STALE DUST and clinging cobwebs settled down around Lee-Nin’s face as she tried to still her breathing and unwind the vise of fear clasping her chest. Sao-Tauna held her hand, squeezing tightly, panting in quick, short breaths. The girl had never liked confined spaces. Lee-Nin hoped Sao-Tauna would not scream out in terror as she had once done when a closet door accidentally closed, trapping her in darkness for a moment.
Lee-Nin slowly raised her free hand to pull a cobweb from her brow, ignoring the bite of a spider on her neck. She and Sao-Tauna stood side by side in the dark and musty gap between the false back wall of the small farmhouse and the real wall. She had lurched in surprise when the massive, ugly man suddenly rose from the bed and went to the far wall. Her first fear had been that the man might try to capture them and hold them for a possible reward. She had gasped as he pulled at a log in a short section of the wall and it swung inward by the width of six hands. He had gestured her and Sao-Tauna to stand in the hidden space beside a leather satchel and a dust-caked sword in its sheath.
“Quiet,” had been all the man said before pushing the wall closed again, sealing them up like mummies from one of the stories she often read Sao-Tauna before bedtime.
Whether by serendipity or extraordinary forethought, a small crack in the mason’s clay between the logs of the false wall sat right before her left eye, giving her a surreptitious, if limited, view of the house and its owner.
Who is this man? Lee-Nin wondered. What farmer has a false wall with a sword hidden inside? How did he know they were coming? How did he know the wardens hounding them were close? Had he seen them? Had he heard them before entering the house? Did he have The Sight? Was he a seer hiding his blasphemy on a farm far from town? The Pashist book on his table spoke to his sacrilegious views. How deep did his heresy extend? What other forbidden books sat stacked on his table? She had been so intent on keeping her eyes on him that she had not even thought to glance at their titles.
Lee-Nin watched through the crack in the wall as the man put the food away and sat down at the table facing the door. He pulled the lantern close as he took one of the offensive tomes from the top of the pile and opened it.
What was he doing? Should he not pretend to be asleep? Should he not hide the books? The wardens had other business that night, but they would not hesitate to carry out the law as they saw fit.
She strained her neck in the tight space to look over her shoulder and down at Sao-Tauna. The girl stood with her eyes closed, her breath still coming in short gasps. Lee-Nin hoped the logs of the false wall insulated the sound of the girl’s breathing from the room beyond.
Such a strange child. Not at all like her siblings. Unlike any child Lee-Nin had ever encountered. She had been such since her birth seven years prior, shortly after the beginning of Lee-Nin’s appointment as tutor to her brothers.
She had loved teaching the children writing and history and simple maths. Kal-Tan, the eldest boy, inquisitive and challenging, with a quick mind that rarely found easy focus. And his younger brother Tagu-Kan, a sweet-natured boy who always did as told and always admitted his mischief. And then Sao-Tauna. As unlike her brothers as stone to water. Quiet, passive, often unresponsive, but deeply observant and able to remember nearly all she saw or heard. A child who signaled her difference as readily as a herald might announce the entrance of a high councilor.
Why would anyone wish to kill such a child? Lee-Nin pondered this question again, as she had almost every hour since learning of the danger to the girl’s life.
TEN DAYS PRIOR
THE TEETH of the comb caught and held in the tangle of rich, black hair. Lee-Nin tugged with the carved bone implement.
“Ouch.”
“I don’t know how your hair gets so tangled.”
“Ouch.”
“I comb it twice a day.”
“Ouch.”
“You hardly leave the living chambers and the gardens, so I don’t see where you get a mouse nest like this in your hair.”
“Mouse? In my hair?”
Lee-Nin laughed and patted Sao-Tauna’s head.
“Not a real mouse. It was a phrase of speaking. A way of describing something.”
“Oh.” Sao-Tauna sounded sad. “I like mice.”
“Yes, I remember the one you put in my pocket for safekeeping.”
“Wan-Nuno.” Sao-Tauna’s face brightened ever so slightly.
“Must you name all of the inhabitants of the palace?”
“Ja-Na was going to eat him.”
“Ja-Na? The black cat with the white feet?”
“Ja-Na likes mice.” Sao-Tauna sounded somewhat sad again. “How can we both like mice, yet I don’t want to eat one?”
“Words are subtle things.” Lee-Nin finished smoothing Sao-Tauna’s hair and slipped the comb into an outer pocket of her dress. The girl rarely spoke so much, and only in Lee-Nin’s company. They stood on a balcony of the tahn’s private chambers. Technically, they should not have been there. Only the royal staff had permission to enter the high family’s private chambers. However, Sao-Tauna loved that particular balcony, as it afforded an unobstructed view of a nest of black eagles perched in the tallest tree of the palace gardens. While Tahn Taujin Lin-Pi disapproved of the impropriety, Tahneff Pai-Neguha made special dispensation for her only daughter and the family tutor who doted upon the child.
Lee-Nin reached out her hand to point at the nest, to ask, as she often did, for Sao-Tauna to describe the difference from the prior day — a game they played with things and people around the palace. As she stretched her finger out, she heard the door of the inner chamber open. The balcony stood outside the tahn’s seldom used private library — another reason Lee-Nin loved to frequent the space.
She brought her finger to her lips and caught Sao-Tauna’s eye. She pulled the girl back against the wall as the door within closed. A voice she recognized as belonging to Tahn Lin-Pi said something she could not make out. Her heartbeat quickened. The tahn would be angered to find her and Sao-Tauna on the balcony, regardless of the permissions his wife had extended. Should she reveal herself now and suffer the consequences, or should she hide and hope Tahn Lin-Pi possessed no desire to watch eagles’ nests from the balcony?
As Lee-Nin swallowed back her fear and made to step around the corner to reveal her presence, she heard another voice she knew.
“You have my deepest apologies, my tahn, but I thought it best to speak where others could not … misunderstand.”
Lee-Nin had heard that voice on a few rare occasions. It belonged to High Priest Bihn-Fan.
“We will not be disturbed here,” Tahn Lin-Pi said.
A pause fell over the conversation within the library. Lee-Nin could not risk exposing herself now. Not in front of the high priest. She also could not be caught listening to a conversation between the high priest and the tahn. The former might cause her to lose her station, while the latter ensured she would forfeit her head.
“You have concluded your investigation,” Tahn Lin-Pi said.
“Yes, my tahn,” High Priest Bihn-Fan replied.
“And your conclusion?”
“Our worst fears are realized, my tahn.”
“You are certain?”
“Without doubt or suspicion of doubt, my tahn.”
“What must be done?”
“There is only one course of action that ensures the safety of the dominion, my tahn.”
“There must be another way.”
“I wish there was, my tahn. I truly do.”
“Could you be mistaken?”
“You have seen the … phenomenon yourself, my tahn.”
“I have seen something, yes. A fluttered imagining, perhaps.”
“It is not your imagination, my tahn. Nor mine.”
“We could wait. See if it occurs again.”
“To wait would be to invite our own destruction, my tahn. Your uncle died from meddling with such dark forces twenty years ago.”
“You need not remi
nd me of the mistakes of my family.” The tahn’s tone took a suddenly ominous color.
“My apologies, my tahn. I wish no offense. My only desire is the protection of the dominion and the royal family.”
“All except one member of the royal family.”
“A regrettable necessity, my tahn.”
“Killing my daughter is more than a regrettable necessity, Bihn-Fan.”
Lee-Nin nearly gasped aloud as the import of the preceding conversation washed across her mind in sudden, icy clarity.
“No words will soften nor diminish the darkness of the deed, my tahn.” The high priest’s voice sounded soft and pleading. “The deed must be done, nonetheless.”
“You are certain Sao-Tauna must die?”
“As certain as I am of standing in this room with you, my tahn.”
No more words came from within the library for a time. The tahn seemed to consider the final verdict on his daughter’s life, handed down in light of mysterious yet damning evidence. Lee-Nin looked at Sao-Tauna. The girl stared back up, her face a mask of solemn astonishment. She clearly understood the meaning behind her father’s words. Lee-Nin placed her arm around the girl’s shoulder and pulled her close.
“If it must be, it must be,” Tahn Lin-Pi said. “My daughter will die to protect the dominion.”
“I know a man who can assist us, my tahn.”
“No.” The tahn’s voice sounded hard, like breaking rocks. “If it must be, it will be by my hand.”
“As you wish, my tahn.”
“May Ni-Kam-Djen forgive me and protect us all.”
“Now and forever,” the high priest added.
THE PRESENT
LEE-NIN SHUDDERED at the memory of the eavesdropped words, once more trying to tease out their meaning, attempting to fathom what a girl of seven summers could have done to warrant a death sentence from her father, and why the high priest of the Tanshen Dominion would be involved in determining her guilt or innocence.
It made no more sense now than ever. Sao-Tauna did not exhibit the behavior of a typical child, and everyone understood her to be special. But special how? The high priest claimed to have seen her do something, but what? And what could it be that endangered the dominion and required her death?
She asked these questions of Tahneff Pai-Neguha when she told Sao-Tauna’s mother what she had overheard. The tahneff did not answer the questions, for she did not believe Lee-Nin’s story. Instead, the tahneff called the palace guardians, who promptly carried Lee-Nin to a cell in the lower jails. She sat in that cell for hours, barely able to breathe, possessed by the thought that Sao-Tauna might already be dead. When the door to the dank, cramped chamber opened, she had expected to see more guards, no doubt ready to haul her off to her own hastily arranged demise.
The door swung wide to reveal Sao-Tauna, standing in the same dress Lee-Nin had slid over her head earlier that day, her small, slender fingers outstretched and beckoning.
As they ran through the palace halls, sneaking out the back gate and disappearing into the crowds of the city surrounding the palace, Lee-Nin had repeatedly asked Sao-Tauna what transpired. Had her father tried to kill her? Had someone else? How had she located Lee-Nin? How had she found the keys to open the cell door? Where had the guards gone?
Sao-Tauna answered none of these queries, nor any others. She had not spoken since talking of cats and mice on the palace balcony. Something had happened to push the normally reticent child to utter unbending muteness. Lee-Nin did her best to try and comfort Sao-Tauna, but the girl seemed impassive to the world around her.
Lee-Nin had used the few gold coins buttoned into the secret pocket of her dress to buy food and provisions and passage in a merchant’s wagon from the city to the countryside. But her coins had been meant to help one alone flee, not two. And they had been intended to give her time to get to her larger stash, which they could not afford the time to do while fleeing the city. After a few days, they had made their way to a small town in the countryside where word of events in the palace arrived before them via horse-backed travelers. Details were few, and often fabricated, but it seemed High Priest Bihn-Fan had disappeared. Stories varied. Some suggested that Ni-Kam-Djen had taken the valuable priest to his bosom; others declared the aged priest had been kidnapped by the Daeshen Dominion as leverage in the twenty-year war between the two nations. No one mentioned Tahn Lin-Pi’s daughter having gone missing. No one suggested that the palace wardens might be looking for her.
Lee-Nin presumed the palace would declare that she had kidnapped the girl and set the entire country looking for her. They had not. They had sent two hands of palace wardens to hunt her and the child in secrecy. Why in secrecy?
The sound of a dog’s low bark and the weight of many boots on the creaky boards outside the door of the farmhouse brought Lee-Nin out of the twisting corridors of her mind and to the present. She squeezed Sao-Tauna’s hand tighter and placed her eye closer to the tiny hole in the false wall.
The door to the house crashed open as two wardens rushed in, swords drawn, curses on their lips, their eyes searching the one-room home and coming to rest on the large, ugly farmer. Outside the door, the two dogs stuck their tails between their legs and whimpered as they scampered away from the house.
Another soldier pushed his way between the first two, leveling the tip of his sword at the farmer’s massive, disfigured head.
“Where are the woman and the girl?” the warden said. The insignia on his chest marked him as a sub-commander of the palace wardens, the zhan’s elite guardians.
The homely farmer stared down the blade at the soldier.
“Gone,” the man said.
Lee-Nin realized then the large man’s gambit. It also occurred to her that she did not even know his name.
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THE TEMPLE
RAEDALUS
DREAMS OF stars and oceans and millennia-old ruins gave way to cries and shouts and screams of pain and fear.
Raedalus opened his eyes, confused, unsure if the night visions continued in a new and horrible fashion, or if the shadowed commotion around him represented reality. The scream of a woman a dozen paces away woke him fully and brought him from beneath his sleeping blanket and to his feet.
The Mother Shepherd!
He stood and turned, trying to understand the events transpiring throughout the camp as he searched for Junari, the guardian of his and his fellow dreamers’ collective destiny. Men and women ran past, some yelling, others pointing, while more still sat on the ground, trying to pull themselves from sleep. He saw Junari’s tent in the center of the chaos. With the night guards absent, he knew the tent to be empty. Probably on one of her nightly walks again. Walking to where? He looked around the camp.
A flash of metal in the moonlight caught his attention. A man in a worn leather jerkin swung a curved sword at one of the dreamers — a husband protecting his wife and small son. The blade tore through the dreamer’s stomach, his inner flesh falling into his hands. As the dreamer fell to the ground, his wife screamed and embraced him, pulling her son beneath a protective arm.
“Blasphemers!” the man with the sword shouted in the Shen language. He stepped forward to the crouching woman as she held her dying husband and her crying son. “We’ll purge ya heretics from the land.”
Raedalus looked to his feet, found what he remembered moving as he had lain down to sleep, picked it up, and hurled it with all his might. The fist-sized stone struck the swordsman in the side of the head, sending him to his knees, the sword falling from his hand. Raedalus ran toward the swordsman. The woman grabbed the rock from where it had bounced to the ground and hefted it high in her arm, bringing it crashing into the swordsman’s head. He crumpled sideways and fell still. The woman hit him in the head again. And again. Then she cast the rock aside and turned to her husband, holding his head as he clasped
at his stomach, trying to keep his insides from filling the grass. Their child, a boy of five or so, wailed in shock and terror.
Raedalus picked up the sword and grasped it unsteadily in his hand. He had never held a sword. He had been raised in the temple. An orphan at age five, the priests had taken him in and brought him up as one of their own until he grew old enough to become one of their own. Novices trained to be priests, and priests trained to serve the gods with prayers and rituals and meditations. He had no preparation for wielding a sword. But the men attacking them — one of the militant bands roaming the roads — would not know of his inexperience. He silently called on his nameless goddess to fill him with the courage to face the militiamen assaulting their camp.
“If he can move, get him to the woods, to safety,” Raedalus spoke to the woman, shouting to be heard over the din of the pitched battle and senseless slaughter around them.
Looking up, he searched again for any sign of Junari. Pilgrims clustered together in small groups, seeking protection in numbers — numbers that held no weapons beyond a few short knives and an occasional rock. There appeared to be at least twenty militiamen attacking the camp. The pilgrims could not stand their ground against men with steel. They would be felled like winter wheat at early harvest.
“To the trees!” Raedalus shouted as he ran, coaxing the pilgrims to flee from the low grass where they had lain dreaming of their goddess beside the road and to seek refuge in the dense forest nearby. Several of the pilgrims already ran for the tree line, turning to encourage their companions to follow them.
One of the militiamen hacked at a woman running for wooded sanctuary, cutting her down with a slice across her back. As she collapsed in a piercing scream of agony, Raedalus raised his blade in both hands and swung it with all his strength, striking the militiaman in the same manner that had felled the woman. Raedalus stopped and looked at the militiaman near his feet. Blood gurgled from the man’s lips as he tried to reach around his back to the gash across his spine. The man’s legs trembled and urine stained his breeches.
The Dragon Star (Realms of Shadow and Grace: Volume 1) Page 5