The Quartered Sea (28 page)

The Kohunlich-xaan.

As Ooman Xhai collapsed onto the sand, the image of Tulpayotee shattered into a thousand points of light that spun up and away until they were lost against the sky.

On the altar, nothing remained of Benedikt's hair except a fine line of ash. The inside waist of the sawrap had been badly scorched.

"Send him to me the moment he recovers," the tul commanded with a nod toward the fallen priest. "Tell him we're leaving for Atixlan and the court of the Tulparax as soon as possible."

* * *

The first thing he remembered was throwing up. It was also the second and third thing he remembered. As his stomach twisted and his throat convulsed, he had the vague idea that there should be more to life than a fight to breathe through the taste of bile.

"There is one thing more, peerless one. He was singing the entire time I followed him along the shore, and when he reached the small cove, it seemed the sea was answering."

"Answering how?"

He could feel damp ground under his cheek. He wanted to shout, "Don't tell her!" but he couldn't find his voice, and he didn't understand why, or even what, she wasn't to be told.

He heard the whispering again, closer, and the small part of his mind that wasn't concentrating on breathing said,
silk
.

"Have that idiot killed. He can obviously go in and out unimpeded through my brother's perimeter, and I don't want him going back in and selling the location of our guest."

"Yes, peerless one."

"Where do you really come from?"

She was talking to him now, her voice holding no more or less expression than when she'd ordered the death of—of whoever it was she'd ordered the death of.

"Did my foolish little brother actually believe he could pass you off as a warrior of Tulpayotee?" Something—a foot, a shoe—prodded him. "Clean him up and bring him to me when he can speak."

For a moment Benedikt thought he was lying on the deck of his brother's fishing boat, watching the sail luff as they came about—except that his brother's sails had never been dyed so many incredible colors. And then he remembered.

He was in Petayn and had slipped out of the house of the Kohunlich-tul in a storm to Sing peace to the crew of the
Starfarer
. He had gone to the small cove where he'd been found and had just Sung a gratitude when someone pushed a cloth soaked in a foul-smelling liquid in his face.

His stomach churned at the memory, but it had been too thoroughly emptied to do anything more.

He was lying, curled up on his side on short grass and the canvass he could see moving in the wind was the wall of a tent.

"Did my foolish little brother actually believe he could pass you off as a warrior of Tulpayotee ?"

Which seemed to indicate that the tent belonged to the Kohunlich-xaan. Tul Altun's sister.

This cannot be good
. Moving slowly, his head balanced on his neck like an egg balanced on a stick, he got one hand flat against the ground and pushed until he flopped over onto his back.

"Good." The face withdrew. A small hand fumbled at his waist and the next thing he knew his sawrap had been unwrapped and pulled from beneath him. "Do him now."

The water had obviously been sitting in the sun, and Benedikt drank as much of the warm liquid as came into his mouth, not really caring how clean it might be.

"If you can get him on his feet, I could do a better job."

The face reappeared. "Can you stand?"

Drawing in what felt like his first full breath in years, Benedikt blinked the water from his eyes. "Yes. I can stand." He wasn't actually positive that he could, but showing weakness right now seemed like a really bad idea. In the end, both the girl attached to the face and the boy who'd been throwing the water, had to help.

When he reached for the queen's coin, Benedikt's hand closed around his wrist. "Leave it be."

The boy shrugged and returned to his leather bucket. "I guess I can see how he might come from Tulpayotee—now that he's not covered in his own puke. He is kind of big and golden."

"Big anyway," the girl grunted as she ducked under his arm and tried to keep him on his feet. "But awfully hairy."

By the third bucket of water, Benedikt could stand on his own. When the girl approached him with a drying cloth—
towel
, he reminded himself—he pulled it from her hands. "Thanks, but I'll dry myself."

"Up to you." The girl told him. "But do it fast 'cause the peerless one won't wait forever, and you really don't want to face her with no clothes on."

Expressive eyes rolled. "Well, yeah. The peerless one is traveling in her caravan." Her tone suggested that he had asked quite possibly the stupidest question she'd ever been forced to answer.

The sawrap
was
too short. As he secured the waistband as low on his hips as he dared, Benedikt thought longingly of the growing stack of breeches back at Tul Altun's compound.

"There's no way anyone had sandals that'd fit you so you're gonna have to do without." After a critical sniff, she splashed him with lime and handed him a wide-toothed wooden comb. "Put this through your hair, and I'll tell the guards you're ready."

She shrugged. "People talk in the bath. I hear you're from a long way away and your boat sank and you washed ashore. The Kohunlich-tul was gonna pretend you were from the god 'cause of how you look. He was gonna say that you were here to prevent the change, but that's just stupid 'cause no one can stop Xaantalicta from rising."

It seemed Tul Altun hadn't been exaggerating when he'd said his sister had spies everywhere.

When the girl ducked around the edge of a canvas flap, Benedikt saw that one foot turned in and she walked with a limp. Not that it seemed to slow her down any.

Turning toward the boy, he asked, "Why did the xaan have me…" Not surprisingly, Xhojee had never taught him the word for kidnapped. "… taken?"

The boy snorted. "The peerless one's not gonna let you help the tul to more of Kohunlich's power, now is she?"

It was the first time Benedikt had ever seen a tent with a corridor. When a pair of guards escorted him from the bathing room, he found himself standing astounded at one end of a narrow hall. Straight ahead, maybe twenty feet away, was an exit from the tent. On his right, three more doors like the one he'd just used. On his left, a seemingly unbroken expanse of brilliantly colored canvas. Underfoot, equally brilliant carpeting. At least he assumed it was equally brilliant, the dim light filtering through the canvas ceiling didn't quite reach the floor.

He could hear a low murmur of voices. One, male, baritone if Benedikt had to guess, rose up out of the mix for a word or two but not long enough for him to make out what they were saying.

He could smell burning lamp oil and lime and, remembering, scratched at the dried lime juice on his chest.

The guards, who wore ornately decorated breechcloths instead of sawraps, were both men and both significantly shorter than Benedikt—although they carried themselves in such a way he wouldn't have dared to mention it. The overlapping pieces of their broad metal collars clanging quietly with each step, they marched him a dozen paces forward and turned him to the left. The wall was not, as it turned out, unbroken.

A string of tiny silver bells chimed as one guard pushed the canvas aside and brusquely motioned that Benedikt should enter.

The first thing Benedikt noticed, as he was intended to, was the tiny woman sitting amidst the piles of cushions on the dais. Everything in the room pointed toward her; all the people, all the things, the patterns painted on the canvas, even the light from the lamps. It wasn't overt, but any stranger walking into the room would have his attention captured and diverted.

The second thing he noticed were the huge palm frond fans turning slowly under triangular openings in the ceiling. Although they managed to keep warm air made warmer by the press of bodies from being completely unbearable, Benedikt had already begun to sweat. The moisture running down his sides made him feel self-conscious in a way that the sawrap couldn't—after all, he wasn't wearing significantly less than any other man in the room.

The tiny woman on the cushions glanced up from the piece of paper she held and beckoned him closer.

When he got a better look, his eyes widened in surprise. This was the Kohunlich-xaan? This tiny, plain woman was the powerful sister who'd stripped Tul Altun of power?

Then she met his gaze, and just for an instant he saw a woman who could inflame a bardic imagination into the worst kind of excess. She knew exactly who she was and what she was capable of. No doubts. No self-delusions. It wasn't arrogance, although the arrogance was there; it was knowledge, a truth incontestable.

She wasn't smiling, but neither was there any overt displeasure in her expression, and Benedikt began to hope—although what exactly he was hoping for, he couldn't have said. The odds were not good that she'd return him to the tul.

As he walked forward, bare feet making no noise against the carpets, heads began to turn and conversations died. There were a number of karjen on the edges of the crowd, but most of the twenty or so men and women standing about wore multiple braids and some wore the kind of complicated hairstyle Benedikt had previously only seen on the three tuls. He saw no shaven heads covered in tattoos and would have been willing to bet that a small cluster of hooded white robes represented the priests of Xaantalicta. Dropping to one knee before the xaan, he found himself comparing the crowded tent to the tul's empty room and wishing he were back in the latter.