He had kept the guise for that last visit to Okhamba. Partially it was because he had got used to it, but it was also because it would be easier to gather men for a dangerous trip if he himself was a man: there would be no tiresome issues of gender, whether in preparation for the journey or during it. Men were apt to either feel disdain towards a woman who sought to risk herself – thinking arrogantly that she was trying to measure up to a man by doing so – or they felt protective, which was worse. They were as predictable as night and day.
But there was another, more important reason. To effect a change of his entire body meant that he was forced to glut himself, to steal the breath and the essence of others until he was gorged to the limit of endurance. The forge of change, the organ that he felt nestling between his stomach and spine – which he imagined as a coil, though he really had no anatomical comparison to draw against – had to be stocked with fuel enough to keep it burning throughout the metamorphosis. That required many lives of men and women.
Not that Saran felt guilt about taking what he needed. He had long since learned that he was unable to feel more than a passing regret in killing, no more than a butcher would in slaughtering a banathi. But he had lived to eighty-six harvests by being careful, and a dozen deaths in quick succession would always arouse terror and suspicion among the survivors. Sometimes they thought it was a mysterious plague, the Sleeping Death that they had heard of, for his victims were found dead without a mark on them as if they had simply stopped breathing; but other times, they sought a scapegoat, and if they found him in mid-transformation, they would tear him apart.
Usually he did not change his whole body any more than he absolutely had to. But this time was an exception.
A violent loathing had taken him. This form, this skin, was tainted now. Saran Ycthys Marul would be sloughed away, and with it perhaps some remnant of the responsibility for the memories it bore.
How could he have known that they would send Kaiku to meet him? Of all people, why her? Though they had been separated for five years, the same cursed attraction existed between them in whatever form he took, and now it was strengthened by the simplicity of being between man and woman. He wished he had never saved Kaiku’s life now. It had exacted a heavy price on one who prided himself on his utter independence.
Yet for a time, he had believed that fortune had turned his way. Why tell her? he had thought. He did not owe her the knowledge. It was his prerogative to change his identity whenever he pleased, and he did not feel that he was betraying a trust if he chose to lie about his past. Then, after Kaiku had told him what she thought of Asara, his mind had been made up. Better to begin again. Kaiku would never have to know.
And then came the time, the moment of joining; but his body betrayed him as Asara’s had done before him. The desire to take her, to be inside her, was stronger than the act of making love could satisfy. At a primal level he wanted to consume her, to reclaim the lost part of himself and to assimilate her very being in the process. Once again, he had lost control.
Now he had ruined everything. He knew Kaiku too well: she was as stubborn in her grudges as in everything else. She would not forgive him, ever. His deception, which had seemed justifiable at the time, now seemed abhorrent when mirrored through Kaiku’s eyes. What a pitiful vermin he was, taking on shapes to reinvent himself over and over, to erase past mistakes with different faces. A being with no core, and no soul, stealing his essence from others, vapid inside.
He had gone to Cailin, and they had spoken of a new task for him, one that would require him to take a new form. He was only too glad to take it.
He could bear himself no longer. It was time to change.
Zaelis found Lucia sitting with a young boy her own age in the lee of a rocky jut that protruded from the side of the valley. It was midday, and Nuki’s eye was fierce overhead, pummelling the world in dazzling light. Lucia and the boy lay in what little shade the rock provided, he on his back, she on her belly reading, kicking her legs absently. Several small animals busied themselves nearby, strangely nonchalant in their activities: a pair of squirrels dug for nuts, darting quickly about but never straying far; a raven prowled up and down the jut like a lookout; a black fox sat worrying at its brush, glancing back occasionally at the two adolescents who lounged under its protection.
Zaelis halted for a time, watching them from downslope. His heart softened at the sight. It was like a painting, a moment of childhood idyll. Lucia’s posture and manner were more girlish than he had ever seen. As he thought this, she turned to the boy and said something about the book she was studying, and he burst into explosive laughter, startling the squirrels. She grinned at him in response; a carefree, genuine smile. Zaelis felt gladdened, then suddenly sad. Such moments were too rare for Lucia, and now he came to ruin it for her. He almost turned back then, resolving to talk to her later; but he reminded himself that there was more at stake than his feelings or hers now. He limped up the hill towards them.
He knew that boy, he realised, as he got closer. His name was Flen; the son of one of the few professional soldiers that the Fold possessed. His father was a Libera Dramach man. Zaelis remembered meeting him once or twice. Of all the people that Lucia spent her time with, Flen was the one she preferred; or so his informers told him, anyway. Caution had driven him to keep a watch on the former Heir-Empress’s activities as she grew.
He found himself disliking the boy already. He had warned Lucia against making her abilities overt, for fear of revealing herself. Even though nobody knew the Heir-Empress of Blood Erinima was even alive, much less the strange affinity with nature that she bore, it was too great a risk. Yet she did not conceal them around Flen. Only Flen. Out of all her friends, what made him special?
Careful, Zaelis, he told himself. She is fourteen harvests old now. No longer a little girl. No matter what you may prefer to think.
Flen noticed him then, though the animals – and hence Lucia – had spotted him a long time ago. They did not scatter as animals should, but held their ground with a peculiarly insolent air.
‘Master Zaelis,’ he said, getting to his feet and bowing swiftly in the male-child fashion, hands linked behind his back.
‘Flen,’ he replied, with a mere dip of his head. ‘May I have a private word with Lucia?’
Flen glanced at Lucia as if to seek her approval; it irritated Zaelis inexplicably. But she was still reading her book as if neither of them were there.
‘Of course,’ he said. He seemed about to say some words of farewell to Lucia, but then decided against it. He walked away hesitantly, unsure of whether he should stay nearby or leave, and then made a decision and struck out towards the town.
‘Daygreet, Zaelis,’ Lucia said, not looking up. It was the first time they had met today, for she had left the house before he had awoken, making the pleasantry an appropriate one.
He sat down next to her, his damaged leg out straight before him. He could manage the traditional cross-legged position when he needed to, but it made his knee ache. His eyes wandered over the puckered and grooved skin on the nape of her neck, the appalling burn scars revealed by her short hair. She looked up at him over her shoulder, narrowing her eyes against the glare of the sun, and waited expectantly.
Zaelis sighed. Talking to her was never easy. She gave so little back.
‘How are you feeling?’ he asked.
‘I’m fine,’ she said casually. ‘And you?’
‘Lucia, you should really be using a more formal mode by now,’ he told her. Her language had subtly evolved into a hybrid of girl-child form and woman-form, which was usual for adolescents as they became embarrassed about using a diminutive mode and began to copy adults; but the dialect she had picked up from the mass of influences among the people of the Fold did not seem appropriate for the child of an Empress.
‘I am quite capable of adopting a far more elegant mode, Zaelis,’ she said, in crisply elocuted, chilly syllables. She sounded eerily like Cailin. ‘But only when I
need to,’ she finished, reverting to her usual style.
Zaelis abandoned that line of conversation. He should never have brought it up.
‘I see you have been communicating with the wildlife of the valley again,’ he said, indicating the black fox, which glared at him.
‘They come to me whether I talk to them or not,’ she said.
‘Does this mean that you are well recovered from your incident with the river spirits?’ he asked, absently running his knuckles over his close-cut white beard.
‘I told you I was,’ she replied.
Zaelis looked out across the valley, framing his next sentence; Lucia, surprisingly, spoke up first.
‘You want me to try again,’ she said. It was a flat statement.
Zaelis turned back to her, his expression set as a grim affirmative. There was no point evading it; she was far too incisive.
Lucia got up and sat cross-legged, arranging her dress over her knees. She seemed so tall and slender suddenly, Zaelis thought. Where was the little girl he had tutored, the little girl he had built a secret army around?
‘It will do no good,’ she said. ‘What happened on the river has been forgotten now, at least by any spirits that I could contact.’
‘I know that,’ said Zaelis, although he really hadn’t for sure until Lucia told him. ‘But something happened there, Lucia. I sent spies to investigate, after what happened to you. The river towns are talking of nothing else.’
Lucia studied him with her fey blue eyes, her silence prompting him to continue.
‘A barge was destroyed on the Kerryn,’ he said, shifting himself awkwardly. ‘Carrying explosives, apparently, and they must have gone off and blown it to pieces. But there were . . .’ He hesitated, wondering if he should share this with her. ‘There were bits washed up, bits of the people that had been on the barge. That, and bits of other things. That barge was carrying something when it exploded, and it wasn’t human.’
Still Lucia did not speak. She knew he was getting to his point.
‘Cailin believes that things are building to a head. The failing crops, Blood Kerestyn’s armies, Saran’s report, the thing you sensed on the river, the Weavers in the Fault. I have grown to believe her. We have little time left.’
He intentionally left out the revolt in Zila, though intelligence had reached him long ago about that. He tried to keep the doings of the Ais Maraxa as far from Lucia’s ears as possible.
He laid a hand on his adopted daughter’s knee. ‘I have come to realise that we have no clear idea of what we are truly facing, and ignorance will kill us. We have to know what is going on now,’ he said. ‘We have to know what we are dealing with. The source of all of this.’
Her heart sank as she felt the inevitability of what was to come.
‘Lucia, we need you to tell us. To go to Alskain Mar, contact one of the great spirits. We need to know about the witchstones.’ He looked pained as he said it. ‘Will you do it?’
You are not a pawn here. Kaiku’s words came back to her then, spoken on the first day of Aestival Week. But they seemed hollow, brittle under the weight of necessity. She knew in her heart that she was not capable of a meeting of minds with a spirit such as dwelt in Alskain Mar, and that she would be placing herself in grave danger by trying; and yet, how could she refuse? She owed her life to Zaelis, and she loved him dearly. He would not ask her if it was not a matter of utmost importance.
‘I will,’ she said, and the day seemed suddenly a little darker.
SIXTEEN
Aestival Week passed, but for Mishani there had been no celebration this year. For seven days now she had been riding through the Saramyr countryside, and for one not used to long journeys on horseback it was a gruelling test. Yet despite saddle-sores and fatigue, and the endless watchfulness, she never made a complaint, never let her mask slip even a little. Though she was surrounded by men whom she mistrusted, though she headed south in secret to an uncertain end, though her own father was trying to have her killed, she was calm and serene. It was her way.
They had left Hanzean soon after the attempt on Mishani’s life, timing their departure to coincide with the beginning of the harvest celebrations so as to take advantage of the confusion and slip away unnoticed. Chien had insisted on personally accompanying her as escort, to make reparations for the shame of allowing assassins to menace his guest. Mishani had expected no less. Whatever Chien’s plans for her, she was sure that he would want to be present to see them carried out.
Nevertheless, their journey was far from safe, despite the retinue of eight guards who went with them; the merchant put himself at considerable risk by travelling with her. Transport by sea was not an option, since all boats would be watched by Barak Avun’s men and their arrival logged in their destination port. That left land travel, which was more fraught with minor perils but which would make evading her father a much simpler task. Anyone seeking them from Hanzean would have no idea which way they went, since nobody knew their destination but Mishani.
Still, the need for secrecy carried its own disadvantages. Mishani was accustomed to travelling by carriage; but they were forced to stay off the roads, and that meant horses, and camping under the stars. Though Chien expended every effort to make her comfortable, providing her with sheets and an elegant tent which the grumbling guards had to put up for her each night, it was still somewhat irksome for the child of a Barak. Mishani liked her little luxuries, and she did not share Kaiku’s readiness to forsake them. But at least she still had her luggage with her from her trip to Okhamba, so she had her clothes and scents, and plenty of diversions.
They had struck out south from Hanzean for several days before turning south-east to meet the Great Spice Road below Barask, which ran almost exactly a thousand miles from Axekami to Suwana in the Southern Prefectures. They did not dare use the Han-Barask Highway, one of only two major routes out of the port, and even when they found the Great Spice Road they stayed well off it, keeping to the west of the thoroughfare until the northern reaches of the Forest of Xu began to loom to their left, and they were forced to join the road to take the Pirika Bridge across the Zan. There they were warned about the revolt in Zila and told to go back if they could and find another route to their destination.
Few heeded the warning: there was no other way. The vast and fearful forest crowded them to the east, spirit-haunted and ancient, while to the west was the coast. There were no ports of a size capable of supporting passenger craft unless they went back to Hanzean, and to go around the forest would require a detour of some nine hundred miles, which was insanity. Instead, most travellers were heading off the road, skirting the Forest as closely as they dared and passing to the east of Zila. With no option left to them, Mishani and her retinue took that route also.
By nightfall of their seventh day of travel, they were camped twenty-five miles to the south-east of the troubled city, near a shallow semicircle of black rocks that knuckled out of the flat plains. It was the last day of summer, and in Axekami the final ritual of Aestival Week would be at its height, welcoming in the autumn. There was no question of hiding out here, unless they cared to go within the borders of the forest which glowered a mile to their east. But their camp was anonymous among many scattered across the plains: other travellers heading south like them and forced to brave the bottleneck that Zila commanded.
Mishani sat cross-legged on a mat near the fire, her back to the rocks that ran along one edge of their campsite, and watched the guards building her small tent nearby. A slender book lay closed on the ground next to her. One of her mother’s. It was a gift from Chien: the latest volume of Muraki tu Koli’s ongoing series of fictions about a dashing romantic named Nida-jan and his adventures in the courts. Muraki’s creation had made her moderately famous among the high families, and her stories had spread by word of mouth to the servant classes and peasantry as well. Handmaidens would beg their masters and mistresses to read them the tales of Nida-jan, which were printed in High Saramyrrhic, a
written language taught to high-borns, priests and scholars but incomprehensible to the lower classes. They would then eagerly pass the stories on to their friends, embellishing here and there, and their friends would do the same for their friends.
Nida-jan was everything Mishani’s mother was not: daring, adventurous, sexually uninhibited and confident enough to talk his way out of any situation, or able to fight his way out if words failed. Mishani’s mother was quiet, shy, and fiercely intelligent, with a strong moral compass; she lived her life in her books, for there she could shape the world any way she saw fit instead of having to deal with the one that was presented to her, a place that was often too cruel and hurtful for a woman so sensitive.
Mishani took after her mother in appearance, but her father in temperament. Muraki was a lonely woman, too introverted to connect with those around her, and though she was pleasant company, it was easy to forget that she was there at all. When her father Avun began grooming Mishani in the ways of the court, Muraki dropped out of the picture almost entirely. While Mishani spent all her time in Axekami with her father, Muraki stayed at their Mataxa Bay estates and wrote. When Mishani had fled to exile in the Xarana Fault, she had not considered her mother’s feelings at all. Muraki showed them so rarely that it simply did not occur to Mishani that they might be affected.
Now Mishani had finished the book, and a deep sorrow had taken her. The stories were not the usual Nida-jan fare; instead, they were melancholy and tragic, an unusual turn for the irrepressible hero. They concerned Nida-jan’s discovery that one of his courtly liasons had produced a son, who had been hidden from him, and whom he only learned of when the mother confessed it to him on her death-bed. But the boy had gone to the east, and had disappeared there some months before. Nida-jan was tortured by love for this unknown son, and set out to find him, becoming obsessed with his quest, spurning his friends when they told him it was hopeless. He set out on foolhardy adventures to seek clues to the boy’s whereabouts. Finally he faced a great demon with a hundred eyes, and he blinded his enemy with mirrors and slew it; but as it died, the demon cursed him to wander the world without rest until he found his son, and until his son called him ‘Father’ and meant it.