Because, after all, it was no fun being a peasant.
She had her eyes closed in order to concentrate; the magic was thick, very thick around here. No wonder the seabirds were crying doom; whatever was happening was powerful and The Tradition had taken note quite strongly.
But she was a bit taken aback when it suddenly felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric all at once.
Legs muffled, arms enveloped, head bowed forward—her eyes flew open and she looked down at herself in shock.
It not only felt as if someone had draped her in a hundred bolts of fabric—it looked that way, too.
She must have been wearing six layers of clothing.
In form, the main article she was enveloped in was a heavily embroidered blue silk robe, but the rectangular, lined sleeves swept down to and along the sand, the robe itself trailed along behind her by the length of her arm, and it was bound around her by a broad, stiff, embroidered silk sash with an elaborate bow or knot that she could feel at the small of her back. Beneath this robe was another; beneath that still another—there must have been six or seven of these robes, each carefully layered so as to show a sliver of colored silk at the neckline. Her hair had been bound up and hidden beneath a wig made in a stiff mounded style with hair sticks thrust through it, and on her feet were wooden sandals so tall she was afraid to take a step in them. Not that she could have even if she had wanted to. She couldn’t move.
The clothing was beautiful but—
This was utterly ridiculous.
Would The Tradition give her another chance? She closed her eyes and tested the potential magic about her.
There was nothing there. She’d had her chance. Now she had to find some other way of getting the job done.
Drat.
With a sigh, she began divesting herself of all of the many garments. She would just have to do this the hard way.
By dusk, she was quietly moving through the underbrush at the side of a road, following her instincts into the north. She had found a peasant farmer’s house with commoner’s clothing drying on bushes outside it. Figuring that one of those silk robes was probably worth more than a hundred outfits, she left all seven of the robes neatly folded beneath the bush, with the wig on top. She kept the jeweled hair sticks, the jade ornaments attached to the sash, and the handful of trinkets she found tucked inside sleeves, in the sash. She might not need them, but you never knew.
How do women manage to do anything in this place? she thought crossly, slipping from shadow to shadow. This did not bode well for accomplishing her father’s task quickly. If women were so confined by their clothing, what other fetters did this land put on them?
What a confounded nuisance.
The Temple was in shambles.
Katya knew it had to be a Temple; religious structures in nearly every land she had ever been in were generally very similar, though this was very small and rather humble. Perhaps it was a Shrine rather than a Temple? This place had a very large front gate, all of wood, which stood open, and a broad avenue lined with stone lanterns leading directly to the front doors, also standing open. There was a large bell and hammer to one side of the door, although one side of the bell frame was splintered and broken. The once-manicured grounds were overgrown with weeds, and the gravel paths had bits of grass sprouting in them. Katya climbed the steps leading to a porch around the entire structure, then stepped quietly through the open doors and peered around in the gloom. The exterior walls were all of wood, and the place appeared to be just one big room with a wooden floor. There was an altar with the statue of a man seated in a cross-legged pose on it. The serenity of the man’s expression was marred by the hole gouged in the statue’s forehead.
Violation of a sacred space. This is not good.
The destruction was not new; in fact, it looked very much as if it had happened many months ago, and yet there had been no attempt to repair it. The Temple looked abandoned.
She prowled around the edges of the room. It was curiously barren, but the walls behind the altar seemed to be composed of nothing but paper stretched in frames. Odd. Very odd. There were no doors, and yet there seemed to be further space beyond the paper walls.
She examined the walls further, and her curiosity increased. It appeared that the center section of each wall moved. She gave the one nearest her an experimental push.
It moved sideways with a faint sound, and she stared at the room beyond…
…and the old man sitting disconsolately in the corner. He looked up at her.
He looked like a more ancient version of the Qin sailors that she had seen, very rarely, among the crews of sailors from other lands on trading ships. He was quite small, no taller than she, and his skin was like parchment, his eyes narrow and slanted. He looked—broken. “It’s no use,” he said dully. “If you have come on her behalf, you might as well know that she has already taken the only valuable thing we had. If you have come for solace, there is none to be had here. I have tried my best, but I am old and hurt, and the others are all dead.”
“What others, Grandfather?” she asked, coming over to help him up as he tried to stand. “I am a stranger here—”
“I can offer you shelter for the night, but little else,” the old man said, as if he had not heard her. “My brother monks are dead, and no one comes from the village anymore. I think they may be dead, too. I have not had the strength to look.”
She helped him to his feet and at his direction, into a little building behind the shrine, which proved to be an open room with a kitchen at one end. There was a small fire burning in a brazier, with a kettle of water over it. “I have tea—” he began.
“Grandfather, you will sit, and you will let me tend to things,” she said firmly. Princess she might be, but she was also not a stranger to every sort of work. That, too, had been part of her training, so that she could counterfeit virtually anyone of any station. Before long, she had the old man comfortable beside a much larger fire, cradling a cup of hot tea. At his direction, she had started a pot of some sort of grain cooking, then went out to survey the rest of the Temple and its grounds.
It had been pretty much ransacked, and the more she saw, the angrier she became. A great deal of the destruction was purely wanton damage. There was no reason to it, if, as the old man had said, there was only one object of value here. It appeared that five or six others had lived here with the old man in lives of quiet simplicity, which had in one day been shattered by an outside force. She did manage to find some bedding that was not too torn up, and the pallet the old man himself must have been using, and some of the same short robes and loose trews of plain dark cloth that both of them were wearing, which had been stored in a closet. That would give both of them a change of clothing.
She returned to the old man laden with her gleanings to find he had gotten enough energy to tend to the food. He looked up at her entrance, his face much more alert this time. “Little daughter, you are too kind.”
“Grandfather, it is my duty,” she replied. “Can you tell me what happened here?”
He bowed his head. “It was a witch,” he said sadly, “and we were not prepared to combat her. But we did not know. How were we to know?”
Slowly, as the grain cooked, as she made up beds for both of them near the warmth of the fire, as they ate, she pieced together the story. This was not an important shrine, but it was regularly visited by the folk of a nearby village, and the old man and his five fellow priests tended the shrine and the grounds, and the spiritual needs of the village, faithfully. The statue—she could not make out from his sometimes rambling speech whether it was of a god, or of a great priest of that god—had been unearthed accidentally several decades ago by a farmer plowing his fields, and the shrine built to house it, priests found to tend the shrine once it was completed. No one had thought that the statue was of any particular importance; the dark stone embedded in its forehead had seemed nothing more than a simple bit of ornamentation.
This old man had bee
n one of the first group of six priests to be sent here; as old age had thinned their ranks, others had been sent to replace them. Katya gathered, as she ate the boiled grains and listened closely, that although there were branches of priests that were martial in nature and trained in combative techniques, these were not of that order, being strictly contemplative. “This was just a forest shrine,” he repeated, over and over, his bewilderment evoking her pity. “What did we have that anyone would want?”
Then, two months ago, She had turned up at the door.
She hadn’t been subtle, either. The way the old man described it, she hadn’t even issued a challenge. The first they had known of her arrival was when the doors had blown open, and a white-clad, white-haired woman surrounded by a whirlwind of grimacing demons strode into the sanctuary.
“A witch,” the old man called her. Katya would have called her a sorceress, but whatever you called her, it was pretty clear that she was very powerful. It was also quite clear that she was both ruthless and evil.
The old man himself had been the first to bar her way, with amulets binding both wrists and a blessed staff to protect him, he had interposed himself between the witch and the others.
Amulets and blessed staff had been utterly useless. With a simple gesture, she had flung him through the air at the bell frame just outside. And that was literally the last thing he knew until he’d woken up again, in terrible pain, lying at the foot of the bell shrine with a broken arm and cracked ribs.
He had staggered into the sanctuary to find his fellow priests dead, lying where they too had been thrown, and the stone wrenched out of the statue.
“It must have been important, some sort of amulet or talisman,” the old man said brokenly. “But we were simple priests. We never had any magic of our own, only magic in things we were given and the power of our faith. How were we to know?”
“You couldn’t,” she soothed him, as she helped him into bed. “You could not have known.”
It was clear that the attack had broken his spirit as well as his body.
The old man had cremated his fellow priests by the simple expedient of dragging their poor bodies to an unused shed, drenching them with oil, and setting fire to the place. He had then waited for someone from the village to come to send word of what had happened to his superiors.
But no one ever came, and he was too weak to make the walk himself. And by now, he had lost faith that they still lived.
“Be easy, Grandfather,” she said into the darkness. “Tomorrow this will be dealt with. I am young and strong. If there is help to be found for you nearby, I will find it. If there is none, I will take you to where help is.”
As soon as he was asleep, she got up again, and stole out.
She needed very little sleep, and right now she needed information far more than sleep. Thanks to the old man, she knew where the village should be, and the first piece of information she needed was whether or not there was anyone still alive there.
Under the cover of darkness, she sprinted down the road and before the moon was very high, she had come to the village. She had feared that what she uncovered would be “what was left” of the village, and to her intense relief found it still standing.
Easy enough to see from a distance, it was like a collection of toy houses all lit up. She caught a hint of the steep thatched roofs in the moonlight, but most of the light came from lanterns outside the doors and being carried by people milling about. The houses all seemed to be like the shrine; substantial in size, raised off the ground, and sometimes going to two or three stories.
Evidently, there was a meeting of some sort going on in what looked like a village square. Katya slowed to a walk, and then, after pausing for a moment in the shadows, worked her way toward the ones that seemed to be doing the most talking.
She listened silently, on the outskirts of the crowd, keeping herself in shadows. She had the notion that if she stayed very quiet, since she was a female, the men might not notice her. And she was right. There were other women and children hovering half in the shadows, listening, but none of them said a word.
She examined these villagers as well as listening to them; for the most part, they wore the same kind of loose trews and wrapped tunic that she had purloined. The men were quite muscular. The women looked quite strong, too, leading Katya to think that, as in the Sea Kingdom the women of this land were not inclined to hide behind their menfolk, even if they did defer to them.
The “meeting” consisted of a great deal of quarreling, not to the point of shouting, but very near. A minority of the men, mostly young, wanted to find out what had happened at the shrine. The majority were still too frightened to go, and kept reminding the others that “she” had said it was none of their business, and to stay away.
Well, after the priest’s story, Katya had a good idea who “she” was. The witch had given some sort of demonstration of her powers and managed to thoroughly cow the leaders.
Katya heard the fear there, fear and even some panic that made the voices of most of those speaking a bit shrill. The faces in the lantern light were strained, and several of the speakers kept looking back over their shoulders as if they were afraid they were going to be overheard.
But to Katya, the interesting thing was that this witch had threatened the villagers rather than actually doing anything to them.
She must have made some display of power, or they wouldn’t be so frightened, but it didn’t look as if the display of power included much actual harm. Not like what had happened to the monks. Katya doubted that this was out of the kindness of her heart, or a disinclination to slaughter an entire village full of people. Oh my, no.
It had to have been because she couldn’t do anything to them.
As she listened to the arguments go back and forth, she wondered what the difference was between the villagers and the monks. Because the witch hadn’t hesitated a moment before going all out against the shrine.
What was in the shrine, besides the talisman?
Perhaps the answer lay, not in what but in who.
Six unarmed priests, none of whom were trained in fighting, most of whom were probably old or elderly? I suspect that may be the answer. They were not a challenge. But a village full of working men and women, with weapons or weapon-like objects…
Whatever it is that the talisman does…might have very little to do with combat.
She might have demons, but evidently not enough of them. Not enough that she could take on a village. Or else…her demons couldn’t cope with something that the villagers could use against them.
She began casting glances around at the homes and workshops. There were carvings and written symbols everywhere; they could be nothing, or they could be guardians and runes of protection. But the shrine presumably would have had the same sort of protections. That couldn’t be it.
Something common, so common as to be easily overlooked.
The iron of their farming implements? The bird-frighteners in the fields? The presence of ancestral spirits about the village? The presence of children in the village? Without having the sort of concentrated and focused magic that a real magician or sorceress had, rather than the bits and bobs that she had as the daughter of the Sea King, there was just no way for her to work it out.
Katya circled the group, looking for clues, hoping for ideas. At least at the moment, it appeared that the witch was not all that powerful—certainly not so powerful that she could not be overcome by someone who actually had strong magic. But Katya knew better than to trust appearances. She wanted to see this creature with her own eyes, to judge for herself just how dangerous she was.
And then there were the seabirds. They would never be crying doom if the danger wasn’t real. So just because this witch wasn’t strong enough to take on a group of simple villagers at the time of the confrontation—
She might be very strong now. She had her stone, and as far as she knew, all the priests were dead. The threats had served their purpose; the vi
llagers had stayed away from the shrine long enough for her trail to have gone cold. That may have been exactly what the witch wanted.
Well, this would not be the only cold trail that Katya had pursued. Meanwhile, she also needed to get help for the old priest. It was a very good thing that she knew exactly how to get that help.
On the outskirts of the crowd were the adolescents, huddled in a knot, listening intently and doing no small amount of grumbling. Katya went to eavesdrop.
“Who is this foreign witch to tell us we are not to visit our own shrine?” hissed one of the boys, keeping his voice down. Katya smiled.
“That’s right!” One of Katya’s little magics was the ability to make her words seem to come from anyone other than herself. Right now it seemed to be coming from a group of four, each of whom would swear one of the others had spoken just now. “Besides, those priests aren’t fighters! What if something happened to them?”
“I’m sure something did,” replied the first boy, grimly. “Someone should have been sent as soon as that witch was out of sight.”
“I never thought I would ever feel ashamed of my father.” That was another of Katya’s little prods. It struck home with more than one of the youngsters.
“If the old men won’t act, we should,” growled the first boy, and within moments, with a little more prodding on Katya’s part, the young men had withdrawn to where they wouldn’t be overheard by their elders. Katya followed them just long enough to be sure that they were of one mind on going to the shrine in defiance of the witch’s orders. But once she was sure—once she had actually seen them marching out on their way—
She felt a little badly about it; she’d manipulated them shamelessly and now they thought of their own parents and grandparents as cowards. On the other hand…
There was an old man, sick and hurt, who had been trying to take care of himself for far too long now. It was more than time that someone helped him.
As she left the village, slipping silently through the shadows with the cool, damp scent of water strong in her nose, they were on the road back to the shrine. And their elders were still arguing whether or not anyone ought to see if the old priests were all right.
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