by Tad Williams
Vo did not think much of the harbor master’s defenses against smuggling, and thought it likely that the lackey’s visit had been more about the ceremonial exchange of bribes for permits than any actual search for contraband, but he could not help admiring the city’s fortifications. Hierosol’s eastern peninsula, which contained most of the anchorage, was as formidable as its reputation suggested, the seawalls ten times the height of a man, studded with gunports and bristling with cannon like the quills of a porcupine. On the far side of the Kulloan Strait stood the Finger, a narrow strip of land with its own heavy fortifications. Modern planners, reexamining the walls in this new age of cannonfire, had realized that if a determined attack should overthrow the much more thinly defended areas along the Finger, the heart of Hierosol would then be vulnerable to the citadel’s own guns. Thus, they had mounted smaller guns in those forts on the western side of the isthmus facing the city—cannons which could reach the middle of the strait, well within the compass of the eastern guns, but could not themselves reach the eastern wall.
Vo respected that in his cold way, as he respected most types of careful planning. If, as rumors suggested, Autarch Sulepis truly intended a conquest of Hierosol, Xis’ ancient rival, the Golden One would have hard work laid out before him.
Still, it would be interesting—a problem well worth the time and trouble, even without the rich reward of plunder, not to mention the choke hold a successful conqueror of Hierosol would gain on vast Lake Strivothos, the still mighty (and wealthy) kingdom of Syan, and the rest of the interior of Eion. Perhaps, Vo mused, after his own project was successfully concluded he might find himself moving higher in the circles of the autarch’s advisers. Yes, it would be a grand entertainment to devote adequate time and attention to cracking open Hierosol’s mighty walls like a nut, exposing all the frail, human flesh within to the mercies of the autarch’s armies, especially Vo’s own comrades, the White Hounds. If such a day came the Hounds would bloody their muzzles well, there was no doubt about that. Vo did not think particularly highly of the cleverness of his fellow Perikalese mercenaries but he had a deep respect for their essential hunger for combat. They were well-named: you could kennel them for years, but when you let them out, they struck like red Nature.
As he thought about it he could almost smell blood in the salty air, and for a moment the seagulls’ shrill cries seemed the lamentation of bereaved women. Daikonas Vo felt a thrill of anticipation, like a child being taken to the fair.
His belongings in a seabag slung across his shoulder, Vo gave the trading ship’s captain a farewell nod as he stepped onto the gangplank. The captain, flush with the pride of a man about to unload a full cargo hold, returned the gesture with magisterial condescension.
The merchant captain had proved to be a garrulous fool, and for that Vo was grateful. During their conversations on the eight-day crossing from Xis to Hierosol he had told Vo so much about his fellow captain Axamis Dorza that he had saved Vo days of work, without ever once wondering why this low-level servant of the palace (for so Daikonas Vo had presented himself) should be asking all those questions. In ordinary circumstances Vo would have found it hard to resist killing the captain and throwing him overboard—the man talked with his mouth full as he ate, for one thing, and dribbled bits of food onto his beard and clothes, and he had an even more annoying habit of saying, “I swear it, by the red-hot doors of the house of Nushash!” a dozen times or so in every conversation—but Vo was not going to complicate his mission. The memory of the autarch’s cousin spewing blood and writhing helplessly on the floor was very much with him.
Daikonas Vo did not know whether he believed in the gods or not. He certainly did not much care whether they existed—if they did, their interest and involvement in human life was so capricious as to be, ultimately, no different in effect than pure chance. What he did believe in was Daikonas Vo: his own subtle pleasures and displeasures made up the whole of his cosmos. He did not want that cosmos to come to an early end. A world without Daikonas Vo at the center of it could not exist.
Very few people looked at him as he made his way along the busy harbor front, and those who did scarcely seemed able to see him, as though he were not fully visible. That was in part because of his outward appearance, which, because of his Perikalese ancestry, was similar to many of the folk he passed. He was also slight in build, or at least appeared that way, not short, but certainly not tall. Mostly, though, eyes slid off him because Daikonas Vo wanted it that way. He had discovered the trick of stillness when he was young, when first his father and then later his mother’s other male friends had stormed through the house, drunk and angry, or his mother had played out her own shrieking madness; the trick had been to become so calm, so invisible, that all the rage blew past him like a thunderstorm while he lay sheltered in the secret cove of his own silence.
The passersby might not look at him, but Vo looked at them. He was a spy by nature, curious in a mildly contemptuous way as always about creatures that seemed to him like another species from himself, things that wore their emotions as openly as their clothes, faces that reflected fear and anger and something he had come to recognize as joy, although he could not connect it to his own more abstract pleasures. They were like apes, these ordinary folk, carrying on their private lives in the full sight of anyone with eyes to see, the adults as uncontrolled in their bleatings and grimaces as the children. In this regard the Hierosolines around him now were barely different from the people of Xis, who did at least have the sense to clothe the revealing nakedness of their wives and daughters from foot to crown, although not for the reason Vo would have done so. Here in Hierosol the women seemed to dress any way they chose, some decently modest in loose robes and veils or scarves that covered their heads and part of their faces, but some nearly as shameless as the men, with necks, shoulders, legs, and most especially their faces exposed for all to see. Vo had seen women naked, of course, and many times at that. Like his fellow Perikalese mercenaries he had visited the brothels outside the palace’s Lily Gate many times, although in his case it had been mostly because not to do so would have attracted attention, and Vo hated attention even more than he disliked pain. He had used some of the women as they chose to be used, but after the first time, when the oddness of the experience had some value in itself, it had meant little to him. He understood that copulation was a great motivator of mankind and perhaps even womankind as well, but to him it seemed only another ape trick, different from eating and defecating only because it could not be practiced solitarily, but required company.
Vo paused, his attention returned to the ships moving placidly in the gentle tides of the bay, tied up alongside the quay like so many great cows in a barn. That one, there, with the lean bow like the snout of a hunting animal: that must be the one he sought. The name painted in sweeping Xixian characters was unfamiliar, but anyone could change a name. It was less easy to hide the shape of a ship as swift as Jeddin’s.
Daikonas Vo approached the gangway and looked up to the nearly empty deck. It could be that Dorza, her captain, was not here. If that was so, he would ask some questions and Dorza would be found. He felt confident that he could get everything else he needed from Axamis Dorza himself. It was an impossibly long coincidence that the captain should sail out from Xis in the disgraced Jeddin’s own ship on the very night of both the Leopard captain’s arrest and the disappearance of Vo’s quarry. Captain Jeddin, despite torments that had impressed even Vo, had denied any involvement with the girl Qinnitan, but his denial seemed suspicious in itself: why would a man watching his own fingers and toes being torn loose from his body protect a girl he barely knew instead of assenting to anything the inquisitors seemed to want to hear? It certainly did not correspond with Vo’s thorough experience of humanity in its final extremes.
He shouldered his bag and walked up the gangplank of the ship that had been the Morning Star of Kirous, whistling an old Perikalese work song his father used to sing while beating him.
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nbsp; Since Dorza had thrown her out, it had taken Qinnitan several days and many inquiries to find this woman, the laundry mistress. In the meantime, she had found herself in a situation she had never imagined in all her life, sleeping rough in the alleys of Hierosol, eating only what the mute boy Pigeon could steal. It could have been worse, but Pigeon had proved surprisingly adept at pilfering. From what Qinnitan could grasp of his story, he had not been fed well in the autarch’s palace and he and the other young slaves had been forced to supplement their meager fare with thievery.
The citadel’s laundry was huge, a vast space that had once perhaps been a trader’s warehouse, but which now was filled not with cedar wood and spices but tubs of steaming water, dozens of them—the room, Qinnitan marveled, must exist in a permanent fog. Every tub had two or three women leaning over it, and scores more women and young boys were carrying buckets from the great cauldron set in the floor at the center of the room, which was kept continually bubbling by a fire in the basement. As Qinnitan watched, one of the girls slopped water over the edge of a bucket onto herself and then collapsed to the ground, shrieking. A woman of middle years, impressively thick-limbed but not fat, came over to examine the hurt girl, then gave her a cuff on the head and sent her off with two other washwomen before directing a third to take the bucket which the injured girl had somehow miraculously not dropped. The big woman stood with her hands on her hips and watched the wounded soldier being helped off the battlefield, her expression that of someone who knows that the gods have no other occupation but to fill her life with petty annoyances.
Qinnitan gestured for Pigeon to wait by the doorway. The laundry-mistress watched her approach, scowling at this clear sign that her day was about to be unfairly interrupted again.
“What do you want?” she said in flat, unfriendly Hierosoline.
Qinnitan made a little bow, not entirely for show: up close, the woman was quite amazingly large and her sun-darkened skin made her seem something carved out of wood, a statue or a ship of war or something else worthy of deferential approach. “You…Soryaza are?” she asked, aware that her Hierosoline was barbarous.
“Yes, I am, and I am a busy woman. What do you want?”
“You…from Xis? Speak Xis?”
“For the love of the gods,” the woman grumbled, and then switched to Xixian. “Yes, I speak the tongue, although it’s been years since I lived in the cursed place. What do you want?”
Qinnitan took a deep breath, one obstacle passed. “I am very sorry to bother you, Mistress Soryaza. I know you are an important person, with all this…” She spread her hands to indicate the sea of washing-tubs.
Soryaza wasn’t so easily flattered. “Yes?”
“I…I have lost my father and my mother.” Qinnitan had prepared the story carefully. “When my mother died of the coughing fever last summer, my father decided to bring me and my brother back here to Hierosol. But on the ship he too caught a fever and I nursed him for several months before he died.” She cast her eyes down. “I have nowhere to go, and no relatives here or in Xis who will take me and my brother in.”
Soryaza raised an eyebrow. “Brother? Are you sure you do not mean a lover? Tell the truth, girl.”
Qinnitan pointed to Pigeon. The child stood by the door with his eyes wide, looking as though he might flee at a sudden loud noise. “There. He cannot speak but he is a good boy.”
“All right, brother it is. But what in the gods’ names could this possibly have to do with me?” Soryaza was already wiping her hands on her voluminous apron, like someone who is finished with something and about to move on to the next task.
This was the risky part. “I…I heard you were once a Hive Sister.”
Both eyebrows rose. “Did you? And what do you know of such things?”
“I was one myself—an acolyte. But when my mother was dying I left the Hive to help her. They would have let me come back, I’m certain, but my father wanted me here in Hierosol, his home.” She let a little of the very real tension and fear mount up from inside her, where she had kept it carefully bottled for so long. Her voice quivered and her eyes filled with tears. “And now my brother and I must sleep in the alleyways by the harbor, and men…men try…”
Soryaza’s brown face softened a little, but only a little. “Who was the high priestess when you were there? Tell me, girl, and quickly.”
“Rugan.”
“Ah, yes. I remember when she was merely a priestess, but she had a head on her shoulders.” She nodded. “Do the priests still come into the Hive every morning to collect the sacred honey?”
Qinnitan stared, surprised by such a strange, illogical question. Had things changed so much since this woman’s days as a priestess? Then she realized she was still being tested. “No, Mistress Soryaza,” she said carefully. “The priests never come in…except for a few Favored who tend the altar of Nushash, that is. No true men do. And the honey only goes to the priests twice a year.” The amount sent in the winter ceremony was slight, only enough taken from the jars covered with holy seals to symbolize the light of the magnificent, holy sun that would survive the cold months and return again. Then, in summer, the high priestess herself and her four Carriers always took the wagon filled with jars of sacred honey to the high priest of Nushash during the important ceremony of Queening, when the new hives were begun and the weariest of the old hives were sacrificed to the flames. The high priest took that honey and presented it to the autarch, or so it was told: Qinnitan and the other acolytes never saw any of the ceremonies that took place outside the Hive, even one so important as the delivery of the god’s honey.
“And the Oracle?”
“Mudri, Mistress. She spoke to me once.” But that was telling more than she needed to. Fortunately, Soryaza didn’t seem to notice.
“Ah, Mudri, was it? Hands of Surigali, she was there when I was a girl and she was old then.”
“They say she has outlived four autarchs.”
“The gods bless her and keep her, then. One autarch was enough for me, and now I hear there’s a new one who means even less good than his father.”
Qinnitan flinched at this casual blasphemy, so trained was she in the decorous and unthinking autarch-praise of the Seclusion. Still, she thought, I could tell her things about this autarch that would freeze her blood. She felt a small thrill of power even as the memories brought a rush of fear. She had survived—she, Qinnitan, had escaped. Had any other wife ever left the Seclusion except in a casket?
“Well, then, I believe your story, child,” Soryaza said. “I will find work for you. You can sleep with the other girls, those who live here—some stay nights with their families. But you will work, I promise you! Harder than you’ve ever done. The Hive is a dream of paradise compared to the palace laundries.”
“What about my…my brother?”
Soryaza regarded the boy sourly. He straightened up in an effort to look useful, even though from such a distance he could have no idea what was being discussed. “Is he clean? Does he have decent habits—or has he been allowed to run wild like most simpleminded children?”
“He’s not simpleminded, Mistress, just mute. In truth, he’s very clever, and he will work hard.”
“Hmmmph. We’ll see. I suppose I can find a few things for an able child to turn his hand to.”
“You are very kind, Mistress Soryaza. Thank you so much. We won’t give you any cause to regret…”
“I have regrets enough already,” the laundry-mistress said. “More if you don’t stop chattering. Go with Yazi—the one with the red arms, there. She’s a southerner, too. She’ll show you what to do.” She turned to leave, then stopped and looked Qinnitan over, a disconcertingly shrewd appraisal. “There’s more than you’re telling me, of course. I can hear from your way of speaking, though, that the part about the Hive is true. No poor girl gets a place there, and no poor girl ever spoke like you. You’ll have to learn to talk proper Hierosoline, though—you can’t get away with Xixian here, someone will kno
ck your head in. They don’t care much for the autarch in this city.”
“I will, Mistress!”
“What’s your name?”
Qinnitan’s mouth fell open. With all the talk about the Hive, she had forgotten the false name she had chosen, and now it had vanished as though it had never existed. In a stretching instant that seemed hours, her mind flitted wildly from one woman’s name to another, her sisters Ashretan and Cheryazi, her friend Duny, even Arimone the autarch’s paramount wife, but then lighted on that of a girl who actually had left the Hive, an older acolyte whom Qinnitan had envied and admired.
“Nira!” she said. “Nira. My name is Nira.”
“Your name must be ‘addled,’ girl, if it takes you so long to remember. Go now, and I had better not catch you standing around with your mouth hanging open—everyone works here.”
“Thank you again, Mistress. You have done…”
But Soryaza had already turned her back on Qinnitan and was on her way across the steaming laundry floor, off to deal with whatever practical joke rude Fate would next set in her path.
Axamis Dorza, sensing something wrong when no one responded to his greeting, came through the door with surprising delicacy for a big man. The captain seemed to have some idea of the pantomime Vo had prepared for him, but though he was obviously a clearheaded fellow and not to be underestimated, his eyes still grew wide when he saw the blood on the floor. When he in turn observed Dorza’s heavily muscled arms, Vo took his blade back a few finger-widths from the boy’s throat: he didn’t want things happening too quickly. If he had to kill the boy he’d lose much of his leverage; if he had to kill Captain Dorza before he could be made to speak, the entire day’s careful work would be wasted.
“What are you doing?” Axamis Dorza said hoarsely. “What do you want?”
“A few words. Some friendly conversation.” Vo slowly moved the blade back until its needle-sharp tip touched the boy’s convulsing throat. “So let us all move slowly. If you tell me what I need to know I will not harm the boy. Your son?”
