Priestess
Nilis tried to sleep, but the bed poked her and pushed at her; there was no position that felt comfortable. After an hour of that tossing she got up and went into the kitchen to heat some milk, hoping that would ease the tension. She sat at the kitchen table, sipping at the milk, staring at the flame of the guttering candle end, wondering what this was about, afraid she knew.
She wandered through the cold dark rooms of the shrine, feeling lost and alienated from them all, though she knew every inch of the stone in the walls and the floor, had scraped her hands raw cleaning them. After a while she drifted back to the kitchen, lit a new candle from the end of the old, and went reluctantly into the Maiden Chamber. She set the candlelamp on the floor and stepped back. “I know what you want,” she said. She drew a hand across her eyes, furious at herself for wanting to cry. “You promised me I’d have the time I needed. You promise me a life here and give me a passage. I won’t…” Her voice broke and the tears she was trying to restrain gushed out. She dropped to the floor and knelt, hugging herself, sobbing out the pain of her years.
She spent an hour there, alternately hitting out at the Face, refusing to listen to what She was saying, and grieving for all the possibilities she’d lose if she let herself hear the call. When the candle was half gone, she sighed-grief, anger, denial all exhausted. Wearily she carried the candle into the kitchen and began packing the satchel with towels and food and other things she thought she might need.
For a few minutes she watched Mardian bringing order into the motley group assembled in the Court of Columns, then she walked from shadow and stopped beside him, satchel on one shoulder, quilt-roll on the other, her fur cloak swaying about cold bare ankles. She heard the mutter of comment from the Cymbankers and tar-folk, but ignored it, stopped his protest with a quickly raised hand. “She gives and She takes away.” Mardian looked at her a moment, looked past her at the empty shrine, then nodded and went back to what he was doing.
They walked south and west across the Cimpia Plain, gathering more new Keepers, villagers and tar-folk as they went. All day they walked, silent except when they were chanting the praises of the Maiden, their voices drowned in the great rumble of the folk following them. Hallam joined them at Sadnaji, along with all his folk who found the courage to cast aside Follower Blacks and cast with it their fear. They climbed the steep slopes to the Biserica Pass and led their rag-tag band chanting Maiden Praises through the great Gates of the Northwall two days before Floarin’s army reached the Pass.
Magic Child
Tuli scratched at her nose, grinned at the place where her hand should be but wasn’t. Ildas had spun a net of light-wire that sucked eyes around her and left her unseen. She was stretched out in dead grass beside Coperic, peering at the sleeping Minarks through some weeds and a hump of dead brush, there only because Ildas wouldn’t work on anyone but her. On his far side two of his people lay in another patch of shadow, Bella and Biel, Sankoise, younger versions of old Hars, with thick, sleek caps of dark gold hair, tilted, blue-purple eyes, the pallor of those who seldom walk in daylight, clad in matte black tunics and trousers that melted into shadow like a part of the night. They were cousins, tough, clever, skilled and impenetrable to most everyone but Coperic, content to follow wherever he led them. They’d accepted her into the band without argument or overt hostility but with no warmth, tolerating her because Ildas made it easier for them to attack and kill norits. They hated the Nor with a cold relentless passion that made Tuli shiver whenever she saw evidence of it.
There was a disturbance on the far side of the army, some shouting, a flutter of traxim, fireballs from the norits; she, trembled when she saw those, the memory too recent to be easy to bear. More bodies left lying. She swallowed, seeing before her the bodies of tar-folk and villagers and Stenda, boys left behind as the army moved on, clustered about the campgrounds like the piles of garbage and ordure. Teras might have been there at any of the camps, one of the dead, but she’d never know it, not being foolish enough to leave hiding and go poking about among the corpses. She moved restlessly, willing the raiders to go away and let things settle into quiet again; she didn’t dare move until then. She could hear curses from the Minarks, froze as a norit rode past, started breathing again as Ildas cooed to her and the norit moved on, having noticed nothing.
Time slid by, minute by dragging minute. Silence descended on the army, a silence broken by the nearly sub-audible hum of breathing and snores from thousands of sleepers, and the scattered creaks, clanks and rustles from those who stood watch. The minutes added to an hour, then another. She touched the leather pouch hanging between breasts whose slow swelling was beginning to be a nuisance, felt the hard knob of the ink bottle and the long thin pipe filled with dreamdust. Might as well be now, she thought. If it’s going to be tonight. Dawn couldn’t be that far away. She breathed a very faint whistle, reached out and touched Coperic’s arm. “I’m off,” she whispered.
He nodded but said nothing.
She began creeping forward, moving on her toes and elbows, supple as a snake. TheDom was down and any movements she woke in brush or weeds would be lost to darkness, but the less she left to chance, the less she might have to regret. Ildas paced beside her when he was able to control his excitement, capered in circles about her when it broke loose, leaped onto her back and rode her awhile, his needle claws digging into her skin and muscle through the thin cloth of her tunic.
She eased carefully past the sentries, began winding through the sleeping Minarks toward the one she intended to work on, the one who had the highest status among these violent, mad and excessively proud princes. He’d be somewhere in the middle of the ground the Minarks had taken for their own, the safest place. She found him by wiggling from one armor pile to the next until she recognized the gear her prize wore when he cantered along the Highroad, ribbons singing silk about him.
Lying flat beside him, not even breathing, she dug into the pouch and pulled out the blowpipe. She scratched away the wax seals and puffed the dust in a cloud that hovered a moment over his face, then settled into his open mouth, was drawn into his nose with each breath he took. He sneezed, started to wake, then went limp. After a moment he was snoring a little, taken by the effects of the drug.
She got up and bent over him, inkpot in one hand, short thick brush in the other, a grin on her face. She knew that black ink all too well. You couldn’t wash it out of clothes and even skin was hard to clean; the spots it left faded to an ugly gray-green but stayed with you for at least a month. With careful neat strokes she painted a glyph on his cheek, another on his forehead and a third on his other cheek; together, they meant I am a lazy useless slave. She set the pot and brush down and eased the blanket off him, then slit open the white silk tunic he wore. Working with the same care, she painted glyphs for the worst obscenity she knew, and below it the words Soдreh sucks and below those she drew an arrow pointing to his genitals; those she painted lavishly black, swallowing giggles as she remembered what her father and Teras had done to the agli; it was that very memory that made her suggest performing a similar service for the Minarks. She studied her work with satisfaction, but it seemed unfinished. She drew fat teardrops dripping down his thighs and weeping eyes on his rather knobby knees, then gave him sloppy black feet. She emptied the dregs in the ink bottle onto the fresh white doeskin tunic he planned to wear in the morning.