18

The Serpent was moving within Tsokawan, but in such a tangle of coils that Hesprec could not tell which way: all she could see was the knot.

Esumit was telling the clan chiefs the boy was dead, while Tecumet was here with soldiers and boats and power. When she had passed onwards, Matsur would follow, step for step, and speak to those same matriarchs and patriarchs, telling them exactly the opposite, singing the praises of the living Tecuman.

Hesprec put her back against the cool stones and closed her eyes, trying to find the Serpent’s will within the great heavy structure of the fortress. But if it was that easy, there wouldn’t be all of this squabbling.

‘All the way to the Crown of the World,’ she told the small stone cell around her, a room deep in the maze of the servants’ cellars, the floor slick with damp. The Serpent moved in the earth; the ardent priestess could seek guidance in buried places.

‘Ardent, or desperate.’ The words tasted old on her tongue. She imagined her own voice as it had been when she had been wrinkled and toothless. ‘All the way to the Crown of the World, and this is what I come back to.’

She stood, decisively, eyes still shut. ‘Do I care, the brother or the sister?’ she remarked to her silent, buried god, shaking her head. ‘But there are other things I care about, so . . . She placed her palms against the dank stones, fingers digging at the cracks between them. She stayed there for a long time, head bowed.

The Serpent shifted around her; she saw the gleam of its scales in her mind. In its movements she could divine death, atrocity, a terror from the long-ago.

Has it started already? She had a dreadful feeling that she was too late.

She shadowed Matsur as he shadowed Esumit, but she had no words for the clan chiefs, no pronouncements to make on the brother out in the estuary or the sister out on her barge. Hesprec was very aware of the eyes on her: a priestess of the Serpent who had yet to venture an opinion on the succession. Had she been interested in playing king-maker she was ideally placed.

She scowled at herself for thinking it, but the reason all this was happening was that they needed the right leader. What she had begun to think of as her great threat – as though her long pilgrimage in the north had given her some personal claim over it – was so overwhelming that the Sun River Nation must be given the very best of chances to survive it, and that meant the right Kasra on the Daybreak Throne.

She tried to ignore the crippling fear that might of course make the wrong decision.

Yet she sensed there was something more, to lead to this division. Why was Tecumet so self-evidently wondrous? Why did Matsur vouch for Tecuman even now, when he had been driven out of his own stronghold and might be no more than bones out in the estuary? Yet there was Matsur Chac Mosen still speaking the boy’s name in praise, and Matsur was no fool . . .

So she shadowed Matsur until he had ceased to unpick Esumit’s careful stitching. Then she followed him down to the windowless rooms beneath Tsokawan, where he knelt to his own prayers.

He had his eyes closed, but she knew he sensed the touch of her shadow as she darkened the door. He remained still for a long time, and Hesprec fancied he was gathering his strength to battle with her, word against word. She was patient, though, and if he had been drawing out his devotions in the hope she would go away, then . . . well, he knew her better than that.

At last Matsur sighed and shook his head, shifting about until he was sitting on the damp stone floor with his back to the wall. ‘Hesprec Essen Skese,’ he named her. ‘I have been three lives here in the estuary, where you have seldom deigned to tread. Perhaps it is time we knew one another better again.’

She sat beside him, lowering herself gingerly out of respect for her aches and pains – clean forgetting about her bright new body.

‘These things are known,’ she began, ‘none knows all the paths of the Serpent.’

Matsur nodded slowly. ‘One might ask why, when you have returned home so full of news, you waste it here rather than taking it to Atahlan where more might hear it.’

‘I have wondered just that,’ Hesprec agreed. ‘And yet we have so many Kasras here; a wealth; an overabundance.’ As he sighed again, she added, ‘Perhaps I should be speaking with Esumit, whose path has brought the girl to the Daybreak Throne.’

‘But here you are.’

‘Help me to understand, Matsur. Why are you still pressing the boy’s claim, when you don’t have the boy?’

Matsur was silent a long while, hands flat to the stones of the floor as he hunted out the presence of anyone nearby. At last he said, ‘Because if the boy ascends to the Daybreak Throne he will do what we say.’

‘Has there ever been a Kasra not advised by the Serpent?’

‘Not the Serpent, us,’ Matsur said flatly. ‘Myself, Therumit. We of the estuary.’

Hesprec felt a worm of fear move in her, because the Serpent did not play those games and strangle itself in its own coils. Am I in danger? But even if there was some faction that sought to rule, she could not imagine violence between them.

Matsur tilted his head back until it rested against the wall. ‘We have come across a secret, Hesprec, a terrible one. Only a handful of us know. It is crippling to know this thing, but it could change everything.’

‘And this doom we see approaching this land. This is part of your secret?’

‘Perhaps it is the key to defeating that doom. It could be the key to many things.’ Matsur’s voice shook, and Hesprec wondered how long the words had been bottled inside him, unable to escape. ‘Hesprec, I know you are wise: you watch when it is time to watch, you strike when it is time to strike.’

‘And you flatter.’

‘Would you come into the estuary, if I asked?’

‘Is it the Serpent’s path that takes me there?’ I should not have to ask, she considered, but this is something new. Who is it that speaks to me, through Matsur’s mouth?

Even as she thought it, Matsur’s reply was a passionate, ‘It is! More than anything we have done these last five lives and more. It is . . . I will send to Therumit. I will tell her I have opened to you. And when you have seen what we have seen, you can go to Atahlan with your warnings and your travels, but with our secret too. And perhaps it will be you that leads us all on the Serpent’s true path, when the doom comes.’

The vote of confidence was probably intended to reassure her, perhaps to recruit her. For Hesprec, all the words brought were an increase to her already turbulent disquiet.

Kalameshli Takes Iron prowled about the edges of his domain.

The warband, Spear Catcher and the others, seemed content. There was food and drink and, although there were southern soldiers keeping an eye on them, they were not overly worried. They had all decided the River People were soft.

And they were soft, but it was a softness that spread like a disease. Kalameshli had spent his long-ago childhood having the tenets of the Wolf beaten into him, and his adult years beating those same tenets into others. The Wolf did not make his people comfortable and complacent. The Wolf made them swift and strong through a life of running and fighting.

But here there was no need to hunt or protect what they had, and when Kalameshli spoke of the Wolf the others all nodded and looked solemn, but he could see the rot eating them from the inside out.

It was worse when he thought of her.

Of all the children he had whipped in his life, he had whipped her the hardest. Of all the unwilling students, she had been least willing. But she had been most important. He saved his greatest efforts for his own child.

That had been the project of his latter years: his daughter, got on a Tiger mother, and so vulnerable to outside influences right from her birth. He had worked so hard to force her to learn, to slap the Wolf into her. She could have been something great . . .

He paused then, for surely Maniye was something great – she was a Champion. Her people had never had a Champion before, or even realized they were lacking one. But whose Champion is she? That shape she took was not just a grand wolf – there was tiger and bear and other beasts rolled into that shape. And how had she come by such a transformation? Under the ministrations of the Serpent Hesprec.

Kalameshli had been forced to travel alongside Hesprec Essen Skese. He had seen his protégée, his daughter, choose the Serpent’s advice over the words of the Wolf. He had seen his child swayed by that creature who looked like just a dark slip of a girl, yet had been an old man in the shadow of Kalameshli’s knife not so long before.

And if only I had struck sooner! Maniye had made the rescue of Hesprec her first act of rebellion, the act that started to sever her from the Wolf.

And now, here we are . . .’ Half guests, half prisoners, far from home in this hot, dry, fish-smelling place. Maniye was out there in the murk with that useless boy-chief, that weak child who was alive only because he stood on the shoulders of others.

Kalameshli Stepped and hunted through the halls and rooms of this huge stone tomb until his nose told him he had found somewhere private. There he built up the stones he had brought with him until he had something like a wolf’s head – if he squinted and stretched his imagination. He set a fire within it, and heated a knife blade until he could smell the hot iron – Wolf’s secret.

He had such plans for Maniye. There were rituals and ordeals for her. She needed to become iron’s sister, so that she could carry it with her Stepped. How much more formidable would her Champion be then? But the chance was slipping between her fingers. Soon she would care for nothing but the whispering of this Serpent priestess; she would forget the Wolf and the north.

Kalameshli told the flames that this was what he cared for. It was not that his daughter was being taken from him. Priests had no offspring, only their god and their duties. He crouched before his little fire and stared into it, looking for a vision. What was the Wolf’s way to free Maniye from the tightening coils about her?

There is only one way. The words came to his mind, and he did not know whether they were the Wolf’s or his own. Or perhaps we are in perfect agreement.

He would cut away those coils with an iron knife. He remembered how he had first seen Hesprec: that pallid old man ready for the Wolf’s jaws. I drew your teeth then. Since then, the Serpent had shed its skin and grown new fangs, but he – she – was young and small-framed, and went about Tsokawan alone.

Staring into the fire, Kalameshli was struck by the perfect pattern to it. Hesprec the Serpent had not escaped the Wolf; that had just been the start of a long hunt that would end here.

I will shed your blood in your own stronghold. And even if they kill me for it, I will have freed Maniye from you.

After he had scattered the ashes of his fire, he went in search of aid.

The warband would do what he wished, he knew. Without Maniye here to gainsay him, Spear Catcher and the rest knew the Wolf, and knew his priest. They were unsubtle, though. Unless Kalameshli planned full-scale war, he would need to hide his hand.

But there were a pair who came and went as they pleased, skulking unseen in every shadow and behind every chair. He had them sent for and sat them down before him, scowling at them ferociously to make them sure he had no time for their foolish jokes. Sathewe, the Coyote girl, and the addled Crow, Feeds on Rags. That he had to rely on such leavings was a bitter mark of how far he had fallen, but the Wolf tested a man many ways.

‘There is a Serpent in this place,’ he told them,

‘There are many Serpents, O priest.’ Rags was squinting at him from one eye, in that annoying way the Eyriemen had.

‘You know the one,’ Kalameshli snapped at him. ‘The creature that came south with us.’

The pair exchanged glances. Yes, they knew.

‘Set aside your mischief and watch her. Most of all, find her when she is alone.’

The Crow and the Coyote exchanged a troubled glance. But they were afraid of him, and so they would do what he said.