Touching Midnight

by Fiona Hood-Stewart

  Malia made one last adjustment to the headdress, then climbed down from the stool. “All this fuss for that snake, Chumac.”

  “To keep Chumac in his place,” Cuin corrected.

  If that was possible.

  The court had long been corrupt, and the present governor was the worst yet—sharp-eyed and ambitious, with his eye set on the failing king, Chataluk’s, throne.

  The corruption of the court had always been legendary, but through Chataluk’s overlong reign it had reached gargantuan proportions, gradually seeping into the provinces and even into the temple itself.

  In Cuin’s opinion, the simplicity had been lost, diminished by too much pomp and ceremony, too many rituals—and far too much gold. The temple shouldn’t be wealthy when the people starved. One of the first decrees she’d made when she’d taken office had been that the gold the temple possessed should be used to buy food from the richer northern provinces in times of famine, but lately, thanks to Chumac’s machinations, temple gold hadn’t been a reliable coin for anything.

  The governor had gradually cut them off from their sources of supply, threatening the merchants and farmers who usually kept the temple storehouses full to overflowing. When they were able to purchase food at all, it was at an inflated cost and almost only from merchants who dealt in contraband. In any man’s language, it was a siege.

  Chuli produced a glittering, jeweled knife, all humor gone from her expression. “You should wear this today.”

  Cuin eyed the blade with distaste and shook her head. Even for Chumac, she wouldn’t wear that knife. It had been designed, and used, by a previous high priestess, who had given in to pressure from a new and powerful cult that had demanded the establishment of ritual sacrifice. “Death and blood are no part of this temple.”

  Although, if Chumac had his way, they would be.

  Grimly, she signaled that the blade should be removed from her presence. “The only weapons I’ll be fighting with today are words.”

  Useless, empty words, because, with her army depleted by Chumac’s paymasters—despite the quantities of gold that lay in the storehouses—her only strength lay in the power and charisma of the temple. And Chumac had long lost all respect for that. Lately, theirs was a cat-and-mouse game fought with strategy and wit, and Chumac was looking more and more like the cat that had got the cream.

  Minutes later, she entered the formal reception room and mounted the dais steps, flanked by priestesses and initiates and her temple guard, which these days amounted to only six men—two of whom she suspected were on the verge of abandoning their posts.

  Chumac entered, short and muscular and girded in all his finery. He was followed by his usual retinue, which today included his war master, Hotec, as if he felt the need for extra support—or, more likely, indicated that he wanted to intimidate her.

  If Chumac was smooth, Hotec was brutal. Abnormally tall, his shoulders as wide as a post, Hotec possessed a lust for death and killing that was evidenced by the dried collection of human remains that hung from his belt. Lately it had even been rumored that he had committed the ultimate in atrocities by dining on his victims.

  Cuin heard Chuli’s faint exclamation, and her own gorge rose at the glimpse of something red and glistening flapping amongst the collection of bones and dried skin at Hotec’s waist.

  Stiffly, she averted her gaze from the grotesque display. Now she knew why Hotec was part of Chumac’s retinue. The insult was pointed—and unforgivable.

  Chumac issued his list of demands through the mouthpiece of his elaborately attired household priest, Nasek. The list, as usual, included a petition that she accept the governor’s protection in these “dangerous times,” and that, in exchange for his protection, she subjugate her temporal power to that of the secular—naturally, Chumac’s.

  “No.” The word scraped harshly.

  She’d been forced to give ground in the village, which supported the temple and the surrounding lands. With lack of manpower, she’d even conceded defeat in the outer perimeter of the temple, where security was difficult to maintain—but not within. Never within. To despoil the inner sanctity of the temple—the purity and intent of the teachings—went against every particle of her being. Chumac had his power, but she was the Cadis, and she wouldn’t allow the temple to feed his hunger for Chataluk’s throne.

  Chumac’s muddy gaze met hers, bold and over-familiar, and in that split second wariness changed to raw fear. She was aware of an overweening confidence in the governor, a smugness that signaled secret knowledge and plans.

  Abruptly she was certain she was no longer simply losing ground. Some time between this meeting and the last, something had happened: she had lost.

  Her fingers tightened on the ornate gilded arms of her throne, the fine bones aching with the pressure. She held Chumac’s gaze, keeping her own icy—calling on her flagging inner reserves, calling on the power of the Sun God to fortify her.

  Instantly, she felt the change—the energy shifting within and around her—felt her spine straighten, her neck elongate. The quality of her stare altered as the fear drained away to be replaced with a cool, indomitable control. She felt the alteration in the air itself, the heat closing around her, as if the very atmosphere was charged with power.

  Chumac recoiled as if—unseen as the phenomenon was—he was suddenly as sensitive to her altered state as she was. Hissing a word, he backed off a step, his fingers curling into a warding sign that signaled his allegiance to one of the new idolatrous cults. With a last, muttered profanity, he jerked his head at his men and strode from the room.

  Hotec lingered, his dark gaze blank of the knowledge that had filled Chumac’s, simmering instead with a malevolence that was too primitive to allow a woman any more power than he chose to give her. But, less sensitive or not, Hotec was no more able to stand the power that filled the room than Chumac had been.

  With a guttural sound somewhere between a grunt and an oath, he turned on his heel, as if jerked by a leash, and followed his master.

  Two

  Long seconds passed while Cuin stared at the empty entrance to the reception room. Slowly, like water seeping from tightly cupped fingers, the power drained away, leaving her empty and diminished, as inadequate as the youngest novice in the temple. As the last whispers of power faded, a chill invaded her stomach, and her hand rose in automatic reflex, sketching a holy sign in negation of everything that Chumac stood for.

  Malia touched her arm, and Cuin started, realizing she had been sitting frozen, staring at the empty entranceway for some time.

  “What do we do now?”

  Cuin willed her sluggish mind to think, willed warmth to seep back into her bones so she could move, but she felt curiously disengaged. Her stomach rolled, and she tensed, although she wasn’t on the point of losing her noontime meal. She hadn’t had a noontime meal. Which was why she was having difficulty focusing. Abruptly, the condition she’d allowed herself, allowed them all, to fall into shocked her. They weren’t just hungry, they were starving to death—the decline slow and insidious—and she couldn’t allow the situation to continue.

  “We pack.”

  The temple had been here for millennia—an isolated remnant of a much more ancient past—surviving the descent into darkness long after everything else it was connected to had fallen. The order had managed to preserve fragments of the knowledge that once had been—holding fast to the ancient wisdom and the belief in the one, true God—but purity and common sense no longer fulfilled what the people wanted.

  According to Chumac, they wanted a god for every season and a god for every reason—gods with teeth and claws, gods that fed from power and blood and fear.

  The temple had survived through famines and uprisings, floods and earthquakes and the ever-evolving political climate, but it couldn’t prevail without the support of the people it served.

  If the message had been written in the sky, it couldn’t have been clearer: the temple was finished, its time over.
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  Chumac wouldn’t do anything as crude as attack them—yet. To openly attack the temple would negate what power they still had, and he needed the support of the temple behind his bid to take the throne when Chataluk finally passed.

  But beyond that practical need, Chumac had no use for any of them. All he wanted was the shell—the illusion—and the sacred relics. He would replace her with his own puppet and put in place the rituals, and the gods, that best served his purpose.

  The knowledge of impending disaster prickled coldly down her spine. She had thought they had more time.

  Jaw set, Cuin rose to her feet, stiff with cold and light-headed from lack of food as she descended the dais and concentrated on reaching the ornate double doors.

  Large and splendidly appointed as the reception room was, it was a mere anteroom in the outer portion of the temple. Outsiders were almost never allowed further into the temple complex than this, but if Chumac ever solved the puzzle of the maze and reached the inner chamber, he would find his greedy fist closing on a handful of nothing—and he would reach the inner chamber over her dead body.

  In the meantime…there were people to save—knowledge and sacred artifacts to preserve.

  The certainty of just how little time they had before Chumac moved against the temple made her heart pound and her throat clog with fear. She had a contingency plan; it was a desperate one, but she couldn’t risk waiting any longer. She had to act now.

  The warmth of the late-afternoon sun streaming through the tall apertures that lighted her private apartment barely registered for Cuin as Chuli and Malia shooed the other priestesses away and began the intricate process of removing her formal garments. Cuin held still with difficulty and studied the two women who had effectively become her family when she’d entered the temple. Age had whitened their hair, but it was malnutrition that had taken the spring out of their step, the sparkle from their eyes. The knot in her stomach tightened as she took note of the faint tremor in Malia’s fingers, the gauntness of Chuli’s face. Like everyone else, they’d lost weight, but unlike most of the priestesses, they didn’t have the physical stamina and resources of youth. She was in danger of losing them both.

  As soon as the headdress and the heavy, intricate robe were gone, Cuin dismissed the sisters, brushing aside their concern with a formal smile.

  With fingers that shook with a mixture of weakness and pure, undiluted fear at what she had to do, she bound her hair in a simple plait, dressed in a plain robe, woven from a coarse mixture of vegetable fibers and alpaca, and laced on rope sandals. The bulky robe felt rough and prickly against her skin after the much finer weave of linen, and the sandals were, quite frankly, abrasive—the skin of her feet already reddening where the rope rubbed—but servant’s clothing was necessary. With Chumac’s soldiers filling the township, she couldn’t walk abroad dressed in a high priestess’s garments.

  After draping a dull brown alpaca shawl over her head and shoulders to hide her face, Cuin briefly examined herself in the mirror. Satisfied, she summoned Malia.

  Malia’s eyes flared with shock. “You can’t,” she said flatly. “Let me go in your stead.”

  “No.” Cuin led the way through the living apartments, took a lighted torch from the wall and opened the door into the maze. While they walked, she outlined exactly what she was going to do.

  Malia’s face grew pale. “This is madness. I thought we were going to get one of the guard to—”

  “That won’t work. I no longer know who’s loyal and who’s not, and if Chumac discovers my plan, we won’t live to see another sunrise.”

  “He wouldn’t dare—”

  “These days, Chumac does what he wills.”

  Cuin halted in what was apparently a cul-de-sac and handed the torch to Malia. “Wait for me at the main gate, but be as inconspicuous as you can. I won’t be able to return this way unless I’ve failed, and if I fail…”

  Malia’s gaze was bleak. They both knew that if Cuin failed, most likely she wouldn’t be back at all. Chumac wouldn’t miss a chance to kill her, and then the weight of responsibility would fall on Malia’s shoulders.

  Cuin pressed firmly on a deeply incised glyph carved into the wall, then placed both palms on the block of granite and thrust the stone door open.

  Dim light flooded the passageway, and a faint breeze stirred, making the torch in Malia’s grasp flicker and smoke as Cuin stepped out into a dark tangle of shrubbery and vines, and instantly sank ankle-deep in mud.

  Outside, it wasn’t much lighter than it had been in the secret passageway, signaling that the sun had set.

  Holding her robe around her knees to keep the hem from the mud, Cuin closed the door, which, from the outside, appeared to be a natural rock formation, then began fighting her way through the undergrowth until she finally emerged in the back yard of a cloth merchant. Draping the shawl over her head and shoulders, she ducked beneath sheets of dyed cloth flapping in the breeze, slipped past the stone hutch that housed the merchant’s business and stepped into a narrow, cobbled avenue.

  Hunching to reduce her distinctive height, she kept the shawl pulled firmly over her head as she walked past freshly lit torches.

  When she entered the village proper, she relaxed her hold on the coarse cloth enough that she could study the confusion of peasants returning from the fields shouldering baskets of produce, bare-footed children darting between buildings and vendors hawking food. On the few occasions that she had ventured out since Chumac had taken up residence in the valley, it had generally been in a palanquin—the curtains tightly drawn against the hard stares and taunts of Chumac’s men. It had been months since she’d last risked leaving the temple; consequently, her face wasn’t well known.

  A delicious savory aroma wafted from one of the vendors’ stands, where a woman bent over a brazier, roasting potatoes and manioc cakes. Cuin’s mouth watered uncontrollably. It had been weeks since she’d had anything more than manioc gruel sweetened with a thin puree of dried fruit, and the thought of actually eating solid food was enough to make her feel faint.

  Swallowing against the hollow burn in her stomach, and the temptation to offer the woman temple gold and risk her life for a roasted potato, Cuin turned on her heel and strode deeper into the village, taking care to keep her head bent against curious stares.

  Rounding a corner, she stopped to orient herself in the deep shadow of a tree. The last time she’d walked freely around the village had been when she was a skinny child studying to enter the order—and even then, it had always been in the company of Malia and one of the temple guard. With her light blue eyes, she’d always been an object of intense curiosity—and a target, even as a child. Since then, the town had more than trebled in size, straddling the river and spreading out over the valley floor. Lately the population had swelled even further with the army Chumac was amassing, but, confusing as the changes and the crowded streets were, she could still remember where the tavern was located.

  She heard the noise pounding from the drinking house before she saw it; seconds later the pungent reek of beer permeated the air. Light streamed from deep apertures cut into the thick walls of a large, sprawling building, picking out, amidst the milling confusion of men and women, the flash of a warrior’s armband, a wrist glittering with jewelry and the satiny gleam of a long, shapely leg. Taking a deep breath, Cuin sidled up to the front door, studiously avoiding any physical contact.

  Crudely designed though it was, the place was notorious, the tales that emanated from it legion, the men and women who frequented it not known for piety. Drawing the shawl even more tightly around her head, Cuin stepped into a cavernous room.

  For the first time in her life—and hopefully the last—she was stepping inside a tavern and house of ill repute, looking for a man.

  Three

  The noise, the sheer assault on her senses, the thick stench of so many bodies packed together in one place, along with the rich odor of roasting meat, hit her like a blow, and for a moment
she froze, physically unable to step any further into the primitive chaos, despite the fact that what she sought was here.

  She needed a warrior who was skilled enough to face Chumac and Hotec in combat, a warrior who could lead men, and yet who was uncommitted to any lord—someone she could trust implicitly. Most of all, she needed a warrior she could command, because, ultimately, the lives of her novices and initiates and the safety of the sacred treasure would rest with him.

  In the months she’d been gathering intelligence, she’d considered and rejected name after name until there was only one warrior left who, to her knowledge, hadn’t yet given his allegiance to Chumac.

  His name was Achaeus, and he was a foreigner—a mercenary who, from all accounts, had hacked his way down from some land to the north, aligning himself with various warlords as and when it suited him. His reputation was wild enough, the fear surrounding the strange armor and gleaming weapons that hung from his belt powerful enough, that it was rumored even Hotec gave him a wide berth.

  According to her source, it was a fact that Achaeus spent his evenings here.

  A meaty shoulder shoved her to one side as a knot of men squeezed in behind her. The protruding butt of a long, curved wooden club, secured across a broad back, caught her a glancing blow, and alarm jolted through her. Chumac’s men.

  Heart pounding, she inched aside, pressing herself flat against cold stone, trying to dissolve into the soot-blackened wall as they passed.

  With the new arrivals, the sound level in the tavern rose. Hunching even lower, and holding the shawl wadded over her nose and mouth to filter the smoke and stench, Cuin took advantage of the temporary distraction and plunged deeper into the murk.

  Long minutes of searching later, barely able to separate warrior from peasant in the tangle of inebriated bodies, she fetched up against a stone pillar and systematically began searching the gloom. The flash of metal reflecting the flames of one of the smoking braziers that were placed at intervals caught her eye. Abandoning her hunched posture, she rose up on her toes, craning to see. The flash came again as the warrior leaned forward, feeding wood into the fire. Too bright for copper, not bright enough for gold.