I am cursed. I have lost my wager. I took service with the autarch’s Hounds because it gave me license to do as I pleased, but I could not let well enough be. Because I wanted something more, I won a place in the autarch’s special service, and now that “something more” is killing me. I have lost a wager and the autarch, as he always does, has won. Someone else will get credit for my hard labor and I will die like a gutted animal.
He could not think about it. It did not make the pain in Daikonas Vo’s body worse but it made his very mind hurt, spread a red, glaring fog in his mind that confused him, and made him fear he might stumble off the path into some deep place.
Vo saw her at last from the top of the great cavern the Xixian soldiers called “Xergal’s Tent.” He knew it was the autarch’s whore even though she was far below him at the bottom of the chamber, knew her as if she were family, and although he could see scarcely anything from his vantage point except her black hair as she walked captive between two soldiers, he knew her shape and posture as a lover would. Her big, dark eyes would be half-shut, her thin face quietly mournful and her thoughts turned inward into one of those great, long silences that had impressed even Vo. He had never met a woman who could stay such a time in her own thoughts, except a whore he had bought once whose tongue had been cut out by a previous client.
He hurried down the creaking ramp that wound its way around the cavern wall. The girl and her captors were still standing in the middle of the moving crowd, facing a wall with several tunnel mouths of several sizes, when the thing in his middle grabbed at both his gut and his heart at the same time. Vo staggered, gasping, feeling as though some terrible fire had burst through the walls of his belly and would consume him entirely. For a moment the next torch down the path shrank to a spark and he could not get any air into his lungs, but then after a little blackness, Vo discovered that although he had fallen onto his hands and knees, he could breathe—and think—once more. He got up and began to stagger downward again, but could no longer see the girl and her guards below. They had chosen one of the tunnels.
By the time he reached the bottom, the pain had let up enough for him to talk.
“Which? Which way for the high officers’ compound?” he demanded of a Naked infantryman.
The man seemed to recognize the White Hound badge, if not Vo himself, so he replied respectfully. “The officers’ tents—go to that one, there.” He pointed to one side. “That’s your fastest way.”
Vo let him go and hurried toward the opening, staggering as he went. He knew there was little chance that he would recover the girl even if he caught up with her—how could he kill two guards without anyone knowing? The girl herself would give him away, just to see him tortured and executed. His work, his suffering, had all been for nothing. He had truly walked of his own will through the Damnation Gate.
He followed the path downward for what seemed most of an hour, in places having to shoulder through men clustered around some half-done task or other. The autarch’s engineers and their slaves were still working in the tunnels even after the strange subterranean invasion had begun, widening and strengthening them. Vo could half-imagine that by the time they were finished the caverns would have become a replica of the Orchard Palace, all high ceilings and white stone facing. In fact, if the autarch stayed true to his youthful direction, perhaps the entire world would become a single Orchard Palace, and everyone in it either one of the autarch’s soldiers or whores or slaves.
It should have been me. But he is clever. He can see things as clearly as I can, almost, and he was born into power and riches. I never had a chance—but it should have been me. This should have been mine; the world should have been mine, not an Orchard Palace but a Palace of Vo as wide as the world . . . !
He wandered along the narrowing path, his mind filled with the thoughts of his world-palace and what each room would contain, until the complexity of the instruments he would need and the number of victims his schemes would require made his head whirl, and he suddenly stopped. For a moment, he thought the terrible gut-pain was coming back—it was just such a nervous stab that generally alerted him—then he slowly realized what it was that had stopped him.
The road had come to an end.
Daikonas Vo looked down at the blackness, the sudden, violent falling away of the earth. He had almost walked into empty air.
He turned and made his way carefully back up the path, only noticing now that it was very narrow indeed, that he had not been following a proper Xixian military road for some time. Had he turned somewhere? Several tunnels had crossed his track earlier, but they had all been smaller than the empty space through which he walked and he had passed them all by. What had happened?
Vo made his way back up the track, following it along the side of a deep drop that gradually grew shallower until the echoes all but stopped. He was circling a deep cavern on a path around its rim, and must be getting closer to the bottom with each circuit, but nothing he could find seemed anything like the wide road that had brought him here. It was not a small chamber: it took him the better part of an hour to go all the way around, just to make sure.
Still, after another long climb up another featureless stone track between two long, leaning slabs, with only an occasional army torch stuck in crevices on the wall to supplement the light he carried, Vo had to admit that this did not look much like anything he remembered from before. Some of it didn’t look like it was Xixian work at all. He wondered if they had foreign engineers and workers down here as well.
Whatever had happened, Vo had clearly lost his chance of catching up with the girl, at least by any conventional pursuit. Ah, gods, and now the pain was coming back again, he realized, the gnawing in his guts.
For a moment he could only stand, his shadow fluttering out behind him like a king’s coronation train. It hurt so badly! He tasted blood. Everything in him told him to escape it, but there was no escape . . . unless he tore it out . . . tore out his entire belly. . . .
A sudden movement made Vo go still as a statue, his killer’s instincts strong enough to overcome even the fire in his guts, if only for a moment. Someone was crossing the path a few dozen yards below him, crossing from one hidden passage to another on the far side of the path. Vo shrank back into shadow and watched with bated breath.
It was a boy—a northern boy, several years short of man’s age and height, with hair that even in this dark place seemed to gleam like palest gold, and he moved through the tunnel as though he felt comfortable there. It was like looking at one of his mother’s woodcut pictures of the Orphan. What could a child be doing in such a place by himself? What did it mean?
A sudden thought occurred to him—could it be the work of the gods? Had they decided at last to show Daikonas Vo their favor, after all his misery? To lead him to the girl so that he would receive the rewards he so richly deserved?
Vo made himself move forward. He had already passed through the Damnation Gate, through which Vo’s mother had always told him there was no return save the Orphan’s—and now, as if out of his mother’s rambling tales, here came the child, in a place no child should be. Could it truly be a sign? Vo decided he would be a fool to think otherwise: he would follow the pale-haired boy.
A perfect vessel of despair, a perfect agent of chaos, Daikonas Vo straightened his back and followed the golden child down into deeper darkness.
“She’s a skinny one. Do you think she’s really going to the autarch?”
“Maybe he likes them like that.”
“But they say his first wife has a rump like a prize mare.”
Qinnitan curled her lip and tried to ignore the guards, even though they were walking just behind her and not talking quietly at all.
“Still, look at her—scarcely more than a child.”
“She’s got that red witch-streak. They say that’s a sign of a temper—that they’re like cats, you try to have your way with one and they’ll scratch you into sandal straps.”
“Ho! That m
akes her sound much more interesting.”
Brother Gunis, the young priest, finally intervened. “Here, now,” he said, turning on the soldiers. “You are talking about the Golden One’s prisoner, which is bad enough, but if I had been listening to your filthy tongues wagging, I would have heard you insult Queen Arimone, too, and that could send you both to the royal strangler.”
The guards murmured an apology. Gunis turned around, his head held high.
“Prig,” she heard one guard say quietly.
“Never touched a woman, that one,” the other muttered. “No stones left.”
Some of the tunnels were narrow enough that Qinnitan and her captors had to back up if a cart was coming the other way so that the vehicle could get by. Most of the carts were loaded with dirt and chunks of ore coming back up from places where the engineers were still working, but others carried more disturbing cargo, corpses loosely wrapped in the soldiers’ own cloaks, bare feet protruding because their boots, which they themselves might have received from another dead man, had been passed on to another soldier.
What more proof did any of these men need, Qinnitan wondered, that they were nothing to their master Sulepis but murderous toys? When the life was out of one it was stripped of anything useful and then thrown on a midden heap.
The number of shrouded corpses that passed them moved Qinnitan in conflicting ways. She had long since given up hope of ultimate escape for herself, but she was heartened to see that these northerners were resisting the autarch. Still, every one of these shapes bouncing lifelessly past on the wagons was a young man of Xis or its dependent countries, no different from her own brothers or even poor, mad Jeddin.
But if the autarch won here, or did whatever it was he had come for, so far away from Great Xis, then it seemed soon the entire world would be nothing more than food for his greed and cruelty. Soon even the oceans would not offer escape from his rule—he would hold all lands everywhere in his grip. Sulepis was young enough and powerful enough, and he was certainly mad enough, to make that horror real.
They had reached the edge of the military’s subterranean camp. They were still far above any fighting, although Qinnitan could hear traces of it for the first time, faint, distant shouts and the occasional boom of something that almost sounded like cannons. The guards who stopped them now seemed much more intent and cautious than the others they’d seen so far, and certainly more so than the ragtag soldiers who had accompanied them down from the surface. A mulasim had even come out to question them, an officer wearing the infantry crest of the Naked.
“If she is bound to the Golden One, then we will take her to him,” the officer said. “Or rather, we will take her to the Leopards, who will take her to the minister in charge, who will decide what happens next.”
“But I must . . .” Gunis began.
“With all respect, Brother,” the captain said, “you must do nothing except what you are told. If the prisoner is so important, why did you bring her without even the seal of your superior?”
“The seal?” Gunis seemed dazzled and confused by the mere idea. “Do you mean I should take her all the way back to the high chaplain?”
“I’m not saying anything.” The mulasim was a squat, grizzled man with the skeptical face of a market peddler but the arms of a wrestler. Now he stepped up until he was face-to-face with the young priest; the soldier was no taller, but a great deal bigger. “I’m saying that this is a problem, and you haven’t helped me any by showing up.” He scowled fiercely and looked around. “I’ll need at least two men to take her forward, and the gods know, I’ve none to spare.”
“But I have two guards . . . !”
The captain laughed. “These?” he said, gesturing at the soldiers who had accompanied them from the surface. “These two pricklepigs? Fat lot of good they’d have been if you’d run into a pack of those Yisti devils coming up out of the ground! No, you two can turn and hurry back to your important work guarding the dung pits. Go on with you, or I’ll have you in irons just like this little girl!”
The guards did not need another warning. They were already a dozen hurrying steps away when Gunis finally found his breath. “What about me? I . . . I was entrusted with this girl. I must be the one to accompany her.”
“Entrusted?” The officer looked from Qinnitan to the monk. “By slavers?” He turned back to Qinnitan. “Do you speak any of our tongue, child?”
For a moment Qinnitan was too surprised to have been addressed to say anything. “Yes. I am Xixian. Please, do not send me to the Golden One! I was taken by mistake from the Hive. . . .”
The captain glared. “I asked you a question, not to sing all the verses of the Morning Prayer. In a million, million years I would not interfere with something that was a matter for the Golden One, or at least those around him, to decide.” He turned back to survey the men in his vicinity. “Now, who to send . . . ?”
Somebody shouted, then there was a loud crash. Everyone around Qinnitan turned. A cartload overstacked with stones had run one of its wheels off the track on the level just above and the cart was wobbling precariously, half off the edge. A moment later it overtipped and several of the stones fell, sending the men staring up at it from below jumping hurriedly out of the way. The cart wobbled and then the whole mass slowly toppled over and broke into pieces on the stony ground below, sending rocks bounding in all directions.
Qinnitan did not need to be invited: she ran, shaking the loose shackles off her wrists as she went. She did not have time to think, but simply chose the nearest passage leading out of the wide chamber and sprinted toward it, sharp stones poking through the flimsy Marchland shoes the farmer’s wife had given her to wear.
Darkness punctuated with the glow of torches. Men’s faces turning toward her as she ran, some with their mouths open like masks of roaring demons, shouting questions at her. Qinnitan knew her one chance was to get out of sight of any witnesses and then hide.
A soldier snatched at her as she dashed past, and although he could not hold her, his brief grasp made her stumble. As she wobbled, trying to get her weary legs back beneath her, somebody else stuck out a foot, and she tripped and fell hard on the stony ground.
“What’s this?” someone demanded in a harsh desert accent as she lay whimpering and trying to catch her breath. “A spy?”
She did not get up, or at least did not remember getting up. A moment later something hit her hard on the back of her head and drove the rest of the thoughts away.
It was the bees. She knew that buzzing, had felt it deep in her bones and guts many times. On a day when the bees were said to be happy they could be marked throughout the Hive, a sturdy rumble so low it was felt, not heard.
It had all been a dream, then—just a dreadful dream. Duny was in the next bed and soon they would be up, washing their hair together in cold water. She would tell her friend the silly dream she’d had and they would laugh—as if little Qinnitan, who scarcely had grown breasts, would ever be chosen as a wife of the great autarch! All the girls would laugh, but Qinnitan didn’t mind. She was happy to be in her home, and safe—watched over by the bees, and by the priestesses, and even by great Father Nushash himself.
But why did the buzzing of the sacred Bees of Nushash have words . . . ?
“. . . is Panhyssir? You summoned . . . hour . . .”
“. . . too much. The high priest would . . . than he . . .”
Her head hurt. Her knees hurt. Her arm hurt badly. She wondered if it might be broken. What had happened?
“Enough, Vash, you are tiring me, walking around flapping your hands like an old woman. Besides, she is awake.” The friendly warmth, the feeling of safety, both vanished in an instant. Qinnitan knew that voice.
“Awake?”
“Can’t you tell? Her breathing has changed. She is lying there, bent like a bow, trying not to be noticed. And she succeeded—at least with you!” The laugh, high-pitched and musical, only made her guts churn. It was like listening to music made wit
h instruments of human bone and skin.
Someone bent over her—even through closed lids she could see the shadow. Whoever he was, he smelled like fruit pomanders and scented oil. “Are you sure, Golden One?”
She wanted to throw up. She wanted to cry out.
“More than sure.” Another laugh. “Give her a little love-pat on the cheek. Open up your eyes, my frightened bride! You have returned to your rightful master at last.”
She did not want to see. She did not want to know. The worst had finally happened.
“Open your eyes, or I will have them opened in a way you won’t like.” Still, he spoke sweetly, reasonably. Qinnitan gave up and looked at him, feeling empty and deathly cold inside.
Sulepis was unchanged, taller than any man she knew, handsome and golden-skinned as he reclined on a mound of cushions that covered most of the floor of a large, lamplit tent hung with costly fabrics and mirrors. The autarch wore his golden falcon helmet, golden finger-stalls, and golden sandals, but nothing else. His brown flesh appeared smoother than any mere human skin, as though he had been carved from soapstone.
He raised his hand toward her, spreading his long fingers as though he could stretch them out from a dozen feet away and wrap them around her. “Your blood flows true, priest’s daughter. Your heritage feels the nearness of destiny, of the great change coming to this world, and draws you to me. You have returned just in time.” He smiled, a brilliant slash of white across his narrow face that in someone else would have looked joyous, but which was inhuman as a crocodile’s smirk. The autarch had her—for all her frantic labors, she had failed and it had all come to nothing.
He pointed a long, gold-tipped finger. “You are a rare one, child, and that should be rewarded. I promise you will die last so you can see it all—yes, you will see me put on glory like a cloak of peacock feathers. . . .”
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