Touched by the Gods
Page 18
“No.”
“These are temple records, dating back centuries. This temple has stood for close to nine centuries; it's one of the oldest in the Empire. Oh, the original portion of the Great Temple at Seidabar has almost two hundred years on us, and some of the shrines in Agabdal and Rishna Gabidéll are so much older than that that no one even pretends to know their age, but still, this is an old temple, older than a dozen lifetimes. And in all that time, until sixteen years ago, no one had ever bothered to collect and codify the temple records. No one had written down much of what the oracles said, or what the priests did. There was no reason to. If anyone had an important question, he just asked an oracle. We never worried very much about what the gods wanted us to do, or whether we were doing it properly – if there was any doubt, we could always ask. If a famine was coming, the Oracle of Vedal would warn us, and we'd stockpile food. If a storm was due, Sheshar would tell us, and the merchant ships would stay in port until it had passed. If we were ever unsure who to ask, we consulted Samardas. It was an easy life; we had no doubts about the gods' favor, no questions about what they wanted of us. For a thousand years, the Domdur were guided by the oracles.” He sighed. “And then the oracles stopped talking to us – or rather, the gods stopped telling the oracles what to say. Suddenly, we had to guess.”
Malledd grunted. This was hardly news, though it was interesting to hear a priest admit just how easy the priests had had it, in the old days. Ordinary villagers hadn't been able to consult oracles at whim.
“We don't like guessing, Malledd,” Vadeviya said. “So we're trying to find other ways of knowing what the gods want, and what they have planned for us. We're trying everything we can think of to learn more about the divine wills. My job, here, is to go through every single written record in the temple, and to note down everything anyone ever said about any of the gods, and to sort it all out and try to make sense of it.”
“Oh, is that what this is?” Malledd said, waving at the loaded shelves.
Vadeviya nodded. “Exactly,” he said. “Malledd, look around you – this is all, after almost nine hundred years, that anyone ever bothered to write down. It all fits in a single small room. When I started my codification, I worked with two other priests, Mezizar and Lasridir, but after a year or so there wasn't enough work for all of us, and they were reassigned to recording whatever the oldest priests could remember from their youth. Now I go through that, through the notes Mezizar and Lasridir take, and sort that out – and they've worked their way down to the priests who were still novices when the oracles fell silent, to memories of hearing about memories.”
“Oh,” Malledd said, impressed by the thoroughness of such a project.
“We scholars are not the only project,” Vadeviya continued. “The astrologers have been studying the moons far more carefully than ever before. We used to want to know when two moons were to pass very close to one another, since that always meant some sort of interaction between the gods who occupy those moons, but it wasn't really important – we could always ask the oracles.” He sighed. “Well, now it's important! Every mathematician, every priest with good eyesight, has been put to work charting the movements of the moons, looking for patterns and predictions. And there are geomancers studying traces left in the earth, and oneiromancers recording dreams in hopes of finding that some are divinely inspired... Malledd, for centuries we priests were the gods' servants and messengers, running their errands and telling everyone what they wanted, and relaying everyone's prayers as if we were errand boys bringing orders to a firm of merchants. Well, the merchants have sailed off and left us with no way of knowing what's to be on the next ship, or even what's in the warehouse.
“We don't know what the gods want.
“And it scares us. It scares us very badly.”
Chapter Twenty-One
Tso Hat chewed on his crust of bread and looked uneasily about. The sun was setting, far off across that infinite plain that they were supposed to cross, and the nightwalkers were starting to awaken. It wasn't anything obvious, it wasn't any specific movement he could point to; he could simply tell, somehow, that the rows of stacked corpses laid out on the mud weren't quite as dead as they had been a moment before.
They still smelled just as bad, though; the stench made it hard for Tso Hat to eat. Not that he really wanted to eat this stuff anyway.
He chewed determinedly, not looking at the bodies. He glanced at the men to either side of him, chewing on their own meager supper, and carefully did not look at the bodies. In half an hour or so, when the sun was entirely below the horizon and the sky was darkening, those bodies would begin to stir, to sit up, to look around and get ready for the night's advance.
Tso Hat and the other living people under Rebiri Nazakri's command would prepare, as well, and would follow the nightwalkers westward, toward Seidabar. And when the sun rose the next morning, and the nightwalkers slowed and stopped and dropped to the ground, the living would make camp, and settle in to sleep – unless the Domdur attacked again, in which case they would fight, defending the nightwalkers. Tso Hat shifted, and felt his sword, stolen from a dead magistrate, shift with him. If the Domdur came at night, the nightwalkers fought and the living stood back out of harm's way, but by day the nightwalkers were just corpses, and it was the duty of the living to defend them until the next sunset.
It was a life of hard work and constant exhaustion and endless confusion caused by sleeping days and walking by night and perpetually struggling to avoid the Nazakri's wrath. It was not a good life.
This was not how Tso Hat had pictured it when he had joined the rebels. He had imagined quick, victorious battles in the city streets of Matua, the Domdur overlords ground underfoot as the people cheered for their liberators; instead he had fought and struggled through the freezing, rocky mountains of Govya, and now faced weeks of trudging westward toward the legendary fortress-city of Seidabar that supposedly stood somewhere beyond this unbelievably huge, flat plain. What's more, he expected a long, slow siege if and when they ever got there; somehow he doubted that the people of Seidabar would look on a horde of walking corpses and their allies as liberators. Certainly most Matuans hadn't.
He looked down at the bread he was chewing, and dropped the rest of it in his bowl; even that wasn't right. He should be eating rice, like a civilized man, but there was no rice to be had here on the dry western side of the Govya Mountains. They were forced to steal wheat from the farms they trampled across and the villages they marched through, to grind and bake it into this chewy, gritty stuff.
Beside him he could hear the other men eating and complaining quietly to one another. They didn't dare complain aloud; Rebiri Nazakri had spies everywhere, and couldn't trouble himself to distinguish between discontent and treason. Tso Hat ignored the complaints; they'd do no good.
One of the corpses twitched in the gathering twilight; Tso Hat glanced up, then looked away.
Some of the nightwalkers weren't bad. They were all pale and dead-looking, of course, and the smell of death was everywhere around them, but if you didn't look at their lifeless black eyes and didn't take any deep breaths some of them could pass for living, albeit unhealthy, people.
Others weren't so pleasant – especially the ones who'd been fighting. Their wounds gaped open, bones and organs showing through; flies buzzed around them, and the torn flesh rotted, blackened, and stank. No one would ever mistake those for anything but corpses. Tso Hat dreamed of the day when he would no longer have to stay anywhere near them.
For one thing, quite aside from the smell and the ugliness, it was demeaning, serving as a guard for a bunch of reanimated corpses. Tso Hat had seen himself as a revolutionary, planning strategy, leading the peasants in uprisings, and someday taking his place in the new government of a free Matua; he had not expected to be a mere guard for an unburied graveyard. Someone had to guard the nightwalkers, certainly – they were utterly defenseless during the day – but he didn't want to be the one to do it.
If he had realized the situation, Tso Hat thought, he would never have joined the rebellion. He had thought that the Nazakri was a revolutionary determined to free the east from the Domdur and recreate the old nations; he hadn't realized that Rebiri was a madman bent only on revenge. He had expected the rebellion to overthrow the Domdur puppets and set up new, better governments that would either fight the Domdur or negotiate with them – perhaps, Tso Hat and his friends had theorized, now that the oracles were no longer ordering the Empire around, the Domdur wouldn't bother trying to reconquer Olnami and Matua and Greya. Tso Hat had heard Domdur grumble sometimes about being ordered about by their gods, had heard it claimed that their ancestors would have preferred to have stayed home and minded their own business. If the conquered nations had refused to stay conquered, the Domdur might well have accepted it.
But the Nazakri hadn't been interested in new, native governments. He certainly hadn't been interested in negotiations.
Tso Hat sighed and picked up the chunk of bread again. He should have known better than to expect sense from an Olnami. All Rebiri Nazakri wanted was revenge. He didn't care about governments or freedom or justice; he just wanted to kill all the Domdur.
He wanted to destroy Seidabar and everyone in it. People had pointed out to him that this would throw the world into chaos; he didn't care. Most of the people who had pointed it out were now nightwalkers, and the nightwalkers never argued with the Nazakri.
Nightwalkers generally didn't exactly argue with anyone. The ones whose mouths and throats were intact could speak, and often did, but they didn't argue. If someone got in a nightwalker's way, the nightwalker would just kill him.
Unless the someone was the Nazakri, of course, or someone the nightwalkers knew the Nazakri didn't want harmed. If a nightwalker said or did something that Rebiri Nazakri didn't like, the nightwalker was just a corpse again, its dark essence sucked back into the wizard's staff. Nightwalkers didn't feel pain, and didn't care about much, but they did not want to be reabsorbed into that staff.
The last bit of bread was just too hard, too disgusting; Tso Hat tossed it aside and got to his feet, brushing off crumbs.
Just then thunder rumbled.
Startled, he looked up; the sky was still mostly clear, a few scattered clouds scudding between the moons. Sheshar was a thick crescent almost directly overhead, light blue against the darkening blue of the sky. There couldn't possibly be a storm brewing – at least, not a natural storm.
Tso Hat shuddered and looked across the field of now-twitching corpses at the great black tent that served as Rebiri Nazakri's home and headquarters.
The Olnami could have used the farmhouse that stood nearby, but he had refused, preferring his traditional pavilion, and had left the house to some of his officers. Tso Hat thought that was typical of the crazy old man.
The Nazakri hadn't always had the pavilion; he had had it made in Ai Varach, when the rebels had captured the fortress and holed up there over the winter. He claimed that a true Olnami warlord would always prefer a tent to the confining walls of a house – but Tso Hat had noticed that he had stayed in the garrison commander's quarters until they left Ai Varach.
On the plain, though, he stayed in the black tent, no matter what better accommodations might be available.
Tso Hat peered at the tent. Sure enough, he could see an unnatural red glow flickering below the sides and through the seams of the pavilion as another peal of thunder sounded; the Nazakri was working magic.
Then the tent-flaps flew open, flinging themselves back flat to either side, and the Nazakri stepped out.
He was a man well past his prime and never truly formidable, Tso Hat knew that, but now, as he stood there in the twilight, Rebiri Nazakri looked anything but harmless. He stood with his feet braced apart and his arms raised, holding his staff over his head; red flame danced eerily around one end of the staff, while the other seemed to seethe with black smoke that never dissipated, but clung tenaciously. The red glow of the flame ran down the wizard's arms like water down stone, outlining him in fire.
Perhaps he was not a tall man, or a young one, or a strong one, but standing there, a monstrous figure of fire and shadow, Rebiri Nazakri was utterly terrifying. Tso Hat froze and stared.
The normal sounds of the camp, the rustlings and low voices, vanished; even the eternal wind that swept the great plain seemed to have stilled. Only the nightwalkers still moved, as the gathering darkness restored them to their semblance of life.
“There will be no march tonight!” the Nazakri bellowed.
Even the nightwalkers stopped moving then, and listened.
“Tonight we will stay here,” the Olnami warlord proclaimed. “The dead shall dig a pit, down to the mother darkness beneath the earth, while the living shall stand watch, to ensure that the vile Balinus and his lackeys shall not trouble us!”
Tso Hat blinked, puzzled. Dig a pit? Well, at least the nightwalkers would be doing the work, and not him. But what did the Olnami wizard want with a pit?
He glanced around and spotted a fellow Matuan nearby – most of the living soldiers who had made it this far were Olnami or members of the various Govyan tribes, but there were a few Matuans and Greyans scattered throughout.
“H'ai ko cha'i mashi,” he called – what's going on here?
The Matuan looked up, and shrugged.
At least he spoke Matuan, Tso Hat thought, or he wouldn't have responded even that much. There were some Matuans who didn't even speak their own tongue any more. It was perhaps evidence of how successful the Domdur conquest had been that the Nazakri himself had made his announcement in Domdur, rather than Olnami; everyone understood Domdur.
The nightwalkers were getting to their feet now, slowly and awkwardly; the western sky was still warm with color. When full night had fallen the nightwalkers would be as strong and fast and graceful as any living man. Rebiri Nazakri and his aides were directing the dead to find tools and start digging.
He didn't seem to be paying any attention to his living followers; Tso Hat tucked his dinner bowl in his sleeve, brushed the last few crumbs from his mustache, and strolled over to the other Matuan.
“U sin Tso Hat huru chi,” he said, using the formal form of introduction.
“Hachi,” the other replied. “Don't you speak Domdur?”
“Of course I speak Domdur,” Tso Hat replied, nettled. “I thought perhaps we might want a little privacy.”
The other glanced meaningfully at the wizard just as a ripple of fire rose crackling from the staff. “I don't think so,” he said. “Domdur is good enough for me.”
“All right,” Tso Hat said. “Whatever language you want, then. Do you know what's going on? Why does he want a pit?”
The Matuan shook his head, but a nearby man Tso Hat took for a Diknoi spoke up. “He's restoring his magic,” he said.
“What?” The two Matuans turned to the Diknoi.
“His power. His magic. He stores it in that staff of his, but it comes from underground, from the deep darknesses. Back in Govya he took it from caves, and in the cities he could tap into it in the deepest dungeons and crypts, but out here on the plain he has to dig for it.”
“You mean it doesn't just come to him?” Tso Hat asked. He had known that the Nazakri slipped away on private errands fairly often, but he had never known the nature of these secretive expeditions.
The Diknoi shook his head. “If black magic were easy, there'd be wizards everywhere. The Domdur say the gods sealed all the dark powers away in the earth thousands of years ago; I don't know about that, but I do know you can't find it anywhere the sun has ever shone. So not only does he need to dig, but he needs to do it at night; once sunlight shines into his pit it'll be useless to him.”
The Diknoi shrugged. “You know how it is. I picked up a little here, a little there.”
Tso Hat smiled to himself. Just like a Diknoi, obsessed with learning and explaining.
“So if he did not dig this pit, he might run out of magic?”
The Diknoi snorted. “Not any time soon,” he said. “I mean, just look at him. He's probably just being careful. Or maybe he's running low on the spirits he uses to make nightwalkers.”
Tso Hat blinked at that one. “You mean they really are demons, and not the dead brought back?”
“I don't know if they're demons, but they're something that isn't human, that lives deep in the earth – it's just like the Domdur always said, with all their worries about sealing graveyards with cold iron and flowers, there are things in the earth that want bodies to live in and will take our dead if they can.”
“If the Domdur think that, then why do they bury their dead?” interrupted a Loghar woman who had overheard. “Why don't they burn them, like sensible people?”
The Matuans, whose tradition was to entomb the dead, resisted the temptation to argue as the Diknoi replied, “Because their goddess Vedal requires them to bury the dead, as sacrifices to ensure fertility.”
“She requires this, even though it makes them susceptible to becoming nightwalkers?” the Loghara asked.
Tso Hat turned away as the Diknoi tried to explain some of the fine points of Domdur theology and funerary customs to her; he wasn't interested in that.
What he was interested in was the fact that Rebiri Nazakri was at the low ebb of his power, and was going to be busy for some time renewing it with this pit of his. And the army wasn't going to be marching westward. When the army was on the move, anyone heading any other direction would stand out.
If he were to say he was scouting for Domdur raiders he could go a half-mile or so from the camp. And if he were then to make a run for it, who would stop him? The nightwalkers would be digging their pit, the wizard would be overseeing the digging, and the living... well, why would they care?