by Kate Elliott
“But Yuri said that—” she hesitated—“that you gave him a merciful death, compared to what—what he was meant to receive.”
Bakhtiian looked away from her, his expression shuttered. “I am not a savage,” he said almost inaudibly.
Tess fell silent. The wind brought to her a sharp, rich fragrance, like vanilla. “It’s true,” she said finally, “that the world forces us to make bitter choices. I suppose that makes it hard to search for the truth, especially if we believe that truth can only be found along the path that is familiar to us.”
He tossed his knife up. It caught the sunlight and flashed. For that instant, as he watched the knife reach its peak and begin to fall again, his face opened somehow, giving her a glimpse of the boy, twenty years ago, who had played with such dangerous toys with the same unself-conscious joy and absorption with which a child plays with building blocks. Then the knife fell, and he caught it.
“God, isn’t that dangerous?”
He laughed. “Of course.” He sheathed the knife. “How can any one of us claim to know which paths the gods walk? How can we hope to walk on their path at all? Except for philosophers like Newton, of course.”
“Newton walked many strange paths. I have to suppose that all paths have gods of one kind or another. But I think we are responsible for finding our own way.”
“We must do what we can with what we have?”
Tess pushed herself to the edge of the wall and jumped down. Bakhtiian put out a hand to steady her landing, a momentary touch, no more. “Is that what you believe?”
“What I believe?” Leaning back against the wall, he folded his arms over his belt. Wind caught a strand of his hair and blew it up away from his forehead. “I don’t know where the sun and the moon came from, how the grass and the hills came to be. I suppose they came by themselves. But I believe that there is truth to be found, and I’m not always certain that it is only to be found in the gods. Or in what we call the gods.”
“You’ve been reading too much philosophy.”
He smiled. “Is philosophy dangerous?”
“Very dangerous.”
“What do you believe, then?”
“I believe that there is truth to be found inside every person, but that very few people find it because it is dark inside, and deeply hidden, and the trees grow thickly.”
“But you forget, there are always springs one can drink from.” He looked toward the plains. “Ah, there are our fellow mortals.”
“Come to bask in the fragrance of immortality, however fleeting?”
“Bask in the fragrance? I think you mean bask in the warmth.”
They walked down to the grazing horses to wait for the approaching riders. The jahar splashed over the ford and halted beside them. Most of the riders wandered aimlessly around the ruins, curious. A few drank at the spring. Ishii and Garii and Rakii made the most cursory of inspections before returning to their horses.
Ishii came up to Bakhtiian. “We have seen what we need here. We can go on.”
If this surprised Bakhtiian, he concealed it very well. The entire company set off westward, Tess and Bakhtiian waiting till the rest had gone.
“So it is a temple. I knew it.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The khepelli asked to see the zhapolaya, didn’t they? Did they ask to see this place as well?”
He blinked. “I am beginning to think the prince has curious concerns. What do you mean?”
“Oh, hell,” she said under her breath, but she had no one else to ask and she needed to know. “Specifically, by name.”
“Ah,” said Bakhtiian, meaning by that breath of a comment nothing Tess could fathom. “Yes, they did. Why do you ask?”
She grinned. “I’m searching for the truth.”
He smiled. “Have it your way. For now. I’m patient, and our journey is a long one.” He reined his horse out, over the ford.
Tess lingered a moment, staring up at the cliffs. The touch of the gods. She was glad that this place had nothing to do with the Chapalii, that it did indeed have gods, that it existed for itself alone. And she was relieved that the Chapalii didn’t know everything there was to know about Rhui, that they had believed these ruins might be of interest to them. In which case, did that mean they had known that the transmitter was a transmitter, or not? Neither prospect was reassuring. She sighed and followed Bakhtiian.
They rode southwest through low hills. In the early afternoon the ground broke under them, the uniformity of the plain disturbed as abruptly as a pebble breaks the still surface of a pond. At first, steep hillocks and low sheer slopes radiated out, and then the earth itself fell away on either side, a few rivulets descending past curves, lost to her sight. Coming around the last of the little hills, they pulled up.
Tess saw the lake first, a pale jewel at the center, before her gaze fanned out to the huge basin that cradled this circle of blue. It was an ancient crater; nothing else could form such a distinctive shape, could be so unnaturally round. Or could account for the strange hills, flung out like debris from some massive impact. A meteor, surely—and then Myshla shied away from the bright wink of sunlight, glancing off a smooth surface embedded in the ground. Bakhtiian, ahead of her, had not noticed.
Tess pulled up Myshla and stared down. Dirt had eroded away from a plate of metal. It gleamed, uncorroded. A shock of grass obscured most of the plate. In days, Tess thought, the entire patch would be grown over. She dismounted and tried to pry it out, but it was too thick. Where the grass ended, the plate disappeared back under earth. She drew her knife and dug down, working quickly. A third of a meter down there was still no break. This was not the artifact of a primitive culture. Bakhtiian called back to her, and she mounted and urged Myshla forward to catch up with him.
Staring around at the steep slope of the crater, down to the flat-bottomed basin below, she wondered how big a ship, crashing or purposefully blown up, would make such a mark in its leave-taking.
At the same time, she realized that it was not the deepness of the crater but the pall of smoke over the land below that gave the bottom an indistinct tinge. She saw neatly laid out fields, some still green. Others looked strangely altered, as if they had been trampled.
It was the town that was on fire, flames licking up from some of the houses huddled inside the earth wall that from this height seemed pitifully insignificant. In another quarter, a whole street lay blackened, smoking like cold breath on an icy afternoon. Figures ran and labored under the sun. A broken line extended out to the lake, a tenuous string to the water.
“Curse them,” said Bakhtiian. “Come on.” He turned his horse to ride along the edge of the crater.
“We’re not going down there, are we? I didn’t know there were settlements out here. What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know.” His voice, like his shoulders, was as taut as a strung bow. “But see, there are vultures.”
She saw the birds, circling near a few squat trees. Below, none of the hurried figures took any notice of the pair far above them.
“I’m sorry,” said Bakhtiian suddenly, “that you have to see this.”
They weren’t trees. They were posts, driven into the ground. Six posts stood in a semicircle just above the well-trodden path, marked by a solitary seventh post, that led down into the valley. The birds cried out raucously and flapped away as Tess and Bakhtiian approached. The stench hit, fetid, overwhelming.
Three jaran men, clad in red shirts and black trousers, had been tied to the posts. All three were dead, and while one, perhaps, had died naturally of his wounds, the manner of execution of the other two was quite obvious.
“They may have been my enemies,” said Bakhtiian quietly, “but I can only hope that they were dead when that was done to them.”
A bird, emboldened by their stillness, settled onto the slumped head of the farthest body.
“Go away!” Tess kicked Myshla forward. The bird squawked and fluttered away. She found hersel
f on top of the scattered and half-eaten entrails that littered the ground in front of the men. Insects swarmed over the remains. Jerking Myshla hard to the left, she pulled away, gagging, to halt in front of the solitary post that marked the descent of the trail.
“Look here,” she said quickly, desperate to stop her gagging, to not have to look behind her and see the burnt-out, bloody eye sockets, the gaping abdomens—“There’s writing posted here, but I can’t read—here at the bottom it’s a bit like Rhuian. I think that’s a ‘b’ there and some vowel, I think an ‘o’ maybe, and I’m sure that’s a ‘c’ but it would be a hard ‘c’ if it was related to the northern dialect that the sailors in Jeds spoke and then that must be—my God! It’s your name.” She put one hand over her mouth.
“It was the obvious choice,” said Bakhtiian, so close behind her that her startled gasp almost made her retch. “Don’t be too proud to be sick if you have to,” he added, more gently.
“Not as long as I don’t have to touch them. Can you read what it says?”
“A little. Evidently a jahar attacked and set fire to this settlement. I suppose their goal was to blame the attack on me, and thus make the khaja hatred for me greater than it already is. My enemies have done this before.”
“Do you know who they are?”
“Oh, yes. They’re Doroskayev’s men. You never saw them.”
“No,” she said faintly.
“We’d better go.” He reined his horse around. “Look. They’ve seen us.”
“Bakhtiian!” In her outrage, turning Myshla after him, her gaze flashed past the three strung-up bodies to follow his back. “Aren’t you even going to bury them?”
He kept riding. “Bury them? You’d condemn them to burial for raiding a village?”
She came up beside him as they rounded the curve of a steep hillock, the crater and the site of execution shut out by the slope. “Condemn? I don’t understand.”
“Let’s get away from here.” He urged his horse to a canter. Emerging onto the plain, rolling here toward a range of low hills, they slowed the horses to a walk.
“Forgive me if I was hasty,” he said after a silence. “Burial is the worst thing that could happen to the jaran. But perhaps in other places that isn’t—” he shuddered—“true.”
“It isn’t. Why is it so bad?”
He turned his head to stare at her, amazed. “To be trapped beneath the earth, forever separated from the sky, never again to live where the wind can touch you? That is only for the sacrilegious.”
“Is it better to be torn to pieces by the animals?”
“But they are the gods’ creatures, scattering our bodies back to the wind. And the wind gathers us up and pours our spirit into the womb of a woman ripe for conception, and the world receives us back again.”
Tess was silent, staring out at the wide stretch of plain, that sudden sink of land lost behind them like a dream. Around them the grass seemed empty of any life but the wind’s. “But I thought you burned the dead.”
“That privilege is only given to those who die in battle, men in honorable war, women in childbirth. The fire releases you from all bonds to the earth, and the gods, alerted to your coming by the bitter herb ulyan, welcome you to the heavens. And your spirit is free forever from this world.”
“And everyone else…”
Bakhtiian said nothing for a moment. “It is also an honorable death. Many choose it.”
“How can you choose to be left lying on the ground?”
“Old people, ill ones, those who can no longer keep up, often stay behind of their own choosing, knowing that their time has come.”
“You abandon them?” She had such a horrible vision of sitting alone among the grass and insects, figures growing smaller, gone, finally, the sun silent above, that for one wild instant she thought all this the dream and herself still far north, lost forever in grass.
“We move, always. We cannot wait.” His eyes, his whole expression, seemed remote, staring at something she could not see. “That is how I intend to die, when the time comes, not seeking to prolong it.”
“You have no intention of dying in battle?”
“None at all.”
“But you carry ulyan.”
Now his gaze focused on her, but it made her feel quite isolated. “But I don’t. I want to come back.”
They rode the rest of the way in silence. The three men, hung out like leavings for the birds, and the half-buried plate of metal ran like loops through her mind, first one, then the other, then the first again, until she wished she could simply stop thinking. Bakhtiian planning war against the khaja; his enemies trying to start that war early to disrupt his plans. Or simply trying, one way or the other, to get him killed? Or simply enamored of killing—how was she to know? The moon was up when, having been challenged by three separate sentries, she and Bakhtiian trotted over a low hill and down into the scatter of tents.
Niko jogged up to them immediately and took the reins of Ilya’s horse. “So many sentries?” Bakhtiian asked.
“Tasha spotted a scout this morning and held on, but the fellow veered east. Josef got a glimpse of him this afternoon, but he slanted off again. Josef thinks he’s solo.”
Bakhtiian nodded as he bent to check his mount’s left foreleg. “See here. It’s swollen and hot.” Niko frowned with concern and examined the stallion’s leg while Ilya watched. “Let’s see if we can lure this scout in tonight and capture him. I wonder if Mikhailov has at last picked up our trail or even joined up with Doroskayev? Gods, I can’t believe Mikhailov would stoop so low.”
“Couldn’t it be one of Doroskayev’s men?” Niko asked.
Bakhtiian smiled slightly and, glancing up at Tess, moved decisively to hold Myshla’s bridle so that she, too, could dismount. “But we have news,” he said as Tess swung down, “that will put things in quite a different light. Assemble the riders. Single sentry should be sufficient for now.” Niko nodded and went off.
“Do I have to hear this?” Tess asked.
“No. Yuri will have put up your tent.” He led the black away.
Finding herself alone in the gloom, Tess allowed the tears to come, but the force of them overwhelmed her and she shut her eyes, leaning against the comforting bulk of Myshla. The image of the three mutilated bodies flared so vividly in her mind that she gasped.
“Tess?” She put out her hand and grasped substance, an arm, the silken sleeve of a shirt, ridged with embroidery.
“Fedya.” She opened her eyes.
“It will only be a short assembly.”
“Yes.” Her fingers slipped down his arm to grasp his hand. “Afterward.”
“Past the horses is a spring and past that a copse.” He squeezed her hand, so gentle a pressure that the feeling it left vanished as quickly as he did, gone after Bakhtiian.
She unsaddled Myshla, checked her hooves doubly carefully, groomed her and hobbled her and set her out with the other horses under Pavel’s care. Pavel nodded at her but he was busy plastering a cold compress of herbs on the foreleg of Bakhtiian’s black, the fine khuhaylan stallion that no one wanted to lose to lameness. The saddle was an easier burden than her thoughts as Tess walked through camp, past the assembly to the very edge of the tents, where Yuri had pitched hers.
As she knelt to dump the saddle on the ground, she saw four Chapalii walk out over a low rise into the darkness. Making a quick tour back through camp, she realized there were no Chapalii anywhere, unless the rest were all in their tents. Surely they could not intend to trek all the way back to the crater by night? A ship, blowing up…What if it had been a Chapalii ship? But that was impossible. Whatever impact had made that crater had occurred millennia ago. Had there been an alien empire before the Chapalii? A greater one than theirs? A hundred possibilities presented themselves. She circled around toward the spring, passing Nikita on sentry duty, and then she was alone again.
She found the Chapalii past the copse, hidden by a rise. They had gathered in a tight cl
ump in the declivity made by the joining of two rises. On her hands and knees, pausing just behind the crest, she could make out all eleven figures, shadowed by the moon. A tiny blue-white light gleamed softly from within their ranks. The night lay still around her. No breeze stirred the air. Voices drifted up to her, phrases broken by pauses and replies.
“…identified two previous…unsure whether the duke…Keinaba…constant surveillance…insufficient evidence to believe…”
A communication. They were communicating—with whom? A Chapalii ship? But none stayed in orbit around Rhui. How far could they transmit? How far did this conspiracy reach? She pulled the little knife Garii had given her from her belt, and hunkered down even more to conceal herself from them as she stared at it. White lights speckled the hilt. She hadn’t a clue how to operate it, and either Garii had purposefully left her ignorant or he had simply not thought he needed to tell her. Tess stuck it back in her belt and lifted herself up carefully to watch again. The scene had not changed.
Wind moved the grass above them. Startled, Tess looked in that direction. In the instant before she really saw, she realized that a man was creeping down on them, was halfway down the hill opposite. Light-haired? Had Nikita followed her? But this man was stocky. My God! She stood up. Fedya must have come after her.
At that same moment one of the Chapalii said something, a slight cry. As if in sudden panic, another of the aliens whirled and crouched. Light streaked out soundlessly toward the man on the hill. He seemed to leap backward, half-rising. The thin line of light cut out through the night again, and the man fell, tumbling down the slope to land at the feet of the aliens. Tess cried out and ran down to him.
Ishii’s voice. “Do not shoot her, you imbeciles.”
She stopped short, facing four knives. Red beads of light shone sharply at their hilts. Armed. Lethal.
“Let me go to him.” Her voice broke on the edge of a sob.
“Let her go,” said Ishii. A path formed for her.
She stumbled past them, collapsing on her knees beside the body. The second shot had opened up his abdomen, a cleaner cut than those endured by Doroskayev’s men, half cauterized by heat. Blood seeped onto the grass. “Oh, God, Fedya,” she cried, reaching out to touch his shoulder.