Spear of Heaven (18 page)

“Why?”

“Because they are,” said Kimeri. “There, see? They’re all
quiet again, and the geldings are behaving themselves. They know how they’re
supposed to be.”

“They look like mountain deer,” Hani said, “except that they’re
so much bigger, and they have manes, and long tails with tassels on the end.
And their horns are straight instead of branched, and much shorter than the
stags’.”

“That’s because they’re geldings, and mares don’t usually
have horns at all. You should see the stallions. They have horns two ells long,
and sharp as spears.”

“Do they kill people with the horns?” Hani wanted to know.

He was not particularly bloody-minded, she noticed. Just
curious. “Sometimes,” she said. “When people get in their way, or are cruel to
them. You don’t whip a senel, my mother says. Seneldi are our hooved brothers.
We treat them like people, and they carry us because they love us.”

“Would one carry me?”

“Why, of course,” said Kimeri.

One of the geldings did, because Kimeri asked; and Kadin
came to see what they were doing, but said nothing, which was much better than
Kimeri would have got from a nurse. Kadin was a mage, and a northerner besides.
He saw nothing alarming in riding seneldi around a perfectly safe and
completely closed-in yard, even if they did leave off the bridles and saddles.

Hani found Kadin terrifying, but he put on a brave face for
Kimeri. She let him think he convinced her. Northerners were so very tall and
so very dark. Even Asanians were a little afraid of them, and Asanians were
used to them.

oOo

After that, Hani was her friend. He took her to the
palace, and got in trouble for it too, what with the other children being sure
he had taken up with a demon. But he was one of the oldest, and while he was
far from the biggest, he could knock down and hammer on anyone who argued with him.
He did that to a boy or two, and she did it to another boy and one of the
girls, and when the two of them were finished, they all decided to forget what
Kimeri looked like and treat her like a person.

The others never quite came close enough to be friends. Hani
was different. He found her much more interesting than anyone else he knew, and
even if he did not believe most of her stories of what the world was like
outside of Shurakan, he liked to listen to them. He had his own stories to
tell, too, and he knew all the fascinating places to play.

One of his favorites was one of the hardest to get to. First
of all it was in the part of the palace where the most people were, though they
only gathered in that particular place once in a Brightmoon-cycle. The rest of
the time there were people muddling about, cleaning the floors, feeding the incense
burners, braiding flowers into garlands to hang from everything a garland could
hang from.

Once one got past those and slipped through a heavy curtain
like chainmail, one was in the best place. A lamp was always lit in it, to
honor the god whose house it was. The god himself stood on a plinth, carved of
wood and set with glittery stones and painted and gilded and dazzling in his
gaudiness. His robe came off at every cycle, and priests put a new one on.

oOo

The day Hani took Kimeri to see the god, he was wearing
cloth of gold. “That’s a good omen,” Hani whispered, being very careful not to
wake any echoes. “His robe is the same color as your hair, see?”

Kimeri stood in a shadow in that shadowy place and smelled
the incense, and felt rather strange. She felt that way in temples in Starios,
too. “There are gods here,” she murmured.

Hani blanched, but he kept his chin up. “Why, of course
there are. This is their place. Are you going to come and see the best part, or
are you afraid?”

Kimeri, who was not afraid at all, gave him a disgusted look
and walked across the patterned floor. She walked the way she had been taught
to hunt, very, very quietly, putting each foot down from the toes backward.

Hani, tiptoeing behind her, made a great racket. He was
scared, but he was excited, too, and a little irked with her for being so much
braver than anybody else. She could have told him that gods’ children would
hardly be frightened of gods, but he had already refused to believe that she
was the sun-god’s child.

It was quiet in the room, which was actually a tall, wide
alcove in a much larger space. The lamp flickered in a draft, making the
shadows leap and dance. Hani’s heart was thudding—Kimeri could hear it. Her own
beat as it always did, maybe a little faster because she was excited, that was
all.

They reached the wooden god and stared up. He was a
terrifying thing to look at, with his four sets of arms and his scowling face,
but Kimeri rather suspected the scowl was a mask. He felt stern to her, but not
unwelcoming. The flowers he was festooned with were almost too sweet-scented.
She stopped a sneeze before it burst out and betrayed them.

Hani, heart still thudding but perfectly in control of his
courage, led her by the hand around the plinth on which the god stood. The
shadows were black there, but when she sharpened her eyes and used a little
magery, she saw how the god stood in a niche, and the niche was a hollow
half-circle.

Hani set hand to wall and felt his way around behind the
god. It was dusty in there, and it smelled of old wood and new paint and
something sharply pungent that came from the god’s robe, and of course flowers
everywhere. But there was plenty of space, plenty of air to breathe. Kimeri
noticed the shape of a door in the very back, and just across from it, in the
god’s leg, another door.

Hani, blind in the dark, groped for the catch that Kimeri
could see perfectly clearly. He was thinking that he could be quiet and keep
from letting her guess what he did. He did not know mages, she thought a little
smugly. The catch made a distinct click, and then the door was open, with a
ladder leading up into the god’s body.

He tugged her in. The scent of old wood here was overpowering.
“Climb,” he whispered, hardly to be heard if she had not been a mage’s child.
He thought he was helping her by setting her hands on the rungs of the ladder
and nudging her feet toward the wall that was the inside of the god.

She climbed. Hani was behind her, panting so loud she
wondered how anyone could keep from hearing him.

It was not a long climb. The god was not terribly tall,
merely tall enough to be imposing. The top of him was almost big enough to be a
room—his head, and there were windows, long and narrow like Shurakani eyes.
Someone long ago had spread cushions underneath them to lie on, dusty but
comfortable.

Kimeri looked out of one eye, Hani out of the other. The
floor was surprisingly far below. The light of the lamp was hurtfully bright
after the dark inside the god. Kimeri shut down her magesight and let herself
see with ordinary eyes.

Hani nudged her with his elbow. “See this?” he whispered.

She looked at what he was holding. It looked like a trumpet,
except that it was soft, made of cloth. Its bell was bronze.

“That’s a speaking trumpet,” Hani said. “A person sitting
here can talk into it, and his voice comes out of the god’s mouth and sounds
like the voice of heaven. That’s how they make prophecies here when the priests
think it’s time.”

She was supposed to be shocked and amazed, but she did not
see why she had to be. “We don’t need to pretend at home,” she said. “Our
prophets are real. They make prophecies in their own voices, and priests write
them down.”

“So do the priests do here,” said Hani, a little annoyed. “The
prophecies are real. The god inspires them. But the people believe them better
if they come from his mouth, instead of from somebody who might look like you
or me and be somebody’s brother, or his cousin.”

“How silly,” said Kimeri. “Prophets are one’s brother or
sister or cousin. What else would they be?”

Hani opened his mouth to reply, but froze. The curtain of
the god’s shrine was sliding back with a great rasping of metal and grunting of
men who heaved away at it. When it was drawn about half aside, it stopped, and
people came through. What they were up to was clear enough to see: they were
carrying enormous sheaves of flowers, baskets and baskets of them.

“Oh, dear,” breathed Hani.

Kimeri would have agreed with him, except that she
remembered the door behind the god. She tried to tell him about it, but he
clapped a hand over her mouth. “Don’t move,” he whispered. “Don’t breathe. If
they find out we’re up here . . .”

His visions of dire fates were clear enough to shut her up.
The least of them showed him being whipped while she got a royal spanking.

The people with the flowers were in no hurry at all. They
brought lamps with them till the space beyond the curtain was blazing with
light. They settled down to weave garlands and gossip and pass round skins of
something that made them warm and giggly. The lamps gleamed on their heads,
which were all shaved bare, and in their eyes, and on the flowers they were
weaving and the flowers that others were taking down from the rafters and the
plinth and everywhere between, including the god’s hands.

Once or twice Kimeri was sure that one of the garland-makers
had looked straight up into her eyes, but the man turned away without saying
anything. She crouched down a little lower and tried not to breathe.

All the dead and dying flowers being moved meant a great
deal of dust and a scent so strong it made her sick. She did her best to keep
her stomach where it belonged. She needed to go to the privy, too. But worst of
all she needed to sneeze. She needed it so badly that her eyes itched and
watered and her nose hurt, and her throat felt as if she had swallowed a bone
sideways. She held her nose, but that meant breathing through her mouth, and
that was noisy. And the sneeze kept on fighting to come out.

The inside of the god exploded.

She was still holding her nose, but the sneeze had shocked
itself to death without ever coming out. Hani crouched with streaming eyes,
yellow-grey with shock. The people outside were gaping and goggling. Some of
them had fallen over. Hani’s sneeze had gone through the speaking trumpet and
come out like the god’s own.

He grabbed her before she could say anything, and nearly
threw her down the ladder, scrambling so fast to follow that he trod on her
fingers. Outside she heard people yelling, arguing—

“The god spoke!”

“No, he didn’t. Someone got inside.”

“What? If it’s a demon—”

“We have demons in the palace. Haven’t you seen them?”

Sooner or later one of them would remember how to get inside
the god, and come running to look. Kimeri shut her eyes and woke up her magery
and dropped.

She landed light, with Hani almost on top of her, too scared
to notice what she had done. He was still holding on to her hand. He half
pulled her arm out of its socket, yanking her through the door—and then
stopping cold as he remembered that he had nowhere to go.

The door in front of them had a perfectly visible catch, if
one had magesight. Kimeri opened it and dragged him through and shut it tight.

They were in a passage like a dozen others, narrow and
dim-lit and dusty. Hani was blind in it, but there was light farther on. Kimeri
pulled him toward it.

oOo

“Do you know where we are?”

Kimeri looked around her. They had gone through a great many
passages, because Hani was sure there were people running after them, and would
not hear Kimeri when she tried to tell him that the priests had never even
found the door behind the god.

People never listened to her. She looked at him sullenly and
set her chin. “You’re the one who knows everything. Where do you think we are?”

“I don’t know.”

It cost a great deal of pride for him to say so. She was
glad. “I thought you knew every crack and cranny of the palace.”

Since he had said so in the same exact words, he could
hardly call her a liar. He glared at her instead. “I don’t know every one. Just
the ones that are important.”

“This one is very important. We’re in it.”

“Then why don’t you get us out of it?”

Kimeri was ready to burst into tears, but she was not going
to let any nit of a boy see her cry. “I can’t find my way, either. I haven’t
learned to do that yet. I get all twisty when I try.”

He thought she was talking about being a girl and being too
silly to tell where she was. He did not know anything about being a mage and
being too young. If she told him, he would not believe her. Nobody believed in
mages here.

That made her angry, and anger made her walk, she did not
care where. Forward was good enough. He could follow or not. She did not care.

He did follow, of course. Being lost made him scared. Being
scared made him angry, but not as angry as Kimeri was at him for getting them
into this in the first place. She stalked ahead and he stalked behind, and
neither of them said a word.

oOo

They walked for a long time. Sometimes they took turns
because Kimeri got tired of going straight. They were going in circles, she
thought. Not the way they would in the woods, the way people got lost when they
went hunting, back to the same place over and over, but the way walls could
turn and twist and bend in on themselves and keep people from ever finding the
way out.

Once she thought they had found it, but when they looked out
at the blessed light it was coming in through a high window in the wall, and
the room they were in was as empty as the rest, and there was no door but the
one they had used to get in.

Hani stamped his foot and flung himself down on the floor. “We’ve
got a curse on us! The god’s punishing us for climbing inside his statue.”

“He never punished you before, did he?” Kimeri asked
reasonably.

The last thing he wanted was for her to be reasonable. “I
never climbed inside him with anybody else before.”