The Hidden City (44 page)

If they would just let her sleep. The world around her seemed distorted, unreal, and she could only watch in numb, uncaring bemusement as her exhausted body screamed for sleep – or even for death. She stood exhausted at the window. The slaves toiling in the fields around the lake below looked almost like ants crawling across the winter-fallow fields as they grubbed at the soil with crude implements. Other slaves gathered firewood among the trees on the sloping sides of the basin, and the puny sounds of their axes drifted up to the dark tower from which she watched.

Alean lay on an unpadded bench, sleeping or dead, Ehlana could no longer tell which, but she envied her gentle maid in either case.

They were not alone, of course. They were never alone. Zalasta, his own face gaunt with weariness, talked on and on with King Santheocles. Ehlana was too tired to make any sense of the haggard Styric's droning words. She absently looked at the King of the Cyrgai, a man in a close-fitting steel breastplate, a short leather kirtle and ornate steel wrist-guards. Santheocles was of a race apart, and generations of selective breeding had heightened those features most admired by his people. He was tall and superbly muscled. His skin was very fair, although his carefully curled and oiled hair and beard were glossy black. His nose was straight, continuing the unbroken line of his forehead. His eyes were very large and very dark – and totally empty. His expression was haughty, cruel. His was the face of a
stupid, arrogant man devoid of compassion or even simple decency.

His ornate breastplate left his upper arms and shoulders bare, and as he listened, he absently clenched and relaxed his fists, setting his muscles to writhing and dancing under his pale skin. He was obviously not paying much attention to Zalasta's words, but sat instead totally engrossed in the rhythmic flexing and relaxing of the muscles in his arms. He was in all respects a perfect soldier, possessed of a superbly-conditioned body and mind unviolated by thought.

Ehlana wearily let her eyes drift again around the room. The furniture was strange. There were no chairs as such, only benches and padded stools with ornate arms but no backs. Evidently the notion of a chair-back had not occurred to the Cyrgai. The table in the center of the room was awkwardly low, and the lamps were of an ancient design, no more than hammered copper bowls of oil with burning wicks floating in them. The roughly sawed boards of the floor were covered with rushes, the walls of square-cut black basalt were unadorned, and the windows were undraped.

The door opened and Ekatas entered. Ehlana struggled to bring her exhausted mind into focus. Santheocles was king here in Cyrga, but it was Ekatas who ruled. The High Priest of Cyrgon was robed and cowled in black, and his aged face was a network of deep wrinkles. Although his expression was every bit as cruel and arrogant as that of his king,
his
eyes were shrewd, ruthless. The front of his black robe was adorned with the symbol that seemed to be everywhere here in the Hidden City, a white square surmounted by a stylized golden flame. There was some significance there certainly, but Ehlana was too tired to even wonder what it might be. ‘Come with me,' he commanded abruptly. ‘Bring the women.'

‘The servant girl is of no moment,' Zalasta replied in a slightly challenging tone. ‘Let her sleep.'

‘I am not accustomed to having my commands questioned, Styric.'

‘Get
accustomed, Cyrg. The women are
my
prisoners. My arrangement is with Cyrgon, and you're no more than an appendage to that arrangement. Your arrogance is beginning to annoy me. Leave the girl alone.'

Their eyes locked, and a sudden tension filled the room. ‘Well, Ekatas?' Zalasta said very quietly. ‘Has the time come? Have you finally worked up enough courage to challenge me? Any time, Ekatas. Any time at all.'

Ehlana, now fully alert, saw the flicker of fear in the eyes of Cyrgon's priest. ‘Bring the Queen then,' he said sullenly. ‘It is
she
whom Cyrgon would behold.'

‘Wise decision, Ekatas,' Zalasta said sardonically. ‘If you keep making the right choices, you might even live for a little while longer.'

Ehlana took her cloak and gently covered Alean with it. Then she turned to face the three men. ‘Let's get on with this,' she told them, mustering some remnant of her royal manner.

Santheocles rose woodenly to his feet and put on his high-crested helmet, taking great pains to avoid mussing his carefully arranged hair. He spent several moments buckling on his large round shield, and then he drew his sword.

‘What an ass,' Ehlana noted scornfully. ‘Are you really sure you should trust His Majesty with anything sharp, though? He might hurt himself with it, you know.'

‘It is customary, woman,' Ekatas replied stiffly. ‘Prisoners are always kept under close guard.'

‘Ah,' she murmured, ‘and we
must
obey the dictates of custom, mustn't we, Ekatas? When custom rules, thought is unnecessary.'

Zalasta smiled faintly. ‘I believe you wanted to take us to the temple, Ekatas. Let's not keep Cyrgon waiting.'

Ekatas choked back a retort, jerked the door open and led them out into the chilly hallway.

The stairs that descended from the top-most tower of the royal palace were narrow and steep, endless stairs winding down and down. Ehlana was trembling by the time they reached the courtyard below.

The winter sun was very bright in that broad courtyard, but there was not much heat to it.

They crossed the flagstoned courtyard to the pale temple, a building constructed not of marble but of chalky limestone. Unlike marble, the limestone had a dull, unreflective surface, and the temple looked somehow diseased, leprous.

They mounted the stairs to the portico and entered through a wide doorway. Ehlana had expected it to be dark inside this Holy of Holies, but it was not. She stared with a certain apprehensive astonishment at the source of the light even as Ekatas and Santheocles prostrated themselves, crying in unison,
‘Vanet, tyek Alcor1 Yala Cyrgon!'

And then it was that the Queen understood the significance of that ubiquitous emblem that marked virtually everything here in the Hidden City. The white square represented the blocky altar set in the precise center of the temple, but the flame that burned atop that altar was no stylized representation. It was instead an actual fire that twisted and flared, reaching hungrily upward.

Ehlana was suddenly afraid. The fire burning on the altar was not some votive offering, but a living flame, conscious, aware, and possessed of an unquenchable will. Bright as the sun, Cyrgon himself burned eternal on his pale altar.

* * *

No,' Sparhawk decided. ‘We'd better not. Let's just sit tight – at least until Xanetia has the chance to winnow through a few minds. We can always come back and deal with Scarpa and his friends later. Right now we need to know where Zalasta's taking Ehlana and Alean.'

‘We already know,' Kalten said. ‘They're going to Cyrga.'

‘That's the whole point,' the now-visible Ulath told him. ‘We don't know where Cyrga is.'

They had gone back into the vine-choked ruins and had gathered on the second floor of a semi-intact palace to consider options.

‘Aphrael has a general idea,' Kalten said. ‘Can't we just start out for central Cynesga and do some poking around when we get there?'

‘I don't think that'd do much good,' Bevier pointed out. ‘Cyrgon's been concealing the place with illusions for the past ten eons. We could probably walk right through the streets of the city and not even see it.'

‘He's not hiding it from
everybody,'
Caalador mused. ‘There
are
messages going back and forth, so
somebody
here in Natayos has to know the way. Sparhawk's right. Why don't we let Xanetia do the poking around
here,
instead of the lot of us going off into the desert to dodge scorpions and snakes while we turn over pebbles and grains of sand?'

‘We stay here then?' Tynian asked.

‘For the time being,' Sparhawk replied. ‘Let's not do anything to attract attention until we find out what Xanetia can discover. That's our best option at the moment.'

‘We were so
close!'
Kalten fumed. ‘If we'd just gotten here a day or two earlier.'

‘Well we didn't,' Sparhawk said flatly, forcing back his own disappointment and frustration. ‘So let's make the best of it and salvage what we can.'

‘With Zalasta getting further and further away with every minute,' Kalten added bitterly.

‘Don't worry, Kalten,' Sparhawk told him in a tone as cold as death. ‘Zalasta can't run far enough or fast enough to get away from me when I decide to go after him.'

‘Are you busy, Sarabian?' Empress Elysoun asked tentatively from the doorway of the blue-draped room.

‘Not really, Elysoun,' he sighed. ‘Just brooding. I've had a great deal of bad news in the last day or so.'

‘I'll come back some other time. You're not much fun when you've got things on your mind.'

‘Is that all there is in the world, Elysoun?' he asked her sadly. ‘Only fun?'

Her sunny expression tightened slightly, and she stepped into the room. ‘That's what you married us for in the first place, wasn't it, Sarabian?' She spoke in crisp Tamul that was not at all like her usual relaxed Valesian dialect. ‘Our marriages to you were to cement political alliances, so we're here as symbols, playthings, and ornaments. We're certainly not a part of the government.'

He was rather startled by her perception and by the sudden change in her. It was easy to underestimate Elysoun. Her single-minded pursuit of pleasure and the aggressively revealing nature of her native dress proclaimed her to be an empty-headed sensualist, but this was a completely different Elysoun. He looked at her with new interest. ‘What have you been up to lately, my love?' he asked her fondly.

‘The usual,' she shrugged.

He averted his eyes. ‘Please don't do that.'

‘Do what?'

‘Bounce that way. It's very distracting.'

‘It's supposed to be. You don't think I dress this way because I'm too lazy to put on clothes, do you?'

‘Is that why you came by? For fun? Or was there
something more tedious?' They had never talked this way before, and her sudden frankness intrigued him.

‘Let's talk about the tedious things first,' she said. She looked at him critically. ‘You need to get more sleep,' she chided.

‘I wish I could. I've got too much on my mind.'

‘I'll have to see what I can do about that.' She paused. There's something going on in the Women's Palace, Sarabian.'

‘Oh?'

‘A lot of strangers have been mingling with the assorted lap-dogs and toadies that litter the halls.'

He laughed. That's a blunt way to describe courtiers.'

‘Aren't they? There's not a real man among them. They're in the palace to help us with our schemes. You
did
know that we spend our days plotting against each other, didn't you?'

He shrugged. ‘It gives you all something to do in your spare time.'

‘That's the only kind of time we have, my husband.
All
of our time is spare time, Sarabian, that's what's wrong with us. Anyway, these strangers aren't attached to any of the established courts.'

‘Are you sure?'

Her answering smile was wicked. ‘Trust me. I've had dealings with all the regular ones. They're all little more than butterflies. These strangers are wasps.'

He gave her an amused look. ‘Have you actually winnowed your way through
all
the courtiers in the Women's Palace?'

‘More or less.' She shrugged again – quite deliberately, he thought. ‘Actually it was rather boring. Courtiers are a tepid lot, but it was a way to keep track of what was going on.'

‘Then it wasn't entirely –?'

‘A little, perhaps, but I have to take steps to protect
myself. Our politics are subtle, but they're very savage.'

‘Are these strangers Tamuls?'

‘Some are. Some aren't.'

‘How long has this been going on?'

‘Since we all moved back to the Women's Palace. I didn't see any of these wasps when we were all living here with the Elenes.'

‘Just the past few weeks then?'

She nodded. ‘I thought you should know. It could be just more of the same kind of thing that's been going on for years, but I don't really think so. It
feels
different somehow. Our politics are more indirect than yours, and what's happening in the Women's Palace is men's politics.'

‘Do you suppose you could keep an eye on it for me? I'd be grateful.'

‘Of course, my husband. I
am
loyal, after all.'

‘Oh, really?'

‘Don't make that mistake, Sarabian. Loyalty shouldn't be confused with that other business. That doesn't mean anything. Loyalty does.'

‘There's a lot more to you than meets the eye, Elysoun.'

‘Oh? I've never tried to conceal anything.' She inhaled deeply.

He laughed again. ‘Do you have plans for this evening?'

‘Nothing that can't be put off until some other time. What did you have in mind?'

‘I thought we might talk a while.'

‘Talk?'

‘Among other things.'

‘Let me send a message first. Then we can talk for as long as you like – among those other things you mentioned.'

* * *

They were two days out of Tiana on their way around the west end of the lake on the road to Arjuna. They had camped on the lake-shore some distance from the road, and Khalad had shot a deer with his crossbow. ‘Camp-meat,' he explained to Berit as he skinned the animal. ‘It saves time and money.'

‘You're really very good with that crossbow,' Berit said.