“Hananja’s Crusty Eyes.” For a moment she was tempted to laugh, until she noted the affront on their faces and recalled her careless blasphemy. Silently she berated herself; now was not the time for amateurish mistakes. “—Apologies. I shouldn’t be surprised. I have been spying, of course.”
“Then you acknowledge your corruption?”
“Spying, as the Prince has spied on me, and as the ambassadors of Bromarte, Jijun, Khanditta, and every other land in spitting distance of the Narrow Sea have spied on one another for centuries. It is the job of an ambassador to spy. If there’s corruption in that, then you’d better Gather a few other people in this palace tonight.”
“Do you refute the other charges?” His expression was implacable.
“Corrupting highcastes and fomenting war? Let me see. I had a meeting with a highcaste who revealed to me one of Gujaareh’s darkest secrets. He did it unbidden and uncoerced, and his intention was to prevent war. How would you judge that, priest of Hananja?”
“I do not judge.”
“Then you had better start.” She was growing angry herself in response to the tension of the moment and the Gatherer’s obstinacy. “There is a Reaper in this land, priest, and I have seen the proof of it. I believe you and your brethren know of this abomination and conceal it.”
The youth frowned in puzzlement. The Gatherer went rigid. “There is no Reaper in Gujaareh,” he said. “There has been none for centuries.”
“I told you of the corpse I saw.”
His jaw worked, and abruptly the affront in his face was eclipsed by something she hadn’t expected to see: shame. “Sometimes Gatherers err,” he said. Beside him the youth’s scowl deepened, though the look he turned on his mentor was somber. The Gatherer fixed his eyes on the floor. “When that happens, we do penance. But I’m no rogue. Nor are any of my brothers.”
“Twenty men have died like the corpse I saw, at the prison. Do Gatherers err so often?”
The man was already shaking his head, but in disbelief. “Twenty? No, that cannot be. Someone would’ve reported it. One or two mistakes the people can accept, but never so many, so quickly—”
“They don’t know,” Lin said suddenly. Sunandi looked down at her in surprise. Lin’s pale eyes were narrowed at the Gatherer, though she spoke to Sunandi. “Someone in the Hetawa probably does, but not these two. Maybe none of the Gatherers know.”
The Gatherer looked from one to the other of them, confusion plain on his face; his voice wavered with uncertainty and tension. “There’s nothing to know. What you suggest is… is…” He faltered silent.
Sunandi snorted. “At least one of the Gatherers knows. Only Gatherers become Reapers.”
“There are no Reapers in Gujaareh!” The Gatherer’s composure shattered so suddenly that it startled them all. He glared at them, nostrils flared, fists clenched, body trembling with rage. Only his voice remained under control; he had not raised it, though he’d snarled the words with such vehemence that they might as well have been shouted. “That would be an abomination beyond imagination. We are tested regularly. When the signs begin to show, we give ourselves to Her. We all know our duty. To suggest otherwise is an attack upon the Hetawa itself!”
The youth looked genuinely alarmed now, and Sunandi felt the same. The sense of unease that she had felt from the beginning redoubled, joined now by an instinctive certainty. Something is wrong with him.
“I mean no insult,” she said, carefully neutral. “It could be some new poison, whose effects mimic Reaping-death. Or a plague. There’s no way to know for certain.” She spread her hands, moving slowly and deliberately so he could see she meant no harm. “But if there’s no rogue in the city, then someone certainly means to suggest that there is. Would that not also be an assault upon your brotherhood?”
The Gatherer’s agitation cooled somewhat, though his stance remained stiff. “It would if it were true. But you have been judged corrupt. These could be lies.”
Sunandi could think of no counter for that argument. Abruptly the whole situation wearied her; she sighed and rubbed her eyes. “They could be. For all I know, they are—lies fed to me, which I now feed to you. If I had all the answers, my job here would be done. As it is, I’m going to leave it unfinished; I must return to Kisua to tell my people what I’ve learned so far.” She paused, looked at him, realizing that nothing had been settled. “If you allow.”
That quick flex of his jaw muscles again, she saw, above neck-cords taut as ropes. After a long silence, however, the Gatherer jerked his head in a nod. “I declare your tithe in abeyance for now. Until I can confirm—or disprove—what you say.” His eyes narrowed to slits. “If you have lied, do not think fleeing to Kisua will save you. Gatherers have tracked commissions across the world in the past. Hananja’s Law outweighs the laws of any foreign land, to us.”
“Of that I have no doubt, priest. But how do you intend to discover the truth?”
“I will return to the Hetawa and ask my brethren.”
The man’s naïveté astonished her. This was a brother of the Prince? “I would not advise going back to your Hetawa. In the morning when no one finds me dead, the conspirators will know I’ve told you secrets. The Hetawa—this whole city—may no longer be safe for you.”
He threw her a look of withering contempt. “This is not some corruption-steeped barbarian land, woman.” He turned to leave; the youth fell in behind him.
“Wait.”
He paused, looking back at her warily. She went to her chest—still keeping her movements smooth and slow—and rummaged through it for a moment. “If you need to leave the city, give this to the guard at the south gate. Only before sunset, mind you; the shift changes at nightfall.”
She stepped forward and held out a heavy silver Kisuati coin. One face of it had been scuffed and scored, as if by accident.
The Gatherer stared down at it in distaste. “Bribery.”
She stifled irritation. “A token. The daytime guard at that gate is one of my associates. Show him that and he’ll help you, even tell you where I can be found. I mean to be beyond the walls by morning.”
He scowled, not touching the coin.
She rolled her eyes. “If later you decide I have lied, lay it on my breast after you kill me.”
“Do not dare to mock—” Exasperation crossed the Gatherer’s face and finally he sighed, plucking the coin from her hand. “So be it.”
He turned and walked out of the bedchamber into the darkness of the main room. She saw him appear again as a silhouette against the balcony hangings, the youth a smaller shadow beside him. He vaulted the railing, his protégé followed, and both of them were gone.
Sunandi let out a long, shaky breath.
After an equally long silence, Lin inhaled. “I’ll go now,” she said in Sua. Rising, the girl went to the corner where an open pack sat, half-concealed by a large fern; she began rummaging through it, making certain she had everything she needed. “Arrange things with our contacts. Should’ve gone last night, but I wanted to wait until tomorrow when most of the foreigners began leaving after the Hamyan—” She paused, hands stilling their brisk movements for a moment. “Thank the gods I delayed. If I hadn’t been here…”
Sunandi nodded, though absently. She hardly felt able to think, much less speak coherently. She’d faced many trials in her years as Kinja’s heir, but never a direct threat to her life. The Gatherer’s eyes glittered in her memory, so dark, so cold—but compassionate, too. That had been the truly terrifying thing. A killer with no malice in his heart: it was unnatural. With nothing in his heart, really, except the absolute conviction that murder could be right and true and holy.
Lin took her arm. Sunandi blinked down at her. “You need to leave now, ’Nandi.”
“Yes… yes.” Kinja had taken in Lin because of her quick wit and good sense; Sunandi thanked the gods for both in that moment. “I’ll see you in Kisua.”
Lin nodded, flashing one of her impish smiles. Then she was
gone, slipping out of the apartment through the front door hanging, an oversized man’s robe wrapped around her to conceal the pack. The hall guards would see her and assume she’d just finished some tryst with one of the high-ranking guests. They wouldn’t question her as long as she headed toward the servants’ quarters. From there Lin could leave the palace and be out of the city before dawn.
Kinja should have made Lin the ambassador, Sunandi decided in momentary envy. She was more ruthless than Sunandi, and eminently better suited to the whole process. But for now, Sunandi would simply be grateful for Kinja’s good taste. She sighed, then turned to the chest to dig out her own pack.
Behind her, beyond the window, a man’s silhouette flickered across the setting Moon.
10
“This magic is abomination,” said the Protectors to Inunru, when the beast had been run to ground. “We will not permit it within our borders.” Thus Inunru went north along the path of the river, and with him went the most devout of his followers.
(Wisdom)
The Reaper knows that it is an abomination. If it had a soul left, it could mourn this.
* * *
Leaving Yanya-iyan had gone smoothly. The palace guards generally concerned themselves far more with unwanted intruders than with departing guests—even those leaving in the small hours of the night. Ehiru summoned another servant-drawn carriage, ordering a drop-off along the quiet streets of the riverfront. Now Nijiri sat with his mentor on a rooftop near the river, gazing out at the Goddess’s Blood as it flowed in the near distance. Dreaming Moon had not quite completed her slow, graceful journey across the sky, but already the horizon was growing pale with the coming dawn. Nights were always short for a time after the solstice.
Corruption and madness and war…
Hamyan, and Nijiri’s conversation with Sister Meliatua, had been only the night before.
At Nijiri’s side Ehiru sat quietly, his eyes fixed on the river but seeing, Nijiri suspected, into some other plane. Though an hour had passed since the conversation with the Kisuati woman, Ehiru showed no inclination to return to the Hetawa. Nor was there any further sign of the temper that had seized him in the woman’s bedchamber—though Nijiri knew the calm was only temporary. If Ehiru’s control had slipped once, it would slip again. That was the way of the test.
He raised his hand, palm up. “Ehiru-brother?” Touch helped a Gatherer focus on reality when his other senses began to betray him; it was a trick taught to all who served as pranje attendants.
Ehiru’s eyes flickered back from that other place, shifting to first Nijiri’s face and then the proffered hand. Sorrow furrowed his brow, but he sighed and reluctantly took the hand. “Have I frightened you so much, my apprentice?”
“You have never frightened me, Ehiru-brother.”
But Ehiru only looked down at their joined hands and sighed again. “She wasn’t lying. In dreams I could be surer, but even in waking, there’s a sense to such things.”
Nijiri used his free hand to begin stroking the back of Ehiru’s. This, too, was permitted in the pranje, but Nijiri suspected he was not supposed to pay such attention to the smoothness of Ehiru’s skin, or the scents of incense and sweat that formed Ehiru’s distinctive musk… With an effort, he made himself lean back. “It’s possible to lie without lying, Brother. She herself admitted that she didn’t know the whole truth.”
“She knows enough to be of concern.” Ehiru gazed down at their hands. “But too much of what she said is… inconceivable. Unacceptable.”
“This business of a Reaper?” Nijiri shook his head. “She must have been mistaken. She was, at first.”
“No.” Ehiru’s expression grew solemn. “That mistake was mine. I assumed she spoke of… of my own error.” He hesitated for a long moment. “The Superior told you?”
Nijiri looked out at the water. “Of course. I made the choice to have you as my mentor in full knowledge.”
“What did he tell you?”
“That you failed to fulfill a commission, doing harm to the soul and perhaps even destroying it.” Ehiru frowned as he spoke, however, and Nijiri stopped speaking, concerned. Was there more to the matter, then?
Ehiru took a deep breath, seeming to ready himself. “The tithe was to be taken from a foreigner—a man of the Bromarte. I found him already in Ina-Karekh and followed him in.” Ehiru abruptly went silent; his fingers twitched a little against Nijiri’s.
“Brother?”
“There was corruption in his soul.” Ehiru still gazed out at the river, but Nijiri suspected he did not see the palm trees on the far shore, the reeds waving in the wind, or the flatboats bobbing gently at their moorings. His hand, in Nijiri’s, felt cold. “Not enough to make him criminal, but enough to taint his dreamscape with ugliness and violence. I tried to take him to a more pleasant place, but then he had a true-seeing.”
Nijiri frowned. “Foreigners don’t see truly in their dreams, brother. They wander helpless in Ina-Karekh every night. A fourflood child has more control.”
“Foreigners have the same innate abilities as we of Gujaareh, Nijiri. Anything a skilled narcomancer can do, they can—though only by accident.”
Nijiri held back a snort; the notion of a barbarian managing the same feat as the most highly trained Sisters, Sharers, and Gatherers seemed ludicrous. Did children write treatises?
“In this Bromarte’s case…” Ehiru sighed. “Up to that point he had been no different from any other stubborn, frightened dreamer. But then he said to me, ‘They’re using you.’ ”
Nijiri frowned. “What did that mean?”
“I don’t know. But I felt the truth of his words. And tonight, when the Kisuati woman said the same thing…”
“So that was it.” Nijiri squeezed his hand. “She is corrupt, Brother. A professional liar by her own admission.”
“Then you dismiss her tales of dead prisoners, and a conspiracy to begin a war?”
“Dead prisoners would hardly begin a war. And anyhow, every account that I have read of war speaks of its terrible destruction and suffering. No one would start such a thing deliberately.”
Ehiru glanced at him, and Nijiri was startled to see a smile on his mentor’s face. “Ehiru-brother?”
“It’s nothing. Just that I forget your youth at times.” Ehiru drew up his knees and wrapped his arms about them, gazing up into the sky. Tiny pale Waking Moon peeked timidly out from behind her greater sister’s curve; sunrise would come soon. “I envy you that youth.”
Nijiri gazed at Ehiru in surprise and read faint lines of regret and worry in his mentor’s profile. “You believe the woman’s tale.”
Ehiru sighed into a breeze. “When the Bromarte had his true-seeing, I mishandled the dream out of surprise. But after he was dead, I saw something else. A man, I think, on the rooftop across. He was wrong, Nijiri. I can’t explain it. His movements, his shape, the feel of his presence; I have never been so frightened in my life.”
Nijiri shifted uncomfortably. “A vision. A manifestation of your guilt.” He had heard that strong narcomancers were sometimes plagued by such things. The dreaming gift was not always easy to control. “Flush with dreamblood—”
“No. The dreamblood was rotten; I was sick with it, not enraptured. What I saw was real.”
“The Kisuati’s Reaper?”
“I can think of nothing else that would have sent such dread through my heart.”
“But to become a Reaper, a user of dream magic must fail the pranje, refuse the Final Tithe, go un-Gathered by our brethren for fourdays, somehow remain unnoticed by others while he goes slowly mad…” He shook his head, unwilling to believe. “It’s impossible. Our brothers are too wise and faithful to let such a thing happen.”
“I imagine those long-ago Reapers had faithful brothers too, once.”
Nijiri sucked in his breath and stared at Ehiru. Ehiru smiled bleakly, his eyes lost in the distance. The words settled into Nijiri’s heart like stones, and he fell silent beneath their
weight. Perhaps out of respect for Nijiri’s turmoil, Ehiru stopped talking as well, and they both brooded for a while.
Eventually, though, Ehiru sighed. “I saw what I saw, Nijiri. And if there are twenty dead men who saw the same thing…”
“Well, that’s for the Superior to determine.” Nijiri got to his feet and brushed off his loindrape decisively. Ehiru glanced up at him, a look of mild surprise on his face. “We must return to the Hetawa and report this. And you must go to the Sharers to request an infusion.”
Ehiru raised an eyebrow. “One display of ill temper does not make me out of control.”
“Not alone. But there have been other signs, haven’t there?” It was unseemly to speak of such things, except when they had to be said. Ehiru squared his shoulders, radiating stubbornness; Nijiri pressed on. “I was trained, Brother, though I never got the chance to properly serve. Have you seen more visions than usual? Have there been times when your hands shook?”
Ehiru lifted a hand and gazed at it. “The morning of the Hamyan.”
He’d let himself suffer for two whole days? Nijiri scowled. “Then it must be done. You Gathered no tithe tonight. By tomorrow night you might be hearing voices, seeing enemies under every leaf—”
Ehiru got to his feet and faced him. “I believe I know my own pattern, Nijiri, having experienced it every year for the past twenty.”
It was a mild rebuke as such things went, but it silenced Nijiri anyhow. He bowed his head, fists clenched in shame and anger at being reminded of his place. But a moment later Ehiru sighed and put a hand on his shoulder.
“I’ll go to the Sharers if that will ease your fears,” he said. “And then we’ll both go to the Superior—”
He paused then, cocking his head. Nijiri frowned and opened his mouth to ask what was the matter, but before he could speak, Ehiru held up a hand to shush him. He pivoted slowly toward the north, squinting along the flow of the river. The rooftops had become still as the Dreamer’s fat curve at last sank out of sight, leaving only the deep monochrome darkness cast by Waking Moon’s pallid light. No birds sang; not even a breeze stirred the laundry-heavy clotheslines. The city was silent.