by Kate Elliott
“We saw a strange light in the sky,” said their captain.
“I saw it, too,” said Tess, without moving from the ground. “It was an omen.”
“We’ll escort you back to camp, then.”
“Tomorrow,” she said. “I just can’t go any farther tonight.”
So they spent the night in the little valley, Tess sleeping on coats and under blankets provided by the riders, guarded by a ring of fires, and in the morning they remarked on the strange burn on the ground in the center of the valley and saddled their horses and formed up around Tess. If they thought it strange to have found her out here, practically alone, they did not discuss their thoughts with Aleksi. Tess was pale and still horribly tired. They rode back toward Karkand slowly, stopping frequently. The day was overcast, and the light had an eerie yellow quality to it.
Soon enough they began to pass refugees from the city. At first clumps of them, cowering away from the patrol. A woman carried a baby on her back and held another child by the hand. An old woman stumbled along, weak and crying, and a little boy dragged a bundle behind him and followed in her wake. Larger groups, families, trudged along the road. Children wailed. A broken-down old horse bore an injured woman slumped over its neck, her thigh a bloody mass of tissue, open to the air. They had nothing but the clothes on their backs, and a few of the lucky ones, a handful of possessions wrapped in cloth, whatever they had grabbed before being driven from the city. A gray-haired woman walked under the weight of a silk bundle. A tall woman with a strong, dark face stopped to shift a pack of roughspun cloth to a better position on her back. A baby shrieked. A woman clad in rich damask linen sobbed with each step, holding a hand to her throat. Two girls held a limping crone between them, helping her along. Most kept their heads bowed. An adolescent girl, her face veiled, balanced a large ceramic vase on her head, walking steadily, only her eyes showing dark and angry as she watched the riders pass.
Tess wept, to see them struggling along.
As they rode on, as morning passed to midday and midday into afternoon, the trickle became a stream, the stream a flood. Hordes of them; Aleksi had not known so many people, even khaja, could live together in one place. No wonder they were weak, crammed like insects into a rotted stump or an old hollow log. They walked, heads bowed. A layer of ash covered their clothes, and at their backs smoke rose into the heavens, a dark blot against the gray clouds far above. As the riders neared the jaran camp, they could see Karkand burning.
“My God,” said Tess. “Isn’t there a rise, where we can look?”
It was a relief to veer away from the road and along a trampled field until they reached a low ridge which gave them a vantage of the city.
Karkand burned. A huge black funnel of smoke marked it, and spits of flame. Aleksi watched the lines of refugees, like tiny insects, leaving the city along the roads and out through the fields. He saw the riders, moving among them, and wagons trundling away toward the jaran camp. In the middle of the blazing city, the huge dome of the temple glowed red with fire. Clouds of heat shimmered out from it, and the intense glow of the flames cast a hot, violent light up into the sky. As they watched, the dome collapsed into a monstrous cloud of ash and smoke that billowed into the air and shrouded the western horizon so that they could not even see the setting sun.
“Goddess save us,” murmured Maggie. “Why did he order this? The whole city is going, all of it, even the suburbs are in flames. And it was so beautiful. Now it looks like a funeral pyre.”
Tears streaked Tess’s face. “Don’t you see?” she asked, shaking her head. “It is a funeral pyre. For our son. For everyone who died today, for everyone who will die. For Charles.” She wiped her face with the back of one hand, but it only streaked grime over her cheeks, blending with her tears. “For Rhui.”
“Look.” Aleksi pointed at the same time that the patrol captain did. “There is Bakhtiian’s banner. He must be riding out to look for you.”
“We’ll wait for him here,” said Tess.
So they met on the ridge, Tess and Bakhtiian, he with the pall of the dying city at his back, she with her face to it.
He said nothing, only drew his horse in beside her and raised one eyebrow, questioning. He looked remarkably neat for a man who had just destroyed a city and defeated an entire kingdom, with his armor newly polished and his surcoat untorn and marked only by a fine layer of ash. He wore his victory with pride but without gloating.
Tess lifted her right hand, to show him the ring. “I am now the Prince of Jeds.”
He regarded her measuringly, as he might measure any threat to his power. “Where is your brother?”
“He’s dead.”
He took the news with no change of expression. “We still have no treaty between your lands and mine,” he said quietly.
“That’s true.” She looked beyond him, toward Karkand. “I have seen what you and I must do: We must unite all the lands against the coming of the khepelli, whether while we live or when our grandchildren rule. What can you offer me, Bakhtiian, in return for my alliance?”
His mouth lifted, not quite into a smile. He twisted for the first time and cast a glance back toward the conflagration. Then he turned back to gaze on her again.
He drew his saber and held it up between them. “My army, which is my sword. And my vision, which was granted to me by the gods. That is all I have, and everything I have.”
Tess stared at the inferno that was Karkand. Over the night and on that day’s journey, she had seemed to Aleksi to change somehow, as if the ring her brother had given her had altered her forever. She was still Tess, but she was also a prince now, invested with a greater power than anyone here but Aleksi and Maggie, and she herself, knew. It was almost as if Karkand was her own pyre, burning away what she once was and creating her anew.
“Your army and your vision,” she said, meeting her husband’s gaze. “That will do.”
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
FINE ASH RAINED DOWN on David’s head. He brushed at his hair, but it was useless. It coated everything, fine white ash and grittier black chunks. His boots crunched on it, and the beautiful woven patterns of the jaran tents lay hidden beneath it. He coughed, and coughed again, and finally gave up and held a scrap of cloth over his mouth and nose.
Although it was late afternoon, some of the encampments were breaking up, loading their goods into wagons and heading south to escape the constant shower. He arrived at their own camp just as Maggie rode in, looking soot-stained and tired.
“David!” She swung down from her horse and beckoned him over. A jaran boy ran up and took the horse from her, and Maggie wiped her nose with the back of her hand and sneezed. “Goddess, this is terrible. David. Have you heard about Charles?”
David blinked through his exhaustion. “What about Charles? I’ve been gone from camp since yesterday dawn, since they launched the assault.”
“Charles left.”
He thought he had heard her wrong. “Left?”
Heavy clouds covered the sky, but the quality of sunlight was peculiar, a warm yellow light instead of the silvery gray of the usual overcast day. The air was dry and smelled of burning. “He left Rhui.”
“Is there a chair?” David asked, sure that he was simply so tired that he was hallucinating. “I think I need to sit down. Why?”
“Duke Naroshi had Hon Echido and a few other members of Keinaba House detained for breaking the interdiction. Only Charles can sort it out. But if Naroshi is watching him, then he can’t risk returning to Rhui. He doesn’t want there to be any chance that the Chapalii catch on to what we’re doing, at least not by trailing him. So he handed his signet ring over to Tess, and he left on a shuttle last evening.”
“On a shuttle?” David retreated under the awning of Charles’s tent, and there, groping, he found a chair and sank down into it. “Oy vey,” he muttered. “So much for the interdiction.”
“Oh, the Rhuians don’t know about the shuttle. He’s officially dead, as far as th
e Rhuian natives are concerned. And Tess remains officially deceased off-planet. But on Rhui, Tess is now Prince of Jeds. We have to make our own way back to Jeds—damn him, I wish I could have gone with him. And the actors. They’ll have to know as well. I’m not sure what Tess intends, but I think Charles wants her and Bakhtiian to centralize as much of the planet—or at least this continent, I suppose—as they can, so that when he begins the new rebellion he’ll be able to bring Rhui wholesale into the League with little resistance.”
“All the same,” said David. “So much for the interdiction. Maybe it was a vain hope.” Even under the awning, the breeze wafted flakes and fine chunks of charcoal along to land on the carpet. A singed scrap of parchment rolled in on a gust of wind and sank and came to rest against David’s boot. Reflexively, he picked it up. “Look at this, Maggie,” he said, raising it up for her to see.
It was a page from a book or a manuscript: a gorgeously painted miniature of a hunting scene, lions and gazelles in flight and horsemen in pursuit, their mounts lovingly portrayed; a piebald, two chestnuts, three blacks, and a dappled gray harnessed with gold bridles and saddles. Through the rocks and bushes behind the mounted men trudged servants bearing two fringed litters in which sat veiled women in rich damask robes. Stylized rows of the angular Habakar script bordered the edge of the painting, where they hadn’t been burned away.
“We are going to destroy her in the end.” As he said it, he felt the truth of the words, and he felt a deep and abiding sadness for what was bound to be lost.
Maggie took the parchment page from him and smoothed it out. “I’ll preserve this,” she said. “I’d say that the jaran army is already well on its way to destroying Karkand, and the kingdom, too, I suppose, although they did leave Hamrat and some other cities unmolested.”
“No,” said David softly. “I meant Rhui.”
She grunted. “Well, it’s too late to have regrets now. Oh, David. It was bound to happen. At least they’ll have a running start. And it will take decades to build up the saboteur network. Where is Ursula, anyway?”
“I haven’t seen her since yesterday dawn.”
“Let her know, if you see her. I’m going to see Cara and give her the details.” She strode away.
With the heavy cloud cover and the screen of smoke along the western horizon, afternoon hazed early into twilight. David cleaned himself up as best he could and crawled into his tent. The camp was deserted. He supposed that Cara and Jo were still at the hospital; certainly they had enough to do. Rajiv—well, wasn’t Rajiv having an affair with one of the actors? He leaned back on his bedroll and shut his eyes, but instead of peace he saw the beautiful painting, curled black at the edges, smudged by grit. What had Charles said? “And the approaching tide/Will shortly fill the reasonable shores/That now lie foul and muddy.” But who was to say which was more contaminated, the swelling tide or the waiting shoreline?
“David?” Her voice, a whisper.
“Dina!” The next instant, she had ducked inside the tent. Then, checking her movement, she paused and crouched at the entrance. There was no light in here. He saw her only as a dark shadow against the paler wall of canvas. “Dina. What are you doing here?”
“I don’t know.” But she shifted and sat, blocking the entrance. “I wanted to see you. My uncle says that the Prince of Jeds is dead.”
David swallowed. When he spoke, he found that his voice shook. “Yes. Yes, he’s dead. Tess is prince now.”
“Tess reigns there, Ilya here,” Nadine murmured. “How long until they want to unite their princedoms and all the lands that lie between? David, are you leaving, then? You and the others?”
“I—it’s all very abrupt. Yes, we’ll have to, as soon as we can get to a port, get ship to Jeds.”
“Tess, too? Will she leave for Jeds?”
“I don’t think so. I don’t know—it’s all so sudden.”
Even within the tent, the smell of soot and fire and smoke permeated everything. Yet he felt her presence just as strongly, not a meter from him, as still and silent as she sat. It was so unlike her to be so subdued.
When she spoke at last, her voice was so quiet he barely heard it. “May I stay, tonight? And on other nights, now and again, until you’ve gone?”
He wanted to ask about her husband, but he dared not. He wanted to ask, but he didn’t want to know, and in any case, weren’t jaran women free to take lovers if they wished to? He wanted her to stay. Tonight especially, after the horrible two days he had spent; for the comfort, yes, but for her more than anything, because he cared for her.
No, it was worse than that. He loved her, but he could not admit it, not to her, not to anyone; barely to himself. So wouldn’t a clean break be easiest? Wouldn’t it be harder, dragging it out like this, however many days or weeks they spent with the army, with her, until he left for good?
Even as he sat there, torn, she scooted forward. As soon as she touched him, her fingers brushing up his arm to his shoulder and curving around to the base of his neck, to touch, each one separately, his four name braids, he spoke without meaning to.
“Yes.”
By the evening of the second day, Diana was relieved and more than relieved when Dr. Hierakis dismissed her from her duties and told her to go back to the Company camp and sleep. Two days and a night of an unremitting stream of casualties had worn her down to a thread.
Gwyn walked with her through camp, his right hand light on her elbow. “This ash is disgusting,” he said, just to talk, she suspected, to have a normal conversation after hour upon hour of tending to bloodied and mutilated soldiers. Karkand lit the western horizon, a dull, ugly glow.
“Yes,” Diana agreed, playing into the part, “it’s terrible.”
“Hey! Wait for me!” Hal jogged up behind them, falling in beside Diana.
“Is there anyone else?” Diana asked.
“No,” said Hal. “We’re the only ones who can stomach it for that long. Why should they anyway, if they don’t want to?”
“How can they not?” demanded Diana. “How can they stand and watch when there’s something they could be doing?”
“Di.” Hal hesitated.
At once, she knew he’d had news of Anatoly. “What is it?”
“No, I just heard, from a rider—”
“Go on.”
“Just a rumor. It’s probably not true.”
“Go on!”
“That Sakhalin led a charge in through the main gates of the city, and his jahar got caught behind the lines and massacred. But you know it’s all confused. Half the army is still out in the city.”
Gwyn glanced toward the western horizon. “Surely not in the city still.”
“I don’t know. Goddess, I didn’t want to tell you, but I thought you ought to know what people were saying. What the reports were.”
“Thank you,” said Diana grimly. But it was what she had expected all along. All day she had waited for this news. She accepted it bleakly, without surprise. Gwyn’s hand tightened on her elbow, and a moment later Hal closed in beside her and rested a hand on her back, so that it was as if they two supported her, the grieving widow. It was some comfort.
At camp, Owen and Ginny had called a meeting inside the big tent, although it was mild outside. Only inside the tents were they free from the constant fall of ash. Gwyn and Hal made a little shield around Diana that only Quinn was allowed to penetrate. Quinn sank down beside Diana and draped an arm over Diana’s shoulders, and Diana sighed and leaned her head on Quinn’s tunic.
Owen was all on fire. He was focused, and pacing.
“We have two important pieces of news,” said Ginny, after Yomi had called everyone to order. “Charles Soerensen left Rhui abruptly, by shuttle, last night.”
Anahita, sitting in her usual sullen silence, flared to life. “And he didn’t offer to take us with him? The selfish bastard.”
“Anahita, shut up,” said Ginny mildly. “So, the Company line is that he’s dead, and that his sister is
now prince. Owen and I just spoke with her in her camp. Poor thing. She’d ridden quite a ways, and her just having lost the baby.” She frowned, glanced at her son, and paused.
“We’re starting a new experiment,” said Owen into her silence, in his fiercest voice, which Diana knew betokened some great roiling plan. “I want your cooperation. I’m bringing a new actor into the troupe. A jaran man. I got a dispensation from Tess Soerensen to take him and his family off planet with us. I want to see how he adapts to theater, coming from the background that he does.”
“What?” Hal murmured, “like a rat negotiating a maze? Dad, don’t you think that’s a little cruel?”
Owen blinked. “Cruel? What curious words you use, Henry. Well, there’s nothing for him here. He’ll be crippled for life if he stays here. Why shouldn’t he come with us? He’ll be wonderful. It will take work, and you’ll all have to be very generous for a while—”
“But who is it?” asked Quinn.
“It’s Vasil Veselov, isn’t it?” asked Diana. She looked at Gwyn, and he at her, and they both nodded, together.
“Hold on,” said Ginny. “We haven’t done with the first bit, yet. Tess Soerensen will be escorting us to a port, so that we and those of Soerensen’s party who didn’t leave with him can return to Jeds and thence to Earth. Oh, and Veselov’s family will be joining us once we leave this area. He has a wife and two small children.”
“Ginny,” said Diana, “did anyone ask Karolla if she wanted to leave the tribes?”
“Karolla? Who is Karolla?”
“She’s Veselov’s wife.”
Ginny shrugged. “I don’t know, but Tess said that she had cleared it all with the headwoman of the Veselov tribe. Let me see. Burckhardt left with Soerensen, or not with him precisely—never mind. Yomi, what other details do they need?”
Yomi discussed logistics for a while, but Diana could not concentrate. She felt a kind of numb relief that Marco Burckhardt was gone, insofar as she could feel anything. Mostly she felt hollow. Someone would come, tomorrow, the day after, a week from now, bringing Anatoly’s body. Then she felt faint, sick with horror. What if they had already burned him? What if the jaran dead had just been left in Karkand, if Bakhtiian had used the city itself for the funeral pyre for his soldiers? She tried desperately to picture Anatoly exactly as she had last seen him, proud and confident as he rode away into battle, but she could not bring the image into focus.
