by Pearl North
“Ha! You think I don’t know what you are doing? Trying to distract me so I’ll stop working with Siblea here, and switch to you. Such compassion, for this, a Singer priest. He tortured women, too, you know.”
Po swallowed.
The old woman returned through the same doorway and whispered something in his ear. “Later, Mab,” he told her. “Right now, I’m having too much fun with him.” He nodded at Siblea. She whispered something else and he rolled his eyes. “Then let her do it.” For a moment he and Mab just looked at each other, and then he shrugged. “Very well.” He turned to Siblea once more. “Tell me, why did you and your people come back here?” It was the first question of any practical use he had put to Siblea.
Siblea’s voice was barely a whisper, but he told the Lit King all about the crop fire, and the rumors of a terra-forming device known as the Lion’s Bloom. Po concentrated on the sweat trickling down his sides. He tried not to even think about Endymion’s rose.
The next time he was released to revive Siblea, he went into a trance only to find that the flower was gone. In its place a seed pod lay on the ground. Po withdrew from the trance and turned to the Lit King. “His system is in severe shock. If I revive him now, he’ll die.”
The Lit King sighed. “Very well. Tomorrow is another day and my hand is cramping.” He nodded to the guards. “Take them back to their cell.”
Ayma was helping a woman fill sacks with dried corn when a group of dark-robed figures rode into the marketplace on horses, a wagon in tow. Ayma’s boss for the day, a middle-aged woman named Loren, looked up and cursed. “The Lit King’s mob. They’ll steal everything if they can. Come on—help me get all of this back into the cart.”
Ayma started heaving sacks into the woman’s cart. Shouts filled the air as the Lit King’s mob started seizing goods and throwing them into their wagon. A man fought one of them for a sack of carrots and took a blow across the temple from a mind lancet for his trouble. Ayma heard his shout cut off abruptly and he fell down and lay still. His wife knelt at his side, wailing. Everywhere people were running, pushing, screaming. Those that fought were soon subdued by mind lancets.
Being near the north end of the market, Ayma and Loren managed to get the cart loaded and were beginning to haul it away by the time a man rode up brandishing a mind lancet. “You there! Stop! That is property of the Lit King! You must relinquish it immediately or be guilty of treason!”
They tried to run faster but he spurred his horse on and got in front of them. The cart was unwieldy. Ayma tried to turn it but that required backing it up, and now another mounted follower of the Lit King had arrived. Loren pleaded, “I have children at home, sir. Please! I must feed them somehow! If you won’t let me sell my corn, at least let me—”
The man swung his mind lancet in an arc aimed to connect with Loren’s head. Time seemed to slow down, and Ayma felt as though she stood outside of herself as she reached up and grasped the haft of the lancet and wrenched it from the man’s hand. She reversed its direction and caught him in the neck with the glowing blue ball at the end.
He screamed and toppled from his horse. Ayma turned and charged at the other two mounted men. In the corner of her eye she saw Loren’s openmouthed stare. It was madness, yes, but all the frustration, fear, and rage she’d felt ever since the mob killed her father had come to a head with that one attack on a helpless woman. They had taken Po and Censor Siblea away from her. She didn’t care what happened next, as long as she could hurt as many of them as possible.
She jabbed the end of the mind lancet into the midsection of the rider on the left. He convulsed, but grasped at the haft of the lancet, attempting to pull it from her grip even as he shook. Her hands slipped on the polished wood.
Suddenly a brick sailed past her and connected with her opponent’s head. With a short, sharp shout, he fell backward and released the lancet. Ayma didn’t dare turn to see where the brick had come from, but she had a good idea. Instead she turned and faced the third rider.
In moments others had caught on to what was happening and joined her and Loren. A brick-maker snatched the mind lancet from the second rider’s saddle and went after a group of the Lit King’s men who had surrounded a poultry merchant.
The guards shoved Po and Siblea through the door of the cell, slammed it shut, and locked it again. Siblea lay in the straw, unmoving. Baris crouched at his side. Selene and Jan looked at Po. Hilloa embraced him. “Are you all right?”
He nodded.
“You were gone for nearly a day,” said Selene. “What happened?”
Po explained in as few words as possible. In the corner, Baris chafed Siblea’s wrist. “Censor! Wake up!”
“No, let him sleep, Baris. He needs sleep, and water when he wakes.” Until he looked back at Selene and Jan, he did not realize what he’d done. He’d corrected Baris—not to prove himself superior, but for the sake of another male.
Hours went by. Siblea slept and Po examined him.
“How is he?” asked Selene.
“He’s strong. His body is in no real danger as long as he gets the rest he needs,” said Po.
Neither Selene nor anyone else inquired after his mind and Po did not volunteer the information.
Ayma stood in the middle of the marketplace, one of about fifty women, all looking as stunned as she probably did. Her arms trembled with exhaustion and her breath came in ragged gasps, but she was alive and, apart from a cut to her hand from a lit’s dagger that would probably scar, unharmed.
The same could not be said for many others. The market square was littered with bodies. The lits who had come to take their food were dead, except for the ones who had managed to get away. Many of the market people were also slain, especially the men. But most of those who had risen up in arms this morning had lived to tell the tale. Many of them tended to the wounded. Others stood around with their newly claimed weapons—mind lancets, bricks, awls, and pitchforks—slowly turning in place, looking about them at what they had wrought.
Ayma felt a deep terror, for retribution could not be long in coming. Several of the lits had escaped and they would surely go to the Lit King, who would send more people here to punish them. But she also felt a bloody exaltation, a bitter satisfaction that she had taken lives on behalf of her father and Censor Siblea, and Po.
Thinking of Po reminded her of the pen in the satchel that she still wore around her neck. “Can anyone here read?” she asked.
This got her glares. “I have Endymion’s rose,” she explained. “And it is a pen, after all—a pen for rewriting reality. If someone here can write, we can destroy the Lit King right now, without further bloodshed.”
“We are led by a madwoman,” muttered an herb seller.
Led? She was leading? She spotted Loren, bending over one of the few men who were still living. He was bleeding from a wound in his belly and she was trying to stop it. Several other women either stood or knelt at his side. Ayma looked over Loren’s shoulder and saw the blood running from beneath her hands. The man looked up at Ayma. “I know you,” he said. “You were with Censor Siblea.”
She nodded. She recognized him now. He’d been at the tavern that day with Censor Siblea, discussing rebellion.
“Can you write, sir? Did the mob teach you?”
The man nodded.
Ayma scrambled to get the pen out of her satchel. At the sight of it, the man’s eyes widened, and everyone else around took a step back, and eyed her with new speculation. “Please,” she said. “Use this. Write—I don’t know. Write something to make the Lit King dead, to release Censor Siblea and the Chorus of the Word.”
Loren glared at her. “Please, Carl, don’t try to move, don’t talk. Your wound.”
He shook his head. “I’m dying. It matters not.” He lifted his hand and Ayma tried to hand him the pen but he waved it away and pointed at her. “This girl. She was with Censor Siblea. And she struck the first blow today. She carries on his work.” He stared at Loren, and then the othe
rs, his strength faltering. “You must help her continue the censor’s work. He came to liberate us. Now, you women, you must free him so he can overthrow the Lit Ki—” His eyes closed and he slumped backward.
Ayma looked at the pen in her hand. “Is there no one else?” she asked, but they paid her no mind. They were grieving and raging for their losses. She looked at them, at the rage that had so long been bottled, and which now spilled. The pen was of no use to them but, she wondered, what of their grief? Was it enough to drive them to storm the temple and free the chorus?
It seemed like a mad dream, but then twenty minutes ago she would not have believed what she had just seen. Perhaps if they could survive the next twelve hours, if they could get more people on their side…
But first things first. They had claimed the marketplace for their own, and they must not lose it.
The wails of the women rose into the sky like dark birds, and in flight, altered. The market square echoed with a new sound never before heard—a war cry.
25
Ayma’s Army
“Stack more hay behind that wagon,” Ayma told a girl who was about a year or two older than her. The girl nodded and began piling another layer of hay bales behind the wagon they had turned onto its side in the middle of the street on the northwest side of the market. Flanking it were stacks of empty barrels, forming a barricade and blocking access to the square. They had had to work quickly, but now every road into the market had some sort of barrier from which they could attempt to defend it. Piles of bricks and broken chunks of paving stone sat near at hand, and every fallen lit had been ransacked for weapons. They had twenty mind lancets and two rifles. Five women, the widow and orphans of an olive merchant, stuffed rags into bottles of oil and passed them out.
When the barricades were as strong as they could make them under the circumstances, there was a pause, and Ayma saw many of the women looking at her. “This is madness,” said a woman with long, dirty white hair. “We can’t do this. We’ll all be killed.”
Ayma nodded. “Likely we will be. But so what? They’ve taken everything else from us, even our men. If there is even a chance of punishing them for that, then I do not think my life is so important. And if we can liberate the censor and bring back the priests, then that is worth many hundreds of our lives.”
Many around them nodded at this, but some seemed uncertain. Ayma hoped they would not have much longer to wait before the attack. And then she heard it—the clatter and clash of the Lit King’s mob on the move. It seemed to come from everywhere around them and she realized that they were converging on the square from all sides. They would not have the option of concentrating their defense in one place. For a moment Ayma looked at the faces of the women around her and wondered if their courage would fail them—if hers would fail her. But then Loren threw her head back and uttered that unearthly wail again. The others joined her and the sound of widows flew up to meet the cacophony of the mob.
Far too soon, the door of the cell opened again and the guards came in. The old woman, Mab, was with them. Siblea could barely stand up. “It’s too soon,” Po entreated her. “He needs more time.”
To all appearances, she was insane. She cracked that grin of hers and said, “Not him—you.” She turned, looking over the rest of them. Suddenly she thrust her bony finger toward Hilloa. “And her.”
From what you’ve said, it sounds like up until now, the Lit King’s just been getting his jollies tormenting Siblea. There was no purpose to it,” said Hilloa as she and Po were hustled down the hallway by the guards.
“Until the very end of the session, after I mentioned Endymion’s tomb. I shouldn’t have, but I wanted to distract him from Siblea. After that he started asking real questions.”
“And now he’s switched victims.” Hilloa nodded as they started up the staircase. “Listen, Po, I think he’s going to question you about what you and Ayma found in the old theater,” she whispered. “I think he’s going to try to get you to talk by mistreating me. We’ve been relatively lucky so far, but…” She glanced at their guards and said nothing more. They reached the same room Po and Siblea had been in the day before. The rank odor of blood and fear still hung in the room, but it was otherwise unoccupied.
“You believe this?” said one of the guards to the other.
“I know. What are we supposed to do, just wait here while he’s off screwing around with that foreign whore of his?”
“Yeah,” said the other one. “I’ve got a keg of ale downstairs and if I don’t get back there, Mason’s going to drink it all.”
“That’s a shame.”
“Screw it, let’s just leave them here.”
“What, unattended?”
“Yeah. They’re chained; we’ll lock the door. What are they going to do? Come on—I’ll share.”
The other man nodded. “Fine.”
They shoved Po and Hilloa into the room and shut and locked the door behind them.
“There’s a secret door back here,” said Po. They went to where he’d seen Mab press the paneling. One section of the paneling did in fact give in at Po’s pressure, and there was a muffled click, but no door appeared. Po pulled and pried at the seam of the door, but it didn’t budge.
“It’s locked,” said Hilloa. They tried the door they’d come in through, but that one was locked, too. “Before the Lit King comes, I have to tell you something. I’ve seen how he acts toward the women who follow him. And I know how the Singers are about sex. They think the worst thing that can happen to a woman is to be forced into it. I think…Po, I think he’s going to rape me to get you to talk. But don’t talk!”
“What?! Force you? I’ll kill him.”
Hilloa shook her head. “You might not be able to. He’ll keep you locked up, and he’ll demand that you talk. I don’t know what you and Ayma found, but if he gets the Lion’s Bloom, all is lost. Just…don’t talk. Let him do that to me. I’m not going to die from it, you know? I’ll survive. Whatever he does to me, don’t talk.”
Po shook his head.
“I mean it. Anything he does is not going to be any worse than what he’s already done to Siblea. I’m strong. I’ll be okay.”
Po felt as if every cell in his body were vibrating at a frequency higher than anything in this plane of existence. Was this how the People Who Walk Sideways in Time transcended to a higher dimension? Was he going to become like Endymion? If so, it might make a lot of things much simpler, though he’d be very afraid for himself.
Hilloa took one look at him and sighed. “Po, I’m ordering you, as a woman—don’t let him goad you into talking.”
Her voice brought him back to the present moment. He swallowed. “As a man I have to tell you that tolerating such a thing is beyond me.”
Her mouth set, firm and flat. “If you were my consort, you’d have to do as I say, wouldn’t you?”
“Yes,” he said reluctantly. “But I didn’t get initiated, so…”
Hilloa shook her head and pulled him to her. “Forget that for now. How do I make you my consort?”
“You…you want me to be your consort?” He felt torn in so many different directions he wondered that he didn’t split apart. He had been so attracted to Hilloa at one time, but it hadn’t worked out, and since then he’d been Queen Thela’s toy, and then he’d met Ayma…If they ever reunited with Ayma again, would the two women share him? Hilloa might be fine with that, but what would Ayma make of it? “Uh…you don’t mean it,” he said.
“Yes, I do. Be my consort, Po.” She pulled herself up on her toes and kissed him.
Her lips were so soft and warm. Her mouth was sweet. He fell into the kiss as if diving into the ocean. Their chains clinked together as he lifted his hands to stroke the sides of her face. She wrapped her arms around his waist and pulled him close, so that he pressed against her. Hilloa. Already he felt himself falling for her all over again. Her kindness, her intelligence…he broke the kiss. “You’re only doing this so that I’ll obey your wi
shes when the Lit King comes.”
She blinked up at him, her face flushed. “Not just for that,” she said, and kissed him again, hard. She was trembling, and her cheeks, when they brushed against his, were wet. He held her tight and made his mind up for himself.
Ayma had known the streets of the citadel her entire life, so why, now, should they look so different? She ran at the head of the howling mob, with a mind lancet in one hand and a brick in the other. The Lit King’s people, who had been on the attack moments ago, now fell back before her. Perhaps the wild exhilaration made her see her city in a new way. All she knew was that they had surprised everyone, most especially themselves, when the Lit King’s reinforcements came.
The very most she had hoped for was to defend the square. Instead they were overrunning the whole citadel, their ranks swelling by the minute as ordinary people saw them fighting and joined in.
Ahead was the Temple of Yammon. Ayma’s mob and many others converged upon it. “We must free the censor!” she cried, and the call went up behind her, but it soon became incoherent as the surging tide of people burst forth with an inarticulate roar.
Taken by surprise, the Lit King’s people scrambled to the gates of the temple, struggling to push the great iron doors closed. If they succeeded, there was little hope of getting inside to rescue the Chorus of the Word. Ayma and the others dashed toward the narrowing archway. A scarred man in a brown robe grappled with her, and she just managed to twist her mind lancet from his grasp and strike him across the back of the head with it. He screamed and fell, and she ran on. Shots rang out, but she did not know if they came from her own people, firing at the lits who were amassing on the walls above, or vice versa. A blur of motion on her right resolved into the butt of a rifle a second too late, and pain exploded across her face as it connected with her jaw. She staggered, but the press of bodies carried her forward, and she managed not to fall and be trampled underfoot.