Gods of Nabban (9 page)

They skirted around the city—the city of a hundred islands, the floating city, the Golden City of Yeh-Lin—rather than cutting through where their wide-spread oars would be a hazard in the maze of canals, then crossed more open water, fought the current at the lower mouth of the Gentle Sister, the tide running against them, and headed upriver for the stone wharf and water-stairs of the red-pillared gatehouse reserved for the imperial family alone. Buri-Nai's boat hung back to allow the dead emperor and those who guarded him—two of the giants, his slaves, a few courtiers who had found themselves with no other transport—to make his landing undisturbed. The rest of the flotilla would be putting in at the lower wharves by the river mouth, jostling, quarrelling over slights, in haste to spread their news.

Reserved for the imperial family, but the boat of First Minister Zhung Hana pushed past them to follow the emperor.

Buri-Nai's own boatmen, grim-mouthed but silent, shot in to the wharf hard on Lord Hana's stern. There would be angry words in the boatmen's stilt-village, undoubtedly. Buri-Nai permitted herself be handed out, climbing the stone steps, scrubbed twice a day to keep them from being slimed with algae and weed, on Diman's arm, her hand again protected by its silken glove. Rat followed, unaided, ignored, and silently cursed the delicate slippers that made her footing so insecure. The boat arrowed away, making for the dyke-enclosed pound upriver, where the vessels of the imperial court were kept.

Oryo gave hasty orders. The emperor was rolled in the silk canopy that had shaded his seat in the boat. A shroud. His household slaves linked arms to carry him on their shoulders under the direction of one of the giants. They waited for Buri-Nai to precede them.

The heir's right. The—call her empress-presumptive?—bowed gravely to her brother's body and took the place she meant to claim. The giants fell in about her, rather than the corpse. A message no watcher could ignore. One carried the senseless prophet as though he were a child.

Slaves and peasants rising in revolt in answer to Dan's Traditionalist preaching in the north and west. In the south, rebellions in Dar-Lathi, where the tribes of the hills and lowland jungles had risen with Bloody Yao's death in the spring. Only a week ago news had come of the massacre of the governor and all in his palace. There were horrified whispers of the feast that had followed. It was said that the garrison of Ogu, the fortified town that was the centre of Nabbani rule in what had once been Lathi, had been overrun and scattered, that the gods of the hills and the goddesses of the little waters had put on their aspects of war and joined with the queens.

The Wild Girls. They were sisters, human daughters of the god of the barren mountain that brooded over the green highlands. Not monarchs as the term was understood in Nabban, not priestesses, either, but revered as having aspects of both by all the chieftains of all the tribes.

The head of the governor, preserved in a chest of salt, had been left on the very seat of the Peony Throne. Even the wizards could not tell how it had come there.

Another sign of the wrath of the gods, perhaps. But which gods?

Rat followed at Buri-Nai's heels with her parasol.

The imperial palace could have been a walled town in its own right, set on the only high ground for miles, on what had once been an island in the marsh and the fortress of the pirate-lords who had held this lawless coast. The deepest channel of the Gentle Sister curled round its southern side; the high wall, studded with guard-towers, had been expanded to include all the hill. There was no fortress within now, only the main palace itself and any number of auxiliary buildings. One could walk for miles within the landscaped grounds, around and around as the paths circled and twined in on themselves, and never look on precisely the same view twice. Buri-Nai kept to the straight, brick-paved road.

Just within the Emperor's Door, which only the imperial family and those attending them might use, Lord Zhung Hana stood.

He had gone so far as to bare his ceremonial sword.

“You are overcome with your grief, princess,” he said. “Your forget that the emperor must precede you. Captain Oryo will escort you and your women to a suitable retreat for your mourning. Perhaps the House of the Pines.”

A traditional lodging for elderly imperial widows, away in the northwest corner, out of sight of the main palace.

Oryo waited to see what she would do. Well, in his place, Rat considered, she might do the same. She did not step away from the princess, but she considered it.

“I am empress by the will of the Old Great Gods. You will kneel.”

Lord Hana laughed.

Did he think he could seize the Peony Throne himself? He might dream so. The Zhung were powerful and counted Kho'anzis—high lords—of four provinces among their great nobles.

Other courtiers crowded behind him. Witnesses, Rat thought, and began to feel an edge of fear.

Oryo expected Buri-Nai to order him to remove Zhung Hana, and Zhung Hana expected that Oryo would refuse to obey her. Diman was the one to watch, and Diman only waited. She did not hide the long knife in her hand. A nod, and Lord Hana would be dead.

Buri-Nai stepped forward past her assassin. Rat did not feel this was a moment for the parasol-bearer to follow. She stayed where she was and considered the swiftest route to cover.

“Do you deny entry to the empress?”

Zhung Hana was a fool. He—slowly, not striking, making it clear he was not striking—brought his sword's point to touch Buri-Nai, just below the breast. Only her upraised hand stopped Diman.

“Captain Oryo,” Lord Hana said, “escort the princess to the House of Pines and detain her there. She is deranged in her grief.”

“The gods are dying.” Buri-Nai spoke clearly, pitched her voice to carry to those beyond. “Their prophets say it, as do the priests of the shrines. We see it in the rebellion of slaves and peasants against the order of the land, in the treason of brother against brother, in the failure of our soldiers to stand against the headhunters and cannibals of Dar-Lathi. But the Old Great Gods have chosen Nabban for the greatest of blessings. The Old Great Gods send a saviour, their chosen, their Daughter. They name me empress of Nabban. Min-Jan's law is overthrown, as the prophets foretold. Kneel. I am your empress. I am your goddess.”

Zhung Hana's lip curled. Buri-Nai folded her hands over her heart. A gesture of prayer. Raised her eyes to the sky, clear and blue.

Rat felt again the light that was not a light gathering. She was already backing away as Buri-Nai clapped hands either side of his blade.

There was a flash of white light, as if lightning, a very small bolt of lightning, had run the length of the sword.

The First Minister fell backwards, his heels on the threshold of the door. His arms were outflung, his mouth and eyes open, strangely dark.

For a long moment, they all stood as if cast in bronze. Then the courtiers beyond the corpse were falling to make obeisance as though someone had slashed the cords of their knees.

“The counsellors of the Blessed Otono will come before me in the hall of the Peony Throne,” Buri-Nai said. “And they will offer their fealty to the empress and the Daughter of the Gods. Oryo, have my prophet taken to some secure place—for his own safety—and a physician brought to tend him.”

She hitched up the trailing hem of her inner robes and stepped delicately around Zhung Hana. He smelt of smoked meat, and fouler things. Rat, knowing her place, stooped to catch up the princess's trailing imperial hair. He had puddled the floor like a puppy as he fell.

She would go over the wall tonight and take her canoe from its hiding place in the marsh grass. It would be a long message she must dictate to the hermit in the Mother's shrine on the river island, two miles up.

The Wild Girls must know of this.

The deaths of the prophets first became necessary in her brother's day, when with her father's death they began to speak. It was not her father's death that set their visions stirring. The rising, west of the desert, of the winds of change. The moment when the heir of the gods put out his hand and began to gather in the power that would be his. The gods knew it, and the land, and the vulnerable minds of the land, were steeped in their dreaming hope.

She will keep this one close, let his words be her warning. Through his visions, she will see what the messenger of the Old Great Gods cannot or will not show her, her enemy's approach.

She does not need this broken prophet, he says. “My daughter, trust to the wisdom of those who have chosen you.”

“In your wisdom you chose me. So trust in your choice. I do as I see necessary.”

Wilful. He would punish her, but . . . what does it matter? Let her have her toys. But he whispers of the drugs that will open the gates of that dreamer's mind to vision, not only open them but tear them wide. There will be a satisfaction in watching her struggle to make sense of the broken flood that spills from the wretched man.

CHAPTER V

The sounds of the komuz were distant, a faint wandering song in the night. The king's bard was playing her great harp in the king's hall, but her apprentice the princess had promised a new song and was sitting in the doorway of her bower trying it out one more time.

An awkward turn of phrase, that. Yeh-Lin heard Deyandara falter, realizing it herself. Another run at that verse, a word changed. The song was not something that would be picked up by the bards, not yet, and yet there was something there. The girl had the bones, now, the burning heart. Mastery would follow. A small song, this. It sounded as though it ought to be a piece of a larger whole, a longer tale of which this was only a moment, like a scene caught in faint colour and hasty lines. Riders by night, passing ghostly under the moon and fading away towards distant horizons. A vision woven of words, a glimpse of something viewed from afar, something never to be known in its entirety. She had hold of something, that child.

Yeh-Lin thought she might put a name to the riders. The child would no doubt deny it.

Child. Her pupil, once, but now? Deyandara was a young woman, the new king's betrothed and a bard in the making. She had spear-carriers of her own and the king's besides to keep her safe, and the wizards of the king's hall. She carried no ancestral curse; she had no particular enemies any longer; the child—woman—needed no guardian wizard, nor yet a tutor, now that she had chosen to belong to the bards.

Yeh-Lin angled the inscribed silver mirror to catch the moon. Something had been nagging on the edges of her dreams, prickling when she drifted on the edge of sleep, for some time now. She had found herself unusually reluctant to pursue it. That fact . . . began to interest her.

Clouds, swirling, captured in silver beneath a cloudless sky. The spiralling path of text was in no script of human lands or tongue of human voice. She followed it, fell into cloud and moon, hung still and seeing.

A man lay on a pallet-bed. He was young, Nabbani, she thought, from his straight black hair, but he was so bruised and bloodied and bandaged, blood seeping through his bandages, too, that it was hard to guess at the bones underlying his swollen features or even the shade of his skin. He laboured to breathe, but he breathed. A woman entered, knelt. Her many-layered robes spread in a great pool of colour about her. Her hair was loose, a river of black over the silk, long enough to fall to her heels when she stood. The room was panelled in dark, carved wood, lit by golden lamps in the shapes of flowers, no two the same. Far grander than the bed, which was a makeshift thing. Not this man's own place, she deduced. Ornate shutters closed the window; impossible to see if were day or night. Yeh-Lin could see only the one corner of the room; she might have seized the vision, entered into it more fully, but . . . better to be soft, to be quiet, no will but the watching, until she knew what she saw.

Nabban, of course. A woman of the imperial family . . . that cherished hair.

She pulled off silk gloves, laid her hands on the man, on his chest and forehead, careful to set skin on skin, not wrappings, even though that meant touching swollen and crusted blackness, which every human instinct should say to leave be. The man twitched feebly, as if, had he strength and waking wits, he would be flinching, struggling, crying out against such handling of what must be agonizing pain. Perhaps he was drugged.

The woman bent low over him. Praying, maybe. She took her hand from his forehead, drew a pendant of some sort out of the breast of her robes, laid it on his forehead. Her hand went over it, with more prayers. Yeh-Lin had only the faintest glimpse. Something pale.

There was a third presence in the room, an attenuated thread.

The man grew still. His breathing eased, deepened.

Yeh-Lin touched the surface of the woman's mind to taste what she found there—

Was slammed away as though by a lion's paw.

The last glimpse she had was of the woman's eyes as her head snapped around. Fury, and an energy she could feel through the spurt of—
fear
, damn it, that she felt—like a blast of wind from an opened door. Red and gold and silver pursued her, a shivering wash of cold fire, of light that cracked and ripped as if through the sky of the frozen north, before she flung herself away, palm clapped over her mirror. Her heart pounded.

Well. So.

The night was silent, except for Deyandara strumming the komuz, gathering her thoughts, perhaps, for then her voice was raised again, that verse, a new turn of phrase.

Once her heart slowed—it had only been a momentary alarm,
not
fear—Yeh-Lin tucked her mirror away and walked across the crunching frosted grass, breath a cloud, to the stone-built bower. A stocky man leaning against the wall a little distance away nodded to her; the woman sitting with her spear at her feet and her hands tucked into her sleeves looked up and tilted her head towards the hall. Faullen and Rozen, chief of the princess's spears.
Get her and us out of the cold, my lady, please . . . 
Yeh-Lin smiled. The black herding bitch, Vixen, bounced up to greet her. It never failed to warm Yeh-Lin's heart, that affection. Animals knew what she was, an alien note in the song of the world, but the little dog had come to trust where her mistress did. Deyandara played a rippling arpeggio and three ringing final chords and smiled shyly, flipping a coppery braid back over her shoulder. “That's it, I think.”