Trinity Rising: Book Two of the Wild Hunt (Wild Hunt Trilogy 2) (52 page)

In Gair’s dreams, it was always the same. How she had looked that day. Sea-coloured eyes still glowing with what they had just shared, a flash of white teeth over her shoulder, then she opened the door and was gone. The click of the latch as it swung closed behind her always woke him and in the instant between sleep and wakefulness, between memory and truth, he could still taste her on his lips.

Aysha.

Crackling parchment snatched him back to the present. A scroll had fallen from the heap in the middle of the table and rocked to a halt in front of him. On the far side of the heap, Alderan was engrossed in a book. Carefully, Gair set the scroll back on the pile.

Alderan turned a page. ‘Find anything?’

Gair looked down at the book on the table between his hands, still open at the same page, at the familiar name. Ishamar al-Dinn. One of the few fragments of Gimraeli that he could read – that she had taught him to read.
How long have I been sitting here?

‘No. Not yet.’ He closed the book and set it to one side, away from the others, letting his hand linger on the cracked leather binding. ‘Just some poetry.’

Ishamar al-Dinn, who’d risked a prince’s wrath for love. Finding that book of verse amidst the maps and breviaries had arrested him as surely as a hand on his sleeve. He’d read no further than the name on the title page – he didn’t need to, not with her voice already filling his mind.

Ai qur’ash-ashann; el majar e binh ey fahl majani, al-ashann iyya el habbir a baranjor
. His throat tightened.
The thornbird sings; my tears fall upon the dust as his song falls sweet upon my heart
.

He remembered her reading it to him as they lay in her bed, lovemaking still warm and heavy on their limbs. Her voice rippling over him like a caress.
Aysha
.

Alderan was looking at him. Afraid that he had said her name aloud, Gair thrust himself out of his chair. The sudden movement started fresh sweat across his chest and back but even over by the windows there wasn’t a breath of a breeze to stir the torpid air. Not even the illusion of coolness to be obtained by looking outside; the embrasures were too high and deep to show anything but silver-blue sky beyond the wrought-iron screens. He plucked his limp shirt away from his skin. Now that the storm had passed, El Maqqam was once more pinned down by the sun’s glaring eye.

‘Surely we should have found something by now,’ he muttered. Restless feet took him the length of the room, hand skimming over the piled manuscripts and books still waiting to be sorted on the crowded shelves. ‘Are these all books the Knights brought with them?’ he asked as his prowling carried him behind Alderan and along the opposite side of the room.

‘So Sister Sofi told me.’ The old man closed his book and moved to the next, quickly discarding it. ‘Children’s stories.’ He reached for another. ‘The Sisters found this room when they moved here from Syfria.’

‘I thought this was a Suvaeon Daughterhouse.’

‘It was, until the Order abandoned it. The building had been locked up and empty for almost thirteen years when the Sisters of Saint Tamas took it on.’

Gair looked around him. Battered leather folios were crammed together with rolled maps and volumes of all shapes and sizes, some spineless and scarred, others stained by salt water or worse, piled up in no kind of order. Evidence of a hasty departure for an uncertain destination.

‘Why did they leave?’ he asked, and then he remembered. Of course. The Saint Benet’s Day massacre, which led to the Lector of Dremen declaring a crisis of the faith, which led to the desert wars and to some soldier on his way south to Samarak slaking his lust with a Leahn girl.
Which led to me
. ‘Never mind. It doesn’t matter.’

‘I didn’t think you would be one to forget.’

Yet he had forgotten. Embarrassed, angry at himself, Gair clenched his teeth. ‘It – doesn’t –
matter
.’

One thousand, eight hundred and nineteen deaths on the first night of the massacre. Eadorian merchants, their entire families, even their employees, all slaughtered. Churches put to the torch with their congregations inside, the doors nailed shut. And the first the rest of the Empire had known about it was when some Zhiman-dari fishermen began hauling up more than yellowtails in their nets.

The news had taken too long to reach Dremen. By the time the Knights set sail it was already too late; not a single northerner was left alive in El Maqqam. Those that had escaped the Cultists’ curved swords had perished in the pitiless heat of the desert. The Knights who had tried to defend them had died nailed to thorn trees in a gruesome parody of the Goddess they worshipped. And now war was stirring again.

I shouldn’t be here
.

His hands were knotted into fists. An effort of will was required to unclench them, more effort still to hold them at his sides and not sweep the nearest shelves clear of all that useless paper and—

Gair shut his eyes and took a slow breath, letting it out even more slowly. Then another. The thunder of his pulse in his ears began to quieten.

At the far end of the room, by the door, the shelves were empty, ready to be refilled. He ran his fingertips along one of them. Despite a dusting, it still bore the ghostly outlines of the texts that had stood there undisturbed for so long.

I should never have come
. ‘There’s nothing here, Alderan. There can’t be. After two days, surely we’d have found it?’

The old man looked up from the books he was sorting into stacks. ‘Perhaps,’ he said. ‘Perhaps not. We can’t know unless we look.’ He picked up the largest pile. ‘These are all religious texts. Why don’t you start refilling the top shelf?’

‘We’re wasting our time here!’

Alderan’s expression remained unmoved, the books held out before him like a gift. With poor grace, Gair snatched them from him and the topmost book slithered off onto the floor. After shelving the others, he stooped to pick it up.

It was a psalter, fallen with the cover open. A name and date were inscribed on the fly-leaf in faded ink. The day its owner received his spurs, perhaps; the book a gift from a doting parent. Gair looked again at the date. Three years before Corlainn sacrificed himself for his beloved Order. He closed the book and slipped it onto the shelf with the others. A dark stain down the pale leather spine did not augur well for the unknown Knight’s fate.

He was maybe only a year or two older than me. Did his mother wonder what happened to her boy?
He felt a brief pang.
Does mine?

A knock sounded at the door, then a Tamasian sister let herself into the room. Her cowl was drawn well forward over her face and she kept her head down as she carried a teapot and cups on a tray to the table.

‘That was a kind thought, Sister, thank you,’ said Alderan from the far end of the room.

She set the tray down and turned to leave. As she did so, her face caught the sunlight angling through the high windows. Angry scar tissue gleamed on her cinnamon cheeks.

‘Sister?’ Gair moved towards her. ‘Are you hurt? What happened?’

The nun retreated, shaking her head mutely. He lifted his hand towards the edge of her cowl and she shrank away, backing into the doorframe in her haste to leave. Then she was gone, sandalled feet pattering down the corridor at a run.

‘Her face!’ Gair turned back to Alderan, who stood motionless with another stack of books in his hands. ‘Did you see her face?’

‘I saw.’ He held out the books. ‘Medical reference.’

‘Don’t you care what happened to her, who did that to her?’

‘I care, but what’s done is done – I can’t change it for her. This –’ he gestured with the books ‘– I can do something about and maybe change countless lives.’

‘But she’s been mutilated! A woman of the cloth!’

‘There’ll be worse than that done if the Veil comes down, believe me.’ Alderan thumped the books back onto the table in a cloud of dust and cocked his arms akimbo, blue eyes hard. ‘Where should I spend myself, Gair? On the one, or the many? The sand is running through the glass. Why don’t you tell me how I should use the time that remains?’

Gair had no answer for him. Alderan was right. Like a Healer on a battlefield, he had to work where he could do the most good for those most likely to live. Anything else was wasted effort. Numb, he took the stack and carried it to the shelves, shock and despair sitting uneasily in his belly. His hands worked methodically to arrange the books on the shelf, but all he could see was the nun’s face, the scars all the more terrible for being shadowed by her cowl.

Knife-cuts. The edges had been too clean to be anything else. Recent, too, judging by the inflammation, the livid spots where stitches had been. Was whatever had happened to that nun the reason Sister Sofi said they needed an armed escort out of the city?

A hand snatched at his arm and dragged him around, the last few books tumbling from his grasp.

‘What did you say to her?’ Sofi’s face was white with fury. ‘What did you do?’

‘Nothing, Sister, I swear!’

He knelt to pick up the fallen texts but she dashed them out of his hands. With her rage behind her she loomed over him, her shoulders hunched, fists tightly balled on her broad hips.

‘Resa’s distraught because of something you said or did, so you tell me what it was, or by Saint Tamas himself I’ll—’ She bit off the rest of the threat, lips clamping together.

Pushing himself to his feet, Gair spread his hands. ‘I saw her face and asked if she was hurt, that’s all. I thought maybe I could help.’

‘Help?’ Sofi’s lips twisted. ‘You can’t help her. No one can. It would have been a mercy if the Mother had seen fit to gather her up that day.’

Gently, Gair asked, ‘Sister, what happened to her?’

Eyes closed, Sofi calmed herself with a deep breath in and a slow exhalation. Then she looked away, jaw working on the words before she spoke. ‘There are so many poor in the city, so many who have no means to bring up their children. We help where we can. Resa was singing to entertain the little ones whilst Sister Avis distributed food from the cart. Nonsense verses, clapping games. She loved to make them laugh.’

Her shoulders slumped, face crumpling in on itself, and she did not resist when Gair turned his empty chair around and steered her to it. She looked down at her hands folded in her lap. ‘She’s desert-born – the first Gimraeli novice our sisterhood has seen in two generations. A gentle child with a ready smile. We were so proud of her. Then the Cultists came.’

Her lips drew back, mouth open, waiting for words that would not come. Gair poured tea, added plenty of honey and pushed the cup into Sofi’s unresisting hands.

‘They said she was preaching to them. Corrupting them. Sister Avis tried to intervene and they knocked her over. She hit her head on the wagon, on the wheel-rim. And then they took Resa’s voice.’ Tears spilled onto Sofi’s face, shining in the afternoon light. ‘They took her voice!’

Now he knew what the knife-scars signified. ‘They cut out her tongue.’

‘She fought them. Fought like a sand-tiger.’

It was horribly easy to picture. The girl struggling, the knife slipping. The wonder was that she hadn’t choked on her own blood.

‘Where is she now?’ Gair asked.

‘The chapel.’ Sofi lifted her head, eyes unseeing through her grief. ‘She prays for the men who did this to her. For forgiveness, though how even our blessed Mother could forgive them I do not know.’

He looked along the table at Alderan, who nodded and said, ‘Go on. I’ll stay here.’

Gair saw no one as he loped through the corridors and cloisters of the Daughterhouse towards the chapel. Sofi said the rest of the sisters would be tending the gardens, repairing the worst ravages of the storm, so he was unlikely to encounter anyone who would report his presence to the Superior. Nonetheless he kept his pace up, just to be safe.

The Tamasians had taken an abandoned Suvaeon house and made it their own, turning the tilt-yard into an orchard and vegetable garden, and the armoury and forge into a workshop for more mundane metalworking. Yet signs remained of the buildings’ original purpose: the worn stone thresholds of doors, scarred by spurred feet, the refectory and dormitories that could have accommodated ten times the number of nuns. This had once been a house of warriors.

Bas-relief Knights flanked the entrance to the church, the branches of the carved trees behind them reaching up to form an arch. The door stood ajar and opened silently at Gair’s touch. Inside, banners of coloured light swept across the Daughterhouse’s chapel, as if the stained-glass saints between the roof-trusses shone with the Goddess’s own grace instead of the sun outside. The rows of pews stood empty, the thick Book on the lectern closed, waiting for the Evensong service. On the high altar, a few candles flickered, their flames reflected in the bronze leaves of the Oak above, giving the illusion that they were stirring in a gentle breeze.

On the altar steps knelt a slender figure in Tamasian brown. Resa’s cowl was down, her head bowed in prayer like one of the saints in the windows. Short, raven-dark hair gleamed in the candlelight.

Gair hesitated in the doorway. The patient, dusty silence of a church was achingly familiar. He smelled hot wax and old wood, paper and stone. As an excommunicate he shouldn’t be there, on sacred ground – in truth, as Sister Sofi had originally said, he shouldn’t even be within the Daughterhouse precincts. On cue, the witchmark on his palm began to burn. He rubbed it firmly with his other hand and tried to convince himself the pain was in his imagination. What was done was done.