Snare (33 page)

Spirit Eyes swept over the countryside, but found no Kazraks and no Soutan, either. If the sorcerer had somehow woken his sleeping spirits, he would have been able to hide from her, of course, but she was expecting him to attack her as soon as he had weapons, and so far, no attack had come. Finally Spirit Eyes showed her a cluster of buildings behind a thorn-vine wall that stood about five miles south of the camp. To one side of the compound lay a paddock where eight horses were grazing. Those she recognized immediately: the Kazraks’ riding mounts and pack horses. Soutan apparently had an ally who was sheltering them.

By then the women had gathered armloads of deadfall oak, and together they returned to camp. In front of her tent Zayn had started a fire. He was kneeling behind it and using his long knife to shred saur jerky into a pot of simmering breadmoss.

‘Smells good,’ Ammadin told him. ‘My news isn’t so good – your enemies are about five miles from here. It looks like they’re staying with one of the local landowners. I can’t be sure, because I didn’t see them. They must be inside his house.’

‘You can’t scan inside buildings?’ Zayn said.

‘No. The crystals can’t see when the Riders are hidden by clouds, either. All they show then is clouds.’

‘Nothing but clouds?’

‘Yes. They won’t look at the ground then for some reason. What’s odd is you’d swear you were looking at the clouds from above.’ Ammadin shrugged the problem away. ‘Spirits have their quirks. Still, I’m certain that Warkannan and the others are close by, and that’s what matters now. Make sure you don’t get out of sight of the comnee from now on.’

‘All right.’

Zayn was concentrating so hard on stirring the porridge that she realized he was hiding something from her again. She considered probing, then decided that she was tired of trying to dig the truth out of Zayn. She went into her tent and devoted herself to arranging the god figures on their special rug.

In the morning, when Ammadin scanned again, she found
another comnee and their horses camped beside the grey road at the very limit of Spirit Eyes’ range to the west. Someone else had decided to cross the Rift early in the trading season. Since they appeared as tiny figures with no detail, she had no idea of whose comnee this might be. She made a point, once she’d returned to camp, of telling Apanador about them.

‘I hope it’s not someone you men are feuding with,’ Ammadin said.

‘So do I,’ Apanador said. ‘We’ve got enough to worry about as it is, with Zayn’s enemies and all.’ He paused, glancing over her shoulder. ‘I’ll be glad to get back on the road. That forest – you can feel the evil, even this far away.’

‘Too many people have disappeared into it.’ Ammadin suddenly shivered. ‘And their spirits still walk. When we’re here, I see them sometimes, slinking through the trees.’

‘You’d think the local authorities would have put an end to those murders a long time ago.’

‘So you’d think. I can’t say I have a lot of respect for them. Well, it’s probably no business of ours.’

Dallador was grooming his favourite horse, a coppery-coloured gelding with a blaze and a white off-fore. After he finished with the curry comb, he pulled a long twist of the purple grass and began rubbing the horse’s coat down, making it shine in the early morning sun. As he worked on the horse’s legs, his pale hair would fall into his eyes; he’d toss it back with a laugh. Zayn stood some distance away, in the shelter of the wagon, and watched him. In the night he’d dreamt about Dallador. He could not get his conversation with Maradin out of his mind, either. The dream and the memory added up to an insight he could no longer hide from himself. He found himself wondering what it would feel like to kiss that generous mouth, and to feel Dallo’s hands – Zayn turned away with a shake of his head. It would do him no good to follow out that line of thought.

When the comnee rode out, Zayn volunteered to bring up the rear, the dustiest and least desirable spot in the riding order. He did actually feel that it was his turn to do so, but even more, he knew that Dallo wouldn’t want to join him there.

That morning they rode through farming country, rich fields of ripening wheatian, long rows of some leafy plant, stippled red and
white, that he didn’t recognize, all set off from the road by pale yellow fences. The land rose slowly but steadily, as if they were plodding up a giant ramp, forcing them to pause often to let the stock rest in the summer’s heat. Towards noon the road finally levelled out. Zayn could see across the fields to scattered true-oaks and the low straight roofs of yellow and white buildings.

Nannes lay on either side of a shallow river, flowing north to south, crossed by four wooden bridges that led to the town on the east bank. The comnee camped on the west bank in a long meadow fronting the river but upstream from the town – land set aside for visiting comnees, Ammadin told him, and their horses.

‘We probably won’t get any customers today,’ she told him. ‘It’ll take time for the local horse dealers to find out that we’re here.’

‘All right,’ Zayn said. ‘I don’t suppose a town like this would have a bookshop.’

‘Yes, they do. I’ve seen it. It’s a trade town, after all, and they have a lot of craftsmen. Why?’

‘I was thinking of trying to find a book that would teach me how to read Vranz. So I can read that book to you one day.’

‘There’s money in the blue tent bag. Take what you need.’

She waved an arm in the direction of Nannes. ‘Cross that second bridge and follow the street down. In a few blocks you’ll come to a market square. You can’t miss it. It’s hung with banners.’

After the monotony of the plains, Nannes came as a relief to a city-raised man like Zayn – not that it was much of a place. Perhaps some three hundred houses and craft shops lay along dirty cobbled streets. The houses sagged and rambled, built from tree-fern trunks, bundles of rushes, and long reddish poles cut from some plant Zayn couldn’t identify. Vegetable gardens flourished out in front of each; here and there chickens scratched and clucked behind woven fences. Trees grew everywhere, both true-oak and a species he’d never seen before. The graceful maroon trunks ended in a spray of branches, delicate and long enough to hang almost to the ground. On each branch were clusters of yellow leaves as narrow as needles, growing from a central stem. Skinny yellow lizards clung to the trunks and chattered as Zayn passed by.

Two-storey buildings that seemed to be both house and shop edged the market square. Although they drooped and leaned, from their upper storey bright banners flapped in the breeze, announcing with pictures a shoemaker, a candlemaker, a blacksmith,
and other such artisans. Zayn walked slowly, glancing around him. One time through, and he would have the entire town tucked into his memory, ready to become a map if he should need to draw one.

Zayn had just spotted the bookseller’s shop when he heard a noise that sounded like drums. He paused at a corner and listened – yes, drums, a deep bass, a chatter of snares. The sound of horns, similar to cavalry bugles but sweeter, drifted on the wind. A crowd of small children tore past him, laughing, and headed towards the music.

‘Where are you going?’ Zayn called out in Vranz.

‘The Recallers!’ a little girl shouted. ‘Their last parade.’

Recallers. The word tore at his memory. He should know what it meant; he had heard it before. Where? He trotted after the children, but he was barely conscious of the streets around him. His reflexes kept him from crashing into walls and bumping into townsfolk while his mind searched, running down the corridors of his memory, throwing open doors, looking into rooms he hadn’t opened in twenty-five years.

And he saw at last the small boy, himself, crouched miserably on the black-and-white tiled floor of a mosque between his father and the healer they had come to see. Tall in white robes, his head wrapped in sleek blue, Hakeem Abbul spoke softly, urgently.

‘The boy is half a demon, yes. There were once a class of men named –’ Here he spoke a foreign word, one beyond Zayn’s understanding then, though he knew it now: Recallers. ‘These Recallers made a blood pact with demons in order to learn secret knowledge, forbidden knowledge.’

‘What must I do with him?’ His father’s voice was a mutter, a sigh.

‘You know the answer to that.’

The crouching boy felt as if all the warmth of his body were draining into the tiles. He was going to die before sunset, he was sure of it, and yet, when his father held out his hand, he got up and took it, let his father lead him from the mosque and back to their room at the shabby inn.

And of course, his father hadn’t killed him.

As he stood, all those years later, on a street in a town far from Kazrajistan, Zayn or Zahir – at that moment, with the memory so vivid, with himself so changed, he was no longer sure which was
his real name – grasped for the first time just how peculiar it was, that his father had never done what so many holy men had told him to do. His father had at times beaten him, at others starved him, all in hopes of ousting the demons within him, but never had he let his son actually come near to dying. Why not?

‘I guess because I was the heir, and the only one he was going to get. I guess.’

Zayn realized he’d spoken aloud, shook himself, glanced around, but no one had heard, not in the racket coming down the street. A long line of men and women were prancing and dancing as they drew near. Some carried drums, some played horns, some jingled straps sewn with tiny bells. All of them were dressed in red and yellow clothes; all had long red ribbons braided in their hair and dangling from their sleeves. Just behind the musicians other men and women came dancing, dressed in a variety of bizarre clothes – sleek one-piece outfits embroidered with spirals, billowing dresses patched together from scraps: blue, purple, green. In among them children wearing long white dresses with purple hoods ran and shouted. Some of the adults, dressed entirely in black, carried bundles that Zayn at first mistook for blankets.

As they came closer, he could see that the bundles were imitation ChaMeech – draped red and purple cloths topped by big ChaMeech heads made out of some kind of shiny material. As they walked they slipped one hand into the heads and made them look around or bow to the crowd. Bringing up the rear of the parade were children carrying baskets. They ran back and forth across the street and shoved the baskets at the watching adults, most of whom dug through their pockets and handed over coins. A little girl with gold hair ran up to Zayn; he fished a couple of Vransic copper souz out of his pocket and dropped them in. She smiled brilliantly, curtsied, and trotted off again.

Once the procession had gone past, the crowd began to break up and drift away. So, Zayn thought. Those are the Recallers, are they? A bunch of buffoons, noisy musicians and bad dancers. Obviously the hakeem had meant something entirely different. As he walked back to the market square, the diversity of the townsfolk struck him – some had pale skin, others dark, though none as dark as his; he saw every possible colour of hair and eyes, thin lips, full lips, curly hair and straight. He found it surprising, but somehow intriguing as well.

When he opened the door to the bookseller’s, silver bells rang out. A long room, crammed with books on shelves, books on tables, books stacked on floors – the light was dim, and the smell of dust and old rushi overwhelming, like the rich perfume of a beautiful woman, or so it seemed to Zayn. Back in Kazrajistan, books though common enough were expensive, run off a page at a time on a press powered by the printer’s apprentices. That a small town like Nannes would have so many amazed him. Out of the murk appeared a skinny young man with short brown hair, wearing a green apron over a shirt and narrow blue trousers.

‘This is a surprise,’ he said. ‘You’re a Kazrak.’

‘Daccor, but I ride with a comnee now.’ Zayn smiled pleasantly. ‘You must not get a lot of Kazraks through here.’

‘We don’t, no. In fact, I think I’ve only ever seen one before. When I was still a child, a fellow rode through here.’

‘Really? I don’t suppose you remember much about him.’

‘I don’t, no, but ask the older people. They might remember. Now, what can I do for you?’

‘I want to learn how to read Vranz, and how to speak it better, too.’

‘You could use a little help there, yes.’ The fellow laughed, but pleasantly. ‘Come back to the counter, and I’ll show you what we have.’

On the counter, inside a glass box, lay an oblong object about six inches by ten. Some shiny blue substance formed a case around an even glossier grey rectangle.

‘That’s an ancient book,’ the young man said.

‘How do you read it?’

‘No one knows any more, but we do know it’s a book.’ He shook his head. ‘The Ancients had whole libraries of these.’

Zayn spent a pleasant half-hour, learning how to associate the Vransic alphabet, which was completely different from the Kazraki version, with the sounds of Vranz. Learning anything new, whether it was the layout of a town or a language, brought him physical sensations of ease and comfort, the same as many men got from a few bowls of keese. Once he knew the alphabet, he bought a children’s reading book and a dictionary with the luxurious joy others would have found in handling gold.

Yet as soon as he left the shop, his cheerful mood evaporated like spilled keese. As soon as he stepped into the street, he felt
eyes watching him. He spun around and caught the gaze of a youngish man with pale hair, a clumsy spy, who bolted and ran the moment he realized Zayn had seen him. Zayn held his ground. In broad daylight he might find the fellow, but what then? He could hardly beat the truth out of him here in a foreign country. As he hurried back to camp, he stayed on guard, but he never saw the fellow again nor any other suspicious person.

Zayn went straight to Ammadin’s tent. He listened for a moment, then raised the flap cautiously and looked in. She had left and taken her crystals with her. Although he’d been planning on merely putting his new books away, he ended up lying on his blankets for the rest of that day in an extravagant orgy of memorizing words in Vranz.