He glanced at the stair.
“Summerchild’s alive,” said Shaldis softly. “She’s awake, she’ll live. Will you come with us now to the Temple of the Twins?”
“And do what?” demanded Jethan, almost spitting the words. His eyes, cold with self-reproach, raked her, then passed to the others: haggard, shaky with fatigue, clearly far beyond even the smallest of magics, even had they known the spells to save the king.
“And stand by him,” said Shaldis, “as his friends. Even if there is no hope.”
Jethan was silent, the bitterness of his blue gaze terrifying. Then he sighed and took her hand. “Let’s go, then,” he said.
FIFTY-ONE
They got as close on horseback to the Temple of the Twins as they could—Shaldis, Jethan, Pomegranate, and Pebble, Moth having volunteered to remain behind with Summerchild. The crowd filled every street, alleyway, and square of the Flowermarket District, in whose boundary wall the small black Temple of the Twins was set like a bead in a ring. More people crowded the lower temple fence that extended beyond the city wall, as the wall of the Temple of Death extended beyond the southern wall on the opposite side of the city. Men stood on ladders and on one another’s shoulders to look over into the enclosed and rather scummy lagoon from which a wide channel led out to the lake itself.
Under other circumstances any of the three Raven sisters would have simply extended the minor spells of illusion to open a path for themselves through the crowd. None was capable of doing so now. Jethan pushed and thrust, Shaldis clinging to his belt with one hand and to Pomegranate’s wrist with the other. They were halfway to the small, guarded door when a noise, like a sigh or a gasp or a stirring, ran through the crowd, a buzz of anticipation.
Damn it, Shaldis thought frantically, damn it.
What any of them could have done when they reached the inner enclosure, if they reached it, she hadn’t the faintest idea. Only that they had to be there, they had to at least try, even though not a trace of power remained to them now.
The temple’s small door was closed, but as Jethan and the three women came near, it opened. The black-veiled figure who regarded them enigmatically from the threshold was alone, but not another soul of the crowding multitude even attempted to push forward. People took liberties with the gods all the time, pilfered from their temples and falsified their tithes and took their names in vain, but they treated differently those who dwelled in the Sealed Temples.
The single, small, high-roofed chamber was empty and clean swept. As she and the others walked through, Shaldis glimpsed a niche curtained in black. The northern side of the chamber was open, pillared, and looked out onto the lagoon, down to which led shallow steps. The stink of dirty water and crocodiles was overwhelming. It was as if, Shaldis thought, the temple had been built only as an adjunct to the lagoon, existing solely for the consecration of kings and in disuse for centuries. Crocodiles must creep up the channel from the lake and bask on its steps and in its cool shelter all the time.
There was a space of about twenty-five feet between the lagoon’s stone brim and the enclosure wall. It was jammed solid with watchers, but they stayed away from the steps.
Two priests stood on the steps, alone. Shaldis came to a halt still within the temple’s shadows. She could see the king wading steadily, breast deep in the green water, across the pool to touch the far edge, which she knew he must do and come back.
The pool was full of crocodiles. It was a hot morning; they basked on the lower steps, floated in the murky verges of papyrus and reed that had rooted over the years all around the lagoon’s sides. They swam, gliding in the green water with the heavy deadly sinuousness of water snakes. One of them came close enough to the king that the bow wave of its passing slopped over his shoulders; he had to step back a pace so that its scaled side wouldn’t brush his face.
Shaldis’s eyes scanned the crowd, frantically searching for a face she knew. She saw Yanrid, Rachnis, Hathmar clustered together with Hiero and Kylin. By the way the Sun Mages clung to one another’s hands it was clear they were in terror and were not even attempting magic. Nearby them Geb, the king’s fat little chamberlain, held his hands pressed over his mouth, weeping.
There was no sign of Foxfire. Was it only chance? Shaldis’s mind screamed at her. It can’t be chance!
It crossed her mind to wonder dizzily if in fact the Veiled Gods did express their preferences by a miracle.
She felt as if her heart ceased beating, for as long as it took the king to touch the worn spot at the pool’s far edge and to wade slowly back.
Two more crocodiles swam near him, as if investigating, then glided indifferently away.
He came up the steps, dripping filthy water from the thin white shirt he wore, then collapsed to his knees on the stone. Shaldis could see him shaking with shock; she thought he was going to be sick. Then Soth came forward out of the crowd, and from the other side the two black-veiled priests, to help him to his feet.
After a long moment he turned and held up his arms, showing himself unhurt, though his face was ashen as a dying man’s and he looked about to faint.
They could probably hear the shouts and cries, thought Shaldis, on the Island of Rainbows.
Soth offered his arm again and the king shook it off. He walked by himself up the steps, through the bare little sanctuary—where he knelt for a moment before the curtained niche—and then to the simple door. He passed the Raven sisters without turning, too numb and shaken to see. Jethan whispered, “What happened?” And Shaldis could only shake her head. The cheering went through her skull like the stroke of an ax, and it was ten times worse when the king came out the little door and walked barefoot, dripping, as if in a trance down the narrow streets that led to the Temple of Shibathnes, the Serpent King, the lord of the dark within the mind.
The Temple of Shibathnes, in its obscure square near the great holy place of Rohar, was in the form of a black tower, sunk into the earth so that only its circular top protruded like a wellhead, and a stairway spiraled down into the rock. A gallery had been built around the top, so that spectators could watch the king descend; and again Shaldis reflected that the place seemed to have been constructed for this one occasion only, for the consecration of a king. The gallery was wood, and had been many times renewed over the centuries, but as Shaldis and Jethan—and hundreds of other people—crowded onto it, it swayed and creaked.
“I think the last time this thing was repaired was before the rains quit, six hundred years ago,” muttered Jethan, clinging hard to Shaldis’s arm. Nevertheless, Shaldis pushed forward toward the rail, and people continued to stream through the round temple’s narrow door and onto the gallery behind her, until she thought the rickety platform must collapse.
If it did, it would be death for everyone. Below her, and visible through the gaping, crazy boards, was a sheer drop of a hundred feet to a stone floor. The stair spiraled down the sides, stone treads worn to a shallow runnel. At noon the sun must shine straight down the roofless well to the bottom, where a statue of some kind stood, presumably Shibathnes, though it was too foreshortened by height to tell. At this hour of the morning the stone deeps were cool.
From the cracks and hollows in every wall, snakes had crept out to bask. Magic of some kind must linger around the place, thought Shaldis, for she could see that most of them were adders or cobras: big spectacle-backed olive-colored king cobras and the vile little brown-black swamp snakes that would pursue men for miles through the mud pits. Her mind groped for the spells Puahale had taught her, to turn snakes aside, but she knew there was no power left within her, after the fight with the Dreamshadow and the saving of Summerchild’s life.
Yet the crocodiles had been turned aside. As the king descended, clinging to the rock cracks of the wall to keep his balance on the crumbling stairs, Shaldis closed her eyes, sank her mind toward trance, listening.
Feeling for the taste, the touch of magic.
It was there. She felt it immediately, the sam
e magic that had marked her grandfather’s house and Ahure’s.
The strange little spells that she’d thought must belong to a nomad Crafty or to a child.
It’s a teyn.
She knew it, with a kind of dazed wonderment and a relief so intense her head ached. The magic was the same, that familiar sweet lightness that she’d felt on the walls of her grandfather’s house, on the scars of Murder the cat. She opened her eyes to scan the crowd on the gallery again. Nearly a dozen teyn had slipped in with the crowd, scattered among them fairly evenly. All domestics, of the tamest sort that owners would send down to the wells for water or the marketplaces for corn, with notes of credit to the dealers.
All back against the wall, of course. No human was going to let a teyn take the rail-side place where the view was best.
There. A white-furred jenny in the usual ragged tunic given to house teyn. Why did she know her, or feel she knew her?
She’d dreamed of her. Dreamed of Foxfire sleeping in the desert.
She’s really smart; she helped cover our tracks when she saw what I was trying to do.
Why in the name of all the gods would a teyn remain in captivity—especially in captivity with Red Silk!—when she had the power to escape?
The king reached the bottom of the stair. He’d nearly stepped on three cobras and an asp, sleeping on the steps; the stone floor of the pit was carpeted with them. He walked forward gingerly, placing his bare feet as delicately as a dancer. There was scarcely room for him to kneel before the image, but he did, his knee inches from a knot of coiled scaly rings—he put his arms around the statue’s black base, rested his head against the Snake King’s foot, the way teyn were taught to, at the feet of their masters.
He remained there a long time. Trying to gather up enough strength, Shaldis realized, to climb back out.
Praying Shibathnes only knew what.
The stairs were steep. He had to climb on his hands and knees. When he got past the last snake coiled on them the cheering started, and the deep hollow picked up the echoes like a mammoth didgeridoo, racketing the noise upward to the sky.
“I’ve heard that the priests of old used to let the candidate get through the first five ordeals, only to let him die on the sixth, if he displeased them,” whispered Hathmar, coming up beside Shaldis as the crowds—swollen to every man, woman, and child in the city, it seemed—followed the king through the streets to the Fishmarket Gate and then out and across an old path through the fields, to where the black Temple of Time stood alone. The priests of the other gods of the city—BoSaa and Darutha and Rohar and the other daylight gods of everyday life—formed a ring around the king, with a ring of his guards outside of that. In any case it was considered the worst kind of ill luck to touch a king on his way to his consecration; and after what they’d seen that morning, evidently nobody in the city was willing to risk anything at this point. The feet of the crowd threshed through the deep dust still lying in the streets and between the field rows beyond the gates, and the whole city lay under a thick golden cloud of it as the sun climbed toward noon.
Looking back, Shaldis saw Mohrvine riding his black horse among the crowd, dressed with his usual careful simplicity, his face blank as a stone wall.
Ready to step forward and volunteer to take the tests of kingship, the moment a crocodile devoured his nephew or a cobra fastened its fangs into his ankle?
Walking along with her arm through Jethan’s, Shaldis prayed Foxfire was all right. She wouldn’t be killed or even physically harmed, Shaldis knew—she was far too valuable—and probably her maid Opal would survive as well. Red Silk was far too canny to commit an act that unpardonable. But she guessed that both girls were in for some hard times, and her heart ached for them.
Softly she said to Hathmar, “No. He’ll survive.” She could see more teyn attaching themselves to the crowd. She sensed more than a single source of that odd, unfamiliar power, but surely there couldn’t be that many teyn Crafties? They shambled inconspicuously in its wake and wandered out to circle the black stone of the enclosure wall.
Like the Temple of Shibathnes, the Temple of Time was also a pit, but wide as the grounds of a great house. There was, in fact, no temple at all: simply the maze, whose twisting walls stood higher than the head of the tallest man and whose convoluted corridors opened into six small, identical chambers, open alike to the sky.
Each chamber held a stone altar, some eight feet long by two broad. On each altar stood a cup.
The king entered the maze at noon, with the sun standing straight overhead. The people around the edge looked down, but such was the height of the walls that Shaldis, pressed against the railing that surrounded the pit above, could tell there was no way for a man within to orient himself.
In times past, had five of those cups been charged with poison, the sixth with harmless wine? Or had all six held different poisons, so that no one could know what antidote to carry, nor could a mage keeping watch know exactly what spells of healing to place upon the king? The king had walked the maze before, twelve years ago, and had presumably been coached fairly recently by Hathmar in its windings. He made his way without faltering to the central chamber.
For a long time he knelt before the altar, as he had in the Temple of Shibathnes, his arms stretched across it and his head pressed to the stone.
“He’s going to make it,” Jethan whispered, and where her arm pressed his in the crowd Shaldis could feel him trembling. She herself could see the pattern of scabbed cuts on the king’s arms and chest and thighs, exactly as Soth had reproduced them. It was the teyn themselves, she thought, who came to him in the desert, when he’d been taken by the Dreamshadow.
Not anyone controlling them. No nomad Raven sister at all.
They had saved him then, as they were saving him now.
After a long time he rose, drank the contents of the cup, and laid himself on the altar, his hands folded over his breast, the noon sun beating down on his face.
Waiting for the will of the gods.
Here kings had died. Shaldis could feel the echoes of those deaths whispering in the stone. She looked along the railing, all around that enormous sunken labyrinth, and glimpsed again, far back in the crowd, the white fur of Foxfire’s jenny teyn. It occurred to her to wonder if Foxfire had ever had the power to turn aside the crocodiles or the snakes, had ever actually been able to make spells work that would evaporate a deadly poison out of a man’s system.
Or had it all been Eleven Grasshoppers, who followed her so inconspicuously about her grandmother’s house?
If nothing else, she reflected, she’d better communicate this theory to Mohrvine as soon as she could, before he got it into his head that he could pass through the ordeals and decided to assassinate the king and make the attempt.
A dark shape moved through the maze, the veiled Servant of Time. The black form stood beside the king’s stone bed, stretched forth a thin hand to touch the king’s head, throat, wrists. Shaldis saw the king move and take the shadow’s hand to sit up, then to stand.
Shouting spread outward from the railing, across the fields to the Fishmarket Gate and from there into the city. Jethan swept Shaldis into his arms and kissed her. Hathmar flung his arms around Pomegranate, Geb embraced Pebble, and everyone was hugging everyone, shouting, whooping as the king was led from the maze. Light-headed with relief, Shaldis thought, Summerchild will hear it from her garden.
Mohrvine, his face a rictus of congratulation, stepped forward at the maze’s entrance to embrace his nephew. Shaldis noticed that Bax stayed very close during that demonstration of affection, and kept between the two men thereafter.
Flowers pelted the king, garments were spread over the drifted sand. He saw the Sun Mages and the Raven sisters in the crowd, embraced them before he was torn away to the embraces, it seemed, of everyone in the city, before the priests and the guards closed in to conduct him back to the city gates, the city streets. A huge tiredness washed over Shaldis, and she stumbled, clinging
to the unvarying strength of Jethan’s arm as he led her among the crowd back toward the palace. Everyone was singing, voices blending into a black buzzing wave of noise; and Shaldis found herself thinking, I’ll have to see to Father when I get back, and Tulik and the others. She staggered again, and Jethan lifted her in his arms.
He set her down in the Golden Court, before the palace gates. Beneath the crimson and gold archways of the Marvelous Tower a curtained chair had been set up. As the king approached the archway the curtains parted and Moth and Cattail helped Summerchild to stand, Summerchild frail as a single dried flower stalk and beautiful in her veils of pink silk, her soft escaping tendrils of mist-fair hair.
Oryn stopped as if transfixed by a spear, staring at her, as if not believing what he saw. Then he ran forward and in the sight of all the people of the city caught her in his arms, a huge fat man in a dirty white shift holding the most perfect Pearl Woman in the city; the cheers would have deafened the gods. Then Oryn turned, and held Summerchild’s hand up, wordlessly proclaiming to all the city that this was his woman, his wife, and his queen, though the loudest herald crying this news would have been drowned by the din. Turning, he cupped her face in his hands and kissed her, before seating her again in her chair and following it, on foot, through the gates.
FIFTY-TWO
Raeshaldis left word at the palace that she’d return in the morning to relay vital information to the king. More than anyone, he deserved rest. Everything else could wait.
“Are you all right?” she asked Jethan as the two of them stood pressed against the crimson-tiled tower gate by the crowd still milling in the Golden Court. She reached up, touched the bandage on his head, the bruises that blackened his left cheekbone and eye.
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