Facing him, only a few paces away, Unver did not attempt to defend himself again, but looked up at the sky and the circling birds. The firelight turned his features into a stony carving, a mask of resignation or even perhaps peace. His arms still hung at his sides as Gurdig came toward him with his curved sword swept back for the killing blow. Then a blazing ball of feathers burst out of the fire pit and flew awkwardly into the air, shedding sparks like a comet, before it swooped down and flew directly into Gurdig’s face. He bellowed in surprise and pain as the burning crow battered him with its fiery wings and became entangled in his beard. His efforts to knock the thing away only made it cling more fiercely, until the dying bird was screeching as loudly as the thane, whose beard now curled and smoked where the crow clung to it.
A moment later Unver lurched forward, picked the slender sword from the ground, then lunged toward Gurdig and buried the point three handspan’s deep in the March-thane’s burly chest.
The dead crow fell away from Gurdig’s face and dropped to the ground, feathers almost extinguished, all movement ended. Gurdig’s eyes bulged in disbelief as he looked from the crow to the shining length of Naidel jutting just beneath his breastbone. He opened his mouth to say something but only blood issued from his lips, then he slowly sank to his knees before toppling face first to the ground like a falling tree.
Unver stood over him, expressionless, staring at nothing. The crows overhead began to settle back into the trees around the camp, their harsh cries changing to something more muted, the branches sagging as they gathered once more.
None of the crowd touched Unver. Nobody dared to come near to either the March-thane or his killer. Instead they stood, awestruck and terrified. Someone shouted “murderer!” but another cried, “The crows knew!”
Like Edizel Shan, Hyara thought, stunned and helpless. The birds swarmed at Edizel’s birth and flew through the fire. She stared at her husband’s body, at Gurdig’s sightless eyes staring up into the night, but she felt nothing. He had been her world, and a cruel world it had been. Now he was dead. She felt nothing at all. She could not understand how everything in her life had changed so much in the space between twilight and dark.
She was still standing when Vorzheva led her son back to the steps of the thane’s wagon. Still as speechless as an infant, he let her seat him there. Some of those who had been watching now came forward to gather silently around the body of the March-thane. Others stared at Unver where he sat on the steps, bleeding and silent, the slender, red-smeared sword still gripped in his hand.
“My father is dead,” said Vorzheva. She almost sang it, as though the words were a cradle song. “Fikolmij is dead. And Gurdig is dead.” Now she raised her voice, so everyone could hear. “The March-thane Gurdig is dead, in fair combat. The gods spoke—you all saw. My son is March-thane now.” She put her hand on his head, but he seemed not to feel or even notice. “And you will make them all pay, now that you have returned to me. You will show them blood and fire, my son—all the clans, and the stone-dwellers too. You will show them blood and fire!”
Unver remained silent. All around the camp wide-eyed clansfolk whispered to one another, looking from the thane’s corpse to the black birds still watching from the trees.
At last, as if waking from one dream and passing into another, Hyara went to help her sister wash Unver’s wounds and bandage them with clean white linen.
53
Their Masters’ Folly
It was a terrifying journey down the wide Avenue of the Martyred Drukhi. The weight of her few belongings and the food she was carrying meant she had to go slowly—not that Tzoja would have dared to walk much faster even if she could. No slave ever wanted to attract attention so they all went at much the same pace, just fast enough not to be accused of slacking, but not so swift as to attract the attention of suspicious guards.
The thoroughfare was dazzlingly lit by Nakkiga’s standards, with a torch column at every crossing, but the light for which Tzoja was usually so grateful now made her feel conspicuous and vulnerable. She pulled the hood of her cloak down as far as she dared as a trio of fully armored Sacrifices walked past. But the soldiers were discussing something and did not even look at her. When they were gone, she stepped up out of the gutter and continued on. The streets were quiet, which was not unusual—unless there was a public celebration, Nakkiga was never noisy—but also strangely empty. Something was happening, Tzoja could tell.
Nothing to me, she reminded herself. It’s nothing to me. Head down, walk straight, don’t bump into any Hikeda’ya and don’t look up unless someone addresses me. It was a good thing that all slaves in Nakkiga were frightened of being noticed, because that was at least one way in which Tzoja did not have to pretend.
She turned off the broad avenue into the slightly less daunting confines of the Street of Sacred Discipline, a shadowy, narrow passage with old stone houses looming close on both sides. Some of the buildings were training dormitories for the Order of Song, which made her anxious—even the youngest Singers were strange and could be full of disturbing surprises—but at this hour of the clock they should be at their academies, and it was by far the fastest way to the city’s outer roads.
So far to go! Tzoja had seldom left the residence in Clan Enduya’s compound during the last years, and other than an occasional trip to the Animal Market, she only went out in Viyeki’s company, borne by litter on the back of carry-men. All this walking had exhausted her already, but she could not stop to rest. Her only hope was to remain unnoticed until she reached the level of the deep lake.
The overhanging houses here oppressed her. Uniformly dark, finished in the slate that had been fashionable centuries earlier, they seemed like a row of heads leaning in to watch her pass. Low, narrow windows facing the street gave them the slit-eyed stare of something that had just been awakened and was not happy about it. It felt as if every window held a watcher she could not see, that each step she took was being silently observed and judged, and that at any moment someone would raise an alarm about the intruder in their silent neighborhood.
She passed through a grave cache at the end of the road, a kind of fenced park built around a pile of stone slabs. Beneath it lay the crypt where the Hikeda’ya interred the ashes of those who sentiment forbade dumping in the Field of the Nameless, but who had not been important enough to earn a place in a family tomb or in the death-cote of one of the great Order-houses. The grave cache was largely overgrown with grass and black creeper, but here and there the bright bloom of a blood lily burned like a candleflame. A few offerings had been left before the crypt door, loose flowers and pairs of house slippers, which made her think that at least some of those entombed here must have been students from the Order of Song. Even the idea of dead Singers made her uneasy. She decided a slave who hurried through such a place would not attract undue notice, so she walked as quickly as she could.
On the far side of the grave cache she left the park and was able to move into the network of smaller streets surrounding the center of Nakkiga. Her heart finally slowed a little. There was much less chance that one of the lower caste folk living here would stop or question a slave, because any slave might be on an errand for someone powerful; just as slaves did not want to be noticed by anyone, lower caste Hikeda’ya, both Bound and Pledged, did not want to draw the attention of the Recognized, their high caste superiors. Utuk’ku’s people were reluctant to kill any of their own pure-blooded folk because they were now so few, but it was no gift for even a full-blood criminal to be allowed to live: the punishment for angering a noble was often far worse than mere death. But because of all these things, the closer Tzoja got to Nakkiga’s center, the less likely it was anyone would stop her.
Terror is a weapon with a sharp edge on both sides, she thought. That is its greatest weakness.
A rare memory of her father pushed up into her thoughts, of him telling her, “He who rules by fear can expect at b
est only obedience, and even that only as long as fear remains.” She had been too young to understand him at the time and had not thought of it for years, but suddenly it was as though he stood over her again. How tall he had seemed!
She had many memories of her dark-haired mother, strong and sour as vinegar, and of her second mother Valada Roskva singing wordlessly as she concocted her cures and simples, her thick, deft fingers sifting the herbs into loosecloth bags, but Tzoja could remember surprisingly little of her father, except how wonderful it felt when he came back from one of his trips to Nabban or Perdruin, how the house had seemed to glow, how easily words had become laughter—even the food had tasted better! Until that time he didn’t come back.
And that is another weapon with a sharp edge on both sides, she thought. A father’s love, or a daughter’s love for him.
• • •
It took her two bells to make her way across the broad city tier and down into the lower levels because she was doing her best to look like the kind of unimportant, shuffling creature that the Hikeda’ya nobles would not concern themselves with. The second bell from Martyrs Temple was so distant she could barely hear it the second time because, instead of following the well-traveled route to the Memory Gardens down into the ultimate depths, she had chosen that rarity in Nakkiga, a comparatively new road, the clean-edged tunnel that led outward from the city and down to Dark Garden Lake, an underground body of water that her master and husband Lord Viyeki had discovered when she herself was still an infant. Viyeki had only taken her there once, but she had no fear of getting lost because it was a well-known route. During Serpent’s Moon, hundreds of families would crowd this passage on their way to the lake to celebrate the end of the Days of Mourning. But more than half a year stretched between now and then: other than a few Bound and their fishing boats, Tzoja felt sure that the end of the lake where the houses of the nobility stood would be all but deserted.
The last part of her journey led her along a winding outer tunnel barely wide enough for a single noble family’s litter and baggage train. Plenty of those would be jostling down the passage when Serpent’s Moon returned, but just now she heard no sound but her own footfalls and what the Hikeda’ya called “the mountain’s breath,” the perpetual soft winds that moaned through these deep passages. She wondered how long she would have to stay hidden. A dark, anxious part of her imagined what it would be like to live here in a darkness even thicker than the city’s, chasing lizards for food when her supplies were gone; she shuddered, but reminded herself how fortunate she was to have this refuge.
While carving out a deep shelter during the siege of Nakkiga, a building crew under Viyeki’s command had broken through into a previously unknown cavern and found a lake there full of blind, white fish and crustaceans, more than enough of them to help save the starving population. As a reward for this accidental but invaluable service, Viyeki had been given one of the lake’s first festival houses when they were built, but for some reason that Tzoja did not understand, her master had never been entirely happy about that or comfortable with the place. In fact, he had decided only a few years later to give it to his own master, High Magister Yaarike, but the house on the lake had never actually changed hands because Magister Yaarike died in a rockfall shortly after Viyeki told him of the gift. The old magister’s family had not known about it, and Viyeki himself had been too busy to give it much thought after he was named Yaarike’s successor as leader of the Order of Builders. Best of all, Lady Khimabu, Viyeki’s wife, had been told that the festival house by the underground lake now belonged to Yaarike’s heirs in the Kinjada clan, and had never learned otherwise. Of all Viyeki’s intimates, only Tzoja knew the truth, because he had told her of it and brought her for a visit in the early years of their bond. Before his work had overwhelmed him, Viyeki had hoped it would be their place, far from gossiping servants, so Tzoja alone, of all his family and intimates, had the heavy key-bar that would open the house. As she made her way now through a forest of black dripstones toward the small estate, able to see only because of all the shining grubs on long, sticky threads that dangled above the edges of the lake, she found herself immeasurably grateful that things had worked out this way.
She thought of her mother, left behind so very many years ago. “A fox’s den never has only one entrance,” had been one of Vorzheva’s favorite sayings. “Always have an escape ready.” At least in this one way, Tzoja had proved herself her mother’s true child.
Her mother had shared that bit of wisdom long before their father disappeared, when the four of them had still been living peacefully at the inn called Pelippa’s Bowl in Kwanitupul and there had seemed no need even to think about such things. Now, all these years later, father and mother and brother lost to her for decades and her own original name little but a memory, Tzoja saw that her mother might have been an unhappy woman, bitter as wormwood, but she had been right about always being ready to run.
• • •
She was a long time hiking around the lake to the festival house in a darkness, illuminated only by the sparkling strands hanging above the water. The glowing grubs swayed so gently on their filaments that they appeared to flicker, which reminded her of her names both old and new.
“Derra? It means ‘star,’ my child,” her mother had told her when she was small. And so did “Tzoja,” the Hikeda’yasao name Viyeki had given to her when she had shared that little remnant of her past in the first days of their unexpected love. Once a star, always a star, he had told her.
Tzoja was so deep into thoughts of the past that she gasped in surprise and stumbled when she stepped out of a thicket of smooth stone columns and found the great, glittering expanse of the night-dark lake stretched before her. For a moment it seemed as though she had walked directly into the starry sky—black stone overhead, black water below, and between those two horizons, thousands upon thousands of tiny, glowing points.
She turned, and there above her, shimmering gently on one of the stony hills that seemed to prop the ceiling of Dark Garden Lake, stood the volcanic stone house that had been awarded to her master by the palace, in thanks for the discovery of this strange, beautiful place. The path to its portico led upward between pale, dimly glowing lawns of candlesnuff fungus and whitecrown to a massive front door carved with the circular wreath of leaves and grass that the Hikeda’ya used as a symbol for the Lost Garden. Tzoja knew there would be blankets and robes inside for her to sleep on, as well as water and preserved food to pad out the supplies she had brought with her. She would be able to live here in secrecy and safety for at least a while—perhaps even until Viyeki came back.
But perhaps I won’t stay lucky that long, she reminded herself. She needed to start thinking about what she would do if this den were discovered, too.
Tzoja settled her bag on her shoulder for the last steep hike to safety, and began to clamber up the slope of loose stones toward the front path.
The light rain felt oddly soothing against Viyeki’s skin, like the touch of a thousand small, cold fingers.
What would it be like, he wondered, to live always beneath the sky like this? Our great mountain protects us but it also isolates us. We take our children from their mothers young to protect them from sentiment and the weakness it causes, and we avoid Mother Sun for the same reason. But is it truly weak to enjoy what the sky brings?
It was a strange and interesting thought, the kind that he often had when he left the confines of Nakkiga, but Viyeki could not afford to follow it just now. He had too many questions he needed to ask the upstart cleric Sogeyu and the Sacrifice military commanders—something that irritated him in and of itself: Why should a high magister have to seek for information? But he could find neither the main officers nor leading Singers anywhere around the camp, although he had walked from one end to the other. And not one of the Hikeda’ya soldiers or the bestial Tinukeda’ya carry-men who remained could tell him where they had gone.
>
His own company of Builders and the rest of the Sacrifice troops were spread across the north side of a hill in what he guessed must be the northern marches of mortal Erkynland. No fires had been lit, and even starlight and moonlight were scarce tonight with rain clouds thronging the blueblack midnight sky. He was thankful that at least they were not making their presence on mortal lands any more obvious than was necessary. Still, as he searched for the other commanders he felt himself almost a phantom, as though it was not the other Hikeda’ya leaders who had left him, but Viyeki himself who had stepped out of the world.
These lands are so wide, he thought, looking out across a landscape that sparkled with rain. So much room! How can the mortals stand it? How can they protect it all?
The answer was, of course, that they couldn’t. In the past, only the sheer lack of soldiers had kept the Hikeda’ya from triumphing in their battles against the mortals, who bred like rats in a midden-heap. That was why the Order of Sacrifice had declared the defeat of the old ways after the failed War of Return, and with the help of Viyeki and others had taken advantage of Queen Utuk’ku’s long sleep to change the ancient laws and begin to use mortal women as brood animals.
Viyeki felt a moment of pain thinking of his lovely Tzoja that way, but as one of the queen’s high magisters he could not shrink from the truth: as an individual, his mistress seemed almost as real to him as another Hikeda’ya, but as a race they were little more than vermin.
Perhaps we could save the best of them when we finally win back our land, he thought. That would be a kindness befitting an old and generous race like ours. And that way we would save them from themselves.