The guards on duty faced the courtyard gate, alert for unwanted intruders and unaware of the internal threat. They might have escaped relatively unscathed if someone up on one of the high tiers of the palace hadn’t whistled an alarm. One of the men turned and spied Nijiri and Ehiru. Startled, he jostled his fellow, both of them turning; Nijiri broke into a run to close the distance, hearing Ehiru’s steps speed up beside him. The first man grinned, seeing only an unarmed youth rushing toward him. Not bothering to draw his sword, he braced himself to grapple. Nijiri ducked his first grab, skidded to a crouch, and drove his fist at the side of the man’s knee. The wet pop of cartilage echoed though the empty courtyard.
The man began to scream, dropping to the ground and holding his knee. Nijiri heard another scream behind him and turned to see Ehiru, his eyes glittering with unholy fierceness, letting a corpse fall from his hands. Before it fell onto its face, Nijiri saw an expression of starkest horror frozen on its features.
Arrows thudded into the sand not two feet away. Nijiri darted for the gate, grunting with effort as he raised the heavy bronze bar. Ehiru, disturbingly calm, turned to face the archers. Just as Nijiri managed to shove the bar aside and push open the gate, there was a blur of motion at the corner of his vision. When he looked around, Ehiru held an arrow in his hand. It was still quivering, two feet from the small of Nijiri’s back.
Impossible! Even for the best-trained Gatherer…
“Go,” Ehiru snarled, throwing the arrow aside. Too numb to think, Nijiri scrambled through the gate.
They emerged onto the busy avenue that circled Yanya-iyan as more whistles sounded from the palace’s heights. Through the street traffic Nijiri saw men in the gray of the City Guard turning, craning their necks to see what had caused the alarm.
“This way,” Ehiru said. He walked swiftly into the crowd and joined its flow, keeping to the center of the street where the human river moved most swiftly. Nijiri kept his eyes low, playing servant-caste again, though he darted a glance back. The guardsmen had just reached Yanya-iyan’s gates. A palace guard ran out with sword unsheathed, looking about wildly; they saw him gesticulating at the city men. Nijiri quickly lowered his head again, noting that Ehiru had done the same. At the first juncture of streets they moved behind a lumbering wagon and turned south. Here was the market, where they could lose themselves easily in the sea of people.
Ehiru navigated his way through the milling folk so swiftly that Nijiri was hard-pressed to keep up. Around the stitch in his side—too many days of inactivity; should have kept up my prayer dances at least—he fumbled out a hand to catch Ehiru’s arm. “Brother, the Hetawa is that way.”
“No.” Ehiru did not slow.
“Brother, we can’t just walk to Kite-iyan! We need horses, disguises, supplies, replacements for our ornaments! And we must tell our pathbrothers all that has happened.”
“Within an hour, the entire city will be on alert.”
Nijiri’s heart sank as he realized Ehiru was right. Even worse, the Sentinels at the Hetawa would be notified, as was customary in any city emergency—but the Sentinels, some of them at least, obeyed the Superior. Returning to the Hetawa meant recapture.
“Then we should take the south gate, Brother,” he said. Ehiru slowed and glanced back at him. Nijiri offered a rueful smile. “It is not the closest gate to the Moonpath, I know, but the guard there is a friend of Sister Meliatua and Sunandi. Remember? He may even give us a horse.”
Ehiru stopped, frowning as he considered this. A merchant brushed past him and he shivered, his eyes unfocusing slightly as they tracked the merchant into the crowd. His body shifted, the fingers of one hand forking at his side—
Nijiri seized that hand and squeezed it hard. Ehiru flinched as if waking from a daydream, then closed his eyes in momentary anguish.
“The south gate,” he said. “Quickly. Get me out of this city, Nijiri.”
Nijiri nodded. Keeping hold of Ehiru’s hand, he pressed through the crowd in a new direction, praying that they reached Kite-iyan in time.
37
The world is born
Echoes, dancing fires, laughter
We race through the realm of dreams, alongside gods
The world ends.
The Prince of Gujaareh lay awake amid the cushions of his gauze-draped bed, contemplating the world he would one day own.
He had no particular desire for conquest. But he did desire peace—like any true son of Gujaareh—and he had long ago realized that peace was the natural outgrowth of order. This had been proven again and again throughout the grand dream that was Gujaareh. The rampant crime and violence that soiled other lands was alien here. No one starved, save in the most remote backwaters. Even the lowliest servant-caste had enough education and self-determination to control his own fate. Every child in the city knew his place from birth. Every elder in the city embraced his value in death. And on the strength of all who came between had Hananja’s nation thrived, growing from a pathetic knot of tents perched precariously on the river mouth into a network of cities and mines and farmlands and trade-routes crowned by its capital, the glory of the civilized world. His beautiful City of Dreams.
But the rest of the world still struggled along in disorder, and what peace could Gujaareh have in the long term with such weak and petty neighbors? He had visited other lands in his youth, and been horrified by chaos and cruelty that made the shadowlands seem pleasant. Other rulers had tried to tame that chaos with might or money, sometimes succeeding, but it never lasted. How could it, when a human lifetime was only so long? Even the most noble warlord eventually grew old and died, passing on power to those who more often than not were ill equipped to maintain it.
Thus the solution: conquer the world, but for peace rather than power. And to hold the world once it was won, become a god.
The Prince sat up. Beside him his firstwife Hendet stirred. He looked down at her and stroked her cheek, greeting her sleepy smile with one of his own. After thirty years and more than two hundred other wives, he still felt honored to have her favor. In the way of southern women, she was still beautiful even with her youth long past; time had left few seams in her dark smooth skin. But she was old—past fifty, nearly as old as himself. He yearned for more children from her, and perhaps could have had them if he’d permitted her to accept dreamblood from the Hetawa. But tempting as the notion had been, he could not bear the thought of the Hetawa’s setting its claws into yet another member of his family.
He kissed her forehead. “I would still rather you stay here. It will be dangerous.”
She lifted a hand to trace his lips with one finger. “Don’t be foolish.”
He smiled and nodded, approving of her decision despite the flicker of grief that moved through him. He would lose her when the power made him immortal. Another decade or two, and then she would pass beyond his reach into Ina-Karekh, where he would never see her again.
More sorrow to lay at the Hetawa’s feet, he decided. Then he rose, naked, to begin his war.
Servants draped a feather robe over him for the walk to the baths. There they sluiced his skin with purifying salt and lemon-water and dabbed him dry with oiled rose petals. When they finished dressing him in the armor of his ancestors and threading gold into his hair, he left the apartments to find Hendet and their son Wanahomen waiting for him. From his kneeling posture, Wana lifted a sword in a worked leather sheath. When the Prince took it, Wana raised his eyes to watch him belt it on, and not for the first time did the Prince marvel at the stark worship in his son’s gaze.