“See how he keeps them waiting by the school? No care for whether the sun stains them.” A male voice behind her, calm, without threat.
Grada kept very still, ice on her shoulders. If he had wanted her dead he could have killed her already.
“School?” she asked.
“The last girls were here three months. Only two of them. Those two went out with the caravan that brought these ones.”
What would they spend three months doing out in the folds of the desert?
Grada didn’t ask. Instead she asked herself what the man wanted. Such questions came as naturally as breathing. Survival as an Untouchable, as a creature whose life was the property of all and any, required that you ask yourself at each turn what every person wanted of you. Grada had been a creature lower than a slave—slaves at least commanded a price, and despite the fact that she had held the hand of the emperor her birth still tainted her, her eyes dark with the sin of her ancestors.
He wants me to answer my own question.
“They are training them,” she said.
“Because?”
“Because…” Grada had never seen a skin so pale until the high mage had led her from Sarmin’s room to the Tower, where she saw her first northerner, a wind-sworn mage. She thought to say the girls were in training for the Tower, to serve the empire, but why here? No, they were not mages; one northerner might live in the Tower but many more lived beneath Sarmin’s golden roofs, proof of his power and wealth. “Because only the richest can afford exotics.”
“That’s my assessment of it,” the man said.
Grada rolled to her side, a slow move, so as to provoke no attack. The man squatted a few yards behind her, off the trail, his robes the colour of sand.
“My name is Rorrin,” he said, veiled as the dunes-men are wont to ride, the sun throwing his shadow before him, short and dark.
“Are you here to kill me?” Grada asked. The fear that eluded her between the river and the pomegranate trees now sent sweat trickling, warm from beneath her arms. She sat, shuffling back from the view of the school.
“Do I look like a killer?” The man pulled his veil about his neck and set back his sun hood. Old, maybe fifty, a comfortable face sagging beneath short grey hair.
“No.” She knew killers, the kind who strode the Maze or bore the emperor’s swords. Many wore it openly in the brutal lines of their face. Others hid it, but for those used to looking, their true nature lay revealed—something of steel about them, in the eyes, in the quiet way they held their peace in chaos, waiting to strike.
“Well, then.” He smiled.
Not a killer. A murderer maybe. Murder lies deeper in a man. “Why are you here, then?” she asked.
“To watch, of course. And better to be away from the trail when you watch. You never know who might come up behind you.” His eyes told a story of kindness, dark but warm.
“And who sent you?” The man who killed Jenna, who cut her body with a sharp knife as if he had been looking for something hidden within, that man had kind eyes.
“We both serve the same person, Grada,” Rorrin said. “Have you seen enough, or should we wait?”
“How long have you been watching?” she asked.
“Four days.” He waggled a sun-dark hand as if it might be more, might be less.
“Another won’t hurt, then.” And Grada rolled to her stomach and crawled back to the ridge, and away from the trail.
CHAPTER TWO
“Who?” she asked.
Rorrin said nothing, not dignifying her pretence, his gaze on the buildings where the slaves had been taken.
Grada let the breath slip from her, a sigh she hadn’t known was in her. “I’m not a killer.”
“To lie to me again would be a mistake.” Rorrin’s voice held no threat, as mild as if they discussed the shade of the sand.
“I…” That pale face stared sightless at her again from beneath the water. “I didn’t want to hurt them.”
“Now you’re just lying to yourself.”
Rorrin wrinkled his nose to dislodge a fly. Not so many this far from the river but enough to annoy. It flew Grada’s way. A shiver of irritation ran through her, not at the fly, the Maze lay black with them in some months, but at the discovery Rorrin was right.
“You said you’d been watching here four days. How could you even know…”
“I said I’d been watching four days. I didn’t say here, Grada.”
“Watching me?” With effort she unclenched the fists she’d made. “Why?”
“Answer my question. I asked first,” Rorrin said.
“They didn’t deserve to die,” she said. “It would have been too easy. I wanted them to know what had happened, to remember me, to hurt, to have it in their minds the next day, the next year.”
“Death would have been a mercy?”
“Yes.” The face again, hair flowing with the current, the river sliding between them. It would have been too easy for him, to slip away with the river.
“And you weren’t feeling merciful?”
“No.” Grada watched the man beside her, his profile as he stared across the ridge at the distant building. “Now answer my question—why were you watching me?”
“I didn’t say I would answer you, just that I asked first.”
Grada pushed herself up, started to rise. “If you think—”
“Down!” A command. “Our friends are on the move!”
The three blonde girls. No, three blonde girls, but perhaps not the same ones. Grada learned that from the shell-game played on shaded corners where the Maze opened onto the wider streets of Nooria. “Watch the pea! Watch the pea!” the man would call, his hands blurring as he swapped the shells. And any honest passerby who tried to watch that pea would lose it just as they lost sight of the wider game.
“Each to a different pavilion,” Rorrin said.
Grada had started to think that Rorrin only spoke to test her. “They’re dividing them—setting doubt in their minds so any groups that formed on the journey here are broken.”
“It seems likely,” Rorrin said.
“We should have followed the caravan,” Grada said. “If it included trained slaves from this school we’d learn more from where those were taken than from watching the outside of the tents and building in which these ones are being trained.”
“Yes.” Rorrin showed no concern.
“You weren’t alone.”
“No,” he said.
“If we move fast we might still catch them before they reach the city gates.” Grada scooted back across the ground, half sand, half dust, and stood out of sight from the school.
Rorrin followed her, his pace a sensible one but too slow to suit her mood. She waited for him at a milestone. Such stones counted out the first hundred miles from the city—this one read “twenty” in the old script of lines and dots.
“We may lose them in the city,” she said as he drew closer, river dust scuffing under his sandals.
“Meere will not lose them.” Rorrin watched her face as if he had asked her a question.
“Answer my question,” she said. “Why have you followed me?” Rorrin seemed almost uninterested in the slaves, as if she herself were the quarry that mattered to him.
A shrug. “Is it only the emperor’s enemies who must train new agents for the fight?” He stepped closer, close enough that she could see the sweat on his brow, the grey stubble above his lip.
“I’m not a fighter.” The idea pulled a laugh from her. “I’m an Untou—”
His hand was on her shoulder, a move of shocking swiftness. “I touched you. Be something new.”
The echoes rose from the base of her skull, old whispers hissing repetition.
A sharp edge demands a cut. Quick hands kill, quick hands kill. Aristo touched me so.
She took his wrist and lifted his hand away. There had been an Aristo… was that voice hers? A memory?
“You don’t have to be a warrior to fight for the emperor. The Tower fights his battles, the alchemists in the Tun, spies who live new lives in far corners beyond the edge of empire.” Rorrin smiled. “Give me my hand back.”
Grada let him go and in a flicker he held her wrist instead, one finger digging down into a nerve that made her cry out and almost fall to her knees. She kept standing though, snarling at the pain.
“You’re too used to doing what is asked of you, Grada.” He let her go. “Can you unlearn that lesson of a lifetime and show that same obedience to only one man?”
The pain subsided in waves as Grada cradled her arm. “I serve the emperor, nobody else.”
“Well next time I ask to have my hand back, consider saying no.” And he walked on by, sandals scuffing.
They walked through the cool of the night with the blazing stars to light a moonless path. The love song of ten thousand frogs accompanied them, and the river’s sigh as it slipped past unseen.
Grada slapped her neck and brought her hand away dark-smeared with blood and pieces of mosquito.
Rorrin snorted at her side. “The death of a thousand bites. The emperor—”
“You don’t have to make every damn thing an… an…”
“Allegory?”
“Yes, one of them.” Grada didn’t know the word, but it sounded right. “A story about the emperor or a lesson or—”
Rorrin pressed something into her hand. “The emperor gave me these.”
Grada looked. Dark objects, rounded, small. A sniff—the faint scent of lemons, bitter lemons.
“Citronel pods. Crush them and wipe the juice on. The blood-suckers won’t want you.”
“Sarmin gave you these?” Grada asked.
“Emperor Beyon. He hated mosquitoes. The things will drink royal blood soon as take from peasants.”
“You knew Beyon? Was he like Sarmin?”
Out in the darkness a whip-o-will unleashed its cry, like a shriek of agony.
“You can’t see the emperor as a friend, Grada. That will make trouble for you and for him. And no, Emperor Beyon was nothing like his brother. He would never have spoken to an untouchable and his friendship was… dangerous. Apt to be pulled away as swiftly as it was given. He had a quick temper.”
“They say he was a great emperor. The people loved him in the city.” Jenna had always offered prayers for Beyon. And to him, which made no sense.
“The people adored him because he did nothing. They loved him because we had peace and times were good.”
“It doesn’t sound as if you loved him.” And if not Beyon, did Rorrin love Sarmin?
“The gods gave us the emperor that we deserved at that time and the emperor we needed at that time. It’s not my place to love the emperor, only to serve him. If the call came I would have laid down my life to obey Beyon with no delay, while the peasants were wondering just how much they liked him after all. The emperor is Cerana. Cerana is the people. I serve.”
Grada crushed the pods and the mosquitoes left her alone while she pondered. Dawn found them still walking. With the sun still flowing up over the rim of the desert they saw the caravan ahead, circled and camped. Rorrin appeared not to see it and Grada broke her silence.
“We should hang back.”
“And look guilty? We’ll walk on by and see them again in Nooria.” He walked on, his pace that had once irritated her with its lack of haste now calling on her strength to keep up.
“And if they turn aside to some river mansion or local farm?” She almost kept the annoyance from her voice.
“Meere,” he said.
Grada looked around, sudden remembrance spooking her. She should have remembered Meere. But wherever he hid he’d done a good job of it.
Meere. She would remember him next time.
CHAPTER THREE
His old bed, stripped down to wood and ropes, did not invite. The mattress, soaked with blood from when Grada stabbed him, had been taken away and burned. Broken plaster bit through his silk slippers. A jagged tooth of alabaster jutted from the window frame. Grada had smashed his window, opened his eyes to the world. The shard threw yellow light upon his right foot, then his left. He came to the edge of the room and turned.
One room. Seventeen years. Safe years.
—
You were never safe.
Sarmin squinted at the broken wall but it was not Aherim who had spoken. When the sun fell a sea of voices rose from some dark infinity. The Many he had saved he had returned to their own flesh, and now they shivered lonely in it. The Many beyond saving still rested with Sarmin. Those whose bodies would no longer receive them, their flesh perhaps too torn to hold a spirit, or the spirit too changed to fit in that which had once contained it. At night they raised their voices.
Sundown had arrived, but a different kind of clock spelled out this day. Mesema had screamed. They tried to shut the door, tried to hush her, but he’d heard it. Her time was upon her; Beyon’s child would be born this night, beneath a scorpion sky. Sarmin had tried to see her, but too easily he had let them turn him away. Women’s work, Magnificence. Women’s work. And an emperor had been turned aside by Old Wives.
And so he had come here, to search one more time for Aherim. His fingers fell upon the old table, where he’d carved the pattern. Tried to save his brother. None of them had seen this future in the pattern. Had Helmar?
Women die in childbirth every day.
Someone had said that to him as if it were a comfort. The rough-carved shapes writhed beneath his fingers, but they were his to alter and cheat, not to command. That spell had been Helmar’s, and Helmar was dead. Another spare branch of the family tree pruned away, albeit belatedly.
“Aherim. Show yourself.”
He searched for a pattern. Two eyes together. A nose and a mouth beneath them. “Will she die, Aherim?”