‘We came at the perfect time,’ Soutan said in Kazraki. ‘His father is away, so we won’t have to make any awkward explanations.’
‘About what?’ Warkannan said. ‘The reason we’re here?’
‘That, and about the false charges against me.’
Although they were reluctant at first, the horses walked through the gate after Alayn sent the shens racing back to the house ahead of them. As they approached the cluster of buildings, four men came trotting out of the house.
‘Ah, some servants,’ Soutan said. ‘They’ll take our horses for us.’
Alayn flung open the door of the manor house and ushered them inside to a big room, plain and airy. Four long trestle tables with benches stood at the near end, along with a big ceramic stove and wooden bins filled with grains and produce. At the far end, wooden chairs and a divan woven of purple rushes stood under the windows. On the divan a woman with long, grey hair, tied back with a thong, sat reading. She wore a loose blue dress, sleeveless and pulled in at the waist with a belt made of linked gold coins. As Alayn led his guests down the length of the room, she looked up, smiled, and rose to greet them. Alayn began speaking fast in Vranz.
‘Alayn’s mother,’ Soutan whispered in Kazraki. ‘You address her as “mada” and bow over her hand if she offers it to you.’
Mada did indeed offer Warkannan her hand. Painfully conscious of her bare arms, he took it, smiled, and bowed. Arkazo did the same, and she smiled at them both, then sat back down on her divan and picked up her book. Alayn led them on through the room, out into a hallway, and on down.
‘Guest tents,’ he said in Hirl-Onglay and flung open a door to reveal not tents, but a sunny room with a further room visible beyond. ‘I have the maid bring water. Food?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ Warkannan said.
Arkazo contented himself with nodding vigorously. Warkannan glanced around the room – a pair of narrow beds, covered with blue blankets, a pair of woven-rush chairs before a long window with a view of the lawn, and between them, a low table. Opposite the window an open door led into another room with a third bed.
‘This looks very comfortable,’ Warkannan said in Hirl-Onglay. ‘Thank you very much, sinyur.’
Alayn smiled, then left with a wave of his hand. Soutan followed him out, talking fast in Vranz.
Warkannan sank gratefully into a cushioned chair. ‘That was quite a shock, seeing a woman of position just sitting there half-dressed.’
‘Yes,’ Arkazo said. ‘But look, we’ve got real mattresses, real pillows! I’m going to lie down and take a nap.’
Arkazo was still asleep when Soutan came snarling into the guest room and slammed the door behind him. Arkazo woke, looked around yawning, then turned over and went back to sleep. Soutan threw himself into a wicker armchair and glowered at the view outside. Warkannan joined him at the window.
‘What’s wrong?’ Warkannan said.
‘I had the perfect plan,’ Soutan said. ‘But Alayn wouldn’t carry it out. I wanted him to go into Nannes and see if he could buy me some crystals. I told him I’d give him a gold coin for running the errand, but no, no, it’s not the money, he says. His father’s suspicious of certain things. The old man’s at the law courts in Nannes, and he’ll be there for days. If he sees Alayn buying a crystal, he’ll be more suspicious than ever.’
‘Can’t he avoid his father?’
‘Nannes is a good bit smaller than Haz Kazrak.’ Soutan paused for a dramatic sigh. ‘And everyone knows Sinyur Alayn and his father the Zhay Pay.’
‘If we ride straight to Jezro, you won’t need a crystal.’
‘Don’t be stupid! Of course I’ll need one with this wretched Zayn following us along.’ Soutan scowled at the lawn for a long moment, then continued. ‘Alayn did come up with something of an idea. There’s a group of – well, I’m not sure what they are, but they call themselves priests. Their head man’s collected a number of crystals, Alayn says. He might be willing to make a trade.’
‘Sounds like a good idea to me. We have Kazraki coins, and there’s at least one extra horse.’
‘Exactly. Surely we can work something out – provided he has the right crystals, of course.’
‘I take it they’re not all alike.’
‘No, I’ve catalogued twenty kinds. You see, they were –’
Someone rapped on the door. Soutan called out in Vranz, and Alayn stepped in, closed the door carefully behind him, then leaned against it for an extra measure of safety. As he and Soutan talked, Warkannan realized that Soutan was looking more and more frightened. Finally the sorcerer turned to him.
‘Our luck has definitely gone bad, Captain. The comnee’s camped just off the main road not more than five miles from here. One of Alayn’s tenants saw them just now.’
‘Then we’d better stay where we are till they’ve moved on,’ Warkannan said. ‘If that’s all right with the sinyur here.’
‘Oh yes, that’s fine with him and his mother. But I hope that those beastly barbarians move on tomorrow. All this waiting is getting on my nerves.’
About a mile past the forest the comnee had found an unfenced meadow that provided decent pasture for the horses. While the men were raising the tents and starting the evening meal, Maradin and two other women went to the forest edge to hunt for fallen wood. With the Riders due to appear in the sky, Ammadin took her saddlebags and went with them. While the women spread out to forage, she scanned.
Spirit Eyes swept over the countryside, but found no Kazraks and no Soutan, either. If the sorcerer had somehow woken his sleeping spirits, he would have been able to hide from her, of course, but she was expecting him to attack her as soon as he had weapons, and so far, no attack had come. Finally Spirit Eyes showed her a cluster of buildings behind a thorn-vine wall that stood about five miles south of the camp. To one side of the compound lay a paddock where eight horses were grazing. Those she recognized immediately: the Kazraks’ riding mounts and pack horses. Soutan apparently had an ally who was sheltering them.
By then the women had gathered armloads of deadfall oak, and together they returned to camp. In front of her tent Zayn had started a fire. He was kneeling behind it and using his long knife to shred saur jerky into a pot of simmering breadmoss.
‘Smells good,’ Ammadin told him. ‘My news isn’t so good – your enemies are about five miles from here. It looks like they’re staying with one of the local landowners. I can’t be sure, because I didn’t see them. They must be inside his house.’
‘You can’t scan inside buildings?’ Zayn said.
‘No. The crystals can’t see when the Riders are hidden by clouds, either. All they show then is clouds.’
‘Nothing but clouds?’
‘Yes. They won’t look at the ground then for some reason. What’s odd is you’d swear you were looking at the clouds from above.’ Ammadin shrugged the problem away. ‘Spirits have their quirks. Still, I’m certain that Warkannan and the others are close by, and that’s what matters now. Make sure you don’t get out of sight of the comnee from now on.’
‘All right.’
Zayn was concentrating so hard on stirring the porridge that she realized he was hiding something from her again. She considered probing, then decided that she was tired of trying to dig the truth out of Zayn. She went into her tent and devoted herself to arranging the god figures on their special rug.
In the morning, when Ammadin scanned again, she found another comnee and their horses camped beside the grey road at the very limit of Spirit Eyes’ range to the west. Someone else had decided to cross the Rift early in the trading season. Since they appeared as tiny figures with no detail, she had no idea of whose comnee this might be. She made a point, once she’d returned to camp, of telling Apanador about them.
‘I hope it’s not someone you men are feuding with,’ Ammadin said.
‘So do I,’ Apanador said. ‘We’ve got enough to worry about as it is, with Zayn’s enemies and all.’ He paused, glancing over her shoulder. ‘I�
�ll be glad to get back on the road. That forest – you can feel the evil, even this far away.’
‘Too many people have disappeared into it.’ Ammadin suddenly shivered. ‘And their spirits still walk. When we’re here, I see them sometimes, slinking through the trees.’
‘You’d think the local authorities would have put an end to those murders a long time ago.’
‘So you’d think. I can’t say I have a lot of respect for them. Well, it’s probably no business of ours.’
Dallador was grooming his favourite horse, a coppery-coloured gelding with a blaze and a white off-fore. After he finished with the curry comb, he pulled a long twist of the purple grass and began rubbing the horse’s coat down, making it shine in the early morning sun. As he worked on the horse’s legs, his pale hair would fall into his eyes; he’d toss it back with a laugh. Zayn stood some distance away, in the shelter of the wagon, and watched him. In the night he’d dreamt about Dallador. He could not get his conversation with Maradin out of his mind, either. The dream and the memory added up to an insight he could no longer hide from himself. He found himself wondering what it would feel like to kiss that generous mouth, and to feel Dallo’s hands – Zayn turned away with a shake of his head. It would do him no good to follow out that line of thought.
When the comnee rode out, Zayn volunteered to bring up the rear, the dustiest and least desirable spot in the riding order. He did actually feel that it was his turn to do so, but even more, he knew that Dallo wouldn’t want to join him there.
That morning they rode through farming country, rich fields of ripening wheatian, long rows of some leafy plant, stippled red and white, that he didn’t recognize, all set off from the road by pale yellow fences. The land rose slowly but steadily, as if they were plodding up a giant ramp, forcing them to pause often to let the stock rest in the summer’s heat. Towards noon the road finally levelled out. Zayn could see across the fields to scattered true-oaks and the low straight roofs of yellow and white buildings.
Nannes lay on either side of a shallow river, flowing north to south, crossed by four wooden bridges that led to the town on the east bank. The comnee camped on the west bank in a long meadow fronting the river but upstream from the town – land set aside for visiting comnees, Ammadin told him, and their horses.
‘We probably won’t get any customers today,’ she told him. ‘It’ll take time for the local horse dealers to find out that we’re here.’
‘All right,’ Zayn said. ‘I don’t suppose a town like this would have a bookshop.’
‘Yes, they do. I’ve seen it. It’s a trade town, after all, and they have a lot of craftsmen. Why?’
‘I was thinking of trying to find a book that would teach me how to read Vranz. So I can read that book to you one day.’
‘There’s money in the blue tent bag. Take what you need.’
She waved an arm in the direction of Nannes. ‘Cross that second bridge and follow the street down. In a few blocks you’ll come to a market square. You can’t miss it. It’s hung with banners.’
After the monotony of the plains, Nannes came as a relief to a city-raised man like Zayn – not that it was much of a place. Perhaps some three hundred houses and craft shops lay along dirty cobbled streets. The houses sagged and rambled, built from tree-fern trunks, bundles of rushes, and long reddish poles cut from some plant Zayn couldn’t identify. Vegetable gardens flourished out in front of each; here and there chickens scratched and clucked behind woven fences. Trees grew everywhere, both true-oak and a species he’d never seen before. The graceful maroon trunks ended in a spray of branches, delicate and long enough to hang almost to the ground. On each branch were clusters of yellow leaves as narrow as needles, growing from a central stem. Skinny yellow lizards clung to the trunks and chattered as Zayn passed by.
Two-storey buildings that seemed to be both house and shop edged the market square. Although they drooped and leaned, from their upper storey bright banners flapped in the breeze, announcing with pictures a shoemaker, a candlemaker, a blacksmith, and other such artisans. Zayn walked slowly, glancing around him. One time through, and he would have the entire town tucked into his memory, ready to become a map if he should need to draw one.
Zayn had just spotted the bookseller’s shop when he heard a noise that sounded like drums. He paused at a corner and listened – yes, drums, a deep bass, a chatter of snares. The sound of horns, similar to cavalry bugles but sweeter, drifted on the wind. A crowd of small children tore past him, laughing, and headed towards the music.
‘Where are you going?’ Zayn called out in Vranz.
‘The Recallers!’ a little girl shouted. ‘Their last parade.’
Recallers. The word tore at his memory. He should know what it meant; he had heard it before. Where? He trotted after the children, but he was barely conscious of the streets around him. His reflexes kept him from crashing into walls and bumping into townsfolk while his mind searched, running down the corridors of his memory, throwing open doors, looking into rooms he hadn’t opened in twenty-five years.
And he saw at last the small boy, himself, crouched miserably on the black-and-white tiled floor of a mosque between his father and the healer they had come to see. Tall in white robes, his head wrapped in sleek blue, Hakeem Abbul spoke softly, urgently.
‘The boy is half a demon, yes. There were once a class of men named –’ Here he spoke a foreign word, one beyond Zayn’s understanding then, though he knew it now: Recallers. ‘These Recallers made a blood pact with demons in order to learn secret knowledge, forbidden knowledge.’
‘What must I do with him?’ His father’s voice was a mutter, a sigh.
‘You know the answer to that.’
The crouching boy felt as if all the warmth of his body were draining into the tiles. He was going to die before sunset, he was sure of it, and yet, when his father held out his hand, he got up and took it, let his father lead him from the mosque and back to their room at the shabby inn.
And of course, his father hadn’t killed him.
As he stood, all those years later, on a street in a town far from Kazrajistan, Zayn or Zahir – at that moment, with the memory so vivid, with himself so changed, he was no longer sure which was his real name – grasped for the first time just how peculiar it was, that his father had never done what so many holy men had told him to do. His father had at times beaten him, at others starved him, all in hopes of ousting the demons within him, but never had he let his son actually come near to dying. Why not?
‘I guess because I was the heir, and the only one he was going to get. I guess.’
Zayn realized he’d spoken aloud, shook himself, glanced around, but no one had heard, not in the racket coming down the street. A long line of men and women were prancing and dancing as they drew near. Some carried drums, some played horns, some jingled straps sewn with tiny bells. All of them were dressed in red and yellow clothes; all had long red ribbons braided in their hair and dangling from their sleeves. Just behind the musicians other men and women came dancing, dressed in a variety of bizarre clothes – sleek one-piece outfits embroidered with spirals, billowing dresses patched together from scraps: blue, purple, green. In among them children wearing long white dresses with purple hoods ran and shouted. Some of the adults, dressed entirely in black, carried bundles that Zayn at first mistook for blankets.
As they came closer, he could see that the bundles were imitation ChaMeech – draped red and purple cloths topped by big ChaMeech heads made out of some kind of shiny material. As they walked they slipped one hand into the heads and made them look around or bow to the crowd. Bringing up the rear of the parade were children carrying baskets. They ran back and forth across the street and shoved the baskets at the watching adults, most of whom dug through their pockets and handed over coins. A little girl with gold hair ran up to Zayn; he fished a couple of Vransic copper souz out of his pocket and dropped them in. She smiled brilliantly, curtsied, and trotted off again.
Once the procession had gone past, the crowd began to break up and drift away. So, Zayn thought. Those are the Recallers, are they? A bunch of buffoons, noisy musicians and bad dancers. Obviously the hakeem had meant something entirely different. As he walked back to the market square, the diversity of the townsfolk struck him – some had pale skin, others dark, though none as dark as his; he saw every possible colour of hair and eyes, thin lips, full lips, curly hair and straight. He found it surprising, but somehow intriguing as well.
When he opened the door to the bookseller’s, silver bells rang out. A long room, crammed with books on shelves, books on tables, books stacked on floors – the light was dim, and the smell of dust and old rushi overwhelming, like the rich perfume of a beautiful woman, or so it seemed to Zayn. Back in Kazrajistan, books though common enough were expensive, run off a page at a time on a press powered by the printer’s apprentices. That a small town like Nannes would have so many amazed him. Out of the murk appeared a skinny young man with short brown hair, wearing a green apron over a shirt and narrow blue trousers.
‘This is a surprise,’ he said. ‘You’re a Kazrak.’
‘Daccor, but I ride with a comnee now.’ Zayn smiled pleasantly. ‘You must not get a lot of Kazraks through here.’
‘We don’t, no. In fact, I think I’ve only ever seen one before. When I was still a child, a fellow rode through here.’
‘Really? I don’t suppose you remember much about him.’
‘I don’t, no, but ask the older people. They might remember. Now, what can I do for you?’
‘I want to learn how to read Vranz, and how to speak it better, too.’
‘You could use a little help there, yes.’ The fellow laughed, but pleasantly. ‘Come back to the counter, and I’ll show you what we have.’
On the counter, inside a glass box, lay an oblong object about six inches by ten. Some shiny blue substance formed a case around an even glossier grey rectangle.
‘That’s an ancient book,’ the young man said.
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