I remain silent. Even saying I don’t know why would sound like agreeing that there’s a reason. Something he said earlier bothers me, but I can’t concentrate on anything but the thought: he wants Agatha dead. It’s in his eyes, his hands, his voice when he says the Select.
“I see you need more time,” he says, with barely-concealed anger. “Think carefully before you cause me any more trouble.”
He turns to the door. Before he can reach it, it opens. I hear the surprised intake of his breath and look up. Jumal is standing in the doorway.
“What are you doing here?” the High Priest demands.
“I believe I’ve already done it,” Jumal says, looking past him at me.
I hold my breath. My stomach feels giddy at the sight of him, but I’m terrified of what the High Priest might do. Did Jumal break quarantine? I try to count the days in my head, but so much has happened…
“I’m glad to see you survived your quarantine. Your uncle has sent you—?”
“I’m not here on my uncle’s behalf.”
They stare at each other, the tension between them so thick it makes my stomach clench. Don’t punish him, I want to cry, but strangely it’s the High Priest whose face is going pale.
“I’d like to talk to Kia alone,” Jumal says.
The High Priest locks eyes with him a moment longer, then growls, “See if you can talk some sense into her, then.” He steps past Jumal through the door and nods to the guard to shut it.
“Jumal,” I want to run and throw my arms around him, but the Malemese don’t touch. “Now you’re imprisoned, too!”
He crosses the room. “Have they hurt you?” His voice is tight, angry.
I shake my head, too choked to speak.
He reaches for my shoulders and pulls me to him. It overwhelms me then, how frightened and alone I’ve been. I lean against him, shaking, my tears dampening his chest.
“Hey, it’s okay,” he says. His hands grip my shoulders. I nod and struggle for control. He holds me a minute longer and then steps back, releasing me. “Sit down,” he says. “Tell me.”
“Are the Queen’s guards looking for me?”
He nods.
“Ag—the Select—is she—is she still alive?”
He rolls his eyes. “No doubt about that. Her insistence on staying in the fever hut has stirred up the whole city. Troops of people march out every day to see if she’s still alive. Everyone’s calling her ‘the angel who saved the miracle child’.” His voice softens, mentioning Tira.
I laugh. It comes out a bit shaky. “I’m surprised she hasn’t come out to set the record straight that it’s God’s work, not hers.”
“Oh, she’s made that clear. The guards at the fever hut are sick of hearing it.”
“Guards? They’re forcing her to stay in there?”
“Just the opposite. They’re waiting for her to take so much as one step outside so they can grab her and haul her away to be quarantined in her house.”
I shake my head. “Why don’t they just go in and get her?” I wish they would. Every minute she’s in there, exposed to… ugh!
“Not even the Triumvirate would order someone healthy to enter the fever hut and touch a person who might have CoVir. When the incubation period’s over they might do it, though.”
What would he say if he knew I did just that? But I didn’t get CoVir. Maybe Agatha won’t, either, despite what the High Priest said. I imagine her inside that stinking, disgusting hut, and shudder.
“She sings,” Jumal says.
“She sings?” I look at him blankly.
“A little off-key,” he says. “The people sing with her. Hymns and lullabies. She must have learned them while visiting. We often sing while we work.”
She’s singing. I’m here, terrified she’s dying, and she’s there singing. I don’t want Co-Vir to kill her, I want to do it myself!
“She does it to let them know she’s alive,” he says. “To reassure them.”
Yeah, that’s Agatha. I laugh. It comes out a little shaky. “The High Priest thinks she’s hatching some devious plan in there, to force Malem into the Alliance.”
“But you don’t think so?”
I look straight into his eyes. “I don’t think this Select could do anything that would hurt anyone, not even under orders. And she’s smart. She doesn’t always come across that way, but she can’t be fooled.”
“I rather thought she came across that way.”
“Well, you know,” I grin self-consciously, “her… accent might fool some people.”
Jumal grins before he resumes his serious expression. “So you don’t believe there’s any basis for the High Priest’s concerns? She’d never do anything even potentially harmful to Malem, under any circumstances?”
I blink. If the potential benefit is greater than the potential risk of harm, and that risk is very slight… Agatha’s own words. But why is he asking? Potentially harmful? He sounds like the High Priest, grilling me. I lean back in my chair. “You were sent here.”
He didn’t come for me at all. I don’t want to believe it.
“No,” he says at once. “It’s not like that. But I have to ask.”
“Because you’re training to be a priest. You’re working for him.” I can’t believe I let him hold me, I cried against him.
“You’ve got me completely wrong.” He takes a breath. “What do you want me to do, Kia, to show you?”
“Get me out of here.” I don’t look at him. I might as well be saying, nothing, and he has to know it. It’s not like the High Priest is going to listen to a seventeen-year-old.
“Where will you go if I do? You’re safe here.”
“I need to see A—the Select. I need to talk to her. To ask her what she thinks she’s doing!” I’m on the verge of crying again, but not in front of him. “The High Priest doesn’t believe she’ll survive the fever hut.”
“He said that? Those are the words he used?” Jumal leans toward me, his face tense.
I nod miserably.
“Then she will die.” He looks down, his expression glum.
“No one can predict that!”
“The High Priest has a remarkably accurate track record for doing just that.”
“What are you telling me?” Select Hamza warned us against the High Priest. Agatha said he was afraid. A Select, afraid? I hadn’t believed it. “Why? Why does he want her dead?”
“He doesn’t want her dead. He just doesn’t want her to succeed.”
“At what?”
“At whatever she’s doing. At bringing Malem into the Universal Alliance.”
“Why doesn’t he want Malem to join the Alliance?”
“It would be the first step to losing our way of life. Just what our ancestors came here to avoid.”
“I have to talk to her!” I have to warn her the High Priest is plotting her death.
He frowns. “It isn’t a good idea. There are guards in the streets, people at the fever hut…”
“Is that what she said about helping Tira? ‘It isn’t a good idea’?”
He sighs. “Okay.”
“Okay? You can get me out?”
He gets up and knocks once on the door. It opens immediately. “Ask the High Priest to join us,” I hear him say quietly.
“I’ll have to send a guard with you, of course,” the High Priest says when Jumal tells him he wants to take me to talk with the Select. I can’t believe he’s even considering it. I can’t even believe he came in when Jumal asked for him.
“The Queen’s guard will recognize yours,” Jumal says. “She’ll know Kia’s been with you while she was looking for her.”
The High Priest’s eyelids lower slightly. A muscle in his cheek twitches. I keep my face neutral.
“Go at night. You’re not afraid of the dark, are you?” He glances at me, his lips twisting upward slightly, into something like a sneer except he doesn’t let it get that far.
I deliberately hesitate. Let him thin
k I’m the timid fool he imagines, just because most off-worlders are used to cities lit up at night and find the darkness here creepy. “I’ll wait till tonight,” I say. “But if the Select sees me with your guard she won’t tell me anything. You want me to find out if she has a plan, don’t you?”
The High Priest gives me a measuring look. “So now you’re listening to me?’ He glances at Jumal approvingly. “I’ll tell my guard to stay back. And… your uncle can go with her instead of you. He knows the way, and the Select knows him. She’ll talk in front of him.”
Jumal looks at me.
My lips part to say I want Jumal with me, but what if that makes the High Priest change his mind? I have to warn Agatha. I nod without looking at Jumal.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
I pace my room. By my reckoning, Agatha has less than a week left of her quarantine. If the High Priest plans to make her death look CoVir-induced, he’ll act soon. Unless he knows he doesn’t have to, unless Agatha’s already burning with fever, already dying. I try not to think of that, try to focus on Jumal’s reassurance, but he’s not there. A person can be healthy one day and the next…
What if Agatha’s already dead and the High Priest’s plan is to have me be the one to find her? That would explain why he agreed to let me go.
By the time Prad Gaelig arrives I’m so anxious I snap at him. He glances at my untouched dinner. “I have to wait on the High Priest’s command,” he reminds me calmly.
“Did she wait on orders from the O.U.B. to save Tira’s life? Did she?” I whisper, the words hissing from my mouth like insects, powerless to do any real harm and furious in the attempt.
“You are upset,” he says, his voice even. I remember that this is a man who administers punishment, however reluctant he claims to feel about it. I bite my tongue, because I still want to fume at him, until he steps closer and adds in an undertone, “I will do what I can.”
Broken-nose joins us at the door. The three of us walk through the dark city without speaking, and into the even darker countryside. Whenever I glance back, Broken-nose is watching me, his solid eyebrows furrowing over narrow, suspicious eyes. Prad Gaelig ignores him but my back prickles under his watchful stare.
It has been raining. The sound of our feet squelching through the mud on the swamp islands fills the night. Each time we pull free of the sucking mud to take another step, the stench of rot rises from the ground like tiny gasps. Prad Gaelig and the guard carry palm lights, which cast an indistinct light on the path in front of our feet and throw everything else into even darker shadow. The black forms of trees loom eerily around us, elongated, twisted ghosts in the night, separated by shining pools of deeper darkness just beyond their roots. Where is the crowd of people Jumal told me came every day? The High Priest can do what he likes here at night.
My legs tremble as we approach the fever hut. It’s dark and silent, just as I remember it. The guard stops on the last clump of land before the swamp island on which the hut stands. Prad Gaelig and I go on alone.
“Agatha,” I call when I reach the hut. Prad Gaelig looks at me, and I remember he’s never heard Agatha’s name.
There’s no answer from the hut.
“Select,” I call again, louder.
Tira hadn’t answered, either. I picture Agatha lying inside on the floor in a puddle of her own vomit and excrement, burning with fever, like Tira. The guard won’t come and unlock the door if there’s no answer. He’ll drag us away and leave Agatha to die. I take a deep, ragged breath and opened my mouth to shout—
“Is that you, Kia?”
“WHAT ARE YOU DOING HERE?”
Silence greets my outburst. Then, through the door, Agatha says, “I was about to ask you that.”
She’s smiling! I can hear it in her voice. The sudden transformation from the image of Agatha dying to the sound of her joking makes me want to scream.
“You’re crazy! You know that?” My voice is shrill in the darkness. I don’t care if the guard can hear it all the way on the next island.
“It has been suggested. Not quite so blatantly.”
“What are you hoping to prove by dying here?” I demand, lowering my voice but still angry.
“Actually, I hope to prove something by not dying here. But whatever happens—Kia, listen—I want you to remember what we were talking about the last time you saw me at Prophet’s Lane. You must return—”
“Yes, I remember,” I interrupt quickly. “I was just telling Prad Gaelig that tonight. When someone does you a good turn, you should return it. Good for good.”
There’s a pause, then Agatha says, “Hello Prad Gaelig. Is your family safely out of quarantine?”
“Yes, thanks to you they are all well. And if I can I will return a good turn for a good turn, Select.”
“You already have: you brought Kia to me. I’m sure that wasn’t easy. Otherwise, you wouldn’t have come at night.”
It was Jumal, I think, and I wonder again how he did it. I remember the High Priest’s face blanching, and something else, what was it…
“It wasn’t my doing,” Prad Gaelig says. “The High Priest asked me to accompany Kia. He thought she might not know the way.”
What does Prad Gaelig think, I wonder? I’d like to see his expression, but it’s too dark.
“How considerate of him,” Agatha says. “Kia isn’t always good with directions.”
“There are times when good instincts will take you closer to the goal than good directions.”
“My philosophy also.”
“Was it instinct or direction that brought you here, Select?”
“God, of course.”
“Yours or mine?”
“Ours.”
Prad Gaelig is silent a moment. “Not many see it that way,” he says.
“Perhaps the problem is too great a reliance on directions, Prad Gaelig.”
“Do you think you and I could resolve it—by instinct?”
“I think we must try.”
“What are you talking about!” I hit the wooden door with my fist, impatient with their riddles. The threat here is real, not mystical. “How is staying in there going to make the Malemese join the Alliance?”
“I don’t know,” Agatha’s voice through the door sounds surprised. “What made you think it would?”
“Well isn’t that your intention?”
Agatha doesn’t answer. Finally, when I’m ready to bang the door again, she says, in Edoan “Kia, what’s the most effective way to control people?”
“Through fear.” I remember my cultural lessons.
“Exactly. And what are the Malemese most afraid of?”
That’s a no-brainer. “CoVir.” I glance at Prad Gaelig. The High Priest no doubt sent him to monitor our conversation, but he doesn’t seem upset with us speaking Edoan. It’s hard to know who’s side he’s on.
“With good reason, in the past,” Agatha agrees. “And this place, this fever hut, is at the core of that fear, the physical symbol of it. It stands here like a hideous monument to those who CoVir has killed. I realized that when Tira walked out of here—skipped out, actually—into her father’s arms. The faces of the guards—like they’d been released, a nightmare lifted—all those clichés that sound silly and trite until you actually see them in someone’s face.
“Then I heard someone say, ‘I’ll spend my quarantine in here’ and it was me talking—another cliché, but that’s what it was like, like waking up in the middle of sleep-talking. I was horrified, until I saw that shadow of fear drawing over their faces again as they looked at me. Then I knew I was right. Because when I walk out of here, I’ll take the fear out of this place with me. It’ll just be an old, useless building in a swamp, and I hope they’ll tear it down and be free.”
She stops abruptly. A small, embarrassed cough sounds through the door. “It’s something that has to be done, not talked about. I think I’m right. I hope so. Sometimes you have to go on that.”
An image comes to my min
d of her singing lullabies through this door to the people who have come here despite their terror of this place, and them joining in. Singing together against the fear. My throat closes.
She misinterprets my silence. “The worst that can happen is that they won’t believe it.”
“No.” I grit my teeth and force myself to speak calmly, “The worst that can happen is that you’ll be dead. The High Priest is going to make sure of it.”
“Kia, the High Priest is a man of God—”
I risk it. I have no choice, she’s so stubborn, so idiotically naive! I switch back to Malemese, and in a low voice only Prad Gaelig and Agatha can hear, I say, “The High Priest told me you will die here.”
“Kia, you are too suspicious,” she answers in Malemese. “The High Priest would not—”
“Yes,” Prad Gaelig interrupts, his voice as low as mine. “He might. I’m sure he hopes God will take care of it for him, and wishes it weren’t necessary, and will regret it as he regrets every execution. But when this door opens three days from now I think you will be dead and CoVir will be blamed.”
There’s a long silence within the hut. I lean forward until my cheek is almost resting against the door. “You have to come out now,” I whisper hoarsely around the tightness in my throat.
It occurs to me suddenly that perhaps this is the plan, that Prad Gaelig is here to get me to coax Agatha outside the hut, where they can kill her. I turn to look at him—
“It is against the law to break quarantine,” Prad Gaelig says. “You cannot leave now.”
I let my breath out, ashamed.
“Calm yourself,” Agatha says gently. Her voice is almost in my ear as though she, too, is leaning into the door. “If I am to die, I will; and if not, I won’t. It is in God’s hands.”
She’s determined to die. I want to scream at her, ‘Die then, in this filthy hut on this cold, ugly world! I hope you get your wish!’ I open my mouth to hurl the words at her…
And find I can’t speak. A sense of loss lies suffocatingly over me and my attempts to push it aside are useless. In a small, tight voice I say, “It matters to me.”
The Occasional Diamond Thief Page 21