"So you wish us to believe," Benabe said. "You still haven't explained what role my daughter plays in this."
"She will stay here, with us," Leeka said. "We will hide her and protect her and commune with her and ready her for-"
"No." Benabe said the word with firm matter-of-factness. "No, I will not allow that."
"The decision is not yours to make. It's Shen's. She has made it already."
"Mother?" Shen asked softly. Like Naamen, her attention had drifted out past the ring of people to the stones surrounding them. She cocked her head slightly, listening to something beyond the argument about her fate.
Benabe ignored her. "I will stay with her, then," she said.
Leeka's eyes might have softened as he answered her-might have, Kelis was not sure. "That is not possible."
"It must be. I will not hand her over to you, no matter what she says."
"Mother," Shen said.
"If you wish to help," Leeka said, glancing up to include Kelis as well, "take the Santoth's message to Queen Corinn. Make her to know that the Santoth must have the book. They will have it, whether she consents to it or not."
Shen stood up. "Mother, the stones have come. They are speaking. They want to-"
She got no further. Her head snapped back. Her teeth gnashed at the air and her arms flew out. She looked like she had been pierced in the chest by something that wanted to lift her into the air. Benabe leaped to her feet and reached to catch her daughter, but the stone behind her suddenly moved. It turned into a cloud of sand, a moving pillar that had something like a human form at its center. It sped past Benabe and surged around Shen's trembling body and caught her as she began to fall backward. Benabe screamed. The other stones surged in on the group, spinning together and roaring like an angry wind.
"They mean no harm," Leeka shouted over the noise. "They will protect her from all harm until the time is right."
Benabe's voice rose louder still. "Grab her!"
Kelis tried, but the moment he stepped toward the girl, he lost sight of her. The swirling sand pressed against him. He could barely move, no matter how he tried to kick or lean or twist his way through it. A few times he saw Shen-her face, her legs, her supine form-revealed in quick glimpses, never in the same place twice.
Leeka said, "And if the time is right, she will let them free. She will lead them back into the world. If what we fear does come…"
As quickly as it began, it ended. The pressure holding Kelis in place vanished. He crashed to the ground, bumping against Naamen, who had also fallen. Silence. Stillness. The fire was out. Kelis blinked quickly. Soon he could see the stars and low moon outlining the people around him. He rose, counting the figures, scanning the featureless plain around them. He saw Benabe, Naamen, but no one else.
"They're gone," Naamen said.
In answer, Benabe let loose an ancient-sounding wail, long held, unending. Her daughter was taken.
C HAPTER
Rialus perched on a west-facing windowsill in his quarters, several stories above ground level, with a view out across the seemingly endless city of Avina. Buildings spread out in all directions, mazelike. Many had been glazed in sparkling hues of crimson and orange. More than one tower floated flags that announced their clan affiliation. Here and there trees rose between the structures, tall, lean poles that exploded in circular plumes at their highest points. Above, flocks of pigeons swooped in great swaths of motion. Starlings darted through the air. Higher up, tiny black pinpricks hung in the sky, watchers. Occasionally gulls flew on patrol, an air of ownership and condescension in their every motion and in each harsh cry.
A hundred different columns of smoke billowed dark clouds into the air, mixed in among five hundred thinner plumes of gray. Even more small white puffs belched out of pipes and chimneys. The columns were not so much a symptom of the contaminants of the air-as they often seemed to be in large Acacian cities like Alecia-as they were reminders of the thousands and thousands of lives being lived in those countless buildings, in workshops and at hearths, around public cooking pits and in great halls filled with revelers. Or so Rialus imagined.
Despite the smoke, the air tasted fresh enough. It carried the salty tinge of the sea, the only reminder-other than the gulls-that it was so near. The edge of the Gray Slopes lay just to the east over a barricade that, through some trick of its architecture, replicated a receding cityscape. The inhabitants of the city had turned their backs on the shore and seemed to willfully ignore their coastal location. If they did glance east, they saw the illusion of the continuation of the city, nothing else.
Even knowing that a portion of the view was an illusion, Rialus still marveled at the size of what he could see and at the way it seemed to go on far beyond the reach of his eyes. How large was the population? As with everything here in Ushen Brae-he no longer thought of this place as the Other Lands-Rialus could not make sense of it. He heard the Auldek bemoan their long centuries of infertility. And he mentally marked down each mention of the rare occasions when an Auldek did die. It only made sense that their numbers had dwindled over time. The fact that they would plan such a massive war in the hope that it would return their fertility attested to this. As did the awe in which they held Allek, the annoying Numrek whelp. On the other hand, the expanse around him indicated a thronging population.
He had put the question to Devoth once. They had been speaking together during a long session in which Rialus was forced to write down every member of the Akaran royal line that he could remember, from Edifus onward. The subject enthralled the Auldek. Rialus suspected it was the chronicle of deaths that held a morbid fascination for him, so he made a point of detailing how each monarch had succumbed. He even made up a few ghastly ends. Why not? Who could call him a liar?
As the meeting ended, and feeling that the Auldek leader was in good spirits, Rialus began, "How-I mean, how-"
"Speak it, leagueman," Devoth said. "You know you're going to, so why not do so without the stammering? Do all your people speak that way?"
Rialus inhaled, thinking, I would speak it if you and the Numrek didn't love to interrupt me at every chance. He made sure to enunciate. "How many of you are there? How many Auldek, I mean, in Ushen Brae?"
Devoth drew his head back thoughtfully, creased the corners of his eyes as if surprised and somewhat suspicious of the question. "There are enough of us," he finally answered, "and there will be more soon. That's what this is all about. That, Rialus Leagueman, is what this is truly about."
With that, he had turned abruptly away, leaving Rialus uneasy as well as curious. On that occasion, and on this one as he recalled it, he had to remind himself that he was not the traitor Devoth believed him to be. Though he had spent hours now divulging information that, on the surface, made him look like the most loose-tongued betrayer, he told himself this was all a ruse, a way to buy time. He would find some way out of this situation, but he needed to survive in the meantime, even if that meant he needed to appear to have betrayed his people.
As Rialus sat on the windowsill telling himself this, his servant, Fingel, approached him. The backless sandals she wore audibly smacked the bottoms of her feet with each step. The sound had annoyed him at first, until he understood it was the only sound she ever willingly made. She never spoke a word unless it was required, a silent servant who announced her presence only with the sound of her feet. She was lovely to look upon. At first he thought her beautiful despite the fact that she had wire whiskers in her cheeks and tattooed bands under her light eyebrows, but before long he began to suspect these things added to her beauty, strange as that seemed to him. She looked to be Meinish by birth, had that race's pale skin and straw-blond hair. Thin featured, delicate, with a slightly upturned nose and a slim body that nevertheless drew his eyes back again and again to the contours beneath her simple shift: she was nothing like his top-heavy Gurta, but that made it easier to admire her without being pricked by conscience or memory. She was quite distracting, really, all the more so for being so cold and detached.