“I will task each Sacrifice I leave behind with remaining alive until they have taken the lives of at least ten mortals,” the general said. “With the help of a dozen or more of your Builders, I think this tower can be held until the rest—”
A strange, croaking sound interrupted her. Suno’ku turned, as did Viyeki and his master Yaarike. Tzayin-Kha, the Host-Singer who had given her all to make the fires speak at Tangleroot Castle, was now struggling to sit up.
“Mistress, no!” cried one of the Singers who had been tending her. He bent to help Tzayin-Kha lie back again, but the Host Singer grasped his arm and flung him away with such astounding force that he spun halfway across the tower chamber, hit the wall with a terrible, muffled crack, then lay still.
Tzayin-Kha slowly rose, clumsy, tottering, her limbs as stiff as alder branches, but it was her face that drew Viyeki’s startled attention: her eyes had rolled up until only a crescent moon of white showed in each, and her jaw was working up and down soundlessly, chewing at the empty air.
“I will bring help!” shouted the other Singer. “She is having a fit.”
“You . . . will . . . do . . . nothing,” were the words that came from Tzayin-Kha’s gnashing mouth, each syllable thick and misshapen. Viyeki recognized that grating, deep voice. It did not belong to the dying Host Singer at all, but to someone far more frightening.
Suno’ku drew her great sword, Cold Root, and leveled it at the thing’s breast. The blind, upturned eyes could not possibly see the gray blade, but Tzayin-Kha’s slack lips suddenly curled in a smile that made Viyeki feel ill.
“My, but we have grown important and impressive,” said the scraping voice. “I always knew you had the seed of greatness in you, Suno’ku seyt-Iyora.”
“Speak your piece, thing of the outer darkness.” The general raised her witchwood blade as if to keep the stumbling, loose-limbed Singer at bay. “Then be gone. You sully the body of one who gave her all for her people.”
Viyeki was astonished. Despite his master’s favor, Viyeki was still an outsider compared to a high noble like Suno’ku, but even he knew the voice of Akhenabi, Lord of Song when he heard it—Akhenabi, second in power only to Queen Utuk’ku herself. How could the general not recognize it?
“Upstart! I speak for the queen!” rasped the voice out of Tzayin-Kha’s slack mouth. “You and the others are to hold your position! Under no circumstance are you to return to Nakkiga! You will defend Three Ravens Tower to your last breath!”
Suno’ku lifted Cold Root high, took a sudden step forward, and crashed the pommel of her famous sword against Tzayin-Kha’s forehead. The Singer’s knees buckled, then she dropped like a sack of winter meal.
In the shocked silence that followed the acolyte who had been tending Tzayin-Kha scuttled forward with a look of helplessness on his face, as if all his training had been burned away in an instant. He turned the Host Singer over, but whatever had animated her had now fled. The center of her forehead was pushed in like a broken eggshell.
“You . . . you have killed my mistress!” he said in wonder and horror. “Tzayin-Kha is dead!”
“A regrettable result.” General Suno’ku sheathed her sword and bent to examine the body. “I used more force than I intended. But perhaps it is a blessing. The thing that possessed her could not have been driven from her dying body any other way.”
“What thing?” The acolyte Singer had lost more than his discipline, Viyeki decided—he had all but lost his mind if he thought he could defy an armed superior. “Did you not hear the voice of our master? Of Lord Akhenabi himself?”
Suno’ku gave a pitying shake of her head. “You were fooled by a dark spirit, Singer. Look at your comrade.” She gestured to the Singer Tzayin-Kha had flung away, still lying in an awkward, broken-necked sprawl at the base of the chamber’s stone wall. “Do you mean to tell me that Lord Akhenabi murdered one of his own Singers for no reason?”
The acolyte’s mouth worked, but for a moment nothing came out. Viyeki was fearful that this one too would begin speaking with that terrible, scraping voice, but at last he managed to mutter, “I do not know what to say, General Suno’ku.”
She turned to Yaarike and Viyeki. “Do you think it a coincidence that moments after I revealed my strategy, something slipped into the body of Tzayin-Kha to demand we not return? High Magister Yaarike, am I wrong?”
Yaarike again wore a strange expression—Viyeki could almost imagine his master was hiding amusement—but all the magister said was, “I can see no fault in your reasoning, General.”
Commander Hayyano and several of his Sacrifices now hurried into the room. All but Hayyano stopped short, staring at the body of Tzayin-Kha. “What has happened here, General?” he asked.
“A deadly trick,” she announced. “Perhaps the work of the Zida’ya traitor who travels with the mortal army. But it has failed. Assemble all of your men except the sentries and those on active patrol. With High Magister’s Yaarike’s permission, I will speak to them.”
Hayyano looked to Yaarike. He was better at masking his confusion and doubt than the acolyte Singer had been, but his hesitation was clear to all.
“You heard your general,” said Yaarike at last, all surface now, his private thoughts once more hidden behind a wall that needed no sentries to keep it inviolate. “Of course you must follow your orders.”
More than two hundred Sacrifices from almost a dozen different troops had crowded into the great, high-raftered hall of Three Ravens Tower. They stood straight, ignoring their many wounds, faces set in masks of resolve. Two torches at either end of Marshal Ekisuno’s makeshift bier cast the only light except for the summer star Reniku, burning in the center of the hall’s high window like a diamond shining from the ashes of a fire.
“My foreparent Ekisuno lies before you,” Suno’ku began, pointing to the marshal’s shrouded, unmoving form. Though the general’s voice seemed soft, it carried to all parts of the chamber. “He was of the blood of great Ekimeniso himself, our queen’s consort, and like his ancestor, Ekisuno was a mighty warrior. He spent his long life fighting the queen’s enemies before he died at the fall of the tower of Asu’a, as did so many others. You know what happened. All of you were there.”
The torches reflected the gleam of hundreds of pairs of dark eyes, watching her.
“Less than one hundred Great Years ago the first mortals came into our lands, savage, dangerous creatures in numbers ever swelling. But when we would have scoured them from our soil, our cousins the Zida’ya prevented us, saying, ‘They are but few, and the land is big enough for all.’ You know the tragedy that came from their foolish forbearance. You know how mortals killed Drukhi, the son of our great queen. And that was only the first of the outrages they have visited upon us. They were the wedge that split the two kindreds of the Keida’ya, and although, for a time, we both lived in uneasy peace with the newcomers, it did not last.
“During the lifetimes of most of you here, the first of the bearded ones came over the sea with weapons of black iron and hearts full of hate. Like locusts they devoured all that they touched, destroying even their own kind in their bloodlust and fury. Then the Zida’ya learned to their sorrow the folly of their patience with these short-lived, swift-breeding animals. The last of our people’s great cities fell when Ineluki of the Zida’ya was destroyed trying to defend Asu’a against the invaders. Only mortal kings, their hands red with blood—our people’s blood—have sat on Asu’a’s throne ever since.”
Here the general suddenly stopped and fell silent, as if some new thought had occurred to her. The assembled Sacrifices, their myriad gazes following her as one, stared raptly at the slender, bright shape in silver-white armor. “Did I say the last city of our people?” Suno’ku asked. “That is not true. One great city remains—one refuge of the People of the Garden. And that city is Nakkiga, our home.