Tainted (Lisen of Solsta Book 2)

by D. Hart St. Martin

  “How so?” Bala asked.

  “He can keep her indefinitely on a charge of treason, and all the while he’ll be forcing her to tell him about Lisen.”

  “He knows?” Elsba whispered.

  “Not about her being his sister,” Nalin replied. “No, he’s looking for the necropath.”

  “Who knows the assassin was pushed,” Elsba deduced.

  “Yes. Damn it.” Just when Nalin thought the pressure might let up, Ariel added more weight to the burden.

  “Eloise will tell him nothing.” Elsba sounded confident in his sister’s strength.

  Nalin didn’t doubt it, but if Ariel should decide to put the watcher on her, there might come a time when Eloise could no longer resist revealing what she knew. He decided to spare Elsba that bit—that a watcher might be set on her sister. “I’m sure she’ll be fine,” he said, but his mind kept worrying at the picture of Eloise and the watcher engaged in mortal combat, mind to mind. He pulled a glove off and rubbed his face. Just when he found a moment of peace, bad news intruded once again.

  “So, what of Lisen?” Bala asked.

  He sat down again, too weary to stand anymore. “I sent her off with Captain Rosarel, into Thristas. He felt she’d be safe there. Or at least safer than in Garla. I don’t know. It may have been a mistake, but she couldn’t stay at Rossla forever. Lorain’s spies are everywhere.”

  “And the possession?” Elsba asked.

  “Over, thank the Creators. She and Jo are free.”

  “May One Be,” Elsba whispered, and both Bala and Nalin responded, “One Is.” They all sat for another moment in silence, Nalin’s thoughts wandering. Finally, he stood up again.

  “I need to clean up,” he said. “We can meet later. For dinner, perhaps?”

  “It’s Evenday,” Bala said. “I already planned something special for Father and me.”

  Nalin nodded. Life did go on without him. “Then, after dinner?”

  “No, Nalin,” Elsba said. “You must join us.”

  “I don’t want to intrude.”

  “But that’s what I meant,” Bala protested. “For you to join us.”

  “Evenday, yes. Until later, then, I suppose.” He rose, nodded to them both and then left.

  He trudged up the stairs, the exhaustion finally claiming him. He should have asked Bala to come make sure he woke up in time to dress. She knows where to find me, he thought as he reached his door and stepped in.

  He dropped his satchel on the floor in his office and moved into the bedchamber where he collapsed onto the bed. Each time he thought matters had become more complicated than he could possibly stand, they got worse. Why had Flandari entrusted all this to him? He was nowhere near strong enough. He lacked the wisdom required to navigate all this chaos. He twitched in fear at every turn this hastily conceived “plan” took. Why had she chosen him?

  He pulled off his boots, dropping them onto the floor, and, as he slipped into the soft twilight of near-sleep, a small voice spoke from deep within his soul, a voice sounding eerily like Flandari’s, responding to his question.

  Because there was no other.

  Opseth loved holy days. For some reason, these days—Evenday like now or in early fall, along with Greatlight in summer and Greatdark in winter—unsealed the souls of the living. Even the spirits of the dead sometimes encroached upon the soul-heavy ether. Usually, Opseth would sit quietly in her sanctuary of an office on such days and breathe in the complexity of images and feelings flowing freely all around her, but today she sought specifics and was having no luck. All that activity blurred the clarity that usually defined the little necropath’s distinctly powerful presence.

  Opseth jumped up from her chair and paced about the room. She shook her arms and stretched her back—anything to retrieve her focus.

  The necropath. She’s just a girl, she reminded herself. She knows nothing of me, is unskilled in facing me. I am the stronger one here and I will prevail. She paused in front of her small desk with the flickering candle upon it and breathed deeply. The air smelled of melted wax—warm, soft and malleable.

  Malleable. That’s it.

  She returned to her chair and sat down. She calmed her racing heart and her scattered thoughts and finally grew capable of reaching out to the impressionable girl. That was what she’d been missing, the girl’s flexible nature, her ability to encompass experience and allow it to mold her. Her youth left her vulnerable, and that’s what Opseth now sought, the necropath’s naïveté combined with her power. She was out there somewhere, and Opseth would find her.

  Eyes closed, she reached out. Distance did little to diminish the connection, but it could interfere. Perhaps that explained the persistent impediment to contact. The girl was far away, either to the north or south or, perhaps, the east. The desert could serve as an excellent hiding place, but not out of Opseth’s reach. In addition, Opseth realized, the girl’s consciousness seemed to be in a state of sleep, and the most likely explanation was the desert and its people’s tendency to sleep by day and live by night.

  So, setting aside for now the question of whether or when to inform the Empir of the necropath’s possible location, Opseth made herself feel the parched heat she believed Thristas baked in. The arid air entered her nose and singed her lungs. She found herself thirsting for water. She pictured herself sleeping in some sort of protected place, the ground hard, the heat unbearable.

  And…she was in. The necropath’s soul opened up to her, and Opseth smiled. At last, she thought. But when she attempted to anchor herself, a force like a great wind blew her far away from the girl’s mind. Her eyes opened in shock, and she struggled for breath. What had happened?

  Opseth reviewed the brief session, and she realized that at some point in the recent past the girl who held the truth that she must never reveal had acquired newer, stronger defenses. What or how, Opseth couldn’t tell. She’d been denied the time to determine that.

  She rubbed her face, poured a small amount of wine into a goblet, kept nearby for moments such as these, sipped and then stood up. The lone candle in the room lit her way to the curtains, and she closed her eyes against the intrusion of sunlight as she opened them. She stood before the window for a moment, an arm shielding her eyes until they had adjusted, and then she returned to her desk and blew out the candle. She grabbed the goblet from the table by her chair, finished off the wine in one swallow and slammed the goblet back down on the table.

  Never before had any assignment caused her such frustration. Until now, she had assumed superiority over the little necropath. What had changed her? Heir Tuane’s murder? It was said she might have killed one of Holder Zanlot’s spies. Had that altered her soul irrevocably? Whatever it was, Opseth must find a way around or through, over or under that wall. Otherwise, her mission was doomed.

  Her mind grew quiet. Another sort of thought teased at discovery. Opseth pursued it, but it eluded her. She allowed it to play with her. It would come when it was ready. And if it never did? Then, it must not have been all that important in the first place.

  CHAPTER NINE

  EVENNIGHT HERE AND THERE

  Lisen awoke to her shoulder being shaken and Korin whispering “It’s time” into her ear. She started to sit up but had to stop; her head throbbed at the temples. She closed her eyes, took two deep breaths and then rose from the pallet, the pain in her head easing back to just an ache. She was about to redo her hair when Korin stopped her.

  “Don’t change. Don’t do anything,” he ordered. “They’ll do everything for us.”

  “But this tunic is gross,” Lisen protested, but he shook his head and took her hand. He led her from his little cave up to the Elders’ chamber in silence, and there they joined the other couples, only Ondra and her spouse arriving after them. Lisen watched as Ondra stepped over to Korin’s side.

  “This will not change your standing in the Tribe,” she said, the venom dripping from her words. “You serve the enemy. Nothing can make up for that.” Sh
e brushed Korin’s eye patch with the tip of one finger and moved away to stand with her spouse.

  “That was for my benefit, wasn’t it,” Lisen stated.

  “Why would you think that?” Korin asked.

  “Because she said it in Garlan.”

  Korin nodded, put one hand on Lisen’s shoulder and looked away, as though he were watching the others. He wasn’t, and Lisen knew it. He was contemplating Ondra’s words. After a moment, he leaned in to whisper in Lisen’s ear. “Remember. They’re all—we’re all—as ignorant about this as you are. The Farii is not a thing those who have experienced it ever discuss with those who haven’t.”

  This time she took her turn to nod, and soon after that, dozens of men and women entered the room, small groups breaking off to surround their assigned participant and to escort them someplace else. Lisen’s attendants, three of whom were in some phase of pouching, brought her to a chamber that appeared to be a residence. The pallet had been rolled up and stored away, replaced by the stool on which they invited her to sit using hand gestures.

  They stripped her of her clothes, and then they bathed her. They dipped soft cloths into a large bowl filled with water heavily laced with sweetly perfumed oils, cleansing her from head to toe and then pouring what remained of the oily brew over her hair. Wasted water, she thought, in a place with so little of it. She pictured each of the other fifteen participants being washed in the same manner—in fresh water, not water left over from the last one to use it. If they were willing to sacrifice so much of this precious commodity, this was a holy endeavor indeed.

  They all saw her naked, but Lisen heard not a word once her tattoo was exposed. At the end of the bath, they offered her a long robe which she had to hold wrapped around her as it had no tie and certainly no buttons or fasteners.

  The magnitude of this night and its ritual settled more fully upon Lisen as they quietly pulled her hair back and braided it, intertwining many colored ribbons. The principal braider worked quickly, without comment, reaching out each time she required a new ribbon, and somehow the woman holding the ribbons knew exactly which color to hand to her next. Not a one of these women spoke enough Garlan to answer the waves of questions that crashed over Lisen. The colors of the ribbons in her braid—what did they mean? Red, gold, bronze, green, a purple so deep she thought it was black until the braider weaved in the black ribbon of one-without-family she’d been wearing ever since her arrival. No orange of Korin’s family, though, which Lisen found curious.

  After the introduction of the black ribbon, the keeper of the ribbons set them down and passed a small bell which the braider deftly merged into Lisen’s copper braid. It turned out to be the last of the braid’s embellishments. No jewels and no beads for her. When loose, her hair fell nearly to her waist, but she could feel the finished braid only to the middle of her back. They’d made it a tight one. Perhaps to keep it from loosening up in the middle of….

  She could take that thought no further. Come on, Leese, there must be something else you can think about, something that will distract you. But there wasn’t. Not a thing. She couldn’t fight the awareness that the people of the Tribe believed that their fertility, their fertility in all things for the coming year, depended on this night’s outcome. She’d agreed to this because she needed these people, but now she realized they needed her as well. Stop it, she thought. There are seven other couples.

  “Please?” the ribbon-keeper said to Lisen and motioned her to rise.

  Once Lisen had stood up, all eight women began bustling about her, speaking softly and giggling as they did so. They stripped her of her robe and immediately slipped a white translucent undershift down over her head. They then wrapped her in a white kashir, gauzy and nearly sheer, with symbols embroidered upon it in gold and green and red. Lisen assumed they had meaning, but no matter how intently she studied them with their graceful curls, peaks and valleys, she couldn’t decipher them. Asking these “ladies-in-waiting” would likely yield only blank stares of incomprehension. Maybe Korin could explain the significance of the characters to her later.

  And where was Korin? They’d been separated now for at least an hour, probably more. Supposedly they would be reunited in order to sit together at the dinner they wouldn’t eat, but for now she was stuck with these women who continued to whisper amongst themselves, sometimes looking at her sideways as though unwilling to let her know she was the main topic of discussion. It made her feel paranoid. They knew things, things she couldn’t possibly know.

  Like sex. They knew about sex here—Garlan sex, Thristan sex—and she didn’t. She knew what she’d read and what she’d seen in movies and on TV about sex on Earth, but here it was a mystery she had yet to unravel. To them she was just some dumb stranger whom they’d invited to participate in one of their most sacred moments. They had no idea how truly stupid about some things she really was.

  Every once in a while Lisen would sneak a look at the three pouched women. Without any hint of self-consciousness, they would, at different times, slide a few fingers through the overlap of the sides of their kashirs and into the slit-like opening of their pouches. They would linger there with a smile and eyes closed, then release the pouch to return to the discussion. On Earth, the baby nestled inside, truly inside the mother’s body, and Lisen might have thought that a closer bond. But what she saw here left her wondering if this ability to touch the maturing infant with the tactile sensitivity of the fingers might not offer the greater intimacy. Her memories from her early years at Solsta provided no answers. A bunch of celibate hermits could never teach me what I’m learning now.

  Suddenly, they all began to move. One said to her, “Time. Go. Go,” and they scuttled her out of the chamber. Lisen had no idea what had told them to go, but some sort of alarm had gone off in their heads simultaneously. With all their dread of hermit magic, these people of the desert possessed the ability to communicate very well without words or any sort of physical movement that Lisen had yet discerned. Perhaps their distrust of hermits rose more from their belief that as The People they were the only ones for whom these gifts were intended and that Garlans who could do such things must be the spawn of whatever devil they feared.

  She shook her head. She was losing it.

  She followed them out into the tunnel, through a tight passageway and into the largest room she’d seen yet in the mesa—low-ceilinged and filled with bright light. A thousand people at least—men, women and children—all of them dressed in multicolored kashirs wandered around the multiple stone tables and benches, seeking their seats, talking loudly, filling the room with celebration. The strong smells of hot, spicy food assailed Lisen’s nostrils, and she wished she could partake of this holy day meal. But no. She must continue to fast until she returned from the top of the mesa, whether shortly after going out when those rejected would be fed or tomorrow morning if she and Korin were chosen.

  Now herded together, Lisen and the other seven women all in the same ceremonial white waited, a silent eye in the maelstrom of noise and activity. From an entrance on the other side of the room, the eight men destined to join their partners in this night’s revels entered, also in white, and both male and female were led to the head table.

  She caught sight of Korin looking resplendent, and her heart beat a bit faster—out of fear for what might happen or from urges she dared not acknowledge, she didn’t want to know. Like everyone else, he wore the same pure-white undershift and embroidered kashir, and his dark hair glistened with oil. They’d anointed the men with a fragrance very different from what the women wore—cinnamon to Lisen’s nose, or something very like it. Korin gestured to her, and she stepped over to him.

  “Follow my lead,” he whispered into her ear, and she nodded. Of course she’d follow his lead. How else would she survive?

  Two Elders, one male, one female, stood at the center of the high table, and the couples all gathered on either side of them. They proclaimed something in Thristan—presenting the participants
to the Tribe, Lisen presumed. The Tribe responded as one with a single word that sounded encouraging to Lisen’s ears, and then everyone took their seats, all those at the head table last.

  Servers entered with huge bowls of the food Lisen had smelled, leaving the bowls situated along all the tables save at the table where she sat. Eating ensued, punctuated by boisterous conversation that sounded like just so much gibberish to Lisen’s ears, but Lisen and the fifteen with her sat very still, very quiet. They seemed to all be looking inward in preparation for what was to come.

  Lisen looked at Korin, and when she saw that he, too, breathed slowly and rhythmically, his single eye closed, she tried to do the same thing herself, “tried” being the operative word. Because Lisen couldn’t concentrate. Her body vibrated with anticipation, and her mind insisted on a slide show of images of what might happen. No matter how much effort she put into centering herself, anchoring herself to a quiet place within, the energy she put into it just turned on her and wired her into an even more manic state of mind. If she didn’t know better, if she didn’t know for a fact she’d ingested nothing except a small amount of water from a public stream an hour or more ago, she could swear someone had drugged her.

  She squinted one eye open and surreptitiously looked around. This tribe didn’t lack fertility. Including the three women who had assisted in cleansing and dressing her for the ritual, there seemed to be at least a dozen pouched members, both male and female. In Thristas, as in Garla, everyone was equal, and the earth-bound part of Lisen derived pleasure from the sight of pregnant men.

  Nalin awoke in a twilit room and, disoriented, had no idea what time it was. He’d dropped onto the bed in the middle of the day, so how long had he slept? Was it the next morning or the evening of the same day? He sat up and slid his legs off the bed, allowing them to remember their purpose in life while he contemplated his own. His last thought before sleep had overtaken him had come in the form of a voice not belonging to him, and it had stated a truth which sleep had, for a time, allowed him to deny. “Because there was no other,” it had said.