Rian watched Maskelle walk back toward the fire. He had had a long journey, made longer by the fact that he didn’t know where it would end. Traveling through the lowland jungles had meant unfamiliar and dangerous animals, raiders, poisonous plants, and strange people with inexplicable customs. He had been hunted by the demons that lived in the deep jungle, chased by the ten-foot-tall flightless gankbirds that populated the hills, and then lately drowned in the near constant rain, which had driven him to the point where he would have been ready to sell his body for dry clothes, if only someone had given him the opportunity. The journey had almost ended on the river fighting those motherless drunken raiders and cursing his own stupidity. Instead he had found a woman worth following.
She was also a woman who thought a curse that could make a thing of painted wood stand up and walk was a minor annoyance. He had seen what the priest-shamans of the Sintane were like. But she had saved his life, and it wasn’t as if he had anything to lose. Nothing matters, remember? You gave up your honor, he reminded himself. At least she could have the courtesy just to admit that she was a powerful wizard, but from what he had seen of the Kushorit and their Koshan priests since crossing the Empire’s boundary, they were none of them entirely sensible people.
The leader of the Ariaden had come back from disposing of the puppet’s box and now stood staring at Rian, his expression a grim glare. Considering that he was nearly a full two feet shorter, Rian didn’t find it a particularly daunting sight. Rastim said, “I don’t know who you are, but you watch your step. She’s an important lady in the Celestial Empire. A powerful lady.”
Rian shook his head and looked away to conceal his grin. No, really? When the obvious eluded him to that extent, he would lie down in a hole and the little actor would be welcome to cover him up. “What’s the Adversary, and how is It different from a Voice of the Ancestors?” He had been hearing people swear by the Adversary most of the way through Gidale Province and more and more since he had crossed the border into the Empire proper, but he had never heard what it was or that it had a voice. Rian had learned Kushorit back in Riverwait, to speak to the provincial traders who traveled across the Sintane to the mountain caravan trails, and who often brought important news of what the other Sitanese Holder Lords were up to. He knew enough of the language for everyday conversations, but had never learned the subtleties, and he had been unable to tell if the people were afraid of the Adversary, or worshipped it, or both.
Rastim looked cautious, as if the question held a hidden trap. “What are you talking about?”
“You heard me. To the priests at the big temple, she said she used to be the Voice of the Adversary. What did she mean?”
The Ariad’s face went still and sincere, by which Rian took to mean that he was about to hear a very big lie. He wasn’t disappointed. Rastim glanced around, as if checking for hidden watchers, as if the rest of the Ariad weren’t staring curiously at them from across the little circle of wagons, and said in a whisper, “The Adversary’s a demon, the demon of all demons.”
Rian folded his arms and looked bored, because he knew that would annoy the little man more than anything else. “That’s pig shit. The Koshans don’t believe in demons. We know that even in the Sintane, play actor.” Nobody was really sure what the Koshan religion was, but they knew what it wasn’t, and it didn’t have anything to do with the grubby cult of demon worship that had spread in some of the outer provinces, with its curses and witching dolls and trading blood for supernatural favors. The odd thing was the Koshan temples in the provinces hadn’t tried to stamp it out, the way the Dial priests had. The Koshans had simply treated it with a supreme indifference that was more damning than any attack.
Rastim glared. “All right, all right. It’s some Koshan thing, like some spirit of bad luck and vengeance, or something.”
“Bad luck?” Rian sounded skeptical, though he thought Rastim might be telling the truth now, at least as he saw it.
“Bad luck and bad things that happen, something like that. And taking revenge on people. And justice. If It was part of any sensible religion, they would call It a demon. They all get together and draw lots for who has to be Its Voice. A symbol for It is carved into the base of every doorway of every temple, to scare other demons away.”
The last part sounded inexplicable and Koshan enough to be true. Rian drew breath to pursue the question, but from across the camp Maskelle said, “Rastim, we can’t stay here.”
She stood by the banked fire, her arms folded, staring off into the night. Rastim muttered, “I was afraid of that,” and went to her.
Impatiently, she pushed her dark hair back from her face and in the glow of the firelight Rian could see the loops and whorls of the Koshan tattoo, just at the edge of her hairline. She said, “We have to push on to Illsat Keo tonight, or we’ll just have more trouble.”
Rastim shook his head. “What good will that do? It will be just as bad there as here.”
“Not there. Illsat Keo is a Temple of the Adversary.”
“Oh,” Rastim said, shifting uncertainly. Rian noted that he didn’t look quite so unconcerned about the Adversary as he had implied before. Maybe the Ariaden believed more of that demon story than he had thought.
Maskelle looked up at the dark cloud-heavy sky. “When we get up on the road, move the body to my wagon.”
Grumbling, but not too loudly, the Ariaden made ready to leave. They were so afraid of the cursed puppet Rian knew it must have done much worse than walk out during plays or knock on its box. Rastim seemed to be the only one nervous of the prospect of visiting a Temple of the Adversary; but then the others seemed to know little of the Koshans. Not that Rian knew much of them, either.
Until crossing the river he had avoided even the small villages, in case the hunters the Holder Lord’s Heir had sent dared to trespass so far on Imperial territory. One night not long after he had crossed the border, he had stumbled on what seemed to be a small abandoned shrine, and driven by pouring rain and exhaustion, he had spent the night on the stone flags under the dome, looked down on by the hundreds of faces carved into the walls. In the morning he had realized what he had been too dazed to notice the night before: the shrine had been empty but clean swept, undisturbed by animal droppings or even blown leaves and dust, and he knew it wasn’t abandoned. He had fled, not wanting to be seen by even some lonely Koshan monk-caretaker.
As Rian helped harness the oxen, he watched the post guards watching them. The factor came out on a balcony, wrapped in a sleeping robe and a disgruntled air, but no one attempted to interfere with them. Either the post guards weren’t inclined to pursue a problem that seemed to be leaving of its own accord, or the factor wasn’t anxious for another confrontation with Maskelle. From the gossip Rian had heard from the boat people, everyone who worked in the compound agreed that she had gotten the better of him in the first one.
Once clear of the compound, Maskelle’s wagon took the lead with Old Mali at the reins. It was so dark up on the road that even though each wagon had a lantern hanging from the box, the Ariaden called Firac still had to walk ahead with another lamp. The breeze had died and there was an odd kind of suspended silence in the night that Rian didn’t particularly like. The cool air was still heavy with water, but the rain hadn’t returned, and without it the jungle at the edge of the road was almost too quiet. It wasn’t true jungle; Rian knew there were farms and little villages all through here, and the belts of trees concealed cultivated fields, but for all that they could be in the middle of wild nowhere.
He walked back down the road a short distance past the reach of the lamplight and then returned to stand beside Maskelle, who was leaning on her staff and watching the wagons crawl by from the muddy verge. “They’re not following us,” Rian said, not that he was much reassured by it.
“But something else might be?” Maskelle asked, watching him with a trace of amusement.
He shrugged, feeling he was being tested. Maybe she wanted to know how much of the night’s ambient tension he could sense. “It just feels wrong, like something’s breathing down my neck.”
She smiled pityingly. “The Infinite touches everyone,” she said, but her tone was more self-mocking than anything else.
“Tell it to keep its hands to itself,” Rian suggested, and went to check the other side of the road.
Maskelle went up to ride on her wagon next to Old Mali and Rian walked beside it. They kept moving at the same slow pace, seeing no one else on the road. Rian still felt they were being followed, though he knew there were no wagons or horses on the road behind them, not for several hundred yards at least. He had spent most of his early life either hunting or being hunted by raiding parties of the nomad tribes in the mountains above Tarkat. His instincts told him something was stalking them, and if it wasn’t the post guards sent by the vengeful factor, then it was something worse, from the river. In the dark he could see Maskelle’s head kept turning toward the dark belt of trees, which didn’t help, either.
Time passed and they traveled quietly; only the occasional snuffling of an ox or a sleepy murmur from one of the other wagons disturbed the peace. Insects sang in the grass and trees. After a time, Maskelle climbed down and walked along the roadside next to Rian, the glow of the lamp tied to the tailgate lighting their way. She muttered, “If it has any wits at all, it has to know we’re making for the city boundary and Illsat Keo.”
Rian assumed “it” was another water demon, following them along the river’s course. If it was something worse, he wasn’t going to ask. “If it could stop us and it doesn’t, there’s got to be a reason for it,” he said, thinking of an ambush somewhere ahead in the dark.
“So say it doesn’t want to stop us.” She halted on the muddy bank and leaned on her staff, thoughtful. The wagon with the lamp pulled ahead and Rian couldn’t read her expression in the dark. Sounding frustrated, she said, “I can’t tell if it’s self-aware and following us out of some intelligent motive, or if it’s just a remnant of what attacked us before, tied to the boy’s remains and trailing it. Or if it’s both.”
“When are you going to get rid of the body?” Rian asked her. The corpse had been rolled in an old blanket and placed in one of the canvas slings that hung underneath the wagon, which were used to haul fodder for the oxen.
“When we pass the dike that crosses the road and marks the outer boundary of the city. It’s not far now; we’ve already passed the first of the Passage Markers.” These were waist-high square stones carved with protective symbols that stood on either side of the road at intervals of twenty-one feet, and would apparently continue all the way to the city. Rian had seen them on the roads that led to the smaller shrines and temples; they were another one of those things Koshans thought necessary.
“Does it make such a difference whether we dump the body inside the boundary or outside it?” Rian knew little about magic and less about religion, but he had been here long enough to know that the Kushorit never put anything anywhere—not a road, not a water trough, and probably not a pigsty—without a reason involving spirits and the Infinite.
She nodded slowly, looking off into the dark.
Rastim’s wagon drew even with them, and he peered down from the seat. “What is it?” he asked.
“I almost made a mistake,” Maskelle told him.
An hour later, the road began to rise and Rian knew they must be nearing the dike. In country that flooded during the rainy season, the city would need massive dikes as well as canals to control the water. Maskelle rode on the driver’s bench of her own wagon, and when the upward slope became more dramatic, she tapped Old Mali on the shoulder. The old woman guided the oxen to the side of the road without a word and Rian waited beside them. The other wagons rolled slowly past, the sleepy faces of the Ariaden peering curiously out; only Rastim knew what they meant to do.
When the last wagon passed, Rastim reined in and said worriedly, “Are you sure about this?” He tipped his head toward Rian significantly. Rian glanced upward in annoyance.
“Yes, yes,” Maskelle said impatiently, shooing a grumbling Old Mali across the muddy road to Rastim’s wagon and glancing over her shoulder back toward the river, as if she could feel something watching them from that direction. “Just hurry and go.”
Old Mali climbed up onto Rastim’s bench and settled herself with a gusty sigh. Reluctantly, Rastim pulled a battered shovel out of the back and tossed it down to Rian. Then he shook the reins and the wagon rolled on.
Rian moved ahead, finding a good spot at the side of the road. Maskelle cut the ties holding the sling to the underside of the wagon bed as he started to dig. Rian had pointed out that burying the sling with the corpse was a waste, but apparently once it had been in contact with the curse living in the boy’s remains, it couldn’t be used to carry food anymore, even food for animals.
As Maskelle came back toward him, she froze suddenly. Rian dropped the shovel and reached for his siri, but she wasn’t looking toward the jungle. She stood with her head tilted a little, as if listening intently to the undercurrents in the night.
When she shook herself and moved forward again, Rian picked up the shovel. He felt obligated to point out, “This is still a stupid way to get rid of a corpse. When it rains again, which will probably be in the next hour, it’ll wash right out of this bank.”
“We’re not hiding it from the Imperial Constabulary,” she told him impatiently, “we’re laying a curse.” She helped him dig, scraping the muddy dirt out with her hands. The night was very dark with just the one lantern, and Rian could almost feel the stalking presence buried in the jungle himself.
“Wouldn’t it be better to dump the body into the canal?” Rian said, but he didn’t stop digging.
“This body is still cursed. If we dump it in the canal, something else will inhabit it.”
Rian grunted, acknowledging that that was a good enough reason. “But burying it is different?”
“Farmers in the outer reaches bury their dead this way, giving the body to the earth spirits after the soul is fled to the Infinite. This boy’s soul was long gone before his body stopped living, and this just might protect it from being used again.” She stopped to look around at the surface of the muddy roadway briefly, as if expecting to see something appear on it. “Earth spirits usually accept the offerings gradually, over time, but then the ritual is usually performed by laymen and not consecrated Voices.”
“So it’s better to bury him,” Rian muttered, trying not to think about demons living in the dirt under his feet. If I learn any more about the Koshan view of the world, I’m going to be afraid to touch anything—water, dirt, trees.
They kept digging, Maskelle reminding him, “It doesn’t have to be deep, just enough that we can cover him completely.” Rian nodded; he could hear branches and palms thrashing somewhere in the brush and thought, It’s close.
Finally, Maskelle said, “All right, that should do it,” and sat back on her heels, breathing hard.
Rian tossed the shovel aside and ran for the body, dragging it in the sling back toward the hole. Maskelle helped him bundle it in. He grabbed the shovel again, but she held up a hand. “Not yet.”
He hesitated, glancing toward the trees and the heavy brush. The thrashing was closer, as the intruder in the jungle fought its way toward them. What it was fighting, he had no idea, except that it was obviously fighting something. Rian dropped the shovel and drew his sword, putting himself between Maskelle and the edge of the trees. Whatever she was going to do, he didn’t want it interrupted. “What else is out there?”
“The trees, the rocks, the moss, the birds, everything in the jungle. The spirits that live there resist the intrusion.” Maskelle spoke hurriedly, clawing through the pile of dirt. She had dropped her staff beside the shallow pit, and in their haste they had buried it.
Maskelle uncovered the staff and scrambled to her feet. Rian could hear her whispering something, not in Kushorit but some language that sounded very like it.
The thrashing came to the very edge of the brush, just within the deep shadow. Rian tensed and one of the oxen lowed in alarm. But the noise abruptly ceased. The ground grew warm, a heat Rian could feel through his worn boots. He risked a glance over his shoulder and saw a low ground mist creeping over the open pit. It swirled around his feet. He swore under his breath, tried to ignore the prickle of unease crawling up his spine, and faced the dark trees again.
The smell of rot came up from the pit, heavy and sickly sweet in the damp air. Maskelle stepped back from it. “Now we can cover him up.”
Rian watched the edge of the trees, wary for a trick. “It won’t try something else?”
She shrugged, looking around for the shovel. “It might. I’ve never seen a dark water spirit so strong before. Whatever cursed the boy’s body must have done something to it.” She paused and added, “But for now it’s going back to the river.”
Rian waited another moment, listening for the telltale crunch of footsteps in the grass, but there was nothing. He shook his head, sheathed the siri, and took the shovel away from her. It didn’t take long to cover the pit, and soon they had the wagon moving again.
Illsat Keo wasn’t visible from the road, but Maskelle had described the marker at the head of the track that led to it to Rastim and all he and the others had to do was follow the short trail through the trees to the temple’s gate. When she and Rian reached the marker, she could tell they had been here by the deep ruts in the mud, which told a story of a wagon wheel sunk deep and freed by hard labor. “Looks like they made it all right,” she said, then noticed Rian was looking up at the marker post.
It was a round pillar, the stone stained by moss and wrapped about by a few vines. At the top was a carved image of a gashwing, the largest of the flighted birds in the central lands and a carrion-eater. The gashwing was one of the Adversary’s incarnations and a common symbol for it. She said, “Let’s go,” wondering if Rian would comment, but he said nothing, just guided the wagon off the road, turning it to avoid the spot where the Ariaden’s wheel had come to grief.
The clouds had cleared enough that the moon was visible, making it easier to drive the wagon. It was a short track through the jungle and soon the lamps on either side of the temple gate were visible. The wall around the temple compound was so low anyone as tall as Maskelle could easily see over it. There were three small shrines inside, the tallest of their delicate towers barely thirty-three feet high. There was also a library and quarters for the handful of monks and nuns who lived here, a low series of buildings on the opposite side of the compound from the shrines. The Ariaden’s wagons were drawn up outside next to the low wall, near the stone-paved edge of the little canal that watered the temple. There was no room for wagons inside, but they wouldn’t have fit through the narrow gate, anyway.
There were more lamps burning inside the compound, and as Rian drew their wagon up to the others, Maskelle swung down from the box. A blue-robed nun came out of the gates, carrying a handlamp. She lifted the lamp, revealing a wrinkled face and the faded designs of her rank on her shaven skull. She said, “Ah, Sister, your friends said to expect you. We haven’t much hospitality to share, as most travelers don’t stop here, but we welcome the company—”
Maskelle held the hair back from her face in a lank, tangled handful, and said, “Barime, it’s me.”
The older woman stopped, staring, screwing up her eyes to see, as if she had to read the remains of Maskelle’s rank design, barely visible at the edge of her hairline. “My child, it is you,” she said finally. She put the lamp down with a shaky hand and came forward to embrace her.
Maskelle managed not to hug her too hard, feeling her eyes prick with foolish tears and annoyed at herself for it; the old woman felt as light and fragile as a dry wisp of grass. She said, “I had to come here, Barime. It wasn’t safe on the road.” She laughed, though it wasn’t funny. “Do you think It’ll mind?”
Barime drew back, smiling and shaking her head. “If It does, that would be Answering us at least, one way or the other.” Rian was unharnessing the oxen and she waved at him, the gesture taking in the others already in the compound. “Your companions are all most welcome.”
Old Mali appeared in the gates and hurried toward them, taking the lead oxen and the harness away from Rian and batting at him when he tried to help her. Barime took Maskelle’s hand and led her to the temple. The compound was awash in light, the stone lamps set on the pillars and the edges of the shrines’ platforms all lit now, revealing the pinkish-gray tint of the stone and chasing shadows through the filigree of carvings. Parrots and tigers and female figures wove through the three-tiered pediments and the heavy decoration around the doors. A group of seated figures that managed to combine the grotesque with the whimsical—men with the heads of monkeys, another one of the Adversary’s incarnations—guarded the small open court in the center, life-sized and lifelike in the flicker of flame.
On the packed dirt of the open space in front of the monastic quarters, Firac was giving an impromptu demonstration of Ariaden theater with one of the small string puppets, a curious group of monks and nuns gathered around him. Maskelle saw with relief that most of them were too young to remember her. They didn’t look at all upset at having their rest disturbed, but then Koshans were used to going without sleep when the rites required it. Killia was sitting on a low wall, her daughter in her lap. The little girl looked much improved, and curious about the men and women with their shaven heads and colorful tattoos and vivid blue robes.
“You’re tired,” Barime said, looking up at her. “There’s time to talk in the morning.” She looked at the group around Firac. “I’ll send them back to bed. It’s not often we get visitors, and never foreigners with such interesting toys. Will you take vigil in the shrine?”
“Yes.” Maskelle sighed. “For all the good it will do.”
Barime embraced her again and went to chase the others back into their quarters. Rastim came up to her, his face drawn from exhaustion but his expression holding nothing but relief. “It went well, then, getting rid of the you-know-what?” he asked.
“Yes, it went fine.” She saw Rastim glance suspiciously at Rian, who stood a short distance away, looking around at the compound. She said, “You’re wrong about him, you know. He doesn’t mean me any harm.”
Rastim gave her a doubtful look, but said, “Maybe so.” The temple’s inhabitants were retiring to their quarters, the Ariaden straggling back out to the wagons. He added, “You were right, we should have come here and not stopped at the post. Gisar stopped his knocking as soon as we got past that bird thing out on the road.”
“Was it your wagon that was stuck?” she asked.
“Yes, why?”
“No reason.” She was glad she had sent them on. If Gisar had had enough power outside his box to trap the wagon wheel in the mud, then they had gotten here none too soon. But Gisar was only a minor creature and would have no wish to draw the attention of the Adversary. “We’ll be in the city tomorrow. You should get some sleep.”
“So should you. You look tired to death.” Rastim patted her shoulder and followed the others.
“Thank you,” she called after him. I didn’t need that. Not that there was really time to do more than nap; it couldn’t be more than two hours until dawn.
Barime returned as the Ariaden went back to their wagons. She said, “It was time you were back. I’m only glad that I was here to see it.” She gave Maskelle the full bow that was due her rank, then turned to Rian and gave him the courtesy bow due to honored strangers. Rian seemed startled at having his presence acknowledged, but managed to return the gesture.
Barime embraced Maskelle again and then headed toward the temple living quarters. Rian stepped up beside Maskelle, watching Barime leave, and asked, “Can all the Koshans do magic?”
She rubbed the back of her neck and let out her breath. “Yes and no. The closer you come to a full understanding of the Infinite, the more your ability to manipulate the spirits of earth, water, and air increases.” She leaned on her staff. The lamps on the temple platform had been left lit for courtesy to the visitors, and the three shrines looked larger without the people to lend perspective. “And the less your need becomes to use that ability.” She shook her head. “It has nothing to do with rank. There are monks and nuns, living as hermits in the deep jungle, who are more powerful than the Priest of the Sare or any of the higher ranks.”
Rian regarded her, suspicion in those green-gold eyes. “So Koshans don’t use their magic.”
“Not the way you think of it, no.”
“Except you.”
“Except the Voice of the Adversary.” Maskelle went up the steps to the central shrine, past the guardian monkey-men, and stood in the open doorway. The interior was dark, the intricate carving of the Adversary’s various incarnations lost to shadow.
It was not very spacious or lavish, but no Koshan temples were. The sizes and shapes of the buildings were important—the heights of the towers and the doors, the curves in the carving, the number of paving stones in the floor—that invoked the spirits of the Infinite, not what was inside. This one was empty except for the niches in the walls for offerings of fruit and flowers, brought by the villagers and farmers in the surrounding countryside. It smelled of damp stone and must and the moss that grew on everything during the rainy season despite the constant efforts to scrub it off.
Rian stood at the bottom of the steps. Patiently, as if prepared to wait all night. For someone who could be as sarcastic as he was, that patience was a little surprising. She leaned in the doorway, the rough stone cool against her back, and said, “What were you in the Sintane?”
He shifted from one foot to the other, eyed her warily, then said, “I was a kjardin for the Holder Lord of Markand.”
“What’s that?”
“A retainer, a personal guard. There aren’t the right words in Kushorit.” She motioned for him to come up and he hesitated. “Why is there a demon carved above the door?”
“It’s the aspect of the Adversary that eats evil.” She shook her head. “The Adversary isn’t a demon. The Adversary eats demons for dinner.” She turned and moved into the little shrine. There was nothing here, just so much empty stone. You expected something else? she asked herself. The shrine was as empty of any spirit presence as the jungle and the river were crowded, but Maskelle could sense it was a recent vacancy. The temple had the feel of a room warmed by a living presence who had just stepped out the far door, just before she had stepped in the near one.
Rian had climbed the steps behind her and she glanced back at him. She couldn’t see his expression in the dark, but his face was tilted up toward the shadows where the ceiling extended up into the tower. She said, “The word in our language for ‘Adversary’ translates to the word for demon in some of the outlying provinces. That’s where those stories come from. The Adversary is the only Ancestor, the only humanlike spirit, that never lived in this world as a human. Before the rise of the Koshan temples, It was thought to be the god of luck, both good and bad. But that’s a misunderstanding of Its purpose.”
“So what’s Its purpose?”
“To destroy evil.” Maskelle moved to the open doorway at the back of the shrine.
There were steps here too, leading up to a round stone platform at the back of the temple. It was within the boundary of the low walls, but high enough to be awash in moonlight and screened by the thick green of the treetops, cut off from the light of the court and compound by the stepped tower of the shrine. The breeze had died and the night was quiet except for the calls of nightbirds. She sat down on the smooth stone, still warm from the day’s sunny intervals. She heard Rian step onto the platform behind her and said, “This is a moon-viewing platform. It’s important to some of the rituals to know the exact shape of the shadow patterns on the moon.”
He moved up beside her, looking up at the full moon. There was a mottled pattern of dark and light across its surface tonight. Without referring to the texts that recorded all the permutations and their meanings, Maskelle could only translate it as far as “portentous events.” With the approach of the rainy season Equinox and the culmination of the Hundred Year Rite, that was only to be expected. Rian sat down next to her and relaxed into a sprawl.
“This is one of my temples,” Maskelle said, “or it used to be.” She shifted around to face him. “Why did you come to the Empire?”
He let out his breath and started to remove his buskins. “It’s a long story.”
“That’s no reason not to tell it.”
He wrestled with a recalcitrant knot in the bootlace. She didn’t think he would answer, but then he said, “The Holder Lord died.”
She frowned. She could see that prying information out of Rian was going to be no easy task, even under the best of circumstances. “You were much attached to him?”
“More so than I thought, apparently.” He managed to wrench the buskin off, gasping in relief, and stretched out on his back.
Maskelle gave up any attempt at subtlety. “I can see why it’s a long story, if you tell it like this.”
He sat up on his elbows. “All right. I’d only been at Markand Hold a year. I was part of a treaty between Markand and Riverwait.”
“Part of a treaty? They trade…” She hesitated over the word he had used, then settled for “… personal guards?”
“Not usually, but when the Holder Lord of Markand’s legion is on the border and he’s naming treaty terms and he points at you and says, ‘And I’ll take that one,’ nobody has much choice about it.”
She watched him thoughtfully. “So Riverwait gave you up to an enemy.”
“The Lady Holder of Riverwait gave me up.” He looked away. “The Holder Lord of Markand had been coming to her hall for years and I was the first of her cortege. We didn’t get along. He chose me as part of the treaty because he knew what it would cost her in honor. She didn’t have a choice. Refusing to give me to him would have been refusing the treaty, and Markand would have overrun us within a month.”
“But she gave you up.”
“I know that part, we don’t have to go over it again,” he said, some annoyance in his voice. “I spent a year at Markand serving the Holder Lord.”
She frowned. “Serving how?”
He sighed. “As a kjardin. A personal guard.”
Maskelle sat back, wrapping her arms around her knees. She could imagine it all too readily. From what she had seen of Rian, he would have made no secret of his dislike when the Holder Lord had come to Riverwait on his earlier visits. The Holder Lord of Markand must have been something of a sadistic games-player to demand the favorite bodyguard of the Lady Holder as part of a treaty in the first place. And it must have been an interesting year at Markand for Rian, a virtual prisoner in the guise of a trusted retainer, and of course everyone else in the Holder Lord’s court would have known.
Rian was watching her face and must have followed her thought. “I made sure he didn’t enjoy it too much,” he said. “There are ways.”
“I can imagine.”
He laid back down and stretched, brows lifted ironically. “I think I overdid it, though.”
It was a nice sight; she had always been attracted to lean men with flat stomachs, even if his skin was a little light for her eyes. “Oh?”
“There’s an old custom, that when a High Holder Lord dies his best guards and servants go to the grave with him.”
“Go to the grave?” Maskelle repeated blankly.
“Continue to serve him in the sunland,” Rian explained. Seeing that she was still baffled, he spelled it out. “Get killed during the funeral, so the relatives can prove how much they really did honor the old bastard.”
She looked away to conceal her reaction. To a member of a religious order that had debated for ten years on whether it was acceptable to allow cut flowers as spirit offerings, the idea of a living human as part of burial goods came as something of a shock.
Rian added, “It’s fallen out of favor. But the priests read the omens and said the Holder Lord needed company on the journey into the sunland. Everybody—the family, the bodyguards, the wives and husbands, the clan leaders, the Guild Chiefs—all got together to decide who it would be. Guess who we picked?”
“I see. And I suppose the Holder Lord left detailed instructions about this to his priests before he died.” Intellectually, Maskelle could appreciate the final refinement of cruelty, but then she had been told often that she seldom did much of her thinking with her brain. The Holder Lord of Markand is dead, she reminded herself. Which was fortunate, because otherwise she would have to go to the Sintane and kill him herself. “How did you get away?”
“I survived the funeral games, which they let me know was very inconvenient for them. The Holder Lord’s Heir wanted me put in the tomb alive, the way they used to do it. The guard captain, who was my lord officer, thought they should strangle me, which is also an old custom. But the chief priest decided to be magnanimous and had them give me a drug that would keep me unconscious through the burial rites, so I’d wake up just in time to suffocate.”
“Small favors.” Maskelle made her voice sound dry, rather than horrified.
“Very small. But they didn’t get as much of the drug down me as they thought, and it took so long they were late for the beginning of the rite, which starts in the Hall of the Hold. I pretended I couldn’t stand, moaned and thrashed around, and they left me in the funerary chapel attached to the burial mound, with only a couple of guards outside. I was just conscious enough to put a finger down my throat and get rid of the rest of the drug. It almost took too long, but I was finally able to wake up enough to take one of the guards from behind and the other when he turned around. I got out of the chapel just before the procession came into sight. There was nowhere else to go, so I headed for the border into Gidale. The Heir sent hunters after me, so I had to keep going.” He sat up, unbuckled his belt, and half drew the siri to show her the hilt. “See that? This isn’t mine, it’s the Holder Lord’s. I took it from the offering table. It had panthers and stags worked in gold; I sold those in Tirane.”
Maskelle grinned in appreciation of the irony, though she suspected Rian had regretted giving up the sword’s ornaments. “Why didn’t you want to tell me this? Why make me pry it out of you?”
He set the sheathed sword aside, though still within easy reach, and laid back down, propping himself up on one elbow. “You’re a religious and I’ve been condemned as a sacrifice by priests—how did I know how you were going to take it?”
“I see.” If she was going to do what she knew she wanted to, it was time for a little honesty. “It’s not half so bad as some things I’ve done.”
“And what’s that?”
“I killed one of my husbands. Well, some people believe I killed all of them, and in a way, that’s true.”
Being Rian, he frowned and said, “You had husbands?”
“Three. The first one, Ilian, died because he trusted me too much. He followed me into danger and I couldn’t protect him. I killed Sirot, the second one, myself, because of a vision I had.” She looked up at the enigmatic face of the moon, framed by faint, faded stars. She had gone over this so many times in her own thoughts, but she realized this was the first time she had spoken of it aloud to anyone in seven years. “I thought it was from the Adversary, but I made a mistake. I was using too much power, relying on it and not the words of the Ancestors.” Regret stung her again and she had to stop speaking to control her voice. She had hated Sirot by then, and everything had been a good deal more complicated than she was making it sound, but the essentials were really all that mattered. “My husband’s son, who was only a boy at the time, was one of the heirs of the Old Emperor. The vision told me that if he took the throne, the Celestial Empire would disappear in a storm of darkness and chaos.” She looked at Rian. “So I tried to stop that from happening, any way I could. My husband fought me and I killed him for it. The third husband, Vanrin, was a man who supported me out of love and folly and ambition, and he was killed in the fighting afterward.”
Rian was watching her worriedly, his brows drawn together in concern. “But you stopped the boy from being the heir?”
“No, he was made the heir, and when the Old Emperor died, he took the throne. And nothing happened.” She laughed a little, bitterly. “The vision was a lie, a trick of the dark spirits, but I believed it completely.” She shook her head. “I’ve been in a great deal of difficulty and most of it’s my own fault. I betrayed my sacred duty to the Koshan Path. The Adversary will no longer speak to me, but while I still live there won’t be a new Voice to replace me, so the Empire has been denied the Adversary’s counsel for the past seven years. In the fighting I used too much of my power and gained the attention of the dark spirits, the things that live in the shadows. Like the river when it runs hard and wild like this, and whatever it was that killed that boy and replaced his soul with something else.” She smiled wryly at how long the catalog of her folly was becoming.
“They punished you for it?” Rian asked cautiously.
“No, I made my own punishment too, my own curse. Now whenever I manipulate the Infinite, use the power that most people call magic, it draws the attention of the dark spirits and they can find me again. And I can’t hear the Adversary. It’s like It took away my eyes and ears.” Or worse, because it was my own idiocy. She added tiredly, “At first I was evil, then I was an annoyance. Now I’m just pathetic.”
His voice serious, Rian said, “Not pathetic.”
“Maybe.” A wind stirred the trees somewhere past the temple, the sound coming to them like the distant rush of water. Rian was watching her, a faint worried crease between his brows. She said, “But of all the things I’ve done, I’ve never given up anyone to an enemy.” She leaned over, slid a hand into the soft warmth of his hair, and kissed him.
When she drew back, he said, “I knew that when I first saw you,” and pulled her down to him again.
Maskelle had time to remember that her bones weren’t twenty anymore, no matter what the rest of her thought, and that the stone beneath them was unyielding, but none of it mattered enough to give her pause. It had been a long time since she had been with a man and longer still since she had been with one she wanted this much, one who wasn’t afraid of her, whose humor and stubborn temperament matched her own. All thought dissolved into lean, hard muscle under her hands, first through tight fabric and then only hot bare skin.
At one point Rian managed to gasp, “Is the Adversary going to care that we’re doing this on his moon-viewing platform?”
“No,” she told him, laughing, “it’s a very ancient, very honored form of offering.”
Later, her head pillowed on Rian’s back, Maskelle drifted into sleep. He didn’t make a very good pillow, having no comfortable softness about him, so her sleep was light and the transition from waking world to dream was almost imperceptible at first.
The dream landscape was much like the real one, though the moonlight seemed to penetrate the heavy shadows of the trees overhanging the wall to a greater depth, so that she could make out the rough knotted boles hung with moss and the vines entangling the branches. Her physical awareness of Rian’s body was still intense; she felt she could have traced every line of muscle, every curve, every old scar. This melded with the dream until she could feel his breathing and his heartbeat as if they were her own. He lay on his stomach, his head pillowed on his arms, drowsing just on the edge of sleep and kept from slipping fully into unconsciousness by a need to listen for anyone or anything approaching. This gave her the freedom to move further into the dream, rising above the moon-viewing deck to a point near the top of the stepped tower, so that she could see the whole of the temple laid out below her in the dark. The three shrines were much as they were in the real world, as were the statues of the seated monkey-men and the quarters for the attendants. But the lamps were not lit in the court and the wagons and oxen didn’t stand outside the wall.
I’m seeing it at another time, Maskelle thought. But is it later or earlier? Then she saw a figure step out of the second shrine and go down the steps, and despite the moonlit dark she recognized herself. She could see that her head was still shaved so that her rank tattoo was visible. Ah, so it’s earlier.
Then a wave of darkness like a silk drape covered everything and Maskelle found herself looking at an entirely different landscape.
Intimacy on the threshold of the Adversary’s shrine had been used as an offering for generations since the Koshan Order first battled the worship of blood demons for the hearts and minds of the people of the lowlands. Some later Koshan philosophers contended that it had been some wily priest’s device to attract converts accustomed to the excitements of human sacrifice, that the spirits of the Infinite, not being anthropomorphized deities, were indifferent as to whether their followers had sex or not. But it appeared that those particular philosophers were dead wrong, because with Rian’s help she had gotten herself a dream vision straight from the Adversary.
The moonlight was the same, but the jungle and the canal were gone and in their place she looked down at a great dusty plain, limitless and vast, the purple-gray clouds of a recent storm overhead, the air dry and cool. The plain was empty except for strange small mountains that thrust upward at intervals, towering several hundred feet above her. They were all oddly unmountainlike shapes, the nearest formed like a mushroom, with a round base supporting a domed top. And while her slow wits insisted that those couldn’t be mountains, that there was no sort of stone that could take these forms naturally, she saw pinpricks of light on some of the farther ones. She focused on the nearest clump and suddenly her vision altered as her brain transformed the image into reality. They were buildings, as large as the greatest temples of the Kushor-At in Duvalpore, carved out of smooth gray stone. The plain under them was not gray sand but gray stone, seamed with the even shapes of paving blocks. Miles and miles of paving blocks.
Then she was walking on those blocks, very near one of the buildings, her feet bare on the warm stone. She looked up at the great shapes towering over her, saw that the surfaces of them were rough and worked with strange unfamiliar carving, the shapes of the openings square and well-defined. There were balconies on some of them, or open galleries. A bridge high overhead connected two of them. She walked toward the door of the nearest, a round high opening in the base, wide enough to drive four or five wagons through side by side. She was too far to see anything of the inside but the flicker of yellow firelight.
Then she was on the Adversary’s moon-viewing platform again, her head pillowed on Rian’s back, the wall of the shrine and the trees and the nightbirds and her own sky above.
Maskelle lay there, the feeling slowly coming back into her numbed limbs, and knew that her spirit had truly left her body, that it had been a real vision, and not just wishful thinking. It was baffling, it was inexplicable. It’s the first time the Adversary’s spoken to me since I left Kushor-At, she thought. Why now? What’s changed?
There were no answers in the night.