Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (49 page)

‘I promise.’

Squeezing her hands, he said, ‘Then go, and with my blessing.’

29

STORM

The sandstorm had begun not long after dawn. First a muddying of the horizon, then within an hour the sand-clouds had become a seething wall advancing across the desert at the speed of a galloping horse, hissing, roaring, swallowing the sun and smothering everything in its path.

Gair crouched over Shahe’s neck, her mane lashing his face, and urged her level with Alderan’s pounding grey. The storm was almost upon them, hot as the breath of a furnace.

‘We have to find shelter!’ he yelled. The sand-veil muffled his voice, but he didn’t dare lower it: the grit in the air stung exposed skin worse than a swarm of bitemes.

Alderan pointed ahead at the looming wall of the city. ‘We’re almost there, see!’

The Lion Gate of El Maqqam reared out of the whirling dust. Gaping jaws framed the gates, the watchtower windows beneath the beast’s scowling stone brows blinded by wooden shutters. One of the heavy studded gates was already closed, two hazy figures wrestling with the other.

‘How far to the Daughterhouse?’ Gair shouted back.

‘Not far once we’re inside. Come on, before they close the gates!’

The approaching storm growled and whined around the walls. In the gateway, one of the blurry figures gestured, beckoning them to hurry. Gair gave Shahe her head. She overtook Alderan’s grey in the space of five yards then raced for the arch, pounding beneath it into a square lined with blocky half-visible buildings. He reined her up and looked back over his shoulder in time to see the old man galloping in with the sand already billowing around him. The thickly veiled guards hauled the second gate shut so close behind him they almost clipped the grey’s tail. They lowered a massive beam slung from chains into brackets across the gates, then vanished into their guardhouse without a word and slammed the door shut behind them.

Within the walls there was much less wind but gusts still swirled restlessly around the square, carving the dusty earth into rippling patterns like a beach at low tide. Gair chanced lowering his veil.

‘Friendly folk,’ he panted, breathless after the race against the sandstorm.

‘They just want to get out of the storm, same as us,’ Alderan said. ‘If we’d been caught outside it would have flayed the hide off us – it still can, so we’d better hurry up and get to the Daughterhouse. They have a guest hall where we can rest.’

He led the way across the square and down a broad street. Few citizens were visible and all were hurrying home, heads down and sand-veils or
barouks
held across their faces. Dust-devils danced between the rosy stone buildings with their barred shutters and closed doors, springing up and dying as if stirred by capricious fingers. Palm trees planted along the median of the street thrashed their heads in the rising wind.

More and more dust thickened the air, darkening the tea-coloured sky. Blown sand stung exposed skin and hands, left grit between the teeth. Within minutes of entering the city they were forced to dismount and lead their horses with rags tied across their eyes as the storm shrieked over the rooftops with the sound of steel on a grindstone.

‘How much further?’ Gair shouted.

His head turned against the wind, Alderan pointed into the haze. Veils of sand shrouded the street ahead, in which buildings were visible only as vague shapes. Even with a hand shielding his face, Gair had to keep his eyes slitted and stumbled into Alderan’s horse when the old man stopped abruptly.

‘This is it.’ He pointed at a pair of massively studded doors set into the weathered pink stone of a high wall. His knock was lost in the roar of the wind; he had to pound on the door with the hilt of his belt-knife to make himself heard.

After a minute or two a small square port slid open behind a grille in the door.

‘Yes?’

To Gair’s surprise, the voice belonged to a woman. He squinted at the grille but saw little more than the edge of a brown cowl. What was a Tamasian sister doing at a Suvaeon Daughterhouse?

‘Bless you, Sister!’ Alderan replied. ‘We are travellers seeking shelter. This is a bad day to be abroad!’

‘You must find shelter elsewhere,
sayyar
. I cannot let you in.’

The port began to close.

Alderan leaned into the meagre shelter of the wall and lowered his veil. ‘The storm is on us, Sister. There’s nowhere else for us to go.’

Anxious eyes flicked from Alderan to Gair and back again, then looked away. ‘I’m sorry, the guest hall is closed. You could try the merchants’ inn, by the river.’

’The river is half a city away!’ the old man exclaimed. ‘We’d never make it there in time!’

Stepping up to the door, Gair shoved his fingers through the grille and stopped the port cover from sliding shut. ‘The house of the Goddess is never closed to the faithful.’

The nun peered at him through the narrow gap in the port. ‘Saint Tamas and the lepers,’ she said. ‘Book of Lessons, chapter fifteen. You are Eadorians.’

‘We are.’ With his free hand, Gair pushed back his
kaif
to show more of his face. ‘Please, Sister, we’ll be welcome nowhere else!’

Her eyes closed as if in a brief prayer, then he heard bolts shoot back. ‘Come in, quickly, before the Superior finds out.’

‘Thank you, Sister.’

‘Do not thank me until you know what gift you have been given!’

The nun held the door open against the wind until they and the horses were inside, then Alderan helped her heave it closed and bolt it behind them. Hunched against the wind, one hand holding her cowl forward to shield her face, she led them past a shuttered-up porter’s lodge and, hugging the walls for shelter, around the dirt-floored yard towards a cluster of rosy stone preceptory buildings looming out of the whirling dust. A square-towered chapel dominated one end, barely visible through the rising storm; at the other a two-storey annexe ran at right angles to the central cloister, ending in a row of stables and stores. Alderan took the horses that way whilst Gair followed the brown-robed sister to the annexe. As soon as she opened the door it was snatched out of her hands by the wind; he gestured the nun in ahead of him and had to put his shoulder to the thick timbers to heave it closed again.

Inside was a long room with a hearth at the far end and a wooden staircase in the corner. The walls were whitewashed plaster, set with shuttered windows along one side and iron brackets for lamps along the other, but the brackets were empty and the tiled floor, now liberally strewn with blown sand, had not been swept in some time. Apart from a farmhouse-style dresser against one wall, the only furniture was a heavy table with a bench on either side in front of the fireplace, though the room could have accommodated at least three more of like size.

‘You must forgive the welcome,’ said the nun, pushing back her cowl and swatting dust from her skirts. She was small and solid, like a fox-terrier, with close-cropped wiry black hair. Her face, though deeply tanned and lined by sun and wind, did not look desert-born. ‘The guest hall here has been closed since Firstmoon.’

Closing the doors to travellers was unheard of, but it explained the lack of fuel in the scuttle beside the hearth at the far end, the film of dust on the table and dresser.

‘Has there been trouble in the city?’ he asked, and she nodded.

‘Our Superior is fearful for our safety. Please, rest here. I shall fetch some tea.’

After the nun left, Gair stripped off his gloves and dusted his hands clean of the fine sand that had found its way inside them, then shook a considerable quantity more of the stuff out of the folds of his
barouk
. Tucking his gloves into his sash, he explored the guest hall. The door to the right of the fireplace led to a small kitchen, its iron range cold and the pantry shelves empty but for a few sacks of dry goods and some jars of seasonings. Upstairs were the guest quarters, but when he peeked inside the first room he found the bed stripped of linens and the pallet rolled up. The next one he tried was the same. Even the air smelled closed-up and stale.

He left the two rooms with their doors ajar to freshen them, then returned to the common room. As he arrived, the nun, who was presumably the Daughterhouse’s hospitaller, returned with a stack of sheets and blankets in her arms.

‘Here, let me help you with those.’ Gair moved towards her, hands outstretched.

Her eyes widened and he realised, too late, that he should have kept his gloves on to conceal the witchmark branded into his left palm.

‘Hidderling,’ she breathed, barely audible above the storm’s shriek. She stared at him, the stack of bedding sagging in her hands.

‘I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to startle you.’ Gently, Gair took the linens from her and set them on the table.

Button eyes unblinking, like a mouse before a cat, the nun backed up a pace.

‘I should never have opened the gate,’ she whispered, her face pale beneath its tan. One hand groped for the simple wooden Oak suspended from a thong around her neck and held it out in front of her in a warding gesture. ‘Holy Mother forgive me, I have admitted an agent of the Nameless onto holy ground!’

Saints, how to explain it? The Suvaeon certainly believed that to be true. ‘I’m not what you think, Sister . . .?’

‘Names give the Hidden power!’ The nun continued to back away. ‘The Superior was right – unclean things walk the streets of El Maqqam!’

She began to pray under her breath, still retreating, ready to bolt at any second. Though he couldn’t quite hear the words, he recognised the shapes her lips made: she was reciting the confession.
These are my sins that I lay before Thee, O Mother; with open heart I come to Thee, a penitent soul
. . . The sturdy little nun was in mortal fear and preparing herself to meet the Goddess.

Sweet saints.

‘Please, Sister, you are in no danger from me.’ To make his height less intimidating, Gair sat down on the nearest bench and dragged his
kaif
from his head to sit around his neck. ‘My name is Gair. I mean you no harm, I swear.’

Behind her the outer door banged open to admit Alderan in another gust of sand and wind, carrying their saddlebags. As he heeled the door shut behind him the nun whirled around, brandishing her Oak.

‘And you? Do you also bear the mark of a witch?’

Alderan shot a look at Gair who spread his hands helplessly in reply.

‘No,’ the old man said, lowering the bulky bags to the floor. ‘You have nothing to fear from either of us, Sister. Gair was raised in the faith by the Suvaeon Knights.’

She darted a wary look back over her shoulder. ‘Truly told?’

‘I went to the Holy City at the age of eleven,’ Gair said. ‘Sister, we only want shelter from this storm, and to consult the books the Knights left here. Then we’ll go.’

The hand holding the Oak lowered a little. ‘And the mark on your palm?’

Before Gair could think of a way to answer without telling an untruth, Alderan saved him the trouble.

‘He was falsely accused,’ he said, dragging the saddlebags across the tiles to the table. ‘By the time the truth came to light, his sentence had been carried out.’ If he was at all perturbed about lying to a nun, he showed no outward sign of it.

She chewed her lip, looking anxiously from one to the other. ‘How can I know this for truth? I have only your word, and the Father of Lies—’ The sister broke off and narrowed her eyes at Gair. ‘Show me your Saint Agostin medallion.’

‘I can’t. I don’t have it any more.’ The silver pendant was long gone, yanked from his neck even before he’d been sentenced.

‘All who trained to be Knights should have one.’ Suspicion honed an edge on the nun’s voice.

‘The marshals took it from me when I was arrested. I never got it back.’

The conversation was going nowhere. He was an offence against everything the sister believed, and he had no further stomach for keeping an innocent woman in fear for her life.

He stood up, heaving his saddlebags onto his shoulder. ‘Coming here was a mistake, Alderan. I think we’ve wasted enough of the good sister’s time.’

With a formal bow to the nun, Gair headed for the door. He’d bed down in the stables with Shahe until the storm ended, then figure out whether to stay to help Alderan or obey his itching feet and go back north.

To his surprise, the nun called after him. ‘Wait.’

He half-turned, enough to see she’d let the Oak drop back onto the breast of her habit.

‘I cannot let you stay here on consecrated ground, but in good conscience, as hospitaller, neither can I turn you out into a storm. You spoke truly, at the gate – the house of the Goddess is never closed.’ Then she sighed and smoothed her dusty habit. ‘So let us say no more of this and pray Goddess it does not reach the Superior’s ear, or I will end my days doing penance.’

‘Is your Superior . . .’ Alderan hunted for an appropriate word.

‘She worries,’ the nun said brightly, folding her hands. ‘She fears for our safety in this city, fears the presence of strangers in our midst. Were it not for the lack of a suitable escort, she would pack us all up and return to the cloister in Syfria.’