Gods of Nabban (23 page)

“Old Great Gods, no!” A strange gesture sent light flaring wildly down a dark stairwell. “It's clear, come on.”

“But—”

She grinned back over her shoulder. She had a sharp, pointed little face and her short hair, free of the jewelled combs she wore when attending the empress, stood up every which way.

“You're a wizard? One of the ones who fled to Dan in the north?”

She yelped with laughter, as if she were drunk.

“Try again. Third time lucky, boy.” She waited at the bottom of the stairs, caught his hand, tugged him around into a dark corner. Kissed him, to his astonishment.

“For luck,” she said, and stooped to drag out a big basketry chest. “And because it's been a long time since anyone laid a friendly touch on you, hasn't it? Here, you take the back end and try to keep up close to it, keep your gown from falling open. Don't want anyone seeing that sword. Keep your head down, too.”

Play a slave and hide his face, she meant. He could do that. She took the front handle and they set off. The chest was not light, not to his weakened arms, anyway. But she must have put it there herself. He was feeble as an invalid, that was his problem. Head down, fall into step with her so that it did not sway wildly. More stairs, corridors where herds of people ran back and forth shouting. Two of the giants passed, running, shouting over heads something about the empress's boat being taken down the river to safety. Stairs, passageways, lamplit receiving halls where crowds gathered making a noise like geese. The basket grew heavier and heavier and Lau had to brace herself against it going down the stairs, to stop him losing his grip on it altogether.

Outdoors. He didn't know where they were, which direction they faced, but there was fire on a nearby mound, within the curtain wall. Some villa or tower burning. Away to his left, shouting, screaming, a hideous din, metallic thunder. The gate that faced the inlet of the boatmen's village. Fire lit the sky there, too.

Lau dropped her end of the chest, and it twisted before he could let go, spilling out silks. That was all that weight, a few gowns. He was ashamed. Also terrified. She dragged him sideways into a bush sweet with leathery, evergreen leaves. A party of men rushed by towards the burning tower. The sounds of fighting faded and the night was filled with more men, tight-packed herds of them, with officers shouting. The remnant of the forces that had held the Beacon Hills? Pursued to the very gates of the palace. At least these had made it inside. It sounded as though the Dar-Lathan pursuit had been driven off, or maybe only given up, retreating. Carrying with them the heads of officers to strip clean for trophies. Bodies for their victory-feast. But perhaps that came later, when they took the empress. There was nothing in the old plays about the Dar-Lathans eating their enemies; he remembered Shouja Wey adding lines about it. Kaeo had wished Master Wey had not done that; it took out a beautiful, hard-edged line about the hero's brother's death.

Fires painted a constellation in scarlet across the line of the Beacon Hills. The Dar-Lathans.

The soldiers had passed into the night, around to the south. He followed like an obedient child when Lau led him by the hand along narrow paths in the dark.

“Down.” Hand on his head, pressing him. He ducked, crawled after her, into a sort of den beneath vines growing on a framework completely obscured by the mound they made. Wisteria, naked, but dense in its grey tangle. Just enough faint light from the distant fire and the rising moon, a few days past the full, to see that. He squatted on the ground trying to steady his breath.

“You are a wizard,” he protested.

“More a sort of priestess, I think you'd say.”

“A sort of priestess.”

“Of the Little Sister.”

“Of the Mother? There aren't any priestesses of the Little Sister.”

“Not,” she said, “on your side of the river.”

She caught him, a hand over his mouth against his yelp, but gentle, her other arm around his shoulders.

“Consider,” she said. “It's not as though your empress has shown any great affection for you, prophet of the god of Nabban. And we're not cannibals; really, we're not. That's a Nabbani lie Bloody Yao started to justify the last war. We're not so different from you, really, except we never lost our gods.” She appeared to consider, holding him in the dark. “Heads, I'll grant you. But I'm sure nobody has any use for your skull. I certainly don't.” She kissed him again, his cheek this time.

“Will you stop doing that?”

“Sorry. You looked like you needed it.”

“It's too dark for you to see what I need.” The words sounded odd in his own ears, as though his mouth remembered friends and how to trade light words, but his mind did not recognize what he did.

“I can see in the dark better than you. How about, I wanted to? Take it as a mother's kiss.”

“I'd rather not take it at all.” Again, something he might have said a year ago, not now. As if she had woken something he'd thought dead.

“There's a lie in your voice, prophet of Nabban. Even a smile. There.” She squeezed his shoulders. “I've made you laugh. Good. They haven't damaged you all that much, not where it matters. That's what I wanted to know. Caught your breath? That's the way. We can't lurk here all night. That fire won't keep them distracted forever.”

“You started it?”

“A beacon to be seen from the Beacon Hills. I did. It's just a moon-viewing tower, nobody in there. Are you sitting on a sword, by the way?”

“I hope not.” There was something beneath him. Cloth. Heavy, when he lifted it. A jacket reinforced with horn plates. The sword and its baldric were beneath.

“My name's Anlau, but you can call me Rat,” she said, changing her gown for the jacket. “Everyone does.”

“Why?”

“Oh, you know. Pointy nose, good at getting in everywhere . . . Stay close.”

Kaeo followed, keeping close as he could without actually grabbing hold of her hem. It was a long way in the dark, wherever they were going, with much twisting and winding through the groves and up the hill that the grounds of the palace covered. The fury at the gates had subsided; the tower still burned.

Fog was rising above the walls. Cold water, mud and reed-beds still holding warmth from the day's sun. The scent of the sea was strong. Buffalo bellowed.

“Tide's coming in,” Lau—Anlau—Rat, said. “Drowning the marsh. It'll be all pools and bogs and sucking mud at low tide, and those ditches turning to channels. We don't have many boats, and there's not much forest around. She's made herself a safe island, for now. Devils take her.” Poked him. “Which maybe they will, if you're right.”

“What did I say?”

“Hmm, what haven't you said? There's a devil loose in the land. Maybe more than one. Maybe the empress is one, though you haven't said that.”

“It's not a damned play. Don't sound so cheerful!”

“You want me to actually let go and throw off the mask? I'll be hiding under a bush howling in terror and saying not me, not me, not here, not now. What good does that do anyone?”

“Can I join you?”

“Don't think two of us howling under a bush will help, either.” She caught at his hand.

“Do you really think the empress is one of the seven?”

“No. But she might be allied with one. I don't know. It seemed like wizardry murdered old Yao, not poison, which was what caught my interest, and then realizing how very suspicious it was Otono's children all dying. But it wasn't wizardry, that's the thing. It really was more like some god's or demon's power set loose. We—I—did a bit of scouting around the palace. It's not too difficult, really. You thought I was Nabbani.”

“You look Nabbani.”

“Pah. It's your gods and your language make you
of
a folk, not your looks. We're the same folk in the blood, folk of what's Nabban now, and Darru and Lathi, only those of us from south of the Little Sister are better looking. And that doesn't make us Nabbani belonging to Nabban, no matter what Yeh-Lin thought. It's the tongue that's the trick of passing, not the looks, so long as I don't pretend to be some flat-faced, pale-skinned lout of a herdsman from Argya or Alwu. Anyway—my goddess is—”

“There's no goddess in the river. The Little Sister gave herself up to become Mother Nabban.”

“My goddess,” she said, “is dead and gone, yes, but sometimes I used to dream her dreams, lost in the Mother as they were, and the gods and the goddesses of Darru and Lathi speak to me. I travel a lot, to see them. Sometimes I think I've been doing nothing but roaming all this land from Upper Lat to the coast of Darru since I was a baby. My sisters and brothers who serve our gods and I all gathered—we were dreaming echoes of—we weren't sure what. And my sisters—the Wild Sisters—were eager for war, the omens said it was time . . . I ended up back in the palace, taking the place of a messenger-girl.”

“What happened to her?”

“Ran away to be a soldier.”

He remembered, though, how easily she had stabbed that guard.

“Really, she did, and was very glad of the chance. Her name really was Lau, too. After the last queen of Lathi, like me. She was Lathan, or her mother was, and brought up on old stories until they took her from the fields at one of the imperial manors for palace service. Easy enough to start sliding myself into things, and people thinking, there's something a bit different about that girl, maybe, and forgetting the thought as they have it.”

“Wizardry.”

“It's not exactly wizardry, in my case. But call it that if you like. So I put myself, very quietly, into Buri-Nai's household to see what she was.”

“What she was up to?”

“That too. And then she killed Otono and snatched you. Just as well. There wasn't anything I could have done for you without revealing myself to—well, probably the wizards, and definitely the empress.”

She was still holding his hand, almost towing him along. Hard to catch his breath, climbing along the hillside.

“Where are we going?”

“Far, far away . . . not really. Downhill soon.”

That was good to know. His head ached. “Water?” he suggested.

“There's water. Not far. Springs and wells all over the hill—very romantic for trysting in the night.”

“Not trysting,” he gasped. She was Wind in the Reeds, or whatever the Dar-Lathans had that was the same. Spy, assassin, wizard—lunatic who wanted to flirt on the edge of a battlefield. It was just her light-hearted manner, a way of encouraging him to talk, to give her all he knew, which she knew already, or maybe just a way to keep him moving and not realizing how much he hurt, scars, wounds, headache, craving for the free-floating release of the yellowroot. It was not anything she really meant, but it warmed his heart somehow regardless. “The empress. She's not a goddess.”

“I can tell that. What do your gods tell you about her?”

“That she's a lie. She's not some saviour chosen by the Old Great Gods. The heir of the gods is in the north. I've seen him.”

“Really?”

“I—think so. I don't know. It was strange.”

“Dreams can be that. What about the empress?”

“They don't know. I mean, I don't know.” Kaeo considered. “The gods fear her.”

“I thought she might be Yeh-Lin returned, taking the princess's place as I took young Lau's, but she seems too—confused.”

Buri-Nai had not struck him as confused. A ruler ill-suited to a time of war, but she had hardly been given the education for that, he supposed.

“Yeh-Lin would have pushed us back over the Little Sister long ago, not sat in her palace worrying about prophecies of a solitary enemy. Buri-Nai sends her generals scurrying about worshipping her as a goddess, but she lacks any clear strategy or a rein to hold them in. And making enemies of all the priests, decreeing the shrines unhallowed? Ordering them killed if they don't offer their allegiance to her cult instead? The folk hate her as well as fear her now, as they never hated even Bloody Yao, for all the misery he brought them. That was stupid, and Yeh-Lin was never said to be stupid. Here. I told you there was a well.”

The well was surrounded by ferns, overshadowed by pale-barked fan-leaf trees, naked now. Some convenience for the gardeners. Kaeo sank down gratefully on damp paving stones, let Rat draw water in a wooden pail. So cold it almost burned in his throat, which was raw and sore anyway.

He did not want yellowroot. He did not want to dream. The headaches would fade in time.

“Why did you save me?” It did not sound as though they needed a dreamer.

“Honestly?”

“Yes.”

“A whim. You're no use to us. We don't need your prophecies and anyway I've heard all you've had to say so far and it isn't much use. Nothing we couldn't have found out on our own with a more reverent use of a shaman's proper rite of dreaming. But I was there when she saved you—a little diversion after assassinating her brother—and I helped the physician keep you from taking the road, which you were about ready to do—not that she noticed my help, but you can thank me. I guess I've gotten fond of you, young Kaeo.”

“I'm older than you.”

“And you look it. You need fattening up. Also I used to go to plays at the Flowering Orange, when I was in the city, before I turned myself into a palace slave. You're going to sing for me, someday, my boy, when you've recovered.”

“Am I?”

“Oh yes.”

She confused him and warmed his heart. “I might.” More water.

“And largely,” she said, her voice serious, “it was because you were where I could get at you, and I figured you wouldn't slow me down all that much, and the risk wasn't too great. And it defied her, taking you. Just so you know, I'd have stolen her dog if the same considerations held good, and if she had one.”