by Kate Elliott
“So the ceremony finishes,” she whispered, while the presbyter droned on in his sonorous voice, and two priests brought forward a cup out of which both Janos and Rusudani drank, Janos looking triumphant and Rusudani looking…exalted and defiant. “The words are much the same, although they speak them out of ignorance. ‘Thus by this drink from the holy cup of Hristain’s suffering are you sealed, thus by this chain are you bound together as wife and husband, never to be sundered in this life.’ ”
Vasha felt Ilya stir, and he looked down at once and saw Ilya looking up at him, puzzled. His expression looked odd, until Vasha realized that the pupils of his eyes were different sizes. Vasha took hold of Ilya’s hand, and Ilya lifted his other hand and rubbed his eyes.
“Shh,” hissed Vasha. Ilya stilled and shut his eyes.
Janos stepped back from the altar and spoke, giving a command.
Jaelle started, jerking her hand away from Stefan. All the color leached out of her face. She looked into the dark church, at the flames dancing around the assembled men, many of whom stared now at her. “I beg of you, your highness,” she pleaded, “grant me the mercy God shows all His children. Do not throw me to the wolves.”
Rusudani spoke.
“What is she saying?” Stefan demanded.
A discontented murmur rumbled through the assembled soldiers. Jaelle’s breath gusted out of her all at once. “Princess Rusudani has interceded for me, may God bless her. I am to attend her and Princess Katerina until we reach Prince Janos’s city.”
Prince Janos gave a series of orders to one of his captains, who eyed Jaelle avariciously. Then, escorted by the abbot and four soldiers, he and Rusudani left the church.
Vladimir nodded to Vasha, and Vasha got an arm under his father and hoisted him to his feet. Ilya staggered and then, with a huge effort, got his feet under him while the khaja soldiers muttered and pointed at him. Vasha feared that they would want to kill him because of his wounds, but in the end the soldiers simply led them out of the church, through the dark maze of the monastery, and into a small wooden hut.
They closed them in there, in a place that smelled of hides and earth, and as Vasha helped his father lie down he heard soldiers muttering outside, laughing, calling out, as they settled into guard duty.
“Let me look at him again,” said Stefan, crouching beside Ilya. It was so dark in the tiny hut that Vasha could only see Stefan as a black shape moving against the darkness.
“How is your arm?” Katya asked from the other side of the hut.
Vasha heard a caught-in gasp and then Vladimir replied, “Better that we leave it as it is until there is light to see by. It’s broken, and the shoulder is out, but I’m not going to bleed to death.”
“Let me at least try to pop the shoulder back. Nikita. I’ll brace him and you—”
“Of course.”
There was a moment of silence. Vladimir cursed sharply.
“That’s done it,” said Katya. “What of you others?”
They talked on, tallying their wounds, none of them as serious as Bakhtiian’s, while Vasha sat beside his father, holding his hand, and listened as Stefan made a running commentary in a low voice, touching Ilya here and here, avoiding the actual wound, trying to coax Ilya to speak, but Bakhtiian said nothing. Vasha could tell he was awake, though, because of the way he breathed, and the way his breathing shifted, quickened, and slowed as Stefan probed.
A thin sliver of light showed abruptly under the door, and a moment later it was thrown open, illuminating them. Vasha blinked furiously. Stefan sat back at once on his heels. Katerina rose imperiously.
The captain stood there. He glanced at them, eyes lingering longest on Katerina, but he spoke in their tongue to Jaelle. Her hands were in fists, but she rose.
“What is it?” asked Stefan.
“I am to attend the princess,” she said, but her voice quavered and she looked afraid. She went with the captain without another word. The door was set to, enclosing them in darkness once again.
Time passed. The others slept, those that could, and it was otherwise silent. Vasha could not sleep. He held onto his father’s hand and now and again addressed a question to him, but Ilya never answered. Outside he heard the soldiers on guard, talking in their khaja tongue. There was no way to mark the stars or the moon. Only the soft sound of breathing and, once, a moan from one of the sleeping men, marked the night passing by. After a long while, Ilya’s breathing slipped into the shallow rhythm of an unquiet sleep. In the darkness, Vasha felt alone except for the touch that linked him to his father.
Jaelle did not return.
PART TWO
The Dominion of Time
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
The Perilous Frontier
NIKO SIBIRIN DIED UNEXPECTEDLY on a day noted for many strange and unlooked for occurrences.
Tess woke alone. Natalia had gone last night to sleep at Svetlana Tagansky’s tent, with Svetlana and Aleksi’s daughter Sofia, and Yuri was, in Tess’s opinion, an obscenely early riser. She had trained him to wake, dress, and sneak out of the tent without bothering her. He was rather like his father in that regard, except that Yuri, unlike any other child in camp, would ask to go to bed as soon as he was tired.
“On the other hand,” she said to the dim ceiling of her tent, having gotten in the habit of talking to herself in the years since she’d had the implant, “that must seem no odder to everyone than my habit of sleeping in.”
She got herself up reluctantly, dressed, and walked out to the pits, now built over and made much more presentable looking, with runoff and a ramp. Three khaja laborers worked now, shoveling nightsoil for the fields into a cart. They glanced up at her and as quickly away; like most khaja men living near the jaran, they had learned to be circumspect around jaran women.
On her way back to the tents, she passed Galina, who looked like she, too, had just woken up.
“Did the little one sleep poorly last night?” Tess inquired.
Galina threw her an eloquent glance. She had dark circles under her eyes.
“You look tired. Shall I take Dmitri for a little while?”
“Oh, yes,” said Galina gratefully. “I just nursed him. I heard there’s a new train of merchants come into the marketplace.”
Tess tied the sling on and settled Dmitri in it. He was not even two months old yet, a rather querulous child and a fussy eater, so that he demanded to eat frequently but wasn’t growing very fast. Galina looked tired and dragged out most of the time. “Then it will be a pleasant change for you to go down with a friend and look at the cloth stalls.”
“I’d like that!” replied Galina, looking relieved to be free of her son.
Tess wandered back to the tents, seeing Galina’s older boy running with the mob of young children who moved like a perpetual motion machine about the camp. Yuri was with them, and today, evidently, Natalia and Sofia and Lara had been put in charge of the younger children, because they were there as well. Tess greeted her children with a kiss, greeted the others with hugs and kisses, and told Lara firmly that she was not allowed to let the younger children whack each other with wooden practice swords.
Sonia looked up from her loom and waved at her. “Good morning!” she said cheerfully as Tess stepped in under the awning. “What game has Lara devised this time?” Tess explained. “Ah. Earlier, she wanted to divide them into jahars, which would have been fine except she insisted that hers always be the strongest so that she could always win.” She shook her head. “I don’t know what to do with that child.”
“Send her off to Uncle Yakhov and let her spend her days with the horses. That would keep her happy.”
“It isn’t really suitable training for a girl….”
“Sonia, I don’t think Lara will ever have the patience to weave or spin. You can’t make a duck hunt like a hawk, nor a hawk swim like a duck.”
“True enough. I’ll speak to Mother about it. Natalia and Sofia would not be nearly as wild without Lara’s influe
nce.”
“Talia is not wild.”
“Not at all, my dear. I see you took the little one from Galina.” Tess bent down so that Sonia could peer into the sling. Dmitri was sucking on his knuckles. His eyes were so brilliant a blue that they startled. “Looks he’ll have,” commented Sonia, “but I hope he outgrows that disposition. So like his father’s.”
“Sonia! You might have a child as fussy as this one.”
Sonia ran a hand over her rounded belly. “I hope I have been faithful enough to the gods’ will that they choose to grant me as easy a child as my other four have been. In any case, I am a much better judge of men than Galina, poor child.”
Tess laughed. “I’ll let you congratulate yourself in peace, then. I’m going to the library.”
On the long walk across the plaza, Dmitri fell asleep, lulled by the movement.
The ke did not meet her in the entry hallway, but Tess noted a new growth, a fretwork pattern of turquoise glass and black marble, pushing out into the white space. She passed into her own chamber and saw the message light blinking. Sitting down in front of the console, she triggered the message.
A woman’s head and shoulders materialized above the console.
“Soje!” exclaimed Tess happily.
Sojourner King Bakundi smiled as if in answer, although this message had to have been recorded days or weeks earlier. “Heyo, Tess.” She lifted a hand. “I’m calling you from the perilous frontier.” Tess smiled and shifted in the seat so that Dmitri could rest on one hip. “I wanted you to meet the newest member of our clan, Tess. This is Imani King Oljaitu.”
The recording device pulled back to take in Imani sitting in Sojourner’s lap. Imani was about six months old, fat, happy, with a nap of curly black hair and a perfect mocha complexion.
“I know you heard the news about her birth, but I haven’t had time to send you a decent image of her yet, so here it is. We’re back on the flagship after a one month holiday with my clan, which was wonderful except there’s a running feud between my sister Candace and my cousin Buru over—”
As she kept talking, the frame broadened to include her husband Rene. He sat in a chair next to her, face composed with a diplomat’s polite interest. He wore a cranberry-colored cutaway jacket, unbuttoned to reveal a double-breasted striped waistcoat underneath. Rene was a dandy, not the kind of person Tess would ever have thought of Soje as handfasting with. Tess got a message from Sojourner about four times a year, always with Rene in tow, and Tess had learned that she could follow the current fashions by studying what Rene wore in the transmission. She had seen this waistcoat before, but the jacket was new.
“As it happened,” Sojourner was saying, “we had transferred for a three day stint onto the Echido barge Usendi, and since I was three weeks to due date we left the med-tech behind on the flagship, and there I was standing on the bridge when my water broke! You’ve never felt embarrassment until you’ve stood in a puddle of your own amniotic fluid among a crowd of polite aliens. The worst part was having to explain what was happening! Then you should have seen changes in their facial tints.” She chuckled. “They hustled me off to the female chambers and while we were sending for the med-tech a ke came in and—”
With Sojourner well launched on her anecdote, Tess focused in on Rene’s hands. That was the new sartorial addition: The tightness of the jacket sleeves was relieved at the wrist by four buttons, left open to reveal a hint of white ruffled shirtsleeve. He had fine hands; Tess had learned to admire them, although she had never yet met him in the flesh. Now, he began to tap on the arm of the chair, as if whiling away the time while Sojourner gossiped.
Tess opened her own screen and, concentrating on his fingers, began to take down the message he was sending to her in Morse Code. Primitive, but useful. Sojourner cheerfully talked on and Imani chimed in with occasional comments in fluent babble.
single level of encryption, message begins, transport codes delivered in tripartite sequences, top level unknown. second level public record, third level coded to house sequence. no further levels noted.
Dmitri woke up and began to fuss. Tess flipped off the message and bounced him a little, and he calmed down, but when she switched the message to run, he began to fuss again. So, giving up, she rewound to the beginning and stood rocking back and forth to keep Dmitri soothed and just listened to Sojourner’s gossip, which was, always, entertaining. She could come back later to decode the entire message.
By the end of the tape, Dmitri was fussing in earnest. Tess locked the message onto a cylinder and then left the library and took the northwest avenue that led to the marketplace. It was a dreary day, overcast and muggy. A great flank of clouds pushed in from the west. Despite that, the market was filled, and Tess pushed and squeezed through the crowd until she reached the bazaar of the cloth merchants. A crowd had gathered here to listen to a man in a plain gray robe who was, evidently, preaching.
Curious, Tess paused to listen, bouncing Dmitri on her hip to keep him quiet.
“…and when it comes to pass that the angels shall descend from the heavens, then, in the hour of the fourth book, all illness shall be razed from the land, and in the hour of the third book, all famine shall be razed from the land, and in the hour of the second book, all war shall be razed from the land, and in the hour of the first book, death itself shall be lifted by the glorious hand of God. So shall these signs be seen in the pilgrimage of His Daughter as She wanders, so do the smallest of miracles appear to mark Her wanderings: Has not the winter past been mild and the crops abundant? Has not the hand of war brought peace? Does the tiny babe not thrive that would have perished before? Those touched by Her mercy must thrive, even the heathen, who are themselves a sign of Her coming. How else would the jaran have conquered so much so swiftly if God had not granted them His Grace, for that they signal the coming of the Merciful Age once again? Is not their bakhtiian a man of a full hundred years of age who yet appears to be a young man of thirty?”
Tess started. She always made it a point to invite churchmen and holy men and women to audience, but this was an apocalyptic prophecy she had certainly not heard before. She studied the man’s plain robes and finally saw the tiny knife hanging from a chain around his neck: that and his lack of beard or mustache marked him as an adherent of what she called the Hristanic Church. She wondered what Brother Saghir, who had already founded a congregation of the True Church in Sarai, would think of this man’s prophesying.
“Tess!” Galina emerged out of the cloth merchants’ bazaar.
Tess slid away from the crowd and went to greet her.
Galina displayed several bolts of cloth. “See, isn’t this blue pretty? It came all the way from the Yarial Empire, across the Golden Road.”
“Or so the merchant claimed,” put in her more skeptical companion, a Danov granddaughter.
“No, look at this weave. Do you see how the thread is—”
The intricacies of weaving were too much for Tess, and evidently the two young women had argued over this point already.
“Dmitri is hungry,” Tess broke in.
Galina sighed. “Very well. Will you carry this back to camp for me, Aunt Tess? Elena is already weighted down with the rest of the cloth.”
Tess exchanged the baby for the cloth, and rather missed the warmth of the infant. She drifted back to listen to the preacher again.
“Just as you have come to this city that lies on the edge of the wilderness, so do we all live in the great city being built by God, at the edge of the time of the ending of the Accursed Age and the dawning of the Merciful Age. There will be much grief and sorrow, but there will also come the burning light of God that will cleanse us of all—”
A figure passed under the arches leading into the cloth merchants’ bazaar. Tess stepped away and peered after it. Those Habakar women who had come to Sarai with their husbands or fathers dressed modestly in public, but the same could be said for all the khaja women here. A few wore veils, many covered their hair,
but most had adopted the jaran custom of free passage for women. This figure, unusually tall, was covered from head to foot in heavy veils.
What on earth was the ke doing out in so public a place?
Tess darted after her. She ducked and weaved through the crowd and managed to follow the ke all the way through the cloth merchant bazaar into the court of the spice merchants (where she sneezed at least three times) and passed into the dim arcade sheltering the Scribes Guild. The ke stood before a nondescript stall, but turned, anticipating Tess’s arrival.
“Here is a manuscript you will wish to acquire,” said the ke at once, as if she had known Tess was following her.
In the first Chapalii world Tess had learned, no Chapalii would have spoken before Tess, heir to a duke, did; it had taken her a long time to get used to the ke’s casual assumption of equality between them. But that’s what I wanted, she reminded herself, stepping forward to examine the stall.
The scribe looked nervous, sitting at a table illuminated by two candles protected by glass shutters and what light penetrated the inner depths: Scribes never worked out in the elements, but the outermost and innermost stalls were always reserved for the poorest or least established scribes.
“You’re new here?” Tess asked in Taor.
He nodded and glanced with superstitious distrust at the ke. “This holy one is known to the scribes here. She is interested in this scroll, which has recently come into my possession.” He fingered a leather sheath which, presumably, held the scroll. Tess nodded. He licked his lips and went on. “It is known as the Byblene Gospel, my lady.”
“That’s a heretical work, isn’t it?”
He pulled ink-stained fingers through his black beard. “I am a good Habakar merchant, my lady, trusting in God Almighty, in whom all mercy resides. This came to me through my cousin who had it from his brother-in-law, who had it from a Xiriki merchant who had it from a captain of the jaran army who claimed to have captured it from a merchant at the siege of Targana who in his turn claimed to have been given it by a scholar from Byblos.”