"They asked for it!" His hands were stinging, and his heart pounded in his chest so loud it seemed like those drums that had earlier called the army to rest, only he couldn't rest, only stand there, sweating and shaking and as flushed as if he'd been standing in the sun all through the blasting heat of a blazing afternoon.
She looked down at the blank paper and set down the brush. Suddenly it was cool again, and he heard wind in the branches, and the murmur of the captains making their plans with the lord commander, and folk bantering outside. The hells! Some of those dogs were chatting up his girl. Their voices drifted through the gauze.
"Think of me as a dagger," the Devouring girl was saying in a voice made strong by a laugh bubbling up. "Watch you don't get pricked."
"I'd like to prick you," replied a wit.
"My friend, you'll need to sharpen that dull point of yours if you want to be pricking anything."
"She's handling them with ease," said the woman. "I suppose such dreary banter is the kind of thing hierodules become accustomed to when they venture outside the temple. Within the temple walls, no one dares act with such disrespect. The ceremonies are sung and danced and paced out in their proper order, and with proper respect to law and custom. Those who walk in the hand of the Devourer are holy in the sight of the land. It falls ill with the ones who think only of their own lust and not of the holy act of joining. Isn't that right?"
He slid his gaze sideways so as to avoid hers, but he knew that if she demanded he look at her again, he would have to.
"I believe that Wakened Crane is council day in Olossi," she continued, without making him look. "Which is today. Go to Olossi immediately. Speak in private to their leader and tell him that these mercenaries must under no circumstances stay in the Hundred. After this, attend the council as a silent observer. That will be message enough to the council members who may think to disagree with those who rule them. Watch and mark who speaks and what they say. Set the hierodule on her road, to eliminate the imprisoned reeve. Then return afterward to Argent Hall and tell Marshal Yordenas that I am displeased with him." Her fingers brushed the hilt of the dagger. "Just that. Nothing more. He'll know what I speak of. As for you, Horas, know that I will know. I am watching you now. I do not like disrespect toward those who are holy in the sight of the gods."
She picked up the dagger and turned it in her hands as though it had a message for her. This was his dismissal.
He staggered outside and stood there panting until the world stopped spinning. When no one offered him so much as a drink to cool his parched throat, he cursed the lot of them for selfish bastards, but not out loud.
"Come on," he said to the Devouring girl.
She looked surprised but followed without asking questions. His thrill in the day, in the catch, in the promise, was ruined. On West Track, the army was being drummed to its feet. Tumna waited in the open ground beyond. He hooked into the harness and hitched her in before him, and she was puzzled but cautious, trying to read his mood.
"We'll go quickly," he said. "Get there as fast as we can."
That was all. They flew to Olossi and though he thought once or twice of the things the Devouring girl had promised to do to him and let him do to her, fear doused his rod. He showed her no disrespect, and without his charm to loosen her tongue, she made no offer.
36
The dream unveiled itself in the gray unwinding of mist, but this time the mist did not end, nor did it part. There was offered both drink and food on a tray lowered down through a hatch in the ceiling. In a haze he gobbled down what was there, but it all came right back up again. Much later, he drank, coughed up some but kept down a little, and after dozed fitfully. He could not remember where he was, only that he was so terribly thirsty.
There it was again, the bowl, and he drank, but the liquid churned in his stomach and he retched it all up. The effort exhausted him. His head was shattered with pain. Through these choppy waves he sank into the depths.
Later, he discovered he had emerged out of deep waters into a kind of waking delirium.
Woozy-headed, he tried to make sense of his surroundings. There was an awful stink, and when he managed to hold up a hand he was after all holding up two hands; both blurred even while he felt he had another arm braced under him. Had he grown a third hand? The effort of thinking and moving made his guts lurch and bowels go loose, and he coughed and heaved and felt the fog overwhelm him once again.
He dreamed, but in fragments: the pain in his head; Scar; a woman inviting him to her bed with a sly smile; a field of rice stubble; sipping from a bowl of water whose pure fragrance drowned him; the deserted temple up in the high hills of the Liya Pass that stank of fear and shame. Here he is wandering. Where has Marit gone? He tries to call after her, but his voice makes no sound. He will never find her.
A click and a scrape woke him.
"For shame!"
He stirred, hearing a voice young and feminine and pleasing.
"Is it right you allow this man to lie in his filth? He looks ill. Is he even conscious?"
"He's a murderer." That was a man's voice, low and rumbling like sifting through gravel.
"Has he been seen at the assizes yet?"
"No, verea. He has not."
"Who is he?"
"Not our business to know, verea."
"If he hasn't been seen at the assizes, then he's only accused. The magistrate hasn't read the sentence. You'd think it best if he came to the court smelling like a decent person. If you won't clean him up, I will."
"Not allowed, verea. He's not allowed up, nor anyone allowed down."
He cracked one eye, then the other, but it wasn't easy; some dried substance had crusted them over. The walls-for there were walls all around him-were stone built, and not so very far away. He was curled up in one corner on stone that was both slicked in patches with a drying stink and elsewhere rimed with a dried coating that crackled under him as he tried to shift up, to sit, to see where those voices were coming from. The walls were plain, with no openings.
"He's waking," said the young woman's voice. "Do something, I pray you!"
He gagged and his stomach heaved again, but he had nothing in him. His throat was raw; each swallow was a stab of pain. His head throbbed. His clothes were stiff and nasty, and it became clear to him immediately that he had soiled himself while ill. But at least now he could sit up, blinking in the flickering lantern light. Where was that light coming from?
Ah! It was above.
He squinted up. The movement hurt his neck. Far above, floating in a sea of darkness, was a ceiling constructed of night or, possibly, planks of wood. There was an opening cut within them, and floating in this hatchway the veil of mist.
Yet as he stared, the gray mist hovering over the opening vanished abruptly to be replaced by a man's disinterested face. The light was withdrawn, a lantern hauled up on a rope, and he sat in blackness trying to recall who he was and why he was here. Footsteps cracked away down an unseen corridor above him, quickly swallowed in the echoless stone.
"I like that," said the gravel voice.
He was answered by a wheedling tenor. "That the Silver girl who always comes?"
"That one? How should I know? Always got their faces covered, don't they?"
"Heh! But you'd recognize the voice."
"Yeah, I would do. Same one. Seems nice enough, but you know how it is."
"Neh, I don't, for I've never stood so close to a Silver before, not even one of the men. Never seen one of their women. I thought they weren't allowed into the light."