Unfettered III

  Still, the noise had unnerved her, and she decided to give up this day’s confirmatory visit to the water clock and turn back.

  It’s the darkness, she told herself as she walked back toward the festival house, shielding the sphere in her hand so that only the tiniest needles of light illuminated her track. She thought she had learned all its tricks and cruelties while living in Nakkiga, but as bad as things had been in the gloomy Hikeda’ya city, this was much worse. Day after day, alone in a pitch-black house in a pitch-black cavern, with only the ghost light of the worms for illumination, and those to be seen only once a day during her walk around the lake, she was beginning to feel as though she were caught in some terrible dream from which she could not awake.

  But I can do it. I must. She had to stay alive until Viyeki returned. If she was caught, Khimabu would see that she was killed. But even that meant nothing to Tzoja compared to the true horror. Khimabu would not be satisfied with destroying Tzoja alone, but would want herself rid of Nezeru as well, her husband’s half-mortal bastard.

  Nezeru, her Nezeru, so strange and so beautiful. Like a fierce little animal from the very first moment she had emerged into the world. Tzoja had never pretended to understand her child, but that had never prevented her helpless love.

  I will not let that witch harm my daughter, Tzoja thought as she made her way as quietly as she could up from the main path and through the modest grounds of Viyeki’s house, and for a moment a rush of anger dissolved all her fears. I will die with my fingernails in her eyes and my teeth in her throat if I have to.

  She was so caught up in imagining it that she did not stop to listen at the door she liked to use, which opened on the back gardens. Instead she was halfway down the hall before she heard the noises coming from the kitchen.

  Whispers.

  She stopped so quickly she almost fell down. A thousand ideas rushed into her head at once—it was the Hamakha Guard, looking for her, or robbers who would kill her before despoiling Viyeki’s house, or ghastly shades out of the depths. But was it really whispering, or was it something else? She paused again, listening with fast-beating heart to the wordless sounds, squeaking, chittering, and the rattle of small things being pushed across the kitchen’s stony floors.

  Rats! Oh, Usires and all the other gods, what if they’ve found my food?

  Tzoja felt around just inside the door until she discovered one of Viyeki’s walking sticks, then edged down the corridor, sliding her feet across the polished floors to make as little noise as possible. The closer she got to the kitchen, the more clearly she could hear the strange sounds; for a moment she almost thought she heard a cadence to them, like speech.

  She lifted the stick high, then pushed open the kitchen door and lifted the ni’yo. A slight pressure of her fingers made it flare into brightness and paint the entire scene in an instant.

  Eyes. Eyes and grotesque shapes, staring at her—a waking nightmare.

  Tzoja gasped and almost dropped the sphere. The figures in front of her suddenly burst into life and went squealing and hissing as they scattered in all directions to escape the sudden light. She saw eyes, hands, limbs, but all in a mere moment before their owners scuttled into the dark corners of the kitchen or past her into the hallway, so that she could not immediately make sense of what she had seen.

  They were not rats, that was dreadfully clear: she had seen faces. Mortals like Tzoja? No, they had not been like her. Hikeda’ya? No, they had not been like the immortals either. In that panicky instant she could not even think of a prayer, though she sorely wished to make one.

  She had fallen backward at the first shock. With her fingers loosened, the light of the sphere began to die. All around her she could hear clatter and scratching as its glow faded, then she was surrounded by darkness again and in another moment, by silence as well.

  Monsters, was her first real thought, remembering the mad things the flare of light had revealed. Small monsters, perhaps, but what else could you call them? She remembered one like a naked child with one limb far longer than others, others with no real limbs at all, and fat, toadlike creatures with human skin and bulging but still human eyes. Already the details were sliding from her memory—it had all been too swift, too violently strange, too unexpected.

  What could they be? Why did those horrors come here? I have lost my sanctuary. Her thoughts were sliding like an avalanche of stones. Monsters, and they were still all around her! She straightened up, half-certain she would feel hands grabbing at her ankles at any moment, then squeezed and rubbed the sphere until its full radiance burst forth again, but in its yellowy light the kitchen was empty and silent.

  No, not silent, she realized after a moment. Beside her own hitching, terrified breath, she could hear another noise, a soft, wordless moan from deeper in the large kitchen. What were they? She was grateful that they seemed as startled and frightened as she was, but she did not trust it would last.

  I should leave this place this very moment, she told herself. Whatever these things are, the house is no longer safe. It certainly isn’t secret. But she had spent days learning the house’s plan by darkness, had found hiding places for all her belongings so that nobody arriving suddenly would know she was here unless they actually caught her. Where would she go if she left? To another house beside the lake, probably just as full of hairless cavern rats or whatever those ghastly things had been? Another festival house that, unlike Viyeki’s, might be occupied at any time?

  She heard a noise coming from the brick oven—a strange, thin sound like an animal gasping for breath or a baby beginning to cry. It did not sound like anything large, so she felt around for the walking stick she had dropped, then slowly and quietly got to her feet. The kitchen was long—even during the short times the house was occupied, her master’s wife, Khimabu, brought a large contingent of servants to wait on the Magister and his guests, so the kitchen had to provide for them as well. She made her way across the polished flagstones in darkness, marveling at how long it took her to cross it. As she drew closer to whatever made the noise, her foot crunched down on something and the muffled whimpering abruptly stopped. After the initial shock and a stifled scream, Tzoja reached down hesitantly and discovered what she had trod on—a heel of bread. She squeezed hard on the light-sphere.

  Whatever had been making the hitching noise was now silent. The heel of bread was the largest piece of food on the floor; the others were little more than crumbs and a few gnawed ends. With a sudden upswelling of horror and despair, she ran back across the kitchen, heedless now of the light that would be visible to anyone outside the house nearby, and threw open the chest in which she had hidden her supply of bread, several large loaves, enough to last her for weeks.

  Gone. All gone. Fragments of dried fruit and sausage among the crumbs and gnawed crusts confirmed what she already feared, but she doggedly went and dragged out the covered basket where those things had been kept and discovered that all but a single waxwing sausage and a few tiny morsels of cheese were gone.

  It was all Tzoja could do not to let out a howl of rage and misery. All her stores, so carefully obtained and hidden, food that should have lasted her until Sky-Singer’s Moon, or even Tortoise, now gone.

  She would have to go back into Nakkiga or risk starvation.

  Her fury rose again. She swung the ni’iyo around the wide kitchen until its light fell on the round bread oven. Whatever hid inside began making soft, terrified sounds again. Angry, frightened, gripped by feelings she couldn’t even name, Tzoja reached down and shoved the ball of light close to the oven door as she leaned forward, careful not to get too close in case whatever was hiding in there had claws.

  An infant stared back at her from the oven’s depths. It was not human, not Hikeda’ya, but not impossibly far from either. A naked, big-eyed infant with a swollen belly, no mouth between its nose and receding chin, and a slit throat—a horrible slash of red across the center of its neck.

  Tzoja recoiled in horror and almost fel
l again. The thing in the oven gave a soft, startled shriek, but did not try to escape. Her heart beating so hard she was dizzy, she leaned toward the opening again. Huge eyes stared back at her, dark as lumps of coal.

  It wasn’t a wound across its neck at all, she saw now with a mixture of disgust and astonishment, but a mouth, which for some unfathomable reason opened out of its neck instead of its face. For a moment, everything she had ever heard about demons and monsters came back to her, from her mother’s tales of unnatural grassland fiends to Valada Roskva’s warnings about restless things that watched the living from beyond the veil of death. But then the unnatural mouth of the thing in the oven pressed together in a wrinkled pucker before opening again to emit a wail of terror, and despite her fear, she became a mother again.

  “Here now,” she said, suddenly realizing that the noise might be a bigger danger to her than even the strange little creature itself. “Hush. Stop that.” Without noticing, she had slipped back into the tongue of her own childhood, her mother’s words straight from the grasslands. “Hush. The Night Eater will hear.”

  And then, as if to prove her words, Tzoja heard a strange, uneven noise in the great hallway beyond the kitchen—thump-drag, thump-drag, thump-drag. Whatever was making the footsteps was no tiny monstrosity like the oven-beast, but sounded larger than any mortal or Hikeda’ya.

  Again gripped by terror, Tzoja only remembered the other door out of the kitchen when the hallway door thumped open. She lifted her light even as she shrank back. A huge, two-headed shape that could have only leaped out of nightmare or madness swayed in the doorway. It threw out its misshapen hands and let out a rumbling noise of rage as it lurched toward her.

  The sphere dropped from her nerveless fingers. For a moment the falling light seemed to make everything leap into the air, then it struck the ground and went out.

  She clambered after it, feeling with both hands, and when she found it she lifted it and held it before her like a weapon, then squeezed it into shining life. A huge shape loomed above her but fell back, groaning as though the light were painful as fire. As the thing wiped frantically at its eyes with the back of a massive forearm, she pushed herself back out of the reach of those huge arms. The creature’s vast face turned toward her, eyes tightly shut. It was as bizarre and misshapen as a grassland shaman’s demon mask, the mouth slack, the eyes hurt and angry but as uncomprehending as the lowest animal.

  “Do not fear,” the monster said in oddly accented Hikeda’yasao, but as if to prove that terrible face truly was a mask, the slack lips did not move in time with the words. They did not move at all. “We do not harm you.”

  Now she finally saw the second head that she had glimpsed in the doorway, as large as the first but canted at a strange angle and thus slightly hidden from her at first. This head, despite being nearly as grotesque as the other, hairless and with round, slightly crooked eyes, seemed actually to be watching her with interest, and when the voice came again the lips moved in time with it: it was this head that had spoken before, not the first one. “Please do not make the light bright again,” it said. “That hurts the eyes, mine and Dasa’s both.”

  She had just been about to make the sphere glare as powerfully as she could, but the speaker’s tone was reasonable, almost apologetic, so she hesitated. She pushed herself back a little farther, and only then did she see that what had come through the kitchen doorway was not one creature with two heads, but two creatures, one carried by the other. The head that spoke lolled atop a shrunken, almost infantile body whose legs ended in stumps just where the knees should have been. This nodding oddity was curled in the crook of a powerful arm that belonged to a carry-man, one of the nearly mindless Tinukeda’ya bred for servitude, but this carry-man had a badly withered leg, and she now understood the step-and-drag sound that had announced its arrival.

  But there was no such thing anywhere in Nakkiga as a crippled carry-man, let alone one that was only a head on a useless body. The Hikeda’ya would never allow such malformed creatures to live. Even Viyeki, the kindest of the race she had met, would have had them dispatched in an instant.

  “Who are you? What are you?” she demanded, fear rising again.

  “Naya Nos am I,” said the malformed infant. “This is my brother-in-claim, Dasa. He does not speak.” The swollen baby-face looked grave. “What we are is Hidden Ones—but that is not something to concern you. Our young ones stole from you. We are sorry, but they have gone long without food, and it has been a poor season for both gathering and gifting. We will do our best to make good what they took from you.”

  The day’s events had been so shocking that Tzoja could only watch in stunned silence as the infant-sized creature called out to the remaining Hidden, who slid out of the oven and other hiding places, eyes wide with fear, then crawled past her as swiftly as they could, as though Tzoja were a sleeping predator instead of the victim of their raid. They followed their rescuers out of the festival house and in moments had vanished into the darkness. She pushed the door closed behind them, then stumbled back to the kitchen to pick up the few crumbs that remained, weeping silently as she pressed the salvaged remnants into a single lump that would be that night’s supper, and perhaps her last meal for a long time.

  Nonao, the secretary who had replaced poor Yemon after his execution, was unobtrusive even by the exacting standards of the Hikeda’ya, but not so much that he escaped Viyeki’s notice as he stood waiting outside the simple, slanted wall of fabric that was the magister’s tent. Viyeki did not look up at him or acknowledge him in any way, but continued to read his much-handled copy of The Five Fingers of the Queen’s Hand with what must have seemed like great concentration. At last even Nonao’s patience began to stretch beyond the fraying point, and the secretary made a small movement, a silent shift of weight from one foot to the other.

  Viyeki looked at him just long enough to make certain Nonao saw him, then dropped his eyes to the book again. “What do you want?”

  “This worthless servant begs your pardon, High Magister, but the prince-templar has arrived.”

  “Ah.” He kept his eyes on the words, though he was not truly very much interested in them. Like all in his caste, he had committed it to memory long before he reached adulthood.

  “Do you not wish to greet him, High Magister?”

  “Of course! That is why I have returned to the words of venerated Xohabi. To remind myself of what is expected, what is right.” He held the book up as though Nonao might not have seen it before. “You have read the Five Fingers?”

  “Of course, Master!”

  “So full of wisdom. So full of help for every situation.” Viyeki began to read. “‘The Five Fingers are the tools the Queen, the Mother of the People, uses to feed and shelter and protect her people. Without a knowledge of these tools and how they are used, without an energetic determination to act for the good of all the People, a noble can only hinder, not help, the Queen in her great work.’ You agree of course, Nonao?”

  “Of course, Master. They are the words I live by, and which are always uppermost in my thoughts as I strive to serve you and the Mother of All.”

  “Good, good.” He ignored Nonao’s increasing anxiousness. “How wise was great Xohabi! Give your ear to this, Nonao-tza—the simplicity entrances us still, all these Great Years later! ‘Loyalty to the People is the first finger. Without dedication to your own kind, you are no better than a solitary witiko’ya in the wilderness, hunting without a pack, dying alone of starvation.’ So true! Who would reject his own people? And what else should the lot of such a fool or traitor be, but death?”

  “Yes, Master.”

  “And how much joy I get from revisiting these words, no matter how often I have read them before. Loyalty to the race! Loyalty to the city! Loyalty to the order and, of course, loyalty to our queen and the Garden that birthed us . . . !” He shook his head in mock-wonder. “I have heard it said that in this one slender volume is written every word needed for a good life. I shal
l never tire of it.”

  Nonao was wringing his hands together, too anxious now even to hide it. “No one reveres Xohabi—or you—more greatly than I do, Master, and please forgive my unpardonable interruption . . .”

  Viyeki decided he had tormented his servant long enough. He did not dislike Nonao personally, but he knew beyond doubt that the new secretary was giving information to the relatives of Viyeki’s wife and doubtless to others as well. It would have been virtually impossible to find someone utterly honorable and incorruptible to fill the position—there were very few such creatures to be found in Nakkiga, and none of them had the talent or intelligence to do a good job with anything more challenging than spreading oil on a slice of puja bread—so he was content with a secretary he knew from the start not to trust.

  But my old master Yaarike would have warned me not to treat him too badly. Better a casual enemy than a determined one. And if I make too much sport with The Five Fingers, he’ll report that to the listening ears as well. The book was an object of near-religious veneration among the noble classes, although Viyeki had no doubt that many of its most noisy proponents were no more inspired by Xohabi’s legendary fawning than Viyeki was.