“Thank you for doing this tonight,” said Summerchild softly, riding at her side as they passed through the city’s northern gate. “I know it’s late.”
It was well past midnight. Even the jostling late-night shoppers, the prostitutes and tavern keepers and sellers of horoscopes and silks who livened the summer nights of the Flowermarket District around them, were retreating to their beds. Customers emerged, chattering happily, from the discreet doors of the Blossom Houses; servants waited till they were out of sight before gratefully putting up the shutters.
Dawn would come soon.
“I meant to ask you to help me scry for the woman in my dream this morning,” said Shaldis, “only my father showed up instead.”
If bath and siesta felt years ago, the morning had retreated into the mists of the legendary past. They reined their horses apart from the king, his guards, and the other two sisters. Like shadows they passed through the gates as they were closing and along the city’s silent streets: Shaldis and Summerchild, Rachnis and Yanrid and the novice Kylin, with Jethan riding behind.
“I’m not sure two of us will be able to find her any more than I could myself,” Shaldis went on as they came into the night-drowned Square of the Sun, beneath the Citadel bluff. “But just for not having to ensorcel all the implements myself, I owe you more than I can repay.”
“You’ve repaid me already, just by letting me know there are others of us out there,” said the concubine. “By telling me we’re not alone.”
The Citadel’s gates had been closed but not barred, for old Hathmar and Hiero the cook had not known whether anyone who was capable of working a bar by magic from the other side would come back with Yanrid and Rachnis. Kylin took the horses to the stable in the lowest court; Yanrid led the way on foot up the broad sandstone steps to the court halfway up the bluff where the scrying chamber was located. It was a small building, circular and tiled in pale blue. Jethan followed them in, his lantern throwing their shadows huge across the inside of its dome and gleaming gently in the smooth facets of the crystals there, the mirrors in their frames of silver and iron. Shaldis rubbed her eyes again, then went out to the courtyard fountain to dip up water for the water bowls. She paused by him in the doorway and said softly, “Thank you for coming with us tonight. For shooting those awful crocs down by the lake.”
“You don’t need to thank me for doing my duty.”
Shaldis shrugged. “I want to,” she said. She had gone past the stage of being snappish with weariness and had passed into a kind of camaraderie of exhaustion. There was nothing she could do about Jethan acting like Jethan. She looked across into the guardsman’s eyes. She was a tall woman, but he stood taller, stiff as the wooden image of some primitive northern warrior god. In the months she’d known him he’d always held her at a distance, disapproving of a woman’s power, perhaps—maybe just of a woman who walked around unveiled and carried money in her purse like only men were supposed to. He had risked his life for the king, and for her in the king’s service; she was fond of him, as of a brother. A brother who wasn’t Tulik.
She asked, “You really haven’t seen your family in five years?”
His face remained unmoving, but something softened in his eyes. “It’s a long way back to my village.” His voice was a murmur no louder than the lap of wavelets on the shore of the lake—a deep voice with the flattish far-north inflection to the words, hard to describe but unmistakable. “Three weeks of travel, even to get to the City of Reeds, and from there all the way down through the canals and the Great Lake. I send my mother letters, but I don’t know whether my father reads them to her. I have never had a reply.”
Not only Ith, Shaldis reflected, could be destroyed by lake monsters unbeknownst to a soul in the south. She glanced over her shoulder into the lamplit gloom of the scrying chamber. Yanrid bent over the ancient stone tablet, grinding ink for the ink bowls (for which she, Shaldis, should even this moment be bringing him water); Summerchild’s hands rested on the table, whispering the spells that would strengthen the drawing power of the questing thoughts.
Her eyes returned to Jethan’s.
“I don’t know whether I’d be able to see to a place that I know nothing of,” she said. “I’ve never seen your village or your family or anyone there. Sometimes I can get an image in spite of not knowing what I seek. I can focus on your mother’s name, or on something you can describe or draw, maybe, to give me something to look for. I could at least see if she’s still alive, if your family’s house still stands.”
Jethan closed his eyes. She saw the muscles tighten in his jaw. “Thank you,” he said without inflection in his voice. But when he looked at her again, some of the weariness was lessened from his eyes. “I’d like that. Tomorrow, or the day after. When you are rested. I understand from His Majesty that scrying takes a great deal of energy. I know you have more important tasks.”
“Some that mean as much to me,” she said, “not that mean more.” She turned and crossed the dark court to the fountain, its waters glittering where the light of the traitor moon came over the high walls. In the two years she’d lived in this place, she thought, she’d always known that her father and mother, that Threesie and Foursie, Twinkle and Tulik and youngest brother Zelph, were all less than a mile away on Sleeping Worms Street, should she ever really want to go back there.
For weeks she’d spoken to Pomegranate through these very mirrors and crystals. She knew just how long a journey it was along the waters of the lakes and up through the great cross-country canals. Three weeks from the City of Reeds would put Jethan’s home somewhere in the parched rangelands of what had, she guessed, once long ago been a single great stretch of water, but which was now the three dwindling lakes called Mud Lake, Sulphur Lake, and the Lake of Slaves.
A land of tiny villages, of meager crops and herds of skinny goats. Of nomad raids and endless work that broke soul and body, with no books, few tales, no time or energy for music or dance. No relief, save what rye liquor could bring.
No wonder he’d fled. Fled and left them to their own devices, she thought. As she had. Like her, he had done the unthinkable—walked away from his family, to save his own sanity.
After her struggles on the lakeshore to make wards work against crocodiles, Shaldis knew she was too tired to attempt scrying spells. On the way through the night market she’d bought a half-dozen candied dates wrapped up in a plane-tree leaf and divided them with Summerchild, for both were ravenous. Whether at another time their combined strength might have been enough to open the closed doors of distance, she did not know.
But after all their spells and concentration, the crystals, the mirrors, the bowls of water and ink, all remained dark. The woman who had cried to her for help was out there somewhere, but as if she stared out the door of a safe fortress into the blackness of a desert sandstorm, Shaldis saw nothing.
In time, Summerchild went up to the Citadel guest room Rachnis offered her. Shaldis walked her to its door, then returned to the scrying chamber in secret. Her mind numb, her body aching with weariness, she refilled the water bowls, remade the spells.
Our children are dying.
Help us.
The lamps had been quenched, only the stink of burned oil lingered in the dark room. Silence lay on the Citadel, but for the murmur of the fountain in the court.
Help us. . . .
Footfalls behind her, a hand warm on her arm. “You’ve had enough.”
She pulled against Jethan’s grip. “You don’t understand.”
“I understand when someone is too tired to help themselves or anyone else.”
She wrenched her arm unavailingly. She might just as well have tried to wrench an oak from the ground with her hands. In the thin light of the setting moon he looked older than his twenty-some years, and his blue eyes seemed very light, like the crystals in her hand. “They will die without our help,” she cried, passionate with despair. “They may be dead already.” And in her exhaustion and her grief, and h
er weariness at the thought that she had to go back to her grandfather’s house after all this, she burst into tears.
The guardsman put his arms gently around her, disregarding it when she pushed at him; he wore the light leather cuirass of palace duty and it was like trying to push a statue. Or like being embraced by one.
“You need to sleep.” His breath whispered against her temple, fluttering the straggles of her hair. “The world is a wide place, Raeshaldis. The gods carry the sky in their hands, light as a silken scarf; they don’t need our shoulders to keep it aloft. At least not tonight they don’t.” And he dried her tears with a handkerchief, taken from some hidden purse at his sword belt—tears that in her more rested moments she would have died rather than let him see her shed. “You cannot save everyone.”
She whispered, “I can try.”
She didn’t know if Jethan heard her. He picked her up in his arms—in their six months of friendship it had always surprised her how physically strong he was—and carried her up the steps to her own chamber in the novices’ court. There he laid her on her bed as gently as a nursemaid, and drew the sheet over her. “And I’ll be sitting right outside your door,” he added. “And if you try to stir out of this room again before first light I’ll lock you in.”
That sounded more like the Jethan she knew, reflected Shaldis, in the two seconds before she dropped into sleep like a dead woman.
SIXTEEN
Oryn knew exactly where he was, in his dream. He’d thought, as a young man, that after he was obliged to pass through the ordeals of consecration himself he’d no longer have to dream about them, but apparently it didn’t work that way. Nothing he’d ever heard of or read could alter dreams.
He was seven years old. He stood in a crowd of people in the dense, still heat of the Place of Kush, the Place of the Lion, but because of the rise of the ground—the slight plateau that lifted all around the Dead Hills—the walls of the Yellow City were not visible. They could have been in the midst of the desert, for all the signs of habitation anyone could see.
The Place of Kush stood isolated, as if to remind the people that the desert that lay beyond the hills was Kush’s domain. The God of Destruction—the King of Winds—was one of the six ancient Beings whose temples had formed the core of the Yellow City, whose names were considered unsafe to utter by the great majority of its people. The place, like the other five Sealed Temples, was ruinously old and very small, a stone sanctuary not much bigger than a shed, scored and cracked all over with the violence of sun and time, so that whatever carvings had once covered it were barely to be seen anymore. Kush had as little regard for his own dwelling as he had for anyone else’s.
That was one of the several very frightening things about Kush.
Oryn watched the door of the temple open, the door that was sealed at all other times. His father stood on the steps before the door, and it was his father who saw clearest what waited inside, the Servant of Kush wearing the mask of a lion. The adult Oryn—the waking Oryn—knew this from having stood on those steps himself. Two lesser priests stepped out and removed from Taras Greatsword’s broad shoulders the crimson military cloak he wore.
They dropped it on the steps, where it lay in the sunlight like a pool of blood, while everyone walked around the side of the temple to the enclosure behind it. Many brought boxes and stools to stand on—some even carried folding ladders, having lugged them the three miles from the city on their shoulders, knowing the crowd would be deep around the Place of the Lion. In his dream the child Oryn didn’t know what was happening in the temple; he clung to the hand of his tutor, Soth, whose long hair was still red, his blue eyes sharp and bright.
In his dream Oryn didn’t know that the Sun Mages, whose blue-and-gold robes stood out like flowers among the dull clothing of the other spectators, were there for any other purpose than to witness the king’s trial before the gods.
In his dream, Oryn didn’t know that his father would survive.
The enclosure was huge, far larger than even in waking life, where it stretched six hundred and seventy feet from the temple’s bleached stone pillars to the small locked door at its farther end. It was like a great courtyard, dug down into the earth to the depth of twenty feet, and the walls of it were faced with cut stone. When the winter sandstorms filled this pit, sometimes five and seven times in a month, teyn belonging to the temple were put to work digging it out at once: this had been the custom, time out of mind. It was as if the Veiled Gods said, There is no telling when the king will die.
Taras Greatsword stepped from the temple, walked down to the enclosure alone. He was naked but for a thin white shift, and his brown hair, short cropped like an ordinary soldier’s, glittered with sweat. He stood a head taller than nearly any man in the realm and his body was like hewed oak, marked with the scars of lances, of arrows, of swords. He was thirty-two years old.
Oryn’s hand tightened pleadingly on that of his tutor. Only a few months before his father had returned from war against the last Akarian pretenders to the throne at the news of the death of Oryn’s mother: poisoned, some said, by other concubines jealous of her position. Greatsword had lingered only long enough to report to his own father and to order Oryn taken away from his nurse and put into the charge of tutors, with strict instructions that the nervous, sensitive boy should be no more picked up or cuddled or have his hand held. Men do not cling to other men’s hands, he’d said.
It was the last Oryn had seen of his father before his grandfather’s death had brought Greatsword back to the Yellow City, to claim the kingship as his own.
As he looked down into the vast pit, Oryn had hated his father, hated him as much as he’d loved his mother and his gentle and lively nurse. He knew his hatred was wrong and that evil would come on him for feeling it—the tales his nurse had told him were full of evil, selfish, hate-filled people who’d come to dreadful ends—but he could not help what he felt. He was glad that Soth disregarded orders and risked a beating by closing his long cold fingers tighter around Oryn’s groping hand.
And in his dream, Oryn’s hatred had power.
When Taras Greatsword began to run the length of the pit, a door beneath the temple opened and a lion sprang forth. It was red maned and tawny, of the breed that haunted the rangelands beyond the White Lake, and could run down and kill the great long-horned cattle that roved there. Greatsword ran, not looking back, and the lion bounded after him, the crowd all shouting as if they were watching a game or a contest, the men screaming his name. Oryn’s heart was in his throat with panic and terror, but in his heart was also anger: for his mother’s death, for his nurse who had been sold to another master because Oryn had cried for her.
It was his anger that made his father trip and fall sprawling on the sand.
When he’d dreamed this, even as a child, he’d been able to smell the lion’s feral stink, to feel the grinding pain in his father’s palms and knees as he struck the sand. The scraping of hot pebbles and abraded flesh before the overwhelming agony of claws, teeth, and slamming weight. In his dream he was unable to hide his eyes or cover his face, but watched the lion tear his father to pieces—heard his father screaming.
Heard himself screaming, No! Papa, no! I didn’t mean it!
Because, of course, that had never happened.
Oryn jerked awake, trembling, gasping, the stink of the lion and of his father’s blood burning his nostrils.
In terror of power, and of what power could mean.
Lamplight made speckled patterns on the tile work of the Pavilion of Lilies. The gauze curtains shifted a little in the garden’s scented breeze. On the fountain’s edge in the moonlight, one of the palace cats cleaned her white-tipped paws.
Oryn sank back to the pillows of his bed, almost sick from the hammering of his heart. It did no good to tell himself that he knew perfectly well that his father had survived the test, had beaten the drugged lion handily to the second door, and had gone on to rule for seventeen years before he’d di
ed of a stroke after a gazelle hunt and a hot bath.
Nor to reflect that this particular dream hadn’t been as bad as others he’d had, concerning the fire or the snakes or the crocodiles. Even when he dreamed about his own experiences of the ordeals, there was always something—some voice in the back of his mind that whispered that he didn’t really need to fear. That he’d passed through them safely after all. That the Sun Mages wouldn’t really let him come to harm.
But the power of the Sun Mages was spent. And there was nothing to take its place. He was like a child again, he thought, staring up at the patterns of the lamplight, the shadowed glimmer of the painted beams. Like that child, watching the one most powerful in his world step into the hands of the gods without protection.
And be devoured.
Knowing that he would be next. And because of his own sins, he was unfit to survive.
“Do you see him?” asked Soth, above the soft splashing of the oarsmen’s strokes. Pomegranate angled her mirror to differently take the last of the full moon’s light, trying to summon Hokiros’s fearsome image in its depths. After half the night of walking along the banks where the King’s Canal was too shallow now to take a boat, it was good to get into the re-dug section, to feel they were making progress. To feel they were at last returning home.
And to be outrunning the mosquitoes that infested the morass of shallows behind them.
Pomegranate shook her head. “I see something,” she reported after a moment. “Moving shapes. The water’s murky that deep in the lake, but I think there are several, of different sizes.”
Soth muttered a curse.
Pomegranate raised her brows. “That’s what you said yourself had to be the case. And at least as far as I’ve been able to tell, the old boy hasn’t come ashore again.”
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