by J. S. Bangs
Walking through the city was like walking through a king’s grave, filled with the memories of riches and luxury. The Devoured wore silks and finely-dyed cotton garments that they had plundered from the houses of the khadir. Silver dishes were used to serve rice to the peasants in Kirshta’s retinue, and precious books were used to start fires. The Devoured recognized her and hailed her with raucous glee as she approached. The peasants of Majasravi cowered in their homes and didn’t look at her.
At least they had rice, Vapathi thought with a grim smile. On his second day in the city Kirshta had set about finding every cache of food and put them out for sale in the markets. But even those supplies were dwindling, and when famine set in again the masses of Majasravi would beg to be Devoured.
The captured dhorsha of the Majavaru Lurchatiya were imprisoned in a bright yellow house two stories tall, with a ram painted in red over the doorway. A detachment of Kirshta’s Red Men guarded the recessed doorway, carrying swords with lazy indifference to ensure only that the captured priests didn’t escape. They nodded to Vapathi as she approached.
“I need to see the dhorsha,” she said.
“As you wish, my queen,” the man said. He pulled open the door for Vapathi.
The heat of the sun gave way to the cool, faience-tiled antechamber of the dhorsha’s house. Rapid footsteps sounded inside. Vapathi walked through the antechamber into the colonnade around the marble-paved courtyard to see one of the dhorsha in his red-fringed bhildu descending from the upper story. The dhorsha looked at her and flinched.
“My queen,” he said, dropping to his knees. His eyes were watery with fear.
He’s afraid I’ve come to kill him, she thought with a certain amount of relish. A dhorsha like him with a temple position in Majasravi would never have known a slave’s fear before. She waved for him to rise. “The Mouth of the Devourer needs something from you.”
“What does he need?” The dhorsha’s jaws tensed. He braced himself to be damned.
“A book which contains the prophecy of the thikratta Thuram, who blessed the Dhigvaditya.”
The man’s face sagged in relief. Vapathi laughed inwardly. “I’ll find it,” the man said. “Teguri-dhu, she kept a library here. The history of Panuna has it. Let me go ask my brothers—”
“The Mouth of the Devourer is waiting,” she said.
The man bowed and scrambled to his feet. He ran up the stairs, and she could hear his steps on the upper balcony, then his voice in the inner chambers. Vapathi waited in the shade of the colonnade.
A few minutes later the man returned, accompanied by one of the other dhorsha carrying a large wooden book-case in both hands. They scurried across the courtyard and presented the book to Vapathi with a flourish.
“The history of Panuna,” the man said. “The first book records the prophecy of Thuram.”
She brushed her fingers over the top of the case, feeling the warmth of the smooth, heavily oiled wood, the smell of rose oil worked into the grain. Fine scrollwork was etched into the edges of the case.
“Do you want to read it now?” the man asked nervously.
“No,” she said. She couldn’t read in any case. “Come with me. Just you—leave your partner here. We’ll go to the Mouth of the Devourer ourselves.”
A gasp of fear sounded in the man’s throat, and he glanced at his partner. Coward. Vapathi turned and marched toward the door. “Follow quickly,” she said.
A moment later the dhorsha followed her into the antechamber and out the door. The Red Men merely nodded at their passing and shut the door behind them. When they stepped into the heat of the sun the dhorsha lifted the corner of his bhildu and threw it over the book.
Such reverence for a simple case of wood and palm leaves, Vapathi thought. But Kirshta had always shown the same reverence, reading for hours in the Emperor’s library, treating the books as more precious than silver. A common affliction of men who learned to read, it seemed.
When they returned to Kirshta’s command center the Devoured were returning from their daily march against the Bronze Gate. Vapathi and the dhorsha waited a moment as they passed. Fresh nicks showed in their arms and arrow-marks on their flesh, and they laughed with each other over their lack of blood. When the march had passed and the Devoured dispersed to their looting throughout the abandoned city, Vapathi continued ahead to the house.
“… same as every day,” the captain of the Devoured was saying. “We gave them your threats, and they responded with arrows and stones. No one hurt, of course, but no progress.”
“Of course,” Kirshta said. He lay across the couch that Vapathi had occupied earlier, talking to the captain with his eyes closed and his face grimacing in pain. Around the feet of the couch lay a half-dozen asps and cobras, draped motionlessly across each other. Their tongues flickered occasionally. They watched the room with glassy, unblinking eyes.
As Vapathi crossed into the antechamber Kirshta opened his eyes and smiled.
“My sister,” he said. “You brought me something beautiful.” He waved the captain aside.
“And a dhorsha to carry it,” Vapathi said. She prodded the dhorsha forward and stood behind him in the center of the room.
The man trembled as he approached Kirshta on the couch. His eyes went to the nest of serpents beneath him and stopped two long paces away. He laid the book gently on the ground before him, dropped to his knees, and prostrated.
“That’s enough,” Kirshta said. “You know what I want to hear?”
“The queen said you wanted the prophecy of the thikratta Thuram,” he said.
“Good. I assume you can find it for me.”
“Just a moment, my lord.”
The dhorsha gently pried open the book cover and began pulling out palm-leaf pages. He scanned each page quickly, his lips moving as he read silently, until he reached a page about a quarter of the way through the book.
“Here it is.” He took a deep breath and began to read:
*Now when Agma-dar had cut the stones of the Ditya and laid down the foundations, the khadir of that place came to him and said, “Thou hast committed a great sin against our fathers and against the Power which inhabiteth this hill, for thou hast made his habitation into a place for your soldiers to tread underfoot.”
But Agma-dar went to the thikratta Thuram, who meditated atop a stone on the bank of the river Saru, and asked him, “Have I committed a sin against the Power which inhabiteth the Ditya by building a fortress thereupon?”
Thuram answered him, “Thou hast.”
Agma-dar asked, “How then shall I build this fortress to exalt the city of Sravi over its enemies?”
Thuram answered, “I will go there and learn the name of the Power, and when he hath given me his name I will prophesy for you.”
Agma-dar asked, “How long wilt thou meditate to learn the name of this Power?”
Thuram answered, “A month and a day.”
So Agma-dar bade him to go, and Thuram moved from atop the stone in the river Saru to the Ditya, and after a month and a day he called Agma-dar to him. And when Agma-dar came, Thuram told him, “Choose thou one of the stones which thou seest on the ground and bring it to me.” And Agma-dar chose him a stone and brought it to Thuram. And Thuram whispered to the stone, and no one heard what he said. Then he answered Agma-dar, “I have put the name of the Power of the Ditya into this stone. Behold, no army shall breach the walls of this fortress to possess the Ditya unless they first possess it.”
And Agma-dar took the stone which Thuram gave him and buried it in the foundation of the walls, and he built up the fortress over it so that none could ever possess the stone. And the name of the fortress was the Dhigvaditya.*
Kirshta laughed and clapped his hands together as soon as the dhorsha had finished. “Lovely story,” he said. “Thuram was a true thikratta. Now, captains of the Red Men, tell me how Thuram’s prophecy was true, and how I can make it false.”
The captains waiting around the edges of the roo
m looked at each other uncomfortably. “The Dhigvaditya has never been taken by force,” Sadma, the one who had been longest in Kirshta’s service, said at last. “Thuram spoke truly….”
“It has fallen to treachery,” another one of the captains added. “As Sadja-daridarya took it, and Praudhu-daridarya a year ago, and Kupshira-daridarya before him.”
“Treachery,” Kirshta said with contempt in his voice. “I’ve had enough of treachery. And we have no one inside who may work for us.”
“We have Apurta,” Vapathi said.
“Assuming the Emperor hasn’t sewn his lips shut,” one of the Red Men said. “Or removed his head from its shoulders.”
Vapathi gave him a black look.
“If Apurta is harmed, I’ll deal with whoever is responsible,” Kirshta said quietly. “Now, I am waiting for the military insight of these captains to tell me how we are going to get into the Dhigvaditya.”
The captains fell quiet. One of them bowed deeply to Kirshta and said in a voice creaking with fear, “O Mouth of the Devourer, we have seen your ability to… devour the bodies of your enemies. Wouldn’t it be possible to simply, ah, eat the walls?”
“She Who Devours eats flesh and blood, not stones and mortar.” Kirshta said. But a note of interest crept into his voice. “Dhorsha, what was the name of the Power of the Ditya before Agma-dar built his fortress on top of it?”
The dhorsha tensed at having Kirshta’s attention fall on him again. “It isn’t recorded, my master. No one knows it.”
Kirshta muttered in annoyance. “If the Power of the Ditya could be named, its power could be broken just as Am was broken. But Thuram, the clever man, put the name into the stone, the very thing that I can’t get.”
“What about the Ushpanditya?” Sadma offered.
“The Rice Gate is every bit as well-defended as the Bronze Gate,” one of the other Red Men said irritably. “You ought to know, you ran patrols there.”
“But does it have the same protection from the Powers?”
“Yes,” Kirshta said. “No easier for an army to take the Rice Gate than the Bronze Gate.”
A thought bloomed in Vapathi’s mind, and she laughed to herself. “What if we didn’t attack with an army?”
Everyone quieted for a moment. “What do you mean?” one of the Red Men asked her.
“Dhorsha, read the prophecy again.”
The dhorsha glanced over his shoulder at Vapathi, then cleared his throat. “I have put the name of the Power of the Ditya into this stone. Behold, no army may breach the walls of this fortress to possess the Ditya until they first possess it.”
“No army may breach the walls,” Vapathi repeated. “But one man is not an army.”
A smile crept across Kirshta’s face.
“That is very clever,” one of the Red Men said in a mocking tone, “but I don’t see how you expect a single person to break the walls of the Dhigvaditya.”
“Unless the doors are opened,” Sadma said.
“But the doors are opened all the time,” the other man replied. “Opening the gate to let someone in cannot possibly count as ‘breaching the walls,’ or else the prophecy would have been trampled underfoot centuries ago.”
“We must break down the doors,” Kirshta said. “And something else you said, about eating the walls… perhaps there is a way to do that after all. But it’ll require some preparation.”
The Red Men both looked at Kirshta in silent confusion.
“Dhorsha,” Kirshta said with a lazy wave of his hand, “did you know my father was a priest of She Who Devours? He performed secret rites in the Holy, high up in the mountains. The priests kept her asleep for centuries while you lowlanders ate and drank and took us for slaves.”
“I did not know,” the man said, quivering nervously.
“You should thank us. You and the rest of your comrades are about to become the first lowlander priests of She Who Devours. And one of you will be blessed to give your flesh and blood to eat the walls.”
* * *
A hundred yards across open stone to the Bronze Gate. For the last thirty yards a precipice opened on each side, falling into a moat of thorn bushes. The gate itself was a cleft in the living stone which formed the base of the Dhigvaditya, closed overhead by an arch of heavy sandstone blocks, sealed across its breadth by a double-door of teak, clad in bronze and stamped with images of Am’s spear. Enormous towers rose on each side of the gate, arrow-slits like tiger’s eyes all around their sides, ready to rain arrows down at any who approached the gate unbidden.
Kirshta clasped Vapathi’s hand. He stood beside her in the shade of the house, watching the sunlight of late morning heat the sandstone of the fortress. “Be careful,” he said.
She squeezed his hand.
“Mouth of the Devourer,” Sadma said. He stood alongside Kirshta and shaded his eyes to study the movements of the Red Men on the ramparts of the Dhigvaditya. He glanced at Vapathi cautiously. “We can still send one of the Devoured instead of your sister.”
Kirshta shook his head. “The Devoured… their names are gone, their death is swallowed. They cannot touch the Powers. It has to be a mortal who frees the name of the Ditya.”
“Are you sure?”
Kirshta laughed nervously. “No. But we’ll only have one chance, and I won’t waste it on one of the Devoured.”
“What about me? Or one of the other Red Men.”
“Soldiers. You would be shot immediately.” He pointed at Vapathi. “A woman alone cannot possibly be an army, and might have a chance.”
Vapathi kissed Kirshta on the cheek. “I’ll be fine,” she said. In truth, she was not sure she would be. But for Apurta, she would try.
There was no point in delaying further. The jar was at her feet, the bundle of dried ephedra twigs tied to her waist. She lifted the jar atop her head and stepped into the sunlight. The light tickled her cheeks and warmed her hands.
“Very well,” Sadma said. He shook his head and retreated into the shade.
Vapathi took a deep breath and turned toward the Dhigvaditya. The jar seemed light atop her head, the carrying effortless. The sandstone walls of the Dhigvaditya approached. Her heart pattered faster with every step.
For Apurta, she told herself.
The shadow of the first tower fell over her. The bronze-clad doors loomed ahead.
“Halt,” came an angry command from the guard-station above the doors. “What are you doing here?”
She ignored the man. The doors grew overhead, three times her height, the bronze rivets in its face as big as her head. She had walked through the Bronze Gate as a slave in the imperial household, but she had never approached them when they were closed. For the first time, she felt real fear. She ran her fingers over the bronze.
“Get back,” the man shouted again. “We’ll shoot you full of arrows if you don’t.” She heard commands being muttered inside the towers.
Vapathi set the jar down and loosed the bundle of ephedra from her waist. The lid of the jar came off, and the smell of hot blood wafted up. She dipped the ephedra into the blood, and with a violent flick of the wrist she splattered the Bronze Gate.
For a moment the blood was dark red against the verdigris and gray of the ancient bronze. Nothing happened. It had failed. Then—
The red darkened. It turned to black, and the metal began to hiss underneath it. Steam rose from the dissolving bronze. The blood trickled down, drawing a black scar in the face of the door.
She dipped the ephedra again and sprinkled the door. The blood hissed as soon as it touched the metal. The bronze crumbled and flaked off, a drop eating away an area as big as a fist. The wood beneath it began to smoke.
“Get back!” came a third command. “After this, we’ll begin to shoot.”
Could they see what she was doing from inside those towers? Probably not, or she would be dead already. An arrow clattered off the stonework next to her.
No more time for subtlety. “Apurta,” she whispered,
“I’m coming.”
She lifted the jar over her heard and hurled it against the door.
The clay jar shattered. There was an explosion of steam and heat. A vile smell enveloped her, smoke billowing up from the gate, stinging her eyes and burning her throat. Shouts of confusion sounded overhead. Crackling and popping from the gate. The sound of arrows being loosed. Beams creaking and rivets falling.
She put her hand out to see if she could push through the door. She found nothing.
She gulped clean air, closed her eyes, and dived through the hole in the door.
A peculiar prickle touched her skin, like walking through old cobwebs that tore when she touched them. A chain of brief images touched her mind: rotten leather straps finally giving way, a dead leaf crushed underfoot, a flake of dried mud that crumbled when touched.
Her feet touched the stones on the inside of the Dhigvaditya. The ground trembled.
Shouting and screaming. The grinding of stone against stone. A rock fell and bruised her cheek. She opened her eyes. She was beneath the entrance arch of the Bronze Gate. The blood against the door had boiled off into a black vapor, filling the arches with a heavy fog. The stench of the vapor stung her nostrils and burned her eyes.
Black vapor blew past her, and the shapes of men with swords moved toward her through the noxious gloom. She hear them coughing. She inhaled once, then doubled over gasping and spitting.
More creaking of shifting stone. She looked back. Through the poisonous haze she saw that the Bronze Gate was gone—entirely gone, no trace left of the bronze and the beams of wood three feet thick. Black blood gnawed at the arch overhead and chewed the foundation stones of the towers, the black stain dissolving the bones of the Dhigvaditya as it spread. Dust and bits of rock fell on her head.
She had to move. The arch was going to fall.
She crouched and pressed herself against one of the walls of the entrance, then scrambled forward. Through the black fog, past the men who had come trying to kill her. Out of the entrance passage and into the central court of the Dhigvaditya. The mist dispersed here. She gasped clean air and saw a panoply of red and black and bronze.