‘Captain Warkannan?’ Zhil said.
‘Yes?’ Warkannan put his book down.
‘Dookis Marya would like to meet you, sir.’
Zhil took a few steps into the parlour. Between his white shirt and pale blond hair, his skin seemed stripped of all colour by the bright morning light. Warkannan wondered if he were unwell or if, more likely, he never left the house for more than a few minutes at a time.
‘Of course.’ Warkannan stood up. ‘Am I presentable?’
‘Oh yes, sir. Come with me, please.’
‘Certainly. What about my nephew?’
‘The dookis prefers to talk with only one person at a time, sir. I hope you’re not offended?’
‘Not in the least.’
Zhil smiled and ducked his head, as if in apology, then led the way through the maze of halls and rooms to a true-oak door at the end of a narrow, white corridor. Zhil put his palm against a depression in the door panel and said a word in Vranz. The door slid back, allowing them into a tiny room, also white, with another door opposite. As soon as they were through, the first door slid shut.
‘Well, that’s fancy,’ Warkannan said.
‘You see, sir, the dookis is very afraid of thieves. At night no one can get through these doors but her.’
Zhil cleared his throat and spoke four slow words in Vranz. The opposite door opened, and they walked into a hallway lit by a long bar of glowing crystal overhead. Glittering glass cases lined the walls from floor to ceiling. Although strong wires bound each one to the wall as a precaution against earthquakes, they leaned inward on the uneven floor, giving the impression that they might suddenly fall and bury the viewer. Things crammed every shelf of every case, so many things that Warkannan could only form an impression of their variety. He noticed books, chunks of obsidian, glass spheres, sea shells, and some shiny silver and white objects that had to be Settler work.
‘This is quite a collection,’ Warkannan said.
‘This is only part of it,’ Zhil said. ‘There are four other rooms filled with cases. She spends all her time arranging and rearranging the things, you see, and cataloguing them. She has several catalogue systems, and whenever she changes the arrangement, she has to change the catalogues.’
A final door and three grey steps led up to the dookis’s apartment. As far as Warkannan could figure, they were in the exact centre of the house, and indeed, when they entered, he found himself in a room without windows. Somewhere, though, there must have been ventilation, for the big room smelled fresh and clean. More glass cases, floor to ceiling, lined every wall. Cases that came only to Warkannan’s waist stood back to back in the centre of the room like a barricade. Books and notebooks lay strewn about in heaps.
The only furniture, a low grey divan, sat on a grey carpet. A small white shen lounged on the divan. If it had not turned its head to eye Warkannan in evident ill-will, he might have thought it stuffed and part of the collection. The sheer weight and glitter of all those objects crammed into cabinets made it nearly impossible for him to focus on what they might be, especially the things that looked as if they could be Settler relics. In this room shelf after shelf held little boxes, metal tubes, grey twists and loops, the occasional crystal, chunks and bars of a blue quartz-like substance, and odd bits of materials odder still.
‘If you’ll wait here, Captain?’ Zhil said. ‘I’ll see if Mada is –’
‘Zhil?’ A woman’s voice called.
Talking rapidly in Vranz, Dookis Marya strode into the room, a tall woman, handsome rather than beautiful, with cropped brown hair and brown eyes. She wore narrow blue trousers and a loose white shirt, gathered at the waist by a belt made of overlapping Kazraki gold coins. Around her neck on a golden chain she wore a small oblong of blue quartz that reminded Warkannan of Soutan’s signal imp, and she was clutching a bundle of Tribal arrows, each with a rushi tag. When Zhil spoke to her in Vranz, she turned to Warkannan and considered him without a trace of a smile. He got the impression that she was considering how he might be catalogued, should she wish to add him to one of the cases.
During their conversation, which Zhil translated, she never left the doorway nor invited Warkannan to sit down. At intervals the shen growled or whined, but it made no attempt to leave the divan.
‘Ah, Captain Warkannan,’ she began. ‘I understand you’re a friend of my secretary.’
‘Yes, Mada, I am. I’ve ridden here from Kazrajistan to see him.’
As they continued, trading pleasantries through the patient Zhil, Warkannan felt more and more sorry for her. Had she seemed happy, he might not have questioned her obsession, but her eyes hinted at pain, a constant ache of longing as they peered out from deep sockets. Her gaze flicked this way and that, from him to the glass cases and back, to the shen, to Zhil, but always back to the cases. She’s too young, Warkannan thought, much too young to shut herself up like a widow. Mercifully, she lost interest in him after a few minutes, turned, and strode back through the doorway into the other room, whatever it may have been. Zhil ushered him out with a long, relieved sigh.
Warkannan said nothing until they reached the blue parlour. He picked up the Mirror of the Qur’an he’d left behind and tucked it under his arm.
‘Your poor employer,’ Warkannan said. ‘May God help her!’
‘Yes sir, but she’s been so generous to us all that we hate to – well –’
‘There’s nothing you can do about it, Zhil,’ Warkannan said. ‘I didn’t mean to imply that. I’ll remember her in my prayers from now on.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘When did this happen? Recently?’
‘Yes sir, but she was always a nervous sort of person, always worrying if her friends truly liked her or was it her riches.’
‘That’s a common problem among the wealthy.’
‘I didn’t realize that, sir. We don’t have very many wealthy people out here, I guess.’ Zhil thought for a moment. ‘And then she always worried about thieves, but things got really bad about two years ago.’ His tone flattened. ‘About the time Mizzou Soutan came here.’
‘I see.’ Warkannan cocked an eyebrow and waited.
Zhil glanced around as if he expected to find someone watching him.
‘I see,’ Warkannan said again. ‘Do you know where Jezro Khan is?’
‘Yes sir, I’ll take you there.’
In the opposite wing of the rambling manor house Jezro Khan had his own office, a little corner room with windows on two sides. Cloth in a soothing pale green covered the walls, and a pair of blue and grey rugs decorated the true-oak floor. A desk stood against one wall, and in the middle of the room, a big oak table held books, a pair of clean handkerchiefs, and what appeared to be hundreds of scraps of rushi. Jezro was standing in front of the table, contemplating the scraps, while Soutan perched on a high stool nearby with Nehzaym’s grey slate in his lap.
‘My hobby.’ Jezro waved his hand at the table. ‘Once Marya decided to put herself into her museum, I had to do something with my time. I always thought I’d love living in idle luxury, but I was wrong. It gets boring after a while. A short while.’
Warkannan picked up a piece of rushi and frowned at it. ‘Near fourth prophet second mention. One zero one.’ He glanced up. ‘What in hell?’
‘What in heaven, actually.’ Jezro was grinning at him. ‘A holy book, that is, though not ours. I’ve been working out some puzzles. Our text for today, dearly beloved, is The Sibylline Prophecies. The author, whoever she was, left us clues in the form of numbers stuck in here and there. They don’t seem to make any sense.’
‘Later editions leave them out,’ Soutan put in. ‘A huge mistake.’
‘Well, it’s pretty obscure stuff,’ Jezro said. ‘You see, the numbers and the clues in the passages around them lead us to this book, the Bible. It’s the other holy book that the First Prophet talks about in the ha’dith. The Church of the One God still uses it.’ He laid a hand on the leather-bound volume. ‘Sibyl refers to
the fourth prophet a lot. The Bible’s a collection of books, and they come in a definite order, organized by type. The fourth prophet on the list is a fellow named Ezekiel, and God only knows what he was drinking when he sat down to prophesy. He kept seeing things in the sky, like wheels within wheels that belched fire and spoke to him.’ Jezro picked up a piece of rushi. ‘Book ten, verse one – that’s my interpretation of that one zero one. I quote: “Behold, on the firmament that was over the heads of the Cherubim there appeared something like a sapphire, in form resembling a throne.”’
‘That’s supposed to be a clue?’ Warkannan said. ‘Clue to what?’
‘The location of the Ark of the Covenant.’ Soutan leaned forward, all urgency. ‘If we have that, we can find the starships that brought us here. For instance, one clue leads to the line, “I lift up my eyes to the hills, where my strength comes from.” So we know that it must be in some sort of hill country.’
‘It would be pretty damn funny,’ Warkannan said, ‘if it turned out to be under Haz Kazrak.’
Jezro laughed, Soutan glared.
‘That’s very unlikely,’ Soutan went on. ‘Other clues point to the east, among an alien people. Who else but the ChaMeech?’
‘Umph,’ Warkannan said. ‘Where did this Sibylline book come from, anyway? I’d never even heard of it till a couple of years ago.’
‘Marya’s father bought the original manuscript about twenty years ago,’ Jezro said. ‘He wouldn’t tell anyone where he got it, not even her, but he had it printed up and started selling it. It made him a lot of money. I’m willing to bet, though, that Yarl’s the only one who realized it contains a code.’
‘And now we may have another source of information. This is called a recept-screen, Captain.’ Soutan laid one hand on the slate. ‘I’m trying to figure out how to use it properly. I can get it to show a series of views, but I can’t make it identify what they are.’
‘Views?’ Warkannan said.
‘Pictures of different locations, all indoors – somewhere. Some of the rooms look very much like the written descriptions we have of the inside of the ships, but I don’t know if these are merely stored images from eight hundred years ago, or if they show me the interiors as they are at the present moment.’
‘Why would they?’
‘This thing might be a security monitor, that’s why. One guard could keep track of a lot of different places if he could see them on one of these.’
‘I suppose. But if the slate won’t tell you where the rooms are, it won’t do you much good.’
‘No.’ Soutan looked sublimely sour. ‘It won’t. Still, I persevere. Success may just be a matter of finding the right command words.’
‘The slate might give us faster results than I can, putting clues together.’ Jezro waved a hand at the heaps of rushi spread across the table. ‘You practically need to have everything memorized before you can see the correspondences.’
‘I can see why you were hoping that Benumar would come with me,’ Warkannan said.
‘That memory of his – yes, I need it, all right.’ Jezro turned to Soutan. ‘Speaking of which, is there any sign of him?’
‘Not in the crystals.’ Soutan slid off the stool, set the slate down carefully on the table, and began to pace back and forth. ‘I’ve been looking everywhere, every direction – nothing. I can’t find the spirit rider. I can’t find Zayn. They could be up on the hill and ready to pounce for all I know.’
‘Calmly, Yarl, calmly,’ Jezro said. ‘We still have actual eyes, you know. I asked Robear to send a couple of men down to Kors to warn people to watch for him. We’ve stationed other men up on top of the hills.’
‘Of course.’ Soutan gave him a sheepish smile. ‘I forgot about that. Stupid of me!’
‘Not at all,’ Jezro went on. ‘It would be better if we could track him, but if we can’t, well, there are old-fashioned ways of dealing with assassins.’
Soutan winced and shuddered.
‘I’m not dead yet, Yarl.’ Jezro grinned at him. ‘I’ll tell Robear to order his men to leave Benumar strictly alone. They’d better be safe inside once he actually gets here.’
‘Safe inside?’ Soutan sneered. ‘One man against ten?’
‘You don’t understand the Chosen.’ Jezro paused for one of his twisted smiles. ‘I don’t want my crazy idea to cause someone’s death. Huh, I’d better have Robear lock up the shens, too, come to think of it.’
‘Jezro, please, don’t do this!’ Soutan stretched out both hands, imploring. ‘It’s too risky.’
‘I’m sorry.’ Jezro looked away. ‘I’ve got to. It’s for me as much as for Benumar, you see. I had my moment of cowardice. Before I decide what I’m going to do about the khanate, I’d better find out if I’m still a coward.’ He turned to Warkannan and raised an eyebrow.
‘Oh, I understand perfectly,’ Warkannan said. ‘But I intend to stick close to you, anyway.’
‘That’s some comfort, I suppose,’ Soutan said.
‘Something just occurred to me,’ Warkannan continued. ‘Suppose Zahir never returns to the khanate, for whatever reason. The Chosen will send someone else, and then someone else if that man doesn’t return, and so on. Sooner or later, word is going to get back that you’re alive. Even if Gemet heard you say you don’t want the throne with his own ears, do you think he’d believe you? The only way you’re ever going to be really safe again is to win this rebellion.’
Jezro scowled at him. ‘Get out and let us get back to work, will you? I want to finish piecing together this passage.’ He picked up a sheet of rushi. ‘I think it must refer to the first history book about the age of kings.’
‘Kings,’ Warkannan said. ‘Ah yes, kings.’
‘Get out, you bastard!’ Jezro shook a fist in mock rage.
‘I’m going.’ Warkannan grinned at him. ‘But think about it.’
With Soutan safely occupied, Warkannan decided that the time had come for a talk with Arkazo. He found him in his guest room, a small but pleasant space with windows on one wall, a bed on the other, and an armchair and table in the middle. A scatter of shiny black tubes and wires lay on the table – some device of Yarl’s, Warkannan assumed. Arkazo was sitting in the chair and reading.
‘What’s that?’ Warkannan said. ‘It must be pretty interesting stuff.’
‘It is, yes.’ Arkazo looked up with a grin. ‘You never caught me studying like this when I was at university.’
‘You took the words right out of my mouth.’
‘It’s a kind of maths called al zhebrah.’ Arkazo held up the open book to show him pages of numbers and little symbols, interspersed with the occasional line of writing. ‘Our people invented it, way back in the old days in the Homelands, but they don’t teach it any more in our schools. I don’t understand why.’
‘I don’t, either, if it’s just numbers.’
‘Yarl gave me this.’ Arkazo shut the book and laid his hand upon it. ‘It’s really something, Uncle, all the things he knows.’
‘That’s true, yes, but what about Soutan himself?’
‘What about him?’ Arkazo’s voice turned sharp.
Warkannan hesitated, considering words.
‘I know you don’t like him,’ Arkazo said. ‘I didn’t myself at first, but we didn’t know him then, really know him, I mean.’
‘Well, you should never judge a man by your first impression, no, but sometimes Soutan worries me. This talk about the lost ships, going home, that sort of thing.’
‘Oh, that! It’s kind of demented, isn’t it?’
‘I thought so, yes. So does Jezro.’
‘It’s the other stuff I like, the things he knows, the books he has. When you live for knowledge like he does, I can see how your mind would slip over the edge now and then.’
‘He lives for knowledge? What about that girl?’
‘Well, he’s only human.’ Arkazo waved a hand in dismissal. ‘And she was lying.’
‘So he says.’
Arkazo sat up straight and glared at him. Warkannan decided to let the subject drop – for the moment. ‘Well, enjoy your book. I’m going to go for a stroll around the estate.’
That same afternoon, while Jezro and Warkannan talked of prophets, Zayn was camping some ten miles from the estate. At sunset he took his horses and left them in a convenient farmer’s field. His gear he hid in the tall weeds and grasses nearby, then started off on foot for the manor house. By twilight he reached the first hill, covered in high grass, and a perfect spot for a lookout. Zayn crouched down among a tangle of pink and orange shrubs at the bottom and waited, watching, until he could be sure that no one was walking or sitting up on the hill crest.
He walked part-way up, then crawled the rest of the way to avoid standing out against the dark sky and the rising silver light of the Herd. Indignant midges flew from the grass and whined around his ears. He stopped, waiting, but he heard no one moving on the crest, and when he reached the top, he found areas of flattened grass where guards had kept watch, but no guards. Why had they withdrawn? Surely Warkannan would know that the Chosen generally came by night. Maybe they’d had no reason to stay. Maybe Jezro and Warkannan were already on their way back to Andjaro Province. Zayn crawled to the edge of the slope and looked down over the long green lawn and the sprawling manor house, golden with light from open windows. To one side stood a long, shrubby line of pale yellow trees with dangling branches, thick with long reddish leaves – possible shelter when the time came. All round the edge of the lawn ran a ten-foot-high wire fence.