave another paper-dry laugh. “Poor child. We aren’t going to hurt you.”
Jaffa saw the sudden hope bloom in the girl’s eyes. At just that moment, Onvidaer moved with the speed of a striking snake, raising her wrist above her head and sliding the long, thin dagger into her left side beneath the armpit. It went in smooth as silk, finding the gap between her ribs. The girl gave a single jerk, eyes gone very wide, and then her legs buckled. She hung from the young man’s grip on her wrist like a broken puppet. Her head lolled forward, greasy hair swinging in front of her face.
“I have no desire to cause anyone pain,” said the old woman. “Onvidaer is extremely skilled.”
Jaffa closed his eyes for a moment, running through the words of a prayer. Once, such a thing would have sickened him. Once, he had even sought to bring the prince’s justice to Mother and all who served her, to break the secret temples and bring their obscenities to light. Now, having seen the men who had risen in her place, he had bound himself to her service. Now he was able to look on the death of an urchin girl without much more than a tremor. There had been so many deaths, after all. And one lesson the Redeemers had taught to Ashe-Katarion at painful length was that there were worse things in life than a quick ending.
Mother crooked a bony finger. “Now, Akataer.”
The boy nodded. Onvidaer gathered the girl’s other arm above her shoulders, so she hung with her knees just brushing the flagstones. Akataer put one hand under her lolling head and lifted it, looking solemnly into her blind, staring eyes and brushing back her hair. Then he leaned in, with the quiet concentration of a craftsman at work, and gently kissed her. His tongue pushed past her slack lips. There was a long, silent moment.
When he was finished, he put one hand on the side of her face and pulled open the lid of one rapidly filming eye until it gaped in ludicrous surprise. Again the boy leaned close, this time extending his tongue through his teeth, and ever so carefully he touched the tip of it to the corpse’s eye. He repeated the procedure with the other eye, then stepped back and muttered a few words under his breath.
In the depths of the girl’s pupils, something took shape. Her body swayed, as though Onvidaer had shaken it gently. Her eyes closed of their own accord, slowly, then flickered open. In place of white, irises, and pupils, they were now filled from edge to edge with green fire. Her lips shifted, and a wisp of smoke curled upward from the corner of her mouth.
The old woman grunted, satisfied. She gestured Akataer to her side and patted him proprietarily on the head with a white-wrapped claw. Then she directed her attention to the thing that had been the urchin girl.
“Now,” she said, “we shall have some answers.”
“This is Mother,” said Akataer, in a high, clear voice. “I charge you to answer her questions, and speak truthfully.”
The corpse shifted again, drooling another skein of smoke. The glowing green eyes were unblinking.
“You followed Jaffa here,” the old woman said, gesturing at him. “This man.”
There was a long pause. When the corpse spoke, more smoke escaped, as though it had been holding in a draw from a pipe. It curled through the girl’s hair and hung oddly still in the air above her. Her voice was a drawn-out hiss, like a hot coal plunged in a water bucket.
“Yesssssss . . .”
Jaffa swallowed hard. He’d been half hoping Mother was wrong, though that meant the girl would have died for nothing. Small chance there, though. Mother was never wrong.
“And who bade you follow him? Who are your masters?”
Another pause, as though the dead thing were considering.
“. . . Orlanko . . . ,” she said eventually, reluctantly. “. . . Concordaaaaaat . . .”
“The foreigners,” the old woman said. She made a hawking sound, as though she would spit but didn’t have the juice. “And what were the raschem looking for?”
“. . . Names . . .” The corpse groaned. “. . . Must . . . have . . . the Names . . .”
She wriggled in Onvidaer’s grasp, and the green fla
red brighter. Akataer glanced anxiously at the old woman, who waved one hand as though bored by the proceedings.
“Dismiss her,” she said.
The boy nodded gratefully and muttered another few words. All at once, the corpse slumped, green fires dying away. The girl’s eye sockets were a charred ruin, and the stench of burned flesh wafted across the yard.
“You have done well, Akataer,” the old woman said. “Return to your chambers. Onvidaer, dispose of that.”
Jaffa frowned. “Mother, I don’t understand. What did she mean, ‘the names’? Our names?”
“It is not necessary for you to understand, child,” the old woman said. “Put the business from your mind, and tell me what occurred on the council.”
Jaffa remembered Khtoba’s sarcastic aside at the prospect of Vordanai sorcery, and wondered if the general would be quite so flippant had he been in attendance here. Would a cannonball kill Mother? Jaffa, looking at her frail, wrapped form, decided that he thought not.
He cleared his throat and began, summarizing the talk and giving his impressions. The old woman listened attentively, interrupting only once, when Jaffa was speaking of Yatchik-dan-Rahksa.
“He said nothing of Feor?” she asked.
Jaffa shook his head. “No, Mother. She must still be a prisoner, or else . . .”
“She is not dead,” the old woman said. “I would have felt her passing. No, they hold her still. Go on.”
When he had finished, there was a long silence. The old woman’s hands, loose ends of the wraps fluttering, were never still. They sat in her lap, fingers entangled like eels, tugging here and there at the bindings as though they pained her.
“An abh-naathem,” she said. “There is a warning there, though that puffed-up fool Khtoba and the upstarts who usurp the names of angels are too deaf to hear. The Desoltai remember the old magics.”
Jaffa remained silent. It was not his place to offer an opinion.
“Child,” the old woman said, “I want the truth from you, now, not what you think will please me.”
“Yes, Mother.” Jaffa bowed his head.
“Will the Vordanai retake the city?”
He looked up, taken aback. “Mother—I am no soldier. I cannot—”
“As best you can tell,” she said, her ragged voice almost gentle. “Is it possible?”
Another pause.
“The Redeemers have assembled a vast host,” Jaffa said, thinking aloud. “But they are poorly trained, and armed only with faith. Khtoba’s Auxiliaries are better, but . . .”
There was a smile in the old woman’s voice. “You distrust Khtoba.”
“The man would sell his own mother for a thimbleful of power,” Jaffa said. “As for the Steel Ghost and his Desoltai, they will do as they see fit, and who can say what that will be?” He shrugged. “If I were the Vordanai captain, I would not attempt it. But if the gods smile on him and frown on us—yes, it is possible.”
The old woman nodded thoughtfully.
“I will give you a message to carry,” she said. “You must conceal it from Khtoba and the Council, of course. But I think it is time that I met this Steel Ghost.”
Part One
Chapter One
WINTER
Four soldiers sat atop the ancient sandstone walls of a fortress on the sun-blasted Khandarai coast.
That they were soldiers was apparent only by the muskets that leaned against the parapet, as they had long ago discarded anything resembling a uniform. They wore trousers that, on close inspection, might once have been a deep royal blue, but the relentless sun had faded them to a pale lavender. Their jackets, piled in a heap near the ladder, were of a variety of cuts, colors, and origins, and had been repaired so often they were more patch than original fabric.
They lounged, with that unique, lazy insolence that only soldiers of long experience can affect, and watched the shore to the south, where something in the nature of a spectacle was unfolding. The bay was full of ships, broad-beamed, clumsy-looking transports with furled sails, wallowing visibly even in the mild sea. Out beyond them was a pair of frigates, narrow and sharklike by comparison, their muddy red Borelgai pennants snapping in the wind as though to taunt the Vordanai on the shore.
If it was a taunt, it was lost on the men on the walls, whose attention was elsewhere. The deep-drafted transports didn’t dare approach the shore too closely, so the water between them and the rocky beach was aswarm with small craft, a motley collection of ship’s boats and local fishing vessels. Every one was packed to the rails with soldiers in blue. They ran into the shallows far enough to let their passengers swing over the side into the surf, then turned about to make another relay. The men in blue splashed the last few yards to dry land and collapsed, lying about in clumps beside neatly stacked boxes of provisions and equipment.
“Those poor, stupid bastards,” said the first soldier, whose name was Buck. He was a broad-shouldered, barrel-chested man, with sandy hair and a tuft on his chin that made him look like a brigand. “Best part of a month in one of those things, eatin’ hard biscuit and pukin’ it up again, and when you finally get there they tell you you’ve got to turn around and go home.”
“You think?” said the second soldier, who was called Will. He was considerably smaller than Buck, and his unweathered skin marked him as a relative newcomer to Khandar. “I’m not looking forward to another ride myself.”
“I fucking well am,” said the third soldier, who was called—for no reason readily apparent—Peg. He was a wiry man, whose face was almost lost in a vast and wild expanse of beard and mustache. His mouth worked continually at a wad of sweetgrass, pausing occasionally to spit over the wall. “I’d spend a year on a fucking ship if it would get me shot of this fucking place.”
“Who says we’re going home?” Will said. “Maybe this new colonel’s come to stay.”
“Don’t be a fool,” Peg said. “Even colonels can count noses, and it doesn’t take much counting to see that hanging around here means ending up over a bonfire with a sharp stake up the arse.”
“Besides,” Buck said, “the prince is going to make him head right back to Vordan. He can’t wait to get to spending all that gold he stole.”
“I suppose,” said Will. He watched the men unloading and scratched the side of his nose. “What’re you going to do when you get back?”
“Sausages,” said Buck promptly. “A whole damn sack full of sausages. An’ eggs, and a beefsteak. The hell with these grayskins and their sheep. If I never see another sheep, it’ll be too soon.”
“There’s always goat,” Peg said.
“You can’t eat goat,” Buck said. “It ain’t natural. If God had wanted us to eat goat, he wouldn’t’ve made it taste like shit.” He looked over his shoulder. “What about you, Peg? What’re you gonna do?”
“Dunno.” Peg shrugged, spat, and scratched his beard. “Go home and fuck m’ wife, I expect.”
“You’re married?” Will said, surprised.
“He was when he left,” Buck said. “I keep tellin’ you, Peg, she ain’t gonna wait for you. It’s been seven years—you got to be reasonable. Besides, she’s probably fat and wrinkled by now.”
“Get a new wife, then,” Peg said, “an’ fuck her instead.”
Out in the bay, an officer in full dress uniform missed a tricky step into one of the small boats and went over the side and into the water. There was a chorus of harsh laughter from the trio on the wall as the man was fished out, dripping wet, and pulled aboard like a bale of cotton.
When this small excitement had died away, Buck’s eyes took on a vicious gleam. Raising his voice, he said, “Hey, Saint. What’re you gonna do when you get back to Vordan?”
The fourth soldier, at whom this comment was directed, sat against the rampart some distance from the other three. He made no reply, not that Buck had expected one.
Peg said, “Prob’ly go rushin’ to the nearest church to confess his sins to the Lord.”
“Almigh
ty Karis, forgive me,” Buck said, miming prayer. “Someone threw a cup of whiskey at me, and I might have gotten some on my tongue!”
“I dropped a hammer on my foot and said, ‘Damn!’” Peg added.
“I looked at a girl,” Buck suggested, “and she smiled at me, and it made me feel all funny.”
“Oh, and I shot a bunch of grayskins,” Peg said.
“Nah,” said Buck, “heathens don’t count. But for that other stuff you’re going to hell for sure.”
“Hear that, Saint?” said Peg. “You’re goin’ to wish you’d enjoyed yourself while you had the chance.”
The fourth soldier still did not deign to respond. Peg snorted.
“Why do you call him Saint, anyway?” said Will.
“’Cause he’s in training to be one,” Buck said. “He don’t drink, he don’t swear, and he sure as hell don’t fuck. Not even grayskins, which hardly counts, like I said.”
“What I heard,” Peg said, taking care to be loud enough that the fourth soldier would overhear, “is that he caught the black creep on his first day here, an’ after a month his cock dropped off.”
The trio were silent for a moment, considering this.
“Well, hell,” said Buck. “If that happened to me I guess I’d be drinking and swearing for all I was worth.”
“Maybe it already happened to you,” Peg shot back immediately. “How the hell would you know?”
This was familiar territory, and they lapsed into bickering with the ease of long familiarity. The fourth soldier gave a little sigh and shifted his musket into his lap.
His name was Winter, and in many ways he was different from the other three. For one thing, he was younger and more slightly built, his cheeks still unsullied by whiskers. He wore his battered blue coat, despite the heat, and a thick cotton shirt underneath it. And he sat with one hand resting on the butt of his weapon, as though at any moment he expected to have to stand to attention.
The Thousand Names Page 2
