Empire of Grass

by Tad Williams

  After a few moments the wagon holding Fremur and his men lurched forward and then turned in a slow circle to head out of the hills. The last Fremur saw of Unver was a darkened shape crumpled against the post at the base of the great stone, motionless but for a slow trickle of blood down his chest. He seemed lifeless as the husk of a dead beetle.

  21

  Among the War-Shrikes

  Nezeru came back to herself at last, bound, betrayed, and groggy. She was tied into the saddle, her face against the neck of Jarnulf’s horse, and the pounding of its hooves shook her until she could barely think. And each moment that passed carried her farther into unknown reaches.

  Nezeru struggled against her bonds, but could find no quick way loose. Jarnulf might be a traitor to the queen and Nakkiga, she thought in disgust, but he knew how to make a knot. As the horse thundered on she grunted and stretched her arms against the ropes, ignoring the pain as she began the long process of freeing herself.

  * * *

  • • •

  The white horse had finally slowed to a canter by the time she worked one hand free. Her face still pressed against the horse’s sweating back, Nezeru began working the rest of her arm back and forth, gripping a loop of her bonds for leverage. As she did so she felt a lump beneath the coils of cord and began to dig under the rope, trying to work her hand between the tight coils, and was at last able to touch something hard with her fingertips. It took no small time to wriggle it loose, but by the time she could wrap her fingers all the way around it, she could tell it was her own knife, still in its sheath. Jarnulf had gone out of his way to tie it just within her reach—he must have known she would find it eventually. Which meant he had given her a way to escape.

  He is truly mad. Mortal thought, at least his, seemed far beyond Nezeru’s understanding.

  She cut the bonds holding her tight to the horse’s back, and could at last sit up straight. Ignoring the terrible ache of her muscles, she grabbed at the pale mane and pulled back until the horse stopped and reared, whinnying. A moment later she slid off in a mess of uncoiling cord.

  Nezeru hit the ground hard and rolled. For a dozen swift heartbeats or more she could only lie on her back staring up at the trees and the darkening sky as she struggled to get air into her chest. She heard the horse stamping anxiously nearby, then it turned and went crashing through the forest, still performing the task its master had set even after its burden was gone. Nezeru tried to rise but her legs were wobbly as willow branches, and she could only take a few steps before she stumbled and fell to her knees. She let her forehead sag to the ground until the blackness cleared. When she next looked up, she could no longer hear the horse’s hoofbeats on the forest floor.

  She remembered that she still had kei-vishaa on her face from Jarnulf’s attack, so she took up a handful of earth and leaves and scrubbed at her mouth and chin. As her head began to clear she crawled back to the spot where she had fallen with the idea of gathering up the rope, but quickly saw that something else lay half-covered in the splay of coils—a sheathed sword.

  She recognized the scabbard immediately; the incised runes on the witchwood blade only confirmed what she already knew. Cold Root, Makho’s fabled sword, she marveled. The blade of General Suno’ku herself! By the Blood of the Garden, the mortal has given me that as well!

  Nezeru crouched, stunned. She did not know where she was and could not understand why she had been chosen by Jarnulf for this incomprehensible treatment, but had a sudden, icy premonition that after this, nothing in her life would ever be the same.

  * * *

  • • •

  Three nights and three days alone in the woods did nothing to further Nezeru’s understanding of why the mortal Jarnulf had kidnapped her. Not that it mattered; she was bent only on finding her way back to the rest of her companions to denounce him and see him get the punishment he deserved. She even hoped she would be allowed to do it herself—separating Jarnulf’s treacherous head from his neck would be the only truly satisfying thing that had happened to her since she had left Nakkiga. But she did not know how far his horse had carried her, or what path it had taken—the hills were covered in slabs of white granite that showed no tracks, even to the trained eyes of a Talon. She could only hope she was still in the foothills of Urmsheim, close to Saomeji and the giant, but the position of the sun and nightime stars suggested that she was instead far south of any place she remembered—and now she was on foot as well. She knew it would take an overwhelming effort to catch up to her companions before they met up with the company that Akhenabi had promised to send from Nakkiga, so she forced her bruised body into a rigorous march. She scrambled over fallen trees and leaped from one flat place to another like one of the mountain sheep that inhabited Urmsheim’s most inaccessible slopes. She was hungry and remembered a small supply of puju in her jacket. The unwanted ride on Jarnulf’s horse, however, had crushed it to a powder that she had to swallow in dry, dusty bites. It barely kept her going, but she dared not take the time to hunt, not if she held any hope of catching up with the rest of the Talons and settling accounts with the mortal huntsman.

  Nezeru hurried down the sloping foothills trying to remember everything that had led up to Jarnulf’s act of treachery. Each riddle she examined seemed to have another set of questions nested inside it, layer after infuriating layer. The mortal had often tried to confuse her with questions that had no sane answers. She swore now that she would get her answers from Jarnulf himself—if that was even his name—in the true, time-honored Sacrifice manner, with a blade at his throat, before she ended him.

  * * *

  • • •

  The purple of dawn was the first thing Nezeru saw when she opened her eyes, but it seemed a bitter hue. More time lost. The kei-vishaa seemed to be lingering in her blood: when she had stopped to rest she had fallen into a sleep deeper than any she had known. Now it was clear that hours had been wasted.

  But even as she struggled to order her groggy thoughts, to rise and begin again, a hand coiled in her war-braid and something sharp pressed against her throat. “Do not move, deserter,” said a voice in quiet Hikeda’yasao, “or your sentence will be rendered here and now.”

  Nezeru stayed motionless, but her heart skipped a beat in relief. She had been found by her own people—perhaps even the soldiers sent to meet Saomeji and the rest with their prisoned dragon! “I will give no resistance,” she said promptly. “I am no deserter, either. I am a Queen’s Talon, on the queen’s business. Let me sit up, and I will keep my hands lifted so you can see that I hold no weapon.”

  “You may not hold a weapon at this moment,” the voice said close to her ear. “But you have a sword you are not grand enough to carry, I think, and I see another blade at your belt. Wait until my fellow scouts join me before you move or I will let out your blood.” The sharp point against her throat pushed harder, a sting like a horsefly’s bite. “Sit and be silent.”

  Within moments two more shapes glided all but soundlessly out of the trees. They wore pale garments smeared with mud and pine needles, so that they almost seemed part of the forest. Nezeru was grateful to have been found, but ashamed to have slept so deeply that ordinary Sacrifices could surround her without waking her. Still, after the shambles her own Queen’s Hand had become, it was almost soothing to find a troop of her order performing their duties with grace and skill.

  The first scout gave her a nod to say she could sit up, but did not let go of her hair or take the knife from her throat.

  “I am Queen’s Talon Nezeru, a Sacrifice of Chieftain’s Makho’s Hand,” she said. “Why do you treat me like an enemy?”

  “Speak only to answer,” he told her. “What are you doing here, prowling near Fortress Dark Lantern?”

  She did not recognize the name. She turned slowly toward him. His skin was pale as birch bark and a stripe of black had been daubed from temple to temple, surrounding his eyes like a m
ask, but she guessed by the shape of his face that he was probably a halfblood like Nezeru herself. “Who are you, Sacrifice?”

  He met her stare with defiance. “I am Scout Rinde of the Legion Sey-Jok’kochi—the War-Shrikes.”

  “Were you sent to meet our Hand?”

  He shook his head. “No more questions from you, Sacrifice. Our commander will decide your fate.” He stood up and slid his slender bronze knife into a sheath on the arm of his muddied jacket. “Now stand and walk before us. My companions both have bows. If you move too swiftly they will put half a dozen arrows in you before you can escape.”

  “I have no interest in escaping.” She let them prod her onto her feet, then walked with them, the one called Rinde at her elbow and the other two pacing silently behind her down the slope.

  * * *

  Tzoja’s days in hiding by the underground lake were long and she had little to occupy her thoughts but memories. She thought often of her daughter Nezeru, but after a year of not knowing where in the world she might be, that was more like mourning. She also thought about Viyeki, who at first had been only her master but now seemed much more to her—a husband, almost, though his peers would have been disgusted by the idea. But Viyeki was not like the rest of the Hikeda’ya, for which she was very, very grateful.

  When he had first chosen her from several slaves sent by the barrack master for his perusal, he had drawn the process out over hours, asking the mortal women strange questions such as whether they dreamed, or had they ever been south of Rimmersgard. He must have liked Tzoja’s answers best—yes, vividly, she had told him; and yes, as far as Kwanitupul. The dream part was not really true, since after her capture by the Skalijar and then the Hikeda’ya, Tzoja generally fell asleep like someone stumbling off a precipice and came back up like a drowning woman reaching for the light. Her slumber was haunted by shadows, angry voices, long bleak vistas through which she walked and walked, but even these faded quickly when she woke. Still, she would have said or done anything to escape the squalor of the slave barn, and inventing dreams for an eccentric fairy nobleman seemed a small price to pay.

  Her answers had seemed to please this Lord Viyeki, and after deliberating silently for a long time he at last chose Tzoja and sent the others back to the frigid barns. The rejected slave-women did not even look up as they were led out.

  “So,” Viyeki had said, “Do you know why you are here? You are young, but not that young, I think. Tell me your name again.”

  “Derra.”

  “An awkward sound. We will consider that. Please take off your clothes. Put them by the door—they will be disposed of. There is a bath in the next chamber. Do you know what that is?”

  She had barely been able to confine herself to a demure nod. She had not been clean for longer than she could remember, and the idea of hot water had been as welcome as the thought of seeing sunlight again.

  Of course, the water was not hot, nor even warm. She learned the first of many lessons about the Hikeda’ya nobility: they preferred to bathe in the icy water that sluiced down from the mountain’s cap in numerous rivulets, although they also had it hot from deep springs, steaming, frothing water that coursed through Nakkiga like veins of blood. But though they scorned hot water for bathing, the Hikeda’ya did use soap, or at least a strange, flaky stone that did the same job, and though she could not force herself to squat for very long in the shiveringly cold water, she at least managed to scrub the grime from her skin.

  With nothing to dress herself in, she had gone naked out into the main chamber and found Viyeki waiting for her. To her eye he could have been a young man of thirty summers or even less, but she had learned enough about the immortals to know he might be hundreds of years old. That had been too strange to think about—it still was—and she had pushed it away, determined to do whatever was needed to stay in this warm place for as long as possible.

  Their first lovemaking, or “coupling” as Viyeki called it, was nowhere near as painful or humiliating as she had feared. Since being captured, she had been taken to the beds of several other Hikeda’ya, and most of them had been perfunctory at best in their attentions, treating her more like a necessary but uninteresting tool than a partner. Viyeki was different. That first time and afterward he seemed interested in her as more than just a receptacle, pausing to look at her face, smell her skin, even rub his cheek gently against her neck—the closest thing to a kiss she had experienced as a bed slave—

  Tzoja was startled out of these memories by a scratching sound at the door, just loud enough for her to hear. She darkened the light of her crystal sphere, then crawled by feel into the hallway. Had it been a less familiar sound she would have hidden, but she had already recognized the noise: it came from Naya Nos’s little fingers, and it meant that the Hidden were at the door.

  Still, she rose to peer through a slot in the door, no bigger than a finger. The wormglow of the cavern revealed the tall, two-headed silhouette she expected, the small one held in huge Dasa’s arms. She opened the door as quietly as she could and beckoned them inside, but they did not move.

  “I am sorry, friend,” said Naya Nos in a strange, unhappy voice, then the two-headed shape moved to one side and someone else stepped forward and jabbed a long shadow at her face. Tzoja barely had time to take a startled step backward before something snapped shut around her neck and then, with sudden, almost casual brutality, she was yanked forward off her feet and onto her hands and knees.

  “There are no words to say my sorrow,” Naya Nos murmured. “He would kill all my people—all the Hidden. We had to give you up to him. Even the Lady Uvasika agreed.”

  The collar was chokingly tight, and at first she could not even swallow. The thing that held her was a slave pole, a long rod with a neck-catch at one end. As she tried to move her head and loosen the grip on her throat, a bright flash blinded her—a ni’iyo in the newcomer’s hand. When Tzoja could see again she discovered that her captor was a tall figure dressed all in black, as bony and grim-faced as any Hikeda’ya, despite his ruddy skin—another mortal like herself.

  He held the lighted sphere close to her face and studied her. “You are the one known as Tzoja, the property of Clan Enduya.” It was not a question.

  “No,” she managed at last. “I ran away from the slave barns.” At least the penalty for a slave trying to escape was a quick death.

  The hard-faced man did not bother to refute her hasty lie, but pulled up on his tether-staff until she had to rise or choke, then he led her toward the door. Outside she saw shapes in the darkness. Naya Nos and the rest of the Hidden, she presumed, here to see her life exchanged for theirs.

  “Cowards!” she cried, but her captor silenced her with a twist of the pole, squeezing her neck even more cruelly. She had not worn a slave collar since Viyeki had taken hers off during the first days she spent in his clan house. She had forgotten how horrid it felt, not just the discomfort, but the knowledge that you were owned, that your very life was now someone else’s property, to be disposed of as they wished.

  She wondered if she would be able to divert this grim man’s attention enough to jerk the pole out of his hand as they climbed one of the steep staircases on the way back to the upper levels of Nakkiga. Killing herself by jumping from the stairs was likely the best alternative left to her—at least it would be by her own choice.

  “Please forgive me for speaking,” she said in as servile a tone as she could manage, “but I am curious. If I have nothing else left, I might as well satisfy that. Who are you?”

  “I am a Queen’s Huntsman.” He dragged her stumbling away from the festival-house and across the cavern, then up one of the winding corridors. To her dismay, she realized he had chosen a covered passage meant for litters and wagons, with closed sides and only shallow slopes.

  “Queen’s Huntsman—but you are a mortal!” she said.

  He walked for a while in silence, keeping t
he collar tight against the back of her neck by tension on the pole. “You are ignorant,” he finally said. “Most of the queen’s huntsmen are mortals. Why would the People stoop to chasing runaway slaves? Slaves are good enough to catch other slaves.”

  “Then you are a slave like me?”

  “I am on the other end of the catchpole, so obviously I am not.” But she heard something alive in his voice for the first time, some glimmer of human feeling, even if it was only contempt. “So do not seek to play on my fellow-feeling, woman. I would not be the queen’s chief huntsman of the lower depths if I had any. Now be silent and stop trying to distract me. We are following the cart-route instead of the stairs, so there will be nowhere you can escape or destroy yourself.” He felt her stumble, and when he spoke again she heard a poisonous note of satisfaction. “All you fools are the same.”

  * * *

  • • •

  Tzoja had been so long in nearly complete darkness that when they reached the dim, lantern-lit streets of Nakkiga it seemed almost as bright to her as a mortal city. The Hikeda’ya nobles and soldiers in the street did not bother to look at her as she was led past, but the slaves did, some only sneaking fearful glances, others staring openly—and doubtless thanking their gods, Tzoja thought miserably, that they were not the ones at the end of the huntsman’s tether.

  As her grim-faced captor marched her through the outskirts of the Harvest District, past the long, narrow warren-houses of fungus pickers and grub gatherers, Tzoja became more fearful with every step. When they turned at last onto the Avenue of the Fallen and approached the guardhouse at the deepward gate of Clan Enduya’s compound, it was all her trembling legs could do to keep her upright.

  The huntsman was taking her back to Viyeki’s clan house—but Viyeki was no longer there. The only one waiting for her would be her master’s wife, Khimabu, the beautiful monster who would happily torture her for daring to bear her husband a child when his Hikeda’ya wife could not. Tzoja tried to pull away, but a surprisingly small twist of the pole yanked her off balance so that her head cracked hard against the compound’s stony outer wall. She sagged, then was throttled into rising again, coughing and breathless, by another twist of the collar.