Savga was heavy. I could not carry her far. So I set her down and she walked alongside me, sucking in spasming breaths, the chain that led from her wrist shackles to mine clanking and tugging with every step. Through the shack les’ crude metal, I felt her stumbling footfalls against the soft skin that covered the small, slender bones connecting my forearms to my wrists, felt her fear and vulnerability. That cold, indifferent chain bound us together as if it were a metal umbilical cord.
On the other side of me walked the two other young girls who had been sundered forever from the arbiyesku: Oblan and Runami. They pressed close to me, shivering, weeping, children chained by metal to a reality no child should face. Two young boys had also been plucked from the arbiyesku. They walked stiffly, reluctant to show their fear but failing to hide it.
The dusty path beneath our bare feet was smooth and slippery with trodden grass. Either side of us, seedpods ex ploded from feathery grainheads at our passage and sailed briefly through the air before lodging, like tiny arrows, into cloth or earth or hair. The sun glared down, shriveling skin, turning my head glossy and hot. The smell of black leather and the stink of unwashed men emanated from the paras marching aflank us. At the very front of the line walked the daronpuis—three of them—and every now and then the cloying smell of incense wafted from their robes and infested the air as they delicately dabbed sweat from their foreheads with hankies of silk.
In my right hand, clutched tight as hope, I held an object one of the paras had slipped into my palm as he’d shackled my wrists. His eyes had briefly met mine before I’d glanced down at the object. It was a small rusted chain and clasp, the type used to close a garment together, on either end of which was attached to a tiny swatch of material the exact rufous color of the ground at Arena.
It wasn’t until he’d snapped a pair of heavy, cool mana cles over my wrists that I realized what the object was: the chain and clasp from the vebalu cape I’d worn in Arena. I remembered shucking that bloody cape, with much cursing and groaning, inside the feed loft of the messenger byre.
I clutched the chain tightly. It was a message from Gen. Surely.
I tried to catch the eye of the para who’d surreptitiously given me Gen’s token. He avoided my gaze.
The dragonmaster walked ahead of me, chained, his shoulders rolling beneath his tunic like the swells of an an gry ocean. He turned to look back at me.
“Gen sent a token,” I murmured, lips cold. “We’ll be fine.”
He snorted and faced forward again.
Savga leaned against me, shuddering, her breath rasping in her throat like strips of jute along arid ground. I didn’t know how to comfort her.
We were led along a dusty, cracked path; we stopped at another guild clan. Again, the daronpu read from his scroll. Again, the keening of women, burning as if it were hot wax across my skin, tearing, yanking, leaving a raw welt.
The paras enclosed more children’s knobby wrists in metal, chained them one to the other. I clenched the small, rusted token in my palm tightly, squeezed it, strangled it.
This should not be happening, I wanted to cry out. This is
my
Clutch. This a place of safety, of family. This is
home
.
It was not.
This was a line of people shackled together, like animals for barter.
When one woman threw herself, shrieking, at the dar onpu with the scroll, a para neatly stepped forward and smashed the hilt of his sword into her face. Blood spurted. Savga screamed. I reeled from the memory of watching a boot heel slam again and again against my mother’s jaw.
Eight women were randomly chosen from the bloodied woman’s clan and punished for her act. The broadsides of swords flashed in the sun. The sound of metal striking flesh, over and over until flesh was pulped with bruises, seemed louder than the victims’ screams.
I lapsed into a daze, moved as if made of wood.
Gradually, the three blinding white domes and the golden minaret of Xxamer Zu’s temple grew larger, shimmering upon waves of heat. Buildings crouched about the temple like wild dogs about a bone.
We were being led into the center of Clutch Xxamer Zu.
My mouth was sour and grit-laden. I badly wanted water. Savga shuffled beside me, her face a clot of melted tallow.
We shambled by a cart repair shop surrounded by di lapidated, abandoned huts. Hammers stopped pounding, saws stopped chewing through wood. Eyes like beads of tar followed us in faces free of all expression. We shuffled by an empty caravansary where pigeons roosted in the empty eyeholes of windows; then we passed a series of narrow, rickety tenements pungent with the smells of citrus and yanew bark.
If not for my discovery at the myazedo meeting, perhaps a decision would have been reached. Perhaps they would have rallied and prevented the slavers from coming. I was, therefore, partly responsible for the chains around Savga’s wrist.
I turned aside and retched. My bile splashed against the warped wooden planks of one of the rickety tenements lin ing the narrow street.
The purpose of the tenements was unclear from their wooden exteriors, despite the wizened old women sitting beneath each lintel, sizzling lily-white liquids in large pans balanced upon smoking braziers. The old women looked at us as if we were pashnor ki fa cinai ersen, the handwriting of the enraged Pure Dragon, which is what the wreckage left by a hurricane is called in the Emperor’s tongue.
At our passage, a dark rishi woman, her skin the brown of a wet water vole and mottled with whorls of sooty green, came to a slow stop, her empty handcart in front of her. A cluster of youths ambled out of an alley, huge baskets of featon kernels strapped to their backs, their skins a mosaic of browns and greens: umber, ebon, berry brown, burnt-onion green, olive, sage. Their piebald markings looked like verdi gris cirri trapped immobile upon flesh, and the expressions on their faces as they caught sight of us went from shock to outrage to careful indifference in a matter of heartbeats. Perhaps they even stopped breathing for several moments.
The paras flanking our chained line walked with hands upon the hilts of their swords, their fierce facial cicatrices furrowed into vulture frowns.
We came upon a thoroughfare, a wide, parched stretch of dirt flanked on either side by mansions. A piebald youth was pulling a rickshaw along the road. Two bayen ladies sat within the rickshaw, shaded by a huge ivory parasol that glittered with tiny mirrors and hundreds of fine glass beads. They didn’t so much as glance at us.
Our daronpu led us onto the thoroughfare. My eyes were drawn to the impressive mansions lining it.
The facade of each mansion was impossibly smooth and white, as if carved from bone, though heavily furred at the base with red dust. Balconies and balustrades protruded from the mansions’ frontage like wrought-iron ribs, and bloodred euphoria flowers dripped in thick profusion from balcony urns to ground level. The fragrance of the flowers was as coppery and heavy as fresh blood.
Late noon. The sun pulsed like a pustulant tumor.
We followed the thoroughfare for a while, then turned down a side avenue, its hardpan littered with curled brown vegetable debris. Abruptly we came out upon the outskirts of Iri Timadu Bayen Gekin, market square of Xxamer Zu’s most exalted aristocrats. Wai Bayen Temple stood at its center.
Beside me, Savga made a noise like a small animal caught by a wild dog. She was staring at the temple with eyes like peeled songbird eggs.
Atop an enormous sandstone plinth perforated with geometrical patterns, the three domes of Temple Xxamer Zu squatted. The largest dome—the one visible from ev ery corner of the Clutch—was topped by a golden mina ret. Between sandstone pillars, the temple’s three sunken open-sided amphitheaters peeped out like three massive black pupils. The amphitheaters’ cool interiors smelled like basins of night, the glass tesserae mosaics upon the pillars within twinkling like blue-white stars.
Standing along the westerly edge of the temple like a regiment of massive, blocky soldiers was a series of stone buildings: the offices, dormitories, treasury vaults, larders, dining halls, and prayer chambers of the Clutch Xxamer Zu holy wardens. The very same stockade where, not two weeks ago, a Host of Auditors had tried to slay me.
The puritanical faces of the buildings were interrupted at regular intervals by severe window casements. At the base of the buildings, stone bridges arched over nonexistent ponds like the humps of a giant, petrified snake. A massive iron fence, fourteen feet high and topped by rusted iron barbs, surrounded the entire stockade.
We stopped before that iron fence.
Gates swung open upon hinges that screamed for oil. The stacks and rows of the stone dormitories glared down at us. We were led over a stone bridge. Down a narrow stone viaduct that sloped beneath one of the stone dorms. The underground viaduct stank of piss.
Did the daronpuis urinate there, too lazy or indifferent to void in a latrine? I pictured them casting furtive looks down the viaduct, hiking the many elegant layers of their gowns above their groins, aiming their pudgy phalluses at the wall, spraying urine doglike over their territory with all the impunity of the untouchable elite.
Savga pinched her nostrils shut with one hand, the chain about her wrist clanking against her chin.
Out of the viaduct, into a courtyard.
Oh, how we gaped!
The courtyard was festooned with succulent vines heavy with lush fruit. Upon ground choked with tiny white flowers, colorful glazed pots brimmed with velvet purple blooms. Fat bees buzzed hither and thither. Massive, shady foliage, leaves the length and width of a child standing with arms and legs spread-eagled, rubbed against imperious spikes of berry-beaded plants. They exuded a tart, turpentine scent, those leaves, that made the air crisp and abrasive.
Flowers like great, golden flutes hung ponderously from glossy white stems taller than my head. Fountains sprayed upon purple-hued leaves, making them jiggle and nod as if they had palsy. Bright orange carp flashed within ponds, look ing like wet slices of sunset immersed in liquid blue sky.
We crossed through this wondrous world of moisture and lushness, too stunned to notice our thirst and hunger despite the profusion of water and succulent fruits gleam ing at us.
Down another viaduct, our senses rattled by what we’d left behind.
Another courtyard, this beautiful in its austerity. Large, slablike stones had been tipped impossibly upright and bal anced carefully, precisely, upon one edge. A daronpu aco lyte, stripped to the waist—his telltale green collar lying at his knees like an obedient dog—knelt at the court’s center. Blood threaded his back and torso. He didn’t appear to no tice us as we shambled past, chains clanking. Eyes rapturously locked upon one of the impossibly balanced rocks, he was us ing a flogger to flail his arms, chest, and back. The sound of the many leather thongs striking his skin was like wet dough being slapped by the seamed hands of an old woman.
Down another viaduct: the smell of dragon dung, the leathery reek of dragon hide.
My heart quickened.
Out into a stable yard.
For a moment I thought I smelled venom. So iron-linked was the smell of dragon to the scent of venom, so strong was my craving for venom, that I could re-create the fragrance of the dragons’ liquid fire out of thin air with my need.
“The messenger byre,” the dragonmaster grunted ahead of me, and as I looked upon the dragons stabled in each stall, I realized that, of course, these dragons were merely escoas, the nonvenomous dragons employed to courier messages, parcels, and privileged persons about the coun try. The very escoas Tansan had wanted to cripple.
I was back where I’d started from upon first arriving in Xxamer Zu. The messenger byre.
The soldiers herded us to an empty stall.
No bedding of any sort had been forked upon the flag stone. A trough of water stood at one end.
As the chain that joined us together was removed from our manacles—which were
not
removed from our wrists—we staggered toward the trough lining the far wall. There we knelt and thrust our faces into the still, dusty water and sucked long and deep, drinking our fill.
By night we’d all have stomach cramps. By morn, the air would be thick with the reek of diarrhea.
But we weren’t to know that. All we knew at that mo ment was that we’d stopped walking, that the screams of families being torn asunder had ended, that water slaked our chapped lips and ran like cool algae down the backs of our throats.
And that, for the moment, was enough.
“Sen fu lili, sen limia . . .”
Love songs, they were, imprinted on my memory from years of crawling about the feet of potter women as they worked and sang, while my toothless, infantile gums chomped away on a stale holy cake, my little fingers care fully picking up treasure to be examined: a pebble, a pot shard, a dead moth.
“My soft honey, my temptress . . .”
While children clutched their empty tummies and cried out or wept in their sleep, my voice drizzled like a golden glaze over the clay-cold stall that imprisoned us.
Stomach cramps come middle-night. The futile scramble to find a place to void. The shame and stench of upset bow els erupting like volcanoes onto flagstone.
Still, when I was not occupied, I sang. When she could, Savga sat curled upon my lap as if she were a baby, and with both arms I held Oblan and Runami close to me. And I sang.
“Sen wai kavarria, gunashti tras hoiden nas.”
Oblan kept asking for her baby brother. She had slept each night with him cradled against her belly; she’d carried him each day while fetching water and hoeing. Unable to fully grasp the enormity of her situation, she focused her concern on her baby brother.
Who will look after him while Mother is busy, Kazonvia? Who, who?
She was almost fran tic with the thought that he was cold, untended, unfed. This from a child about to be sold into slavery.
“My first obsession, I am unfit to live with while lovecrazed.”
Dawn seeped into the night, staining the walls ashy gray. The first flies began to buzz about our foul prison. My tail bone was bruised from where I’d been sitting on the cold floor with Savga’s weight pressed upon my lap. My legs felt bloodless; they didn’t belong to me.
A daronpu acolyte appeared outside our stall’s iron gate and spoke with the four paras who’d stood guard over us the entire night. I stopped singing. The few rishi women who’d been chained along with the rest of us rose up, plead ing for food for the children, clean water, a latrine.
“The arbiyesku’s hatagin komikon and his wai roidan yin have been summoned by Lupini Xxamer Zu’s First Chan cellor!” one of the paras barked above the pleadings of the women. His voice was raspy with the fatigue of standing guard all night. “Come forth now.”
Savga clutched my neck.
I swallowed. My tongue felt made of splintered wood. I looked toward the dragonmaster, where he’d sat crouched upon his haunches all eve near the stall gate. He rose to his feet. His blood-marbled eyes looked opaque in the pre dawn gloom.
“Come forth!” the acolyte demanded, impatient and imperious, pleased, as an underling, to be momentarily in a position of power. He tugged on his green scapular, straightening it. Picked invisible lint from it. “Don’t keep us waiting.”
I tried to rise. Savga shrieked hoarsely and clamped her self to me.
“I won’t leave you; I won’t,” I murmured into her hair. I couldn’t rise with the weight of her and her terror. One of the arbiyesku’s boys helped me up, though his little hands were hardly capable of the adult task. Oblan and Runami rose alongside me, pressing close, silent, clutching my soiled bitoo tightly.
Like a wounded six-legged beast, we lurched toward the stall gate. Savga squeezed my waist so hard with her legs, where she clung to me like a baby monkey to its mother, that my ribs ached.
The acolyte glanced at the dragonmaster, then looked with disgust at me and the children.
“They stay here,” he snapped, flicking the air with beeswax-polished nails.
“Please—” I began.
“Put that thing down and come forth!”
The acolyte looked younger than me, milk-sopped with a life of ease, his fa-pim skin extraordinarily pale from years of copying scrolls upon parchment by candlelight, away from all sun.
“The Lupini has summoned me, yes?” I said, voice low. My stomach torqued painfully. “Can’t these three come with me?”
His throat and cheeks flushed, as if dark wine were spreading like a stain over his skin. He turned to a para, punched the air with his indignation. “Behead the children! Bring her out.”
“No!” I cried, and everyone within the stall shrieked, wailed, covered eyes and ears. Could he order such a thing, he, a mere acolyte? Apparently, yes. Would he be obeyed?
The para nodded brusquely.
Apparently, yes.
Oblan and Runami gripped me tighter in their terror. I turned to them and spoke quickly, pawing at their hands, trying to pry their little fingers from my bitoo, while Savga held me even tighter and pressed her face into my neck.
“Please, listen, let go of me. I’ll come back, I promise; let go, please.”
The para opened the gate, withdrew his sword.
“Go, go!” I shrieked at Runami and Oblan, smacking their arms, pushing them, hitting them. “Listen to me! I’ll come back for you; now go!”
They ran from me, slipping, stumbling, and dived behind the legs of others.
You will be their mother now. You alone can offer them love, shelter them from harm. Know this, Kazonvia.
I turned, heart pounding against the backs of my eyes, and faced the para. I wrapped both arms about Savga, holding her tight against me. She shuddered.
“Savga,” I whispered into her hair. “I have to go now. Please. They’ll hurt you if you don’t let me go.”
She shook her head. The hair of her crown was soft and fine under my chin. “You won’t come back.”
“I will,” I said, meaning it, really meaning it, yet almost choking on the promise, for I knew that once I left that stall, I would never see her or Oblan or Runami again.
“We’re foremost friends,” Savga breathed against my neck, her little ribs heaving beneath my hands. “Don’t leave me.”
Filled with despair, I looked at the para, met his eyes, made inhuman, so deliberately, by his monstrous facial ci catrices. And I remembered how Tansan had given herself over to violation, and protected me from the same, for the sake of the child in my hands.
“You will have to cut the arms from my body to separate us,” I whispered.
The para’s eyes widened; then he turned for instruction from the acolyte, who looked as if he would snatch the sword himself and start hacking at me.
The dragonmaster spoke.
“We waste time, woman!” he barked at me. “Must we lose our heads from the First Chancellor’s rage at being kept waiting, all for the sake of one child? Must this aco lyte be whipped, this para demoted? Bring her along and be done with it; let the chancellor do what he wishes with the thing!”
I stared at him and a low, hollow sound echoed within my ears, as if I were standing at the bottom of a deep well, and I wondered, then, what he really felt about children, about all the children he’d seen mauled to death in Arena during his reign as dragonmaster of Clutch Re. Perhaps he
forced
himself to dislike children, to be able to continue each day, to be able to do the things that were required of him as a dragonmaster. Perhaps his dislike of children was a front, was his only defense in a world made merciless and bloody by the Emperor’s Temple laws. Impatience with children was his shield.
One he was now ingeniously using to protect me.
The acolyte stiffened, reminded by the dragonmaster of his lowly status. He gestured for me to step out of the stall. I obeyed and kept my arms tight around Savga. The stall gate clanked shut behind us.
The acolyte spat at my feet. His spittle was the color of dark meat, looked like a giblet. He spun about and started across the stable court. Hunching his shoulders, the drag onmaster followed.
After a moment, so did I.
Not once did I look back to where Oblan and Runami watched my departure with unblinking eyes.