The arbiyesku had a tally of three dead. Fwipi was amongst them. She’d been crouched over Agawan, Savga’s infant brother, when a brick from the cocoon warehouse had slammed through the reed matting wall of the women’s barracks and into the side of her face. Since I’d found Savga huddled beside Fwipi’s body in the debris, she’d insisted on remaining by my side, Agawan strapped to her back. Tansan was keening over Fwipi’s body.
The destruction in the arbiyesku compound was horribly reminiscent of that which had been wreaked in danku Re, during my youth, by a maddened yearling Kratt had flown into the pottery compound. Life goes in circles. I found my self gripped with a strong urge to hide in a small corner and rock myself to sleep.
I wondered if Mother was aware of the consequences of what she was doing. I suspected not. The haunt’s obses sion with protecting Waivia had multiplied with each pass ing year. That obsession was like a virulent growth; it had sucked everything good and humane from the haunt and left behind only destructive malignancy. At least, I hoped that was the case. The alternative was too appalling to con sider: that the haunt—my mother—was aware of what she was doing, but was nonetheless obeying Kratt’s desires, ex pressed through Waivia.
Why would Waivia wish harm upon Xxamer Zu? Because Xxamer Zu was the seat of Nashe, the center of the Great Uprising that would end Temple’s reign; and Kratt, the half bastard of a Xxelteker ebani, wanted to
be come
Temple through the acquisition of as many Clutches as he could. Waivia wanted the same power and wealth for her son. It was sheer speculation, conjured by a shocked and exhausted mind. But I
knew
Waivia. I knew her de termination, her mental prowess, and the vicious survival streak in her that had been exacerbated, if not created, by the cruel bigotry shown her as a child.
“You’ll accompany me back to headquarters,” Malaban Bri said, surveying the wreckage and the rishi toiling amidst it. It was just after dawn; Knife-carver was approaching with one of the two escoas that had run in panic, hobbled and wing bolted, at the Skykeeper’s appearance. Malaban Bri and I stood side by side, soot-streaked and covered with straw and jute litter. The bonfires were still raging in the warehouse; Malaban had made it his first priority after the Skykeeper’s departure to ensure that the fires remained lit, so that the few undamaged involucres remained heated.
“Zarq?” he said.
“I heard.”
I glanced down at Savga, who was looking up at me with those bruised and fierce eyes of hers.
“Stay with your mother, Little Ant,” I murmured, plac ing a sooty hand gently upon her back and pushing her away from me. I refused to think of Fwipi, of the way she’d looked when I’d found her, her head turned at an impossi ble angle on her broken neck, her face a bloody mess from the brick. A child should never have to witness such. But they do. They do. “I’ll be back. Promise.”
Shoulders hunched, Savga moved away a pace, then turned to watch me mount the escoa.
Malaban and I launched into the sky and flew toward the stockade at the center of the Clutch.
We landed in the messenger byre and I instinctively glanced at the shadowed corners, expecting Auditors to ap pear. Unnerved and exhausted—and drained by the image of Fwipi’s crushed face that kept swimming to the fore of my mind—I silently followed Malaban into what had for merly been Xxamer Zu’s Hives, the chambers where the Clutch Daron stored precious copies of Temple scrolls in the floor-to-ceiling hexagonal cells that filled the room. The smell of ink and incense and old paper mingled with the reek of tobacco.
Rutgar Re Ghepp—the erstwhile Lupini Xxamer Zu— was amongst the grim-faced men who awaited Malaban Bri and me. Ghepp looked almost as disheveled as we did.
His fawn silks looked slept in. He’d lost weight, looked sleep-deprived. But he was still beautiful, and he sat amongst his captors as if he were one of them. On second glance, I realized he
was
. The myazedo’s liberation of his Clutch had worked somewhat to his advantage; thanks to my insistence that Ghepp be kept alive to parley with his brother, he was still a key player, surrounded by powerful men. Only now, others were responsible for the welfare of the Clutch, and he was free from being solely accountable for making difficult decisions.
He regarded me with thinly veiled hostility and leaned forward, a muscle working over one of his sculpted cheek bones. He reminded me of a notched and drawn arrow.
Malaban Bri summarized the night’s events, including his encounter with the Kwembibi Shafwai. He listed the tribe’s demands and then introduced me, giving a brief history of what he knew about me—a far less detailed summary of my life than that which I’d given Knife-carver and Tansan. Save for Malaban Bri and Ghepp, I didn’t recognize any one. I shifted uneasily. Thought of Fwipi. Thought of Savga. Pushed the thoughts away.
A neat aristocrat in lavender silk interrupted Malaban. “This rishi before us is Zarq-the-deviant?”
“That’s one name she goes by,” Malaban said, unper turbed. “She was introduced to me as the Dirwalan Babu. The Skykeeper’s Daughter. She’s one and the same who told me the secret to breeding bulls and she learned that secret from the Kwembibi Shafwai.”
A stir in the room. The eyes that regarded me held vary ing degrees of revulsion and shock, save for those of one swarthy lord; his eyes glinted with lust.
“She summoned that creature last night?” Lavender Silk asked, voice rising.
Malaban turned to me. “Zarq? Did you?”
“Malaban, that Skykeeper
attacked
us.”
“Not at your behest.”
“No!”
“Coincidence that this tribe appeared just before the Skykeeper did, and that you’re known to them,” Lavender Silk said.
“They didn’t summon the Skykeeper. You weren’t there; you didn’t see—”
“You call yourself the Skykeeper’s Daughter, rishi via.”
“Damn it,
Kratt
sent the Skykeeper!”
“Kratt?” Lavender Silk’s preened eyebrows arched. “You’re saying Waikar Re Kratt controls a creature of the realm, and not you?”
My mind was spinning. “My sister controls it. She’s with Kratt. It used to obey me but—”
“Now it does so no longer,” Ghepp interrupted, his tone curdled. “You require the rebel daronpu to control it, and he’s conveniently not present. Yet again, he’s departed at our time of need.”
“Gen returned? When? Why didn’t someone tell me?” Confused, I looked to Malaban for answers.
He asked a question of me instead. “Can Dragonmaster Re control this Skykeeper? He turned against you in my villa; would he use the creature to get at you here?”
“The
dragonmaster
? What’s he got to do with this? And he’s dead by now, surely.”
A pregnant silence.
“No,” Malaban rumbled beside me. “His room was dis covered empty two days ago, and one of my escoas gone.”
Not possible.
“Jotan?” I asked.
“She was out.” By his tone, I knew precisely where she’d been. “The handservant she kept in her room was found dead. Head staved in.”
I remembered the malice fomenting in the dragonmas ter’s unnatural eyes when he’d spoken of Tansan:
No one ties me up without suffering for it.
The dragonmaster was alive and loose.
“I suggest we appease my brother’s wrath and prevent another attack from his creature,” Ghepp said, addressing the men around him. “Give him this deviant.”
“I don’t see why she’s even amongst us,” Lavender Silk said. “You’ve done ill, Malaban, succoring this heretic.”
“I’ll remind you—” Malaban began tightly, but I inter rupted.
“Kratt’s not after me. Not now, not anymore. He thinks I’m in Skoljk. The Skykeeper’s attack was a warning not to proceed against Temple.”
Ghepp’s beautiful nostrils flared. “I won’t have my al liance with my brother ended over your presence in my Clutch.”
“
Your
Clutch?
Alliance?
” I was near to tearing out my hair. “You’re a hostage, you idiot, and whatever
alliance
you think you have with your brother is worth shit! He’s been occupied in Bashinn, and that’s the only reason he hasn’t attacked us before now. Don’t you see? Kratt’s got his sights on governing all of Malacar; he wants to be the next Emperor, and he’ll stop at nothing to achieve that.
Alliance,
” I said bitterly. “He’s playing you for a fool, and using Temple’s might to achieve his own ends.”
A stupid outburst: Kratt had usurped Ghepp’s birthright and always made Ghepp feel a fool. Ghepp flushed and his almond eyes went glassy. “Send her to my brother.”
“Strange powers stir in the land,” Malaban growled, and I could scarcely hear him, my heart was pounding so hard with fury. “If Zarq has the ability to influence these powers, we should deliberate long and hard before giving her to Kratt—”
“Imprison her.” Ghepp’s eyes were tearing me limb from limb.
I should’ve held my tongue. I
tried
to, for all of several heartbeats. “You will not lock me away again,” I said, voice low. “You did once, and I escaped. Try it again, and I’ll kill you.”
Ghepp surged to his feet. His chair thudded against the floor. “You hear? This deviant bitch threatens me! Send her to my brother.”
“Where’s Chinion?” I cried. “Why’re there no myazedo rebels in this room?” I rounded on Malaban. “We need Djimbi elders on our council, people who know and under stand the old magics. Not these
flowers
.”
Outbursts from several of the men; two rose to their feet in indignation.
“We’re not concerned with useless paganism, rishi via!” Lavender Silk cried above the others.
“Send her to Kratt!” another shouted.
“Gentlemen!” Malaban boomed, and he slammed fists upon the table. Silence. He glared around the table. “I’ve not forgotten who first informed me of the secret to breed ing bulls in captivity, and I expect some of you to remember who first informed
you
of it. If Zarq’s to be given to Kratt, we discuss it behind closed doors.”
He didn’t look at Ghepp as he spoke, but Ghepp’s finely chiseled nostrils went white with rage nonetheless. Ghepp knew Malaban was implying that decisions shouldn’t be made with Kratt’s brother present.
“We imprison her, then,” Lavender Silk said.
“She’s not our hostage,” Malaban rumbled. “She brought us the secret.”
“She’s a liar and a swindler and a deviant. Someone else gave her the secret;
that’s
clear to me.”
“She can be kept under close surveillance until we reach a decision,” Malaban Bri said, immovable. “This council will recess while Zarq and Rutgar Re Ghepp are escorted back to their quarters.”
I could see how Malaban had risen in power to become the successful tycoon that he was; his commanding pres ence brooked no argument.
Sullenly, the lords of the council acquiesced.
Cinereous smoke occluded the air, sludgy and dense as fear. Thatch was strewn about like batting from a gutted doll. Mud-brick huts had been butchered and fractured. The distilled sound of grief keened through clotted pock ets of silence.
The Skykeeper’s flight over Xxamer Zu could be pre cisely mapped by the trail of lacerated huts its talons had left behind. Just that, understand: a trail. Not widespread destruction. Not rampant ruin. Just that one smoking path.
A warning.
I reached the arbiyesku depleted. It was late noon; those who’d had to work the fields—regardless of death of fam ily or friend—had picked up hoe or scythe or spade and trudged to the fields. Their backs were bent, their shoulders stooped. The damage the Skykeeper had done was much wider than that one path, after all. Fear is like the wind: invisible, invasive, unfettered by paths and trails.
The bonfires still blazed in the ruins of the cocoon ware house, heating the few intact involucres and baking into hard ribbons the shreds of splattered cocoons. The tatters of keratin and flesh smelled peculiar as they curled in the heat. It was an aborted smell, that. The smell of necrosis charred, of decay smoked and preserved.
Instead of marching around the outskirts of the ware house, scimitars swinging at their hips, the dragonmaster apprentices stationed as cocoon guards were hewing wood and feeding the fires. Few rishi helped; I could count how many with a swift glance. Indeed, the many rishi usually seen toiling about the arbiyesku were markedly absent.
The tribe of the Silent Slayers was not.
There they squatted, their bellies now full—if Knifecarver were to be believed—with the excised flesh of their dead. I bitterly reflected that they
could
have been assisting the arbiyesku in rebuilding huts. But as much as I resented their willful insularity, a small part of me couldn’t help but grudgingly admire them for their solidarity and singular ity of purpose. They’d come to collect a debt, and nothing would distract or deter them from obtaining their goal.
The children and old women of the arbiyesku were weaving jute-and-reed wall matting to replace the smashed sections of the women’s barracks. At my approach their hands fell still. Savga stood up from amongst them, eyes reflecting the awful weight of her grief over the loss of her granna, Fwipi.
Throat tight, I placed a hand on her head and sat beside Agawan, asleep on the ground. My escorts stood in sentry position a few paces away from me. The old women and children looked from the soldiers to me, eyes wide with un ease, afraid to move.
“Ignore them,” I said wearily. “They mean no one any harm. They’re here to . . . watch over me. Nothing more.”
After an uncomfortable pause, Savga moved. “I’ll get you water,” she whispered.
She returned with water, a cold kadoob tuber as wizened as an old monkey’s balls, and Tansan. Tansan wore grief for her mother like a splintered circlet upon her brow. She didn’t so much as glance at the soldiers; Savga had fore warned her.
Tansan stood above me, statuesque and beautiful. “We took her body to the fields, said prayers. The vultures and hyenas will make new life from her body and bones.”
“Hearts are riven when a mother dies,” I murmured. My words were inadequate. I didn’t know how to express what I felt over the loss of Fwipi; I’d clamped down on those emotions, had buried them beneath hard layers of anger to ward my mother’s haunt, and Kratt, and yes, even Waivia.
After a pause, I drank from the gourd Savga held out to me and took a bite from the kadoob. Its smoky flavor was too bitter. I preferred hunger that day.
Tansan squatted beside me, muscles in her smooth thighs bulging. “What did the council say about them?” she asked, voice pitched too low for the soldiers to hear. She was look ing at the Kwembibi Shafwai.
“I didn’t bring the secret of the bulls from the jungle; we owe the Kwembibi Shafwai nothing, because they’re mere savages.”
“Wrong thinking, that,” Tansan murmured, sounding po tently like Fwipi.
“What should we do?” I wasn’t asking her so much as myself, but she answered anyway. Softly. I could barely hear her.
“Some of the Xxamer Zu myazedo will take an old egg layer from the brooder stables tonight, take her to the camp in the hills. They’ll hew wood and prepare for when she secretes death wax about her.”
A slow shiver swept over me. The cold pimples were for two reasons, the first being the mutinous theft that Tansan was planning against the council of the Great Uprising. The second reason: that she had chosen to share such informa tion with me. It was the culmination of a tense, unsteady relationship that had started when we’d first met and she’d declared my life cursed. I was moved by her disclosure.
“You’re going to hatch your own bull,” I murmured.
“We intend on trying.”
“The brooder stables are unguarded?”
“Some of us have been . . . gathering bayen gems and gold since the liberation of the Clutch. Some of the brooder guardian clan will be sound sleepers tonight, for these gems and gold.”
“Tansan, if you’re caught . . . Think of Savga, of Aga wan.”
Her black eyes turned opaque. “I won’t get caught.”
There was nothing to say against such conviction. I dropped my eyes. “May bull wings hatch for you. May you be safe.” And then, irked by what felt like her abandonment of Xxamer Zu, I angrily looked up again. “We shouldn’t give up. I still think we can do this.”
“Do what?” She swept a hand across the compound, the Clutch, the nation. “This is no longer our battle, Zarq. This is bayen men playing games of power and wealth. They’ll forget what they owe the piebald rishi of Xxamer Zu be fore the year is through.”
“We won’t allow them to forget! This is our land.”
She looked again at the Kwembibi Shafwai. “If they don’t give them what is theirs, they won’t give us what is ours. We’re one and the same to them.”
Again, I couldn’t argue against the bitter truth in her words. “I want to gather a group of Djimbi elders to join the Nashe council. Will you at least help me in that, Tansan?”
“A waste of time.”
“So you
are
giving up.”
“I didn’t say I wouldn’t help you. But until Chinion re turns, it won’t matter who we send to the council. Only Chinion can cut the truth from the fat of bayen lies and deception.”
“There’re some pretty tough elders on this Clutch who won’t be cowed by the council lords, I’m betting.”
“We’re a strong people,” she agreed.
“When
is
Chinion returning?”
“He’ll be back.”
“You’re sure?”
“Yes. He promised.” She smoothly rose to her feet. “Wa ter needs to be fetched.”
I watched her walk away, her dark, mottled limbs fluid as hot gravy running slow and thick from a ladle. She was a warrior, and her mother had just been killed, and she was carrying an urn upon her head to fetch water for her chil dren and kin.
That’s the definition of strength, for me.