“I have come home.”
In the same moment, on the eastern side of the city, Teacher Yehamwy stood on one of the Hetawa’s wall walkways with Sentinel Anarim and two other members of the Council of Paths, watching the smoke and firelight from the west draw closer.
“This is getting out of hand,” Anarim said.
“As chaos does,” said Ni-imeh of the Sisters. She and others of her order—those not fighting—had come into the Hetawa for shelter at the first word of trouble. “You believe the Prince will come here first?”
“That was the suggestion sent into his dreams,” said Yehamwy. “Nothing can be certain, of course, without the control of dreamblood.” He glanced at Sharer Anakhemat, who nodded wearily.
“We can’t say until he arrives on our doorstep, and even then we may never know if the decision was the result of our influence or his own wishes,” said the Sharer. “His dreaming has become sharper lately; we had to be subtle. Distance-narcomancy is always difficult. And no one has had time to travel to the borders to reinforce it, not in several days.”
Ni-imeh nodded. “We must be content with that, then. If he’s not seen to seek our blessing in restoring his rule, the rift between Hetawa and Yanya-iyan may never heal.”
“Is there any word from the searchers?” asked Yehamwy.
Anarim answered. “They tracked down five motherlines before this whole business began.” He nodded toward the glowing horizon. “Several women and girls have been found with considerable untrained dreaming gifts; only one had seen visions or showed signs of losing control. But even her power was nothing that could explain the plague.” He grimaced. “Unfortunately, with so much chaos in the city, the remaining searches will be delayed.”
“Would it help if we aided your efforts?” Ni-imeh asked. “The House of the Sisters has been relatively unscathed by these nightmares. Those of our members and apprentices who have the necessary narcomantic skill can travel in disguise, for the sake of safety.”
Yehamwy and Anarim looked at each other in surprise. Ni-imeh’s lips thinned in faint irritation. “Just because you have only now realized the potential of women does not mean that we have been fools all this time.”
Anarim’s expression softened into as much of a smile as the Sentinel would ever allow himself. “We would appreciate any assistance, of course. But it may require travel out of the city. Several of the motherlines are noble or farmer families, with residences in the greenlands or upriver towns.”
“That’s no difficulty—” Ni-imeh broke off, startled, as a sound broke the relative stillness of the Hetawa’s courtyard. They turned to see a boy, too young yet to serve as an acolyte, running across the flagstones as fast as his small legs could carry him. Even from the wall-height, they could hear the child weeping as he ran.
“What in nightmares?” Yehamwy stepped forward and drew breath to call out to the boy. He was forestalled by Sentinel Anarim, who reached out and clapped a hand over his mouth unceremoniously.
“The House of Children,” said Anarim. They could see the House from their vantage—at the far end of the long Hetawa courtyard, opposite the Hall of Blessings. Though most of the House’s windows should have been dark—the children were sent to bed shortly after the evening prayer-dance and bath—they could see lanterns moving throughout the building, and as the wind shifted they could hear children’s cries of fear from within. A moment later, another figure ran out through one of the House’s gates. This one was taller; one of the House’s adults.
“ ’Ware, Kisuati!” he shouted as he ran. His volume was a shock against the Hetawa’s stillness; they stared at him, even Anarim frozen in a kind of horrified disbelief. “In the House of Children, Kisuati soldiers—”
More figures ran out after him. They all heard the sharp hiss of an arrow as it flew; an instant later the Teacher went silent and fell to the ground.
“Oh, Goddess,” whispered Ni-imeh.
Yehamwy put a shaking hand to his mouth. “Bahal, that was young Bahal, he was Deshephemun’s apprentice—”
“Get inside,” said Anarim. “Go to the Hall of Blessings; tell everyone you see to gather there. It may be only the children they want.”
“Only the children?” Anakuhemet looked horrified. “What are you saying?”
“They’re taking the children hostage. I and my brothers will deal with this. Go, now!”
“But—” Yehamwy took a step away but then stopped, hovering. “Anarim, most of your brethren are—” He looked out toward the western city, where Yanya-iyan rose above the rooftops.
“There are eight of us left,” Anarim said, with a tight, ready smile. “An eight of Hananja’s Sentinels is an army.” And he ran into the shadows before they could protest again.
There was something about Lord Sanfi as he prostrated himself in Yanya-iyan’s throne room—lately redubbed the Protectors’ Hall—that made Sunandi think of crocodiles.
“—A misunderstanding, or perhaps even foul slander,” the lord was saying. He had been on his knees nearly from the time he entered. It was that, among remembered observations from their dinner evening, that gave him a reptilian manner in Sunandi’s eyes. The ease with which he humbled himself, as if his pride was only another tool in a vast arsenal used to manipulate those around him. The way he studied the faces of his audience, reading them for weaknesses. The quick slide of his eyes over Sunandi, assessing and dismissing her all at once. She was no longer useful to him; he sought richer prey.
“So you say, Lord Sanfi,” said Protector Yao. It did not sound as though she liked him either. “But we’ve heard testimony from the foreign merchants from whom you purchased weapons and other goods of war. What excuse can you offer for that?”
“Only that I am innocent, Esteemed,” he said. He spoke in fluent Sua, but there was an awkwardness in the way that he used the supplicative forms. He was clearly unused to them. “If it will satisfy you as to my innocence, I know of others among my peers who may have transgressed—”
Sunandi had heard enough, revolted by the man’s bald-faced betrayal. Tiaanet, she decided, would do well to kill her father off and take over the lineage before he embarrassed them any further.
“Respectfully, Esteemed,” she said, interrupting Sanfi, “we have no time for this. The last report from the western gate was that it might fall at any moment. Let us imprison this man—with his wife and daughters, if that would please him—and devote our efforts to defense.”
Mama Yao nodded at this, as did Sasannante, but Aksata rubbed his eyes, looking bored and weary. They were all weary. Aksata had been the one to insist that the Protectors take over the throne chamber, putting their own chairs where the Sunset Prince’s oxbow seat had once stood alone. The palace servants had been serving cold food and misplacing laundry—and “accidentally” making loud noises in the small hours of the night—ever since.
“There’s no need for worry, Speaker,” Aksata said, mastering his mood enough to smile at Sunandi. “The western gate is no great loss. Indeed, we have already sent orders to your husband to withdraw, and bring his remaining forces here.”
“I see.” Sunandi frowned, trying and failing to make sense of whatever strategy Aksata might be planning. “Then, Esteemed, this Gujaareen prince and his fighters will enter the city. They’ll be able to attack Yanya-iyan itself at that point.”
“Yes, they will,” said Aksata, and he exchanged a brief smile with Moib, who chuckled softly. “That suits our purposes for the moment.”
Sanfi was listening closely at the foot of the dais; Sunandi noted a slight frown on his forehead, though he did not rise from his knees. It almost amused her to see his concern, given that he had just offered to turn on his own allies, but that did not trouble her half so much as the idea of enduring a siege.
But before she could formulate a question that might not annoy Protector Aksata further, there were loud voices at the door of the chamber. A moment later the door opened, and one of the palace guards cam
e in at a brisk pace, stopping beside Sanfi and kneeling to report.
“Esteemed and Wise, forgive my intrusion, but my commander has sent me to inform you we are under attack,” he said. His Sua was flavored with the rough accent of the forest-country: a lowcaste. “They’re already inside the palace. All the archers of the first tier are dead … We believe they came in with the retreating troops, wearing the uniforms of our men …”
“Wait,” said Mama Yao, frowning. “How can they be inside the palace? The Prince and his army of traitors were only just at the city gates at last report—”
“These aren’t the Prince’s people!” the soldier interrupted, plainly forgetting his manners. “I don’t know who they are. They came among us in disguise, as I said—We found thirty members of the shield-guard dead, with no wounds that bled but plenty of broken necks and crushed throats. No one even heard them cry alarm! And now the men in their clothes are …” He trailed off, shaking his head. “Some say they climb walls like scarabs.” He glanced up at the throne room ceiling, as if to be certain there was no one there.
Sunandi shivered, a chill prickling the nape of her neck as understanding came. “Sentinels,” she murmured. “Hetawa priests.”
Moib frowned. “The ones who guard? I was told only the Gatherers—”
“The Sentinels train the Gatherers, Esteemed,” Sunandi said. It was unspeakably rude to interrupt an elder, but she had to find some way to convey to them how dire a development this was. It was a possibility she herself had never anticipated; she too had thought of the Sentinels as defenders rather than attackers. But that had been folly on her part, for Nijiri had warned her. The whole city was the storm he’d summoned, and his brethren were the lightning poised to strike.
Sunandi walked forward to stand beside Sanfi. “I have seen a Gatherer, unarmed, break a mounted soldier’s sword-arm with what seemed a glancing blow—and they are the lesser fighters. The Sentinels are the ones trusted to hunt down Gatherers when they go mad and turn into Reapers. They have no magic, but they have armament, and their sole purpose is to fight.”
Sasannante said, “But we have nearly the whole of the force we brought from Kisua—” He sat up, scowling. “Wait, how many of these warrior-priests are there?”
“Dozens or hundreds. No one but the Hetawa knows for certain,” Sunandi said, shaking her head. “Esteemed, you should come: there are safer places to hide than this.”
Mama Yao bristled. “Hide?”
“Yes,” Sunandi said. She wanted to scream the word. “We can hide, or we can wait here and fight an unknown enemy, of unknown strength, and hope we’re lucky enough to win. Which do you choose?”
Mama Yao pursed her half-toothless mouth, but finally looked at her fellows. Aksata looked as though he would have liked to object, but Sasannante and Moib stood at once. As they came down from the dais, soldiers moved to surround them, and Sunandi gave the order to take them to the garden of Yanya-iyan—the palace’s most defensible point.
And as they moved, Sunandi vowed to herself that when she was an elder, she would listen to the younger people around her. Youth did not make one stupid, and true wisdom was clearly something even elders had to work to achieve.
Behind them, as they left, the shunha lord Sanfi slipped out unnoticed.
From the depths of contemplation, Gatherer Rabbaneh felt the presence of new dreamers beyond his door. Four where there had been one—and another four for Nijiri, and a four for Inmu, and even a four for the Superior. And four more beyond that, lurking in the hall beyond the guest suite. All just to subdue three Gatherers? Rabbaneh almost chuckled out loud.
The door opened. Rabbaneh opened his eyes, listening as three of the soldiers quietly spread themselves around the small room, flanking him. The fourth—Rabbaneh smelled fresh-forged metal and leather, and heard the rattle of some sort of hinge or lock mechanism. So that was what they were up to.
Ah, Ehiru my friend, you frightened these people too badly ten years ago. They think us all little better than Reapers. For that alone I should teach them a lesson—
“Gatherer Rabbaneh?” That was the young soldier who had guarded him this past fourday. Rabbaneh had developed a fondness for the youth, who turned out to have been artisan-born as Rabbaneh himself was, from a distinguished family of chanters in Kisua. He had been kind enough to share some of his chants with Rabbaneh at mealtimes. Rabbaneh would take care not to hurt him as much as the others.
He got to his feet and turned to face the boy, who held a nightmarish leather-and-iron contraption designed to clamp Rabbaneh’s hands into closed fists. A rogue’s yoke, of some sort of Kisuati design. There were all sorts of flanges and latches on the thing; Rabbaneh curled his lip at its sheer ugliness. “I suppose that is for me.”
The young soldier nodded, swallowing audibly. He darted a look at his companions, who all stood ready with swords drawn, and finally faced Rabbaneh again. “I’m sorry, Gatherer, but the Protectors have ordered this. With all that’s going on—”
One of the other men, an older soldier and likely the boy’s superior, barked something at him in Sua. Rabbaneh, whose Sua was ceremonial at best, guessed the man was telling him to get on with it.
That one first, then.
The soldier had not finished berating the boy when Rabbaneh darted a hand at the soldier’s eyes. Instead of laying his fingers lightly on the man’s eyelids, he jabbed hard. While that one screamed and clapped his hands over his eyes, Rabbaneh crouched low to get beneath the sword of the soldier to his left—not that swords were any great threat in such a confined space, especially not when the men had spread themselves out so conveniently for him. Mildly affronted that they had come at a Gatherer so ill prepared, Rabbaneh struck the soldier’s kneecap rather harder than strictly necessary. The sound of the breaking joint was unpeacefully loud, like a tree limb cracking in the wind. The soldier’s shout was even louder, and mingled most cacophonously with that of his eye-gouged comrade.
Should have silenced them, Rabbaneh thought with belated guilt. Sonta-i would scold me so if he were here—
The third soldier was coming at him now, sword already raised and face contorted with rage. That made him the easiest target, for he was no different from the hundreds of violent men Rabbaneh had Gathered over the course of his twenty-two years of service. Three quick punches to the face and the man sagged to the ground, dazed and half-blind. There was no real need to put him to sleep after that, but Rabbaneh did it anyway just to be thorough.
When that one fell—the whole affair had taken perhaps three deep breaths—Rabbaneh turned to face the young soldier. The boy had not moved throughout the attack, except to take a step backward and begin trembling like a river-reed.
“I’m sorry,” Rabbaneh said, making his voice soothing. “This was necessary—” He stopped, startled, as a curved sword-blade appeared from the middle of the boy’s chest.
“Gatherer,” the boy blurted, then looked down at himself in equal surprise before sagging forward, dead. As he fell, Rabbaneh saw that two more Kisuati soldiers were coming through the doorway, jostling each other and shouting to their comrades in their panic.
Whether they had mistaken the boy for Rabbaneh from behind, or whether the boy had simply been in their way, Rabbaneh would never know. He was on them before they had fully gotten through the doorway, covering each of their faces with his hands and driving pure fury into their waking minds. Such was the force of his rage that they screamed as their souls tore loose; Rabbaneh did not care where those souls went. He dropped the bodies and lunged through the doorway to kill the rest, kill them all, peace be damned—
The blow that rang through his body jarred him out of the rage. He tried to turn, batting aside a sword that slashed toward his face as an afterthought, but found his movements hampered in an odd way. Then came another of those curious jarring sensations, and he was free to move again.
The soldier who had been behind him—just to one side of the doorway; Rabbaneh had
not seen him—stepped back, raising his sword to swing again. It was already coated with red.
Rabbaneh raised a fist to strike at the soldier, but his arm moved sluggishly, as in a dream. That was foolishness, because in a dream he had total control, and movement was a simple matter of focused will—
Another jarring blow. Rabbaneh turned his head, still marveling at his slowness, to see another soldier completing a lunge. His hand was around the hilt of another sword, the tip of which was thrust between Rabbaneh’s ribs just to one side of his breastbone.
“Rabbaneh!” Nijiri’s voice, unpeacefully alarmed. The head of the soldier who had just struck Rabbaneh suddenly twisted at an ugly angle. He flew off to the side, dislodging the sword in the process. Rabbaneh felt a completely inappropriate and disrespectful urge to laugh at the look of surprise on the corpse’s face, but for the moment he was more concerned by his sudden inability to stand. He managed to sag to his knees with some semblance of grace, but then could not help falling sideways in a clumsy, mortifying sprawl.
Then Nijiri was there, and Inmu too, both of them looking frightened and anxious. So too the Superior, behind them, all of them gazing at him in alarm. But why? The soldiers had been dealt with. They were free.
“The Protectors …” Rabbaneh started to say, and then realized he had forgotten the end of the sentence. What about the Protectors?
“Rabbaneh-brother.” Inmu, still so young even after seven years of Gathering, looked on the verge of tears. “Nijiri, can you not—”
“I’m no Sharer,” Nijiri said, his face grimmer than usual. “Small cuts, perhaps, I could heal. Not this, not before his life bleeds away.”
Inmu choked back a sob. Rabbaneh opened his mouth to remind Inmu that such histrionics were unbecoming of a Gatherer. And they had more important matters to concern them, such as … such as … what? He could not remember. It was so difficult to breathe.
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