Raklion watched and listened. His heart tolled like a godbell in his chest.
They cannot have her. And I will not give her to Nagarak for nailing. She is Hekat. Godtouched and mine.
Her blue eyes glittered. “The coin you parted with makes no difference, Abajai. I am no man’s slave, I belong to the god.”
Ignoring that, Abajai stepped close and touched her scars. “You did that to your face?”
She smiled unflinching until he stepped back. “No. The god did it.”
Abajai sighed, and shook his head. “Foolish Hekat. When you were beautiful, you were precious to me. Now you are nothing, you are meat with maggots, you are a horse with a broken leg. Worthless. Useless. A waste of the air.”
Hekat’s scars tightened as she frowned. “I am Hekat. I dance with my snakeblade. I killed a warlord for the god.” Her straight finger pointed. “You are a Trader. You peddle in flesh. Your purpose was to find me in the savage north so I could serve the god by serving Raklion, its warlord. Your purpose is done. You may go now, Aba.”
As Abajai hissed and Yagji squealed his outrage, Raklion swallowed laughter. So bold, so proud.
Hekat . . . I love you.
Abajai turned. “Warlord, do you see we tell the truth?”
Raklion nodded, hiding reluctance. “I see my warrior is Abajai’s slave. Does Abajai suggest I stole her from him?”
“ No , warlord!” cried Yagji. “We suggest no such thing! How were you to know what she was? You were grossly deceived, and so were we!”
“You wish to take her?”
Abajai snorted. “Take home meat with maggots in it? Bridle a horse with a broken leg? She is a runaway, warlord. She spits on the god. Let the god take her. Let her perish in its eye, let her be nailed to the runaway’s godpost and left to die in pish and pain. That is the fate of runaway slaves.”
Hekat’s head lifted, her fingers rested on her blade. Her eyes found Raklion’s, wide and questioning. He drummed his fingers, and she relaxed.
“You are certain of this, Trader Abajai? You renounce your ownership, you give her to Nagarak high godspeaker for smiting?”
“Warlord, I am certain. She is Nagarak’s now.”
He nodded. “So be it. I will send her to the godhouse that she might be punished.”
Yagji’s fat face was bloated with spite. “When will the high godspeaker kill her, warlord? I want to be there. I want to see this vicious bitch die. We are owed that much, for what she has stolen.”
“It is your right, Trader. A message will be sent. Return home now, and speak of this business to no-one.”
The Traders bowed and withdrew from the chamber, not a single look for the girl-child they condemned.
Hekat said, “You will not give me to Nagarak for killing.”
“No?” said Raklion, and looked at her with narrowed eyes. “But Hekat, you are a runaway slave. The law is the law, I must not flout it.”
She shrugged. “The law is nothing beside the god. It sent those Traders to buy me for its purpose. It guided me to your barracks so I might serve.”
“What if your service was to slay Bajadek warlord? You have slain him. Perhaps your death must serve it now.”
“Tcha,” she said, like a scornful nursemaid. “The god is not yet finished with me.”
For the first time. Raklion felt a roil of unease. “The god? Or a demon? Hekat, you are no ordinary girl-child. I fear you have snared me in a demon’s trap.”
She reached beneath her tunic and pulled out her amulet, the black stone scorpion that drank the light. “Here is the god’s symbol, warlord. Could I wear it unsmitten if I served a demon?”
Godspeaker wisdom said she could not. “How old are you?” he demanded.
She shrugged again. “Old enough to slay Bajadek in battle.”
Old enough to stir his loins. She was his heart, standing outside him. “Are you truly from the savage north? I have never been there, I am told it is harsh.”
“I am from the god, warlord,” she said, impatient. “The rest is nothing, it is foam on sadsa.”
“And what of Trader Abajai?” he asked her. “What of his petulant partner, Yagji? They think I do send you to Nagarak for killing.”
She did not answer. The silence deepened, it filled with blood.
He said, after some time, “If you are discovered I must deny you.”
She smiled, it was a fearsome sight. “I will not be discovered, warlord. I am in the god’s blinding eye, no-one sees me when I hide there.”
Raklion sat back in his warlord’s chair and fingered his godbraids. Their godbells chimed, praising the god.
The world is full of Traders, peddling flesh and useful whispers. I could throw a stone from the palace and strike another Abajai, another Yagji, without taking careful aim. The Traders district is overrun with them, like rats.
He sat in his chair, and watched Hekat leave.
It was the quiet time in Et-Raklion as Hekat walked through the streets to the Traders district. The prowling godspeakers looked past and through her, she expected it, she was not amazed. The god was guiding her, she could feel its presence. Its mystery cloaked her, closing every eye to her silent passing.
The cream stone wall of Abajai and Yagji’s expensive villa was no barrier to her. She was a trained knife-dancer now, she needed no convenient tree. She leapt from the street to the wall’s wide top, then lightly into the garden below. Yagji’s bubbling fountains sounded loud in the silence, but otherwise not even a nightbird broke the bush. No lamplight showed behind the villa’s shuttered windows, Abajai and Yagji were not entertaining, they were safe in their beds certain she would soon die.
They mocked the god. She would prove them wrong.
She slipped through the darkness to the rear of the villa, to the door that led in and out of the slaves’ vegetable garden. Easing it open, stepping inside the villa’s slave quarters, she stood for a moment to see if any slave stirred. She heard nothing. Retoth slept, and the other slaves with him. Her unshod feet trod the passage to the staircase, they took her up into the villa where Abajai and Yagji dreamed, unawares.
The nightlamps in the corridors were burning, that was the only thin light in the villa. Every lavish room was sunk in shadow, shadows cloaked her as she breathed her soft way to the villa’s sleeping chambers.
She would deal with Yagji first.
He was a mound beneath his blankets, all his godbraids tied up in a scarf. The flickering bedlamp on the table, lit against demons, burning incense, showed her his slack mouth drooping, drooling. His shifting eyes beneath their eyelids. His overfed flesh and the pettiness he carried with him like coin, that wafted from him like spoiled perfume.
Around her neck the scorpion amulet trembled. It was a carved stone thing, and yet it felt alive. She eased the amulet over her head and unthreaded it from its leather thong with steady, unhurried fingers. When it was free she held it before her eyes, feasting her gaze on it, seeking to know the god’s desire.
I am a knife-dancer, I have my blade. Shall I slit Yagji’s throat, god? Shall I kill him like a goat?
An answer came, not in words but as a feeling.
No . What happened here was sacred business, not the bloody slaughter of the battlefield. Guided by impulse, by the god’s silent voice, she tugged back Yagji’s covering blankets and set the stone amulet on his bare chest. The god was in her stone scorpion, let her stone scorpion be its instrument.
Die, Yagji. Die a sinning man.
She waited, barely breathing. Was it the lamplight or did the scorpion ripple? She could hear her heart beating, drumming for the god.
Yagji woke. His eyes flew open. He saw her standing there and tried to scream, but no sound left his open mouth. He looked at the scorpion on his skin, dark eyes wide with rising terror and pain.
Hekat leaned over him. “You stupid Yagji. I belong to the god. You cannot touch me. You belong to demons.”
A whimper escaped him. He tried to throw the
scorpion from him, he could not grasp it, it would not move. He tried to sit up, the scorpion pinned him. He was pinned to the mattress, weighed down by the god. Water filled his eyes, it slid down his cheeks. “ No . . . no . . .” His voice was a whisper, his bones were chalk.
Slowly, so slowly, the god extinguished his godspark. Unmoved, Hekat watched the life drain from his bulging eyes. They dimmed, they faded, they died completely. Yagji was dead, and gone to hell. She lifted the scorpion from his unmoving chest and carried it along the passageway to Abajai’s room.
Serene and sleeping, he did not stir. For a small time she stood by his bed and watched him, breathing deep of the incense he burned against demons. She stared at the scarlet scorpion on his cheek. She had never liked Yagji, but Abajai she had loved and trusted.
Only the god deserves love and trust.
She placed the stone scorpion on Abajai’s chest.
Like Yagji before him the Trader woke startled, his body filled with pain and fear. He clawed at the amulet but could not remove it, its carved stone pincers were sunk in his flesh.
There was sorrow in her this time, for the Hekat who had loved him, for the man she’d thought he was. She banished it, coldly. Sorrow was weak.
“You go to hell now, Abajai,” she told him. “Go to Yagji, he waits for you. The god wants no godspark of a wicked man. You are the meat with maggots in it. You are the horse with a broken leg. I am not your slave, I belong to the god. If you had seen this I would not be here. You would not be dying a sinner’s death.”
His ribcage labored as he struggled for air. His taloned fingers reached for her but she was beyond him. She was always beyond him, she knew that now. He should have known but he would not listen.
Stupid Abajai, deaf to the god.
When the scorpion was finished, and Abajai was dead, she left the villa as she had entered. Unheard, unseen, except by the god.
Sighing, Vortka shifted the offering-satchel from his left shoulder to his right. It wasn’t as heavy as it could be, public offerings had dwindled since the celebrations of Raklion warlord’s victory over Bajadek, but still it was heavy enough. With the satchel resettled and aching his spine, he took his small godknife from his robe pocket and nicked the side of his left hand’s little finger. Crimson blood welled reluctantly, as tired of flowing as he was of cutting himself. Ignoring the small, familiar pain he smeared the snake-eye carved into the godpost at the end of Eluissa Way. Power swelled and surged and he felt a warm pleasure.
I am a godspeaker. I serve the god.
Leaving the newly sanctified and protected Eluissa godbowl behind him he trudged the city’s cobblestones to the next. Its godpost guarded the end of Dog-tooth Alley, which marked the beginning of the Traders district. He’d started collection duty just after newsun, and still the city’s streets were nearly deserted. A few slaves scurried about their masters’ business, some early risers reclined on curtained litters or sat upright in slave-drawn carriages. He did not speak to them, they did not speak to him. Godspeakers were revered and feared, even the novices, something he had never looked for in his life.
Before his father’s death, before his mother became wife to that other man, he’d always thought he’d be a potsmith. That like a good son he’d follow the path trod by his father and his father’s father and his father’s father’s father, all the way back to the world’s beginning. Potsmithing with clay and bronze and reed and carved stone was honest work seen in the god’s eye. He had not asked for more than that.
He had not asked to be a godspeaker .
Like everyone in his village of Todorok, in all of Mijak, he prayed the god saw him in its eye. He attended sacrifice, he obeyed the god’s law, he wore his amulets and made sure the godspeaker never saw him in his eye, for being seen by a godspeaker almost never boded well. He lived his life believing the god did see him, he worked hard as a potboy for his father, knowing he would soon be old enough for proper potsmithing tasks.
But then his potsmith father died and he disappeared entirely from the god’s all-seeing eye. After that came pain and grief, then Trader Abajai with his chains. He saw himself a slave until the day he died. He did not dream the god had another purpose for him.
The instant his fingers closed about the godstone in Et-Nogolor city’s slave pen he knew he was no slave but a chosen servant of the god. The god’s power poured into him, scouring away the old Vortka, polishing the new. The path before him became unknown and unknowable, the god did not share its secrets with mortals. Not until a mortal was needed. That was its way, he would never question it.
True, life as a novice wasn’t easy or painless, but what did that matter? Nothing mattered but the god. It had saved him from slavery, brought him to Et-Raklion, it had crossed his path with the knife-dancer Hekat, that strange fierce warrior-child he had never forgotten.
She is chosen, as I am. In its time the god will tell me why.
Until then he would serve in the godhouse, he would be the god’s slave. Godhouse chains were not so hard to bear.
The godbowl at the end of Dog-tooth Alley was scarcely one-third full. Vortka frowned. Traders were rich men, they could do better than this. He emptied their miserly offerings into his satchel, sealed the godpost and its bowl and walked deeper into the Traders district. If its other godbowls were not more generously filled he would have to tell Salakij novice-master, who would tell Nagarak, and Nagarak would punish the Traders for disrespecting the god.
He shuddered. Foolish Traders, if that was their fate.
The sun was higher in the sky by two fingers now, and more people hurried about their business. If there was one good thing in tramping the streets, emptying godbowls, it was the chance to leave the godhouse for a time, see faces that did not surround him in the godhouse. Many tested godspeakers served in the city, they were the weft and warp of Et-Raklion, of every warlord city in Mijak, but never novices. They could not be trusted with important administrative tasks. If Salakij were to be believed, novices could barely be trusted with a broom.
As he walked the streets he rested his godsense, a godspeaker’s ability to taste emotions and scent a man’s sin, to sense the past and sometimes the future. To know things unknown by any man not touched by the god. It was whispered among the novices that Nagarak had the power to read men’s minds as though they were common tablets of clay, but who could say if that were true? The high godspeaker spawned more rumors than a fly laid maggots. He could not read minds himself, that was all he knew. But ever since he’d woken the godstone in Et-Nogolor he’d been able to sense moods, and sometimes hidden meanings in the world.
That was impressive for a novice godspeaker.
Even as he opened himself to the mosaic emotions of hurrying slaves and bustling Traders he looked around him at the district’s expensive villas. Life was odd, filled with the god’s mystery. If the Trader caravan had not stopped in Et-Nogolor he might have ended up here, a humble slave with a scarlet godbraid.
Abajai and Yagji lived on one of these streets. He would know them at once, but doubted they would recognize him. He had never been a person to them, he was walking coin, gold in chains. Would they recognize Hekat if they saw her? He hoped not, for she was their runaway. Bad things happened to runaway slaves.
He pinched himself, to stop wrong thinking. Worry for Hekat is a sin. She belongs to the god, it will protect her. If you doubt that, you must kneel for the cane .
He did not want to kneel for the cane. Besides, how would Abajai and Yagji see her? Traders had no business with warriors. And Hekat was different now, not just because of the scars. She was taller, stronger, her bones were tightly roped with muscle. Her face beneath its spiderweb had changed, she was a warrior with blood in her eyes. It would be best for those Traders if they did not see her or show they knew her if they did.
With a deep breath in and out Vortka loosened his painful grip on the satchel straps and bent his thoughts towards his duty.
The godpost godbowl on
Travas Street was half-filled with offerings, a more satisfactory result even if it did mean the weight of his offering-satchel almost bent him double. He could manage one more bowl’s offerings but that was all, if he filled the satchel to the brim it would pull his spine to pieces, he was certain. To save himself from that calamity he would have to return to the godhouse after his next collection, deliver his satchel’s contents into the godhouse treasury, then return to the city to complete his task.
Tcha. And the godhouse kitcheners wondered at the appetites of novice godspeakers . . .
Swallowing a sigh lest the god think he was complaining, Vortka trudged past villa after villa towards Rokbrot Way, where the next godbowl waited. Just as he reached a long cream stone wall his novice godsense hummed a warning. A heartbeat later he heard a fearful screeching, the sound of panicked running feet. Then the villa wall’s blue-painted door flew open and he looked in surprise upon a panting slave.
“Godspeaker! Godspeaker! My masters are dead! Both of them stone-dead in their beds!”
“What do you mean, slave? How are they dead? What has killed them?”
The distraught slave wrung his plump well-kept hands. “Demons, godspeaker! It must be demons! Please, I beg you, come see for yourself!”
Vortka hesitated. He was only a novice, demons were dealt with by those older and wiser than he. But if he sent for a superior and demons were not present, if he wasted that superior’s time . . .
“Show me, slave.”
The slave’s tear-streaked face quivered with relief. “Yes, godspeaker. Hurry, hurry, follow me!”
Once inside the lavish villa, where more distressed slaves wept and milled, Vortka let his heavy satchel slide from his shoulder to the polished tile floor.
“Someone must stand with these godhouse offerings,” he said. Seeing the slaves start with fright, he took off his amulet and held it out. “Here is my demoncharm, blessed by Nagarak himself. If demons abide here they will not dare strike the wearer of this amulet.”
“You there!” said the slave who’d fetched him, pointing to a young strong man. “Take the godspeaker’s demoncharm and guard his satchel with your life!”