“Do they walk barefaced, bare breasted maybe, to visit their barefaced friend?” Lohar’s trained, powerful tenor was heavy with sarcasm. A number of his followers had trailed him into the court, and more were coming. Mostly, Shaldis guessed, because in a district where work was scarce and beggars numerous, it didn’t take much to get up a crowd. “I saw them standing like harlots before the porch of the temple, staring as if they had never seen holiness before! Don’t think I didn’t! Veiling themselves in their evil glamours, demons in disguise, assuming only the outer form of women in order to deceive!”
“That’s one I haven’t heard,” murmured Shaldis.
“No,” returned the Summer Concubine softly. “And it doesn’t sound promising. How powerful a mage was he ?”
“One of the best, according to Hathmar. He was herbmaster of the college, and a powerful healer. But his were among the first powers to fade. Hathmar says he didn’t used to be like this at all. He started drinking ijnis—brewing it up in his rooms—and of course that’s something you can’t hide for very long.” The marks of it showed in his face as he harangued his True Believers: the frenzied sparkle in his bulging brown eyes, as if he were being eaten from inside by something he could not control. The way his voice scaled up and down like a crazily played flute. The way his wide mouth grimaced and stretched.
“The masters of the college were still trying to figure out what to do with him—he’d already started having fits, and his spells, when they worked at all, were getting unreliable—when he started having visions of the god Nebekht.”
“Why do you think every basin and bucket on your roofs stands empty?” Lohar ranted. “Why do you think you have to deal with Xolnax and Rumrum? Why do you have to walk halfway across the city to be jeered at and driven away by the rich folks’ guards? The Lord of the Iron Girdle is angry, my friends, angry! Furious at these hussies, these impudent tramps! For a thousand years he has forborne . . . .”
Shaldis explained, “He says—I’ve heard him preach it about two hundred times in the bazaar—that Nebekht directed him to a tomb in the Redbone Hills, to find his statue: Nebekht is the war god they worship up near the White Lake, where he’s from. I don’t even know if what’s in the temple—what he found in the tomb—is actually a statue of the real Nebekht or some other god. He has long conversations with it, supposedly. It tells him how the world’s supposed to be run.”
“And the running of the world appears to involve killing large numbers of animals,” the Summer Concubine commented. “Phew, can you smell the blood on him? I think getting out of here looks like a good idea.”
“Bring the hussies out of there, the demon sluts! Let’s show them how the true servants of true gods treat those who persist in defying their commands!” The men around him cheered and another volley of rocks and dung hit the wall.
“Lose yourself in the crowd.” The Summer Concubine brushed Jethan’s shoulders with her fingertips. “We passed a café in the plaza just outside the East Gate. Meet us there.”
“Lady,” protested the young man, “only common women sit in cafés! You can’t—”
“We’ll all have a better chance of getting away if we separate.” And when Jethan opened his mouth to object, she added wearily, “I command it.”
His mouth set and his nostrils flared with a thousand unspoken words about willful women who wouldn’t do what was obviously best for them.
“I’ll put a cloak over you . . . .”
The men had crowded up to the door, Lohar staying prudently in the rear. Two or three of them leaped at Jethan when he lunged out; he seized the nearest and wrenched the billet of wood from his hand, swung it at the others. The beggars, laborers, farmers out of work were armed mostly with clubs and sticks, but a few had knives, or axes from the slaughtering pens. Shaldis knew from experience how much damage could be done simply with chunks of adobe brick.
“Can you distract them?” whispered the Summer Concubine. “I can put a cloak over him, but not while everyone’s looking.”
The two women sidled to the doorway. Shaldis counted over the men in the mob with her eye, naming them: Bald Guy, Squinty, Big Nose, Blue Tunic, Food-Stains . . . weaving those names into a Wyrd of Quarrels, which she cast like a net into the square. Then, stooping, she picked up one of the thrown rocks and flung it at Tall Guy in the middle of the mob.
Years of running with the boys in the markets had made her good.
“Watch the hell what you’re doing!” Tall Guy yelled, whirling, and grabbed a skinny dark-skinned man behind him by his beggar’s rags.
“Bugger you!”
“Whoreson!”
“Who’re you shoving?” This from the two men into whom Bugger You had hurled Whoreson, jostling them into others still.
“I don’t take that kind of talk from any goddam thief . . . .”
“Who you calling a thief.”
“I’m calling a thief the whoreson who sells bread that’s half sawdust is who I’m calling a thief.”
Lohar whipped around, shouting for order—as a former mage himself he must have guessed what was going on. The moment his eyes were off Jethan, the Summer Concubine swept a gesture with her long fingers and Raeshaldis yelled over the din, “Jethan, run!”
The young man stared around him for a second, making Shaldis want to hit him, then bolted. Shaldis herself kept hold of the Summer Concubine’s hand, the two women dodging through the crowd, which by now had dissolved into a dozen knots of struggling, cursing, shoving men. Someone grabbed at her dress, others yelled—obviously their own cloaks left something to be desired—but they managed to dart through the gate of Greasy Yard, feet slipping in the muck of Little Pig Alley outside. They turned several corners, crossed a court where a stringy old man was taking down the shutters from a tavern, hurried along an alley permanently mud-sodden from blood oozing from the slaughter yards and stinking to the gods in heaven.
From the tops of the walls, the vultures watched them sardonically as they fled.
They met Jethan a few minutes later at the Hospitality of BoSaa café on BoSaa’s Square, just outside the East Gate. The Temple of BoSaa, god of cattle and farmers, for whom the broad plaza had been named, had long ago been swallowed up in the maze of caravansaries and markets that had little by little encroached on its grounds. From the table where they sat—in the curtained corner where other veiled women sipped coffee with each other and unveiled ones chatted with men—Shaldis could just see its gate pylons peeking over the jumble of low domes and tiled roofs, painted statues faded and sand scrubbed and what was left of the electrum of their cornices flashing patchily in the afternoon light.
“Wait a little and go back there,” instructed the Summer Concubine. “Find Preket the landlord and rent that room. I’ll send a page tomorrow with money for you.” She turned to Shaldis. “If you had more time in that room, would you be able to listen into the wood the way you were doing and tell what happened to Turquoise Woman? Of who may have come, and where she might be, and if she’s all right?”
Her voice sounded desperate. Above the veil Shaldis met her eyes, and the Summer Concubine looked away, as if not wanting to admit the fear already strong in her heart.
“I don’t know,” Shaldis lifted her veil awkwardly to sip her coffee—she’d never been graceful, and years of drinking coffee like a boy hadn’t given her much practice in the ladylike handling of veils and cups in public. “The first thing to do would be to check at her husband’s house, wouldn’t it?”
“If I thought he’d tell the truth about it, yes.” The Summer Concubine’s voice turned bitter. “I’ll send there and make inquiries this afternoon. But whatever he tells me I’d like to compare with whatever you can learn—can sense—in that room. In the meantime Jethan can go back there now.”
“Lady!” protested the young guardsman. “First let me return you to the palace!”
“Don’t be silly,” said Shaldis. “By the time we walk back and you pack up whatever you t
hink you’ll need, the city gates’ll he shut and by tomorrow that room may be rented out for a whorehouse. I’m surprised it hasn’t been already.”
Jethan’s back stiffened at the reference. “I am very sorry my lady was ever brought into contact with the disorderly women who haunt that district,” he said. “But to let you return to the palace without an escort . . .”
“I’ll be with her,” pointed our Shaldis.
Jethan’s upper lip seemed to get longer. “That isn’t the point. It’s only women of the common classes who walk around together without a manservant.” And he glanced speakingly at the other women at the tables nearby. One of them was Melon Girl, with a potbellied man in red who looked like a senior bullyboy: She caught Shaldis’s eye and waved.
“Of course.” The Summer Concubine clasped her small hands and smiled at Jethan, without meeting his eyes but with ready, warm sympathy in her gaze. “But we are dressed as women of the common classes, you know, and properly veiled. And in an emergency we can always rely on a gray cloak.”
Jethan looked as if he wanted to say that neither protection nor appearances were at issue, but rather the inherent rightness of things, and moreover in his hometown there wouldn’t even be a section of a public café for women, but the Summer Concubine went on: “And the Lady Raeshaldis is quite right about the room being rented out again. We must learn what happened, and where she is . . . if she can be helped.” Her fair brows drew together under the coarse yellow cotton of her veil; pain shadowed the depths of those blue eyes. “Please help us. There’s clearly something going on, something evil.”
“As you wish, my lady. But it isn’t right that—” He lowered his voice at the furiously hissed insistence of both women; already men in the main section of the café were beginning to look. Disgruntled but quieter, Jethan went on, “It isn’t right that you should return to the palace alone.”
And then, to the bemused stares of everyone in the café, he executed a deep salaam and vanished into the jostling crowds.
TEN
Bax and his riders pursued the fugitive teyn through the whole of the day.
Rain had washed the tracks of the teyn from the canyon that the Summer Concubine had described—as Oryn had thought he might, Bax identified it instantly from her description—but they found evidence of the band’s concealment nevertheless. Bax’s scouts were still casting about for the trail when the Summer Concubine’s messenger arrived with a description of her second vision in the water bowl. The commander recognized that place, too: She had seen a cave that was barely more than a longitudinal slit in the rocks, beneath a huge dust-colored overhang of stone above an open hillside. “Headed southeast, it sounds like. I wonder if they’re making for the Singing World?”
“They wouldn’t know about it, surely?” Oryn followed the commander back toward the horses, nonchalantly trying not to limp. It is one thing to be a competent rider—which Oryn was, mostly because as a fat child he had had a horror of looking silly on a horse. It is another to ride for almost six hours when one is not accustomed to doing so. Oryn was already debating whether he should spend one week or two in the hot room of the palace baths, drinking soothing tisanes and being massaged.
“You ever been there?”
Oryn shook his head. Few people had, of those who made their homes in the farmlands along the lakes. He’d heard about that vast, lumpy platform of twisted rock—twenty miles long by some five wide—like a tawny island above the gray gravel pavement of the desert beyond the Dead Hills. But he doubted even his father had gone there in the wars that had brought House Jothek to the rulership forty years ago. There was no reason to visit the place. Nothing grew in the Singing World, nothing could be mined there, no water had ever been detected in its bare, wind-smoothed ridges. Only the crooning wind, muttering with near-human groans around the rocks. Hermits had dwelled there once, devotees of Kush, god of the desert wind. What had become of them no one knew.
“It’s a perfect place to hide,” Bax said. “Once you get among those rocks you don’t leave a print, and your pursuers haven’t more than a few feet of vision in any direction.” The flicker of morning winds showed up the silver in the commander’s coarse, dark hair under the edge of his helmet. Though this red-walled canyon—Camel Rock Canyon, it was called, of course—was still in what was called the near ranges, meaning that paloverde grew among the rocks and in the open land stands of cactus and sagebrush occasionally broke the brown monotony of the earth, it was close enough to the outer limits of the king’s authority that there was danger from the bandits who haunted the nearer wastes and the nomads who had grown bolder with the desperation of thirst. All the guardsmen who waited for them at the canyon’s mouth wore full armor, back-and-breasts, greaves, helmets, mailed skins.
Head aching from the helmet’s weight and knees chafed from the greave straps, Oryn felt considerable sympathy for them. The mantlings that protected the back of his neck from the sun seemed determined to creep down his collar and whipped him in the eyes every time he turned his head, and the somewhat short-waisted cuirass gripped his bottom ribs like a torturer’s iron clamp. On those occasions when his father would insist that he ride out in armor on some training expedition designed to “make a man of him,” Oryn had regarded it as a point of honor to play the fool, wearing his gaudiest eye paint and covering himself in perfumed ointment. He recalled once constructing a crest of crimson wildflowers for his helmet and discoursing on aesthetics to his disgusted parent and half a regiment of baffled palace guards. No wonder Bax had looked surprised when he’d asked to come.
It had been quite polite of him, Oryn thought, not to look either alarmed or appalled as well.
But this was no longer matter for play. He wiped his dripping forehead and tried to loop back his hair out of his eyes. The lives of three children were at stake and, more than that, the lives of perhaps many more in the villages that relied on the labor of supposedly domesticated teyn. Bax had a job to do and the last thing he needed was an amateur getting in his way, particularly one he couldn’t just shove aside.
So Oryn’s voice was diffident as he said, “Yes, but according to my lady, these are village teyn. They wouldn’t know the Singing World, would they?”
“They’ve got to have wildings among ’em.” Bax rubbed his chin, where beard stubble lay like granite dust: Oryn was wishing he’d had Geb shave him too, but that had been out of the question in terms of time. “Though you’re right—I haven’t seen a handprint all through the canyon, and it’s the wildings that run bent and push off with their hands.” He shook his head and strode down to where the horses waited, remounts saddled while the men hunted for signs. “I’ll be curious what we find when we find ’em.”
Oryn gritted his teeth as discreetly as he possibly could, waved away a sergeant’s offer of aid, prayed very briefly for the dignity of success to Oan Echis the guardian god of the Jothek house and got his foot up into the stirrup. Oan Echis was in a good mood that morning and Oryn made it to the saddle unassisted. New robes for all your priests, first-quality silk . . . .
“Do they communicate?” he asked as the cavalcade rode out through the harsh midmorning light. The clouds were gone as if they had never been. Rain pocks made a thousand tiny craters in the thin desert dust, like the false promises of young lovers. The hooves obliterated this evidence of the wizards’ Song. Dust settled in their place. “You’ve ridden patrols for thirty years. We’ve taught the village teyn to understand us and even to speak a bit . . . . Have you ever heard a wilding teyn speak to another teyn? Do they have a language? Or make any noise once they’re past infancy?”
“We only see ’em when we’re hunting ’em,” pointed out Bax, his eyes always moving, always scanning each slight hollow of the land. “They may discourse natural philosophy back in their caves for all I know, my lord. Yes, I think they communicate somehow, from the way the bands will move to avoid patrols. But I’ve never seen or heard a thing, nor has anyone I’ve ever spoke to, no
t even the nomads.”
“Have you ever known them to steal children?”
Bax didn’t answer for a time. The gray-brown emptiness rose to chewed-looking ridges of stone, then fell away again. Even the cactus was sparse here, small and squat and farther and farther apart. Once Oryn saw a snake coiled in the black puddle of a rock’s shade. Once he saw a rabbit far away, bounding over the heat-paled dust. In all the world there seemed no other life.
There was poetry here, he thought, but it was a music he did not understand. Maybe the nomads did, who wandered the wastelands from oasis to oasis, living on the edge of the winds.
And there were limits beyond which even the nomads would not go.
“There’s always children that disappear from the rangeland villages, my lord,” the commander said at last. “Not often, but regularly. Not taken by jackals, I mean—you’ll usually see vultures and a body—but just disappear. The djinni get the blame for it, and it may be the djinni, though myself I’ve never figured what the Beautiful Ones would want with a squalling brat. They could have had all four of my brothers for the asking, I’ll tell you that.” He shaded his eyes against the white glare of the southern sky.
Oryn opened his mouth to ask what he sought, then thought about it and didn’t. So far only a single vulture could be descried, like a dust mote in the brilliant air.
“Curse it.” Bax froze, looking out to the southwest, then reined his horse and groped for the spyglass that hung at his belt. Oryn unfurled his own and trained it toward what the commander had seen first: a long, low whisper of dust on the southwestern horizon.
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