“Direnja hiVayeshtu of the Green Malachite clan,” the officer said, once Trinesh had introduced himself and his three troopers. “I have the honor of being the Kasi of the fourth Cohort of the Legion of Mengano the Jakallan. I find no dispatch announcing a visit from Storm of Fire.” He smacked his lips ruefully. “Not that headquarters might remember to send me any. Have you reported yet to General Qutmu?”
“Sire?”
“General Qutmu. Qutmu hiTsizena, the new general of the Battalions of the Seal of the Worm, the Ninth Medium Infantry.”
“I thought—”
“That old Qurrumu hiKhanuma was still in charge? He retired last year to tend his worm-crop in the City of Sarku, and Prince Dhich’une popped this toady of his into the slot. General Qutmu’s in command of this miserable siege.”
“Uh, yes, Sire.” The Kasi was looking at him expectantly, and Trinesh stumbled on. “We’re from Fortress Ninu’ur, Sire. We were lost in the desert, and now we seek to rejoin our unit. ’ ’ How much would this prosaic-looking artilleryman believe?
Direnja hiVayeshtu eyed them keenly. “Not deserters? I’ve nothing against you, and I’d hate to turn you over to Qutmu’s wormy lads! But there are some—” he glanced toward the back of the tent “—who take considerable joy in watching the impalement of deserters.”
“No, Sire. We fought the Yan Koryani at Fortress Ninu’ur, took it, and then became—ah—separated from the rest of our folk.”
“Cha! Whatever.” Direnja hiVayeshtu gave his scrolls a last desultory poke. “Well, you won’t find ’em here at Pu’er.”
“Pu’er?”
“Pu’er, HereksaV’ Dineva murmured. “Didn’t somebody lay siege to Pu’er last year? I don’t think it fell, though.” “Ai, Pu’er.” The Kasi scowled, made a ring of thumb and forefinger, peered through it in the direction of the city, and spat. The obscene gesture conveyed a great deal. “Seal of the Worm and Scales of Brown—two of Lord Sarku’s best Legions—tried to take it and failed. No artillery, no engines, and no timber anywhere within two hundred Tsan to make ’em. Stupidity! They gave up. They ate their supplies, ate the forage, ate the bodies of the dead, ate the peasants and ail their children to boot—and left!” He slapped a palm upon the table. “Left it to us, the proper folk, to finish. Artillery and sappers. General Mengano sent us out from Thri’il, and we’ve a Cohort of Vrishtara the Mole’s diggers over yonder behind the mangonels. We’ll crack the nut, and then their undead—” he flicked a quizzical eye at Trinesh. “—You’ve seen, eh? You know? Fa! Their dirty undead can clean up the job and bring greater glory to the Petal Throne thereby!” “Ask them where they acquired their armor,” another voice asked, a woman’s. Trinesh had not seen her reclining upon the Kasi's sleeping mat in the shadows behind him. She sat up, stretched, and began wrapping an emerald-green skirt about her ample hips. Little silver chains jangled at her wrists and ankles, and her slightly slanted eyes still bore streaks of black Tsunu-paste.
Trinesh knew a devotee of Lady Dlamelish when he saw one. The most sensual of the five Lords of Change of Pavar’s pantheon, the Goddess loved the pleasures of the body and the hedonistic Now above all else. This woman was neither young nor old, a bit too plump for Trinesh’ taste (a picture of poor Saina flickered among his thoughts), and much given to paints, powders, and strong perfumes. She lifted her loose, heavy tresses to clasp a collar of green-dyed Chlen-hide about her throat; its glyphs and symbols indicated a priestess of some sort, probably of one of the junior Circles.
“Ah, yes. Your armor.” The Kasi raked them all with another glance.
“Took it from a cache we found at Fortress Ninu’ur, Sire,” Trinesh improvised. No one would argue that: it was steel, far more costly than the harness issued by his Legion. He made out the glint of a tiny turquoise phallus on a silver chain at the captain’s throat; the man, too, was a worshipper of the Emerald Goddess—or of Her Cohort, Lady Hrihayal. Both deitie§ loved the pleasures of the senses. This Kasi, of all people, ought to sympathize with a rich bit of plunder!
Direnja hiVayeshtu grinned. “You’ve just these three soldiers, HereksaT'
“Yes, Sire. We lost a few.”
“But you picked up a few trinkets, eh? The armor? This girl? Yan Koryani, by the look of her.”
“The maid of the enemy commandant at Fortress Ninu’ur,” Trinesh replied easily. “The boy’s a slave—useful.”
“As you say. And the old man? —And that? The Nininyal?" “The man’s Tsolyani, a hermit who helped us in the desert. The other’s a scholar of some kind. Surrendered and offered to join our side. We were taking him to General Kutume, Sire.”
“Would you sell the girl?” the woman purred. “One of our senior priestesses, the Lady Anka’a hiQolyelmu, is at Kankara, just up the road, on her way to take charge of our temple in Sunraya. She’d like her.”
The Kasi showed white teeth in a broader smile. “Save religion for later, Mashyan! Sex and sacrifices after breakfast! These folk have journeyed a long way. I’m not sure, but I think Fortress Ninu’ur lies about a hundred and forty Tsan southwest of here.”
The woman, Mashyan, went to the Lady Jai, pulled her two cloaks aside, ran emerald-lacquered nails over the girl’s limbs, and admired her openly. She exclaimed at the strips of bloody cloth Dineva had used to wrap her feet.
“A long walk through the desert, dear! We must remedy that. Scars will spoil your value. Does she speak Tsolyani?” Trinesh fixed the rest of his party with a warning eye. “Not much. I’d not wish to sell her, though—a gift for my clan-sisters. Uh, Sire, you did mention food?”
The Kasi shouted, and orderlies hurried in with Chumetl, cakes of fresh-baked Dwa-bread, a bronze cauldron of fiery-spiced Jakallan stew, and the remains of a haunch of Hmelu. He watched while Trinesh allocated eating places to his party. The Tsolyani might not be as fastidious as the lords of ancient Mihallu, but it was still mandatory to eat upon daises set in tiers according to one’s rank, even if these were no more than several layers of carpets, a stairstep arrangement of earthen platforms, or squares scratched upon the bare ground. This was important, therefore: a gaffe here might just convince the Kasi that they were deserters, unfamiliar with the usages of Trinesh’s Red Mountain clan. Too big a mistake, and they could be hauled off as spies.
Direnja hiVayeshtu himself squatted crosslegged upon his sleeping mat, the highest of the impromptu daises; Trinesh and the priestess, Mashyan hiSagai, decided that their status was about equal and seated themselves upon the carpet underneath the mat, the next lowest; then came Chosun upon the rough reed matting that underlay the carpet, and below him upon a raised section of the earthen floor were Arjasu and Dineva. The others were relegated to the still lower area near the entrance of the tent. Trinesh was relieved that Tse’e made no objection; it would be hard to explain the presence of an unknown Prince of the Imperium, the half-brother of the Seal Emperor himself, to this simple artilleryman!
The food was plain camp fare, but to Trinesh it was a banquet. The esoteric delicacies of Mihallu were as dead leaves when compared with these familiar dishes. They ate hugely, while Direnja hiVayeshtu and his priestess looked on.
Trinesh wondered whether the Kasi still suspected them to be deserters. He did not press the matter, but his remark about General Qutmu hiTsizena was worrisome: sooner or later they would have to report. Only the senior commander could grant them permission to leave for Kankara or wherever General Kutume and their Legion were currently reputed to be.
Then there was the Flame-damned priestess. Her basilisk-gaze never left the Lady Jai. She might want the girl for herself—devotees of the Emerald Goddess and Her Cohort were given to such predilections—but Trinesh doubted it. A very pretty^ noble, captive maiden made an excellent offering, and had not Mashyan hiSagai mentioned the Lady Anka’a hiQolyelmu? Even in Tumissa Trinesh had heard of that one: second or third in the Empire after their High Priestess, the Lady Timuna hiReretlesa, was she not? And devoted to very odd rituals? A nic
e gift to her could mean a rung or two up on the ladder of promotion within the Temple.
His little inner voice fussily insisted upon drawing a parallel between that last thought and Trinesh’s own plans for the Lady Deq Dimani. He glowered to himself and forced his attention back to what the Kasi was saying.
“—There’s room in the guest-tent.” Direnja hiVayeshtu wiped his fingers upon the little towel the orderly held out to him. “We’ve had only a courier or two during the past month. Nobody of any consequence since the end of last year.”
“The end—?” Trinesh was confused.
“Ai, since the Emperor’s Accession-day on the tenth of Dohala. ’ ’
This could not be! “Sire, what—uh—is the date? We’ve been in the desert a long time.”
Direnja hiVayeshtu exchanged glances with his priestess. ‘Urn—today’s the eighteenth, I think. The eighteenth of Shapru.”
Dineva gasped, and Chosun cried, “The year?” Puzzlement and suspicion successively crossed the Kasi's bearded features. “Why, 2,362, of course. You couldn’t have been out in the wilderness very long. Without provisions?” “Five months—and more,” Arjasu whispered. “How? It was Pardan when we left! We spent only a night in Na Ngore, several hours in the tubeway car—a six-day or so in Mihallu. ” “The Nexus Point,” Thu’n cried shrilly. “Sometimes they open into the same place but across the Planes of Time! We’re only lucky that we didn’t come out farther up or down the timeline!”
“Deserters!” Mashyan tossed her black locks and shrieked with delighted laughter. “La! I guessed it! You’ve no choice now, love! Everybody saw these rogues come in, and General Qutmu’ll feed your eyeballs to his worms if you don’t turn them over to the guards!”
“No—no, we’re—” Trinesh stammered. Oh, to the icy hells with it! “Sire, please listen to me. You won’t believe our story, but I swear by Lord Vimuhla’s Eighty-Seven Greater Aspects that what I say is true!”
He was right. Neither Direnja hiVayeshtu nor the priestess Mashyan hiSagai believed a word of his tale. At least the Kasi had the decency to display a little regret when the soldiers came to lead them away.
19
The Lady Jai Chasa Vedlan strolled gracefully across the sun-baked square in front of the slaves’ stockade. Ridek watched her stoop to enter the Tsolyani Kasi's tent. She wore an ankle-length skirt and a short blouse, both green and both very becoming, given her by the priestess Mashyan hiSagai.
She seemed to have gone over completely to the enemy. He spat a thick globule into the dust.
Three days he had spent grieving for Aluja and the Lady Deq Dimani, then another three pining for Ke’er and his family. Thereafter he strove to shut off the tears and force himself to accept the unhappy present. He did not succeed, of course. One six-day was not enough, nor was one year, nor even one aeon. Yet his tutors had praised the resilience of the young, and they had not been wrong. The noble children of Yan Kor were steeped in fortitude, endurance, and patience; those three stepping stones lay at the threshold of the “Way of Nchel.” He would recover, and he would live, whether as the son of the Baron of Yan Kor or as a slave .who cleaned latrines and ate offal.
Ridek Chna Aid was determined to survive. He was also resolute in his intention to escape. The Weaver of Skeins would have to be dissuaded somehow from using the drab threads of slavery to make Ridek’s tapestry!
The Lady Jai had apparently taken the easy road: sleep with the Tsolyani Kasi or with the slatternly bawd who passed for a priestess—or both—and lick the scraps from their plates. Let her! She might come of noble lineages, but she apparently lacked courage. Ridek would waste no tears upon her.
The life of a slave was hard, far more onerous than the tasks and tests his father’s teachers had set him. Ridek’s hands and feet blistered, bled, and hardened, and he thought his bones would crack with the endless digging of saps and trenches. His fellow prisoners would have covered for him, he knew, and even the Tsolyani guards might wink at an extra rest period down in the pits where their officers could not see. He was stubborn in this, too, however: he would do his share and ask no favors. Would his father have done less?
Vrishtara the Mole’s overseers were not harsh, as slave-masters in the Five Empires went, but they did demand a healthy return on the crusts of bread and brackish water they invested in their prisoners. The Yan Koryani and Saa Allaqiyani soldiers were accustomed to toil; most had been peasants at home and knew what it was to sweat. They were thus little different from the Milumanayani villagers who had eked out a bare subsistence in this awful land before the war. Those poor creatures, too, worked without protest. The nomadic tribesmen of the Desert of Sighs were another matter; they worked and died, or they refused to work and died anyway. For them the end was the same.
Unfortunately, it was not quite the end for everyone. That was the terrible part of it.
Ridek had not believed the senior Yan Koryani officer among the prisoners, a Ghitaa of a Tliimrik of five hundred, the equivalent of the Tsolyani Kasi of a Cohort. This man, Shekka Va Kriyor, told him that those who died were used as food.
“The undead eat the corpses?” Ridek cried.
“Not the undead,” the Ghitaa replied somberly. “Those eat nothing. It is the living who enjoy a haunch of red meat now and then: the fiends of Lord Sarku’s Battallions of the Seal of the Worm—and sometimes of the Legion of the Scales of Brown as well. The custom is ancient in the Kraa Hills around the City of Sarku. As the worms consume corpses in the tomb at the behest of the Worm Lord, so do His two-legged devotees. It is ceremonial, a ritual of identity with their deity.”
Ridek was revolted to the core of his being. Thereafter he remained in the midst of the crowd of prisoners whenever the soldiers in brown-lacquered armor and skull-helmets came to inspect their, captives. Some were taken away, and they were not seen again.
Later Ridek inquired further from Shekka Va Kriyor. “They do not make them—us—into undead, then?”
“No, boy,” the man said. “It’s no easy process to make a dead man walk. It’s an honor, moreover, for a warrior of Lord Sarku’s faith to return and fight for Him again. They don’t take others—except as sacrifices.”
“But what joy can there be in joining the undead: to shamble mindlessly along, to eat nothing, to live a half-life of bare awareness?”
“Such are only the lowest of the Worm Lord’s servants: the Mrur and the Shedra. A favored minion is made into a Jajqi, a creature possessing intelligence, a will, and certain other powers. A Jajqi may live—as they speak of life—forever. Consciousness, the survival of the intellect, and the preservation of one’s powers: these are the promises Lord Sarku dangles before His followers.”
“But—but not to come forth by day, not to be accepted among the living—to dwell always amid bones and sepulchres . . . !”
“Oh, the undead can indeed walk in daylight—you’ll see them when General Qutmu orders the assault upon Pu’er. They do not like the light, but they can function in it. Folk say that a Jajqi can imitate the living to such a degree that you would not know he—it—was dead. They move freely among us.” Shekka Va Kriyor chuckled. “Within the Inner Citadel of the City of Sarku there are many Jajqi, and they are said to be more honored there than the living.”
Ridek shuddered and went back to digging with renewed vigor in the trench he had been assigned.
The long line of mangonels behind him fired another volley, their thick, vertical beams thudding against the leather-padded rests in a cadenced drum-roll. The stones, rough-hewn into balls by the masons, whistled overhead, and even their Tsolyani guards ducked. Ridek raised his head to watch the dust-clouds rise from the dun-hued city wall across the dry fosse some two hundred paces away. Last night Oghan Chai Vidur, who had once served as' an artilleryman in the Gurek of the Clan of the Second Moon, said that the wall would fall within three days. He and some others of the prisoners wagered breadcrusts upon the exact hour.
And then what? Ridek strai
ghtened up, leaned on his crude mattock, and ran a dry tongue over cracked lips. The sappers would withdraw, the creaking siege towers would trundle forward, and this trench he was digging would swarm with armored soldiers, some living and some otherwise, on their way to make the final assault.
One after another, the big stone-throwing ballistae on Ridek’s left hissed and vomited destruction at the city. He dived into the trench. The crossbow-like contraptions fired smaller balls than the mangonels, but their trajectories were flatter and hence more perilous to anyone in their path. The little bolt-firing ballistae were silent this morning; the garrison of Pu’er no longer put their heads up to provide targets.
“Hoi!” their leather-armored guard shouted. “Work! Dig!” Those words and some cheerful obscenities were all the Yan Koryani he knew.
Ridek dusted off the remains of the Gaichun's elegant green tunic. He had paid the price for his brief sojourn as a prince! When the Kasi had first ordered him thrown into the slave pen, he had almost been stripped of this garment by his fellows. He had speedily learned that there is no aristocracy among slaves, it did not matter that the tunic was cut in Engsvanyali fashion and was neither Yan Koryani nor Saa Allaqiyani. It identified him as one of the soft officers’ sons who went on to become staff officers in the Baron’s army. He had met their ilk so many times at his father’s court that he tended to sympathize with the rough, simple soldiers. A few of the female captives had made him different offers for his tunic, too, and were it not for Shekka Va Kriyor, he might have ended as somebody’s fancy boy!
A poor SJcein that would have been for Ridek Chna Aid!
The Ghitaa had taken pity upon his youth and inexperience— there was no other explanation for it—and had included him in his circle of lesser officers and older troopers. Ridek had enough sense not to divulge his true name. The ransom of a son of the Baron of Yan Kor would make any Tsolyani rich, and the sacrifice of such a prize would doubtless rejoice their Gods and hasten their victory. He dared not confide in anyone, not even Shekka Va Kriyor: there were probably spies in the stockade, while others might sell him for freedom—or even a breadcrust. Henceforth he was Dokku Khessa Tiu to his own folk as well as to his captors. He hoped that his ancestors in the Paradises would pardon the deception; his personal servant in Ke’er, whose name and lineages he thus borrowed, would not mind.
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