After the horrors of that time, once the bodies were limed in their pits and the men who had carried them down had carried water back up to scrub away the many stinks of death, the man who had led them all took the lands he had won for his Kingdom and the Dir'al Shahan for his own.
In all the years since then, he had not been seen outside the silence of its walls. In forty years the gilding had peeled and tiles had slipped, rain and sun had done their work to dull what had been glorious and no work had been done against them. There were no orders, and no one dared; where the King did not command, in his own palace no one stirred.
Desecrated by its occupation, shabby by neglect, it had become a monument to absence, of God or King depending; and it was still and nevertheless the Dir'al Shahan that people meant, when they spoke of Ascariel. They might come on pilgrimage, they might pray in all the holy places, they might fast and scourge themselves in the new-built temples to their own true God; but it was still the Dir'al Shahan that filled their dreams before they came and their eyes after, their thoughts always. Some, many thought more about the King than about the God. Even those who came and looked and went away disappointed because it did not g
litter in the sunshine so brightl
y as it did in their imagination, even those who would rather see the building razed than restored — they all found that the one thing had turned into another thing, that they could not see those walls and domes and minarets without thinking about the man who sat within, whose reach extended as far as he could throw his Shadow, and that was far indeed.
In forty years, the King had not come out. Neither in forty years had any gone in to him, except his servants and his Shadow at his call.
Now there was a party going in, and not by invitation. The Shadow was there, and the Princip of Surayon, come to visit his old friend all unexpected. The Shadow
’
s daughter and the Princip
’
s granddaughter, they were there. The two sons-in-law of the Shadow, they had come this far but would not go that
little
step further, would not pass the doorway of the Dir'al Shahan: the one from duty and fealty and doubt, the other from piety and faith and great distaste. Imber would not cross the threshold of his King without a direct command to do so; he was sure that his wife ought not to do so either, he feared for her dreadfully and had told her so, but could not find in himself the authority to forbid her. Hasan looked at the high gate and the higher wall and could not see any palace for any King. What he saw was a great temple overrun by unbelievers and deliberately corrupted, rank in its ruin. What had been sacred could not be made secular, only profaned. He would not step through that gateway while any temporal power sat beyond, be it Patric or Catari or the Ekhed returned; nor would he have stepped through it while the imams held sway, because their God might be his God also but their worship was not. He disliked buildings, distrusted walls, resented any ceiling that closed the sky against him. Like the Ransomers, he would burn the
Dir al Shahan sooner than he would pray there. Where Julianne prayed, whether she prayed at all was no concern of his; there was he thought advantage to having her meet and speak with the old spider in his lair. He was not in the least concerned for her safety, though her future worried him deeply. That was a dark pool, and full of shadows. His own voice was a stone dropped into it, that made ripples and showed him nothing but broken reflections that might have been his own face, might have been the Patric boy's or neither.
Like Hasan, the Ransomers looked at the palace and saw the temple, and felt the sacrilege of it like a chill in their bones in the sunlight. Not a stone of it, not a timber nor a scrap of plasterwork should have been let stand. It was the God gave the victory here, and this tribute to false worship was an abomination in His sight. None the less for that, there was a Ransomer going in. The King's Shadow had declared a truce and given safe-conduct to the Princip and to his entourage, to Hasan and to his; Marshal Fulke was prepared to lend his reluctant voice in support of that, but only so far and no further. Only this far, to this wide sweep of pavement where the palace sat like a thrown rock on a frozen pond, inappropriate and doomed. Bad enough to bring heretics and sworn enemies within the walls of the city at all; he could not countenance letting them within the walls of the palace unwatched, unguarded, armed. What protection the King might have he did not know, except that there were neither soldiers nor priests in there; and the Princip of Surayon was a witch and a warrior both, and the girl likely as bad. He was glad to have the Sharai s word not to venture through the gate, but he would not trust it. He would not set himself and his men to bar the way, against the Shadow's order; but he would have his men watch the Sharai and the Surayonnaise in their separate parties, and he himself would risk whatever wickedness the bones of the building still sustained, to guard his King against whatever wickedness the Princip and the girl might yet have planned.
He felt soiled in his triumph, he felt the God soiled in His, that it should be followed by this capitulation of honour. His only comfort - small and bare that it was, cold comfort - lay in the absence of the heretic and traitor, the apostate boy who had once worn Ransomer black. That boy was still an element in this story, camp-fire rumour placed him here, there, all over; Fulke would not be content until he had placed him squarely in a fire's heart and seen him burn. Had he been here—well, he could not have been here. Had he joined the march at any point from Surayon to here, Fulke would have burned him regardless of truce, safe-conduct or King's command. The King himself, in person, could not save that boy. There was vengeance to come against him, and Fulke held it in his heart like a treasure, but he was glad not to have spent it yet. Let the Ransomers find the boy quiedy, privately, let them deal with him in their own way, within their own strong walls; no public eye, no glare of argument, only the traitor and the men he betrayed and the God to witness where they called in His debts.
No boy, but Ransomers and Sharai and Surayonnaise had made uncomfortable companions on the slow march south, and they were uncomfortable companions still; there had been no bonding along the way. Even Imber, who had drawn together the scattered forces of Surayon and led them as an army to the battle's end - even he had drawn back from them now that the fighting was done. Besides, he was in mourning for his cousin; he could no more woo his country's enemies than he could woo his wife. He had ridden with his own, the survivors from Elessi and the preacher's band of followers, those few. He had watched his wife, he had watched the Sharai that they said she was married to, that some said she had run away to marry; he had spoken to neither one in all the days of their marching, and had been ready to do so only in protest, only if he saw her speak to the Sharai.
He had ridden with his own people, and with those he had made his own. He stood with them now and was not the only one to feel gjad of the great stretch of this platform, which gave such separate peoples space enough to hold themselves apart
They stood apart, Elessans and Ransomers, Surayonnaise and Sharai: apart and exposed, the walls of the Dir'al Shahan offering all the shade there was and none of them venturing close enough to use it. To the Sharai, in the Sands the sky was shelter enough, like a tent stretched between them and God, a veil but not a barrier; they wore its midnight colour as a sign. Here, though - on levelled stone within a city walled with stone, within and above a bewildering maze of houses, stables, markets, streets all of stone, so that they wondered why they ever would have followed their sheikhs or Hasan or God Himself into this place - they felt as though even the sky had been stolen from them, ripped away. There was nothing overhead but light and glare, which might very well be the glare of God. They crouched down on their haunches and drew up the hoods of their robes, they gripped the headropes of their horses in lieu of each others' hands, under the mocking eyes of unbelievers; they stared about them and cursed their tamed cousins the Catari who
had built this place as vehementl
y as they cursed the Patrics who had stolen it, the imams who had ever declared it holy. As long as there were camels and sheep and water in the Sands, as long as there were men and women to be grateful for that, what did God need with more?
All the groups held themselves apart, as they had ridden here, as they had fought in the valley, as they had buried their dead. The bulk of their armies they had left in the valley, camped north and south of the river, east and west of the plain, where each could see which other broke the truce. Only these few, these watchful wary few had come to Ascariel, and the Sharai, the Surayonnaise emphatically wished that they had not.
Fewer still were going further, in through the gate of the Dir'al Shahan. Those few were meeting now, solitary walkers coming together in the shadow of the wall. The King's Shadow, who knew this place of old; the Princip of Surayon who had known it also but long ago, at the Conclave that had given him his country; the two girls, and Fulke whom they did not trust. None other. There should have been one other, the girls thought, one at least, but Marron was not here. Marron, they supposed, was with Jemel; and the two boys together - together with the Daughter, which was a different thing, a greater and a worse - they might be anywhere. They hadn't been sighted since the battle. At least no one had found their bodies, but that was small reassurance, when they had a whole other world to lose themselves in and no one to send a message home.
The girls might have been angry with the boys, if they weren't so worried. They might have been more worried still, if they weren't so nervous. The King was a mystery, he lived in closer seclusion than the strictest religious; and yet they meant to walk in on him unannounced
...
As far as they knew, they were unannounced. He could hardly be unaware that they had come; his Shadow might have warned him days ago, that they were coming. Julianne's father was maintaining a magnificent discretion, saying nothing at all of any consequence. What that meant, even Julianne couldn't guess. Perhaps he knew that they'd be welcome within; perhaps he knew that the gates would not be opened, the walls could not be climbed.
Perhaps he knew nothing, and had simply travelled in hope and with no expectations, as they had. As they had tried to do.
Five figures, but they had walked two and two and one across the wide open stretches of the pavement, coming from different directions under a white sky and a sun of burnished copper: the old men, the girls, the Ransomer. That was how they stood before the gate, grouped but not together, not one group and not at all with one intent.
'Do we knock?' Elisande asked, deliberately savage, fiercely unfunny.
'No,' Coren said. 'We wait. When the King is ready, he admits us.'
'If he will,' from Julianne, the most doubtful, the least determined.
'He will,' and that was her father and her friend, speaking together but still not with one intent. He meant that he was sure of his ground, of his master; she that she was sure of her own purpose and the strength of it to carry her through to where she meant to be, face to face with the man she'd come to see, whether he chose to have it so or not.
'How long does he usually make you wait?'
'Julianne, I don't usually go in by the gate.' He said it with that longsuffering tone universal among fathers. She flushed, and was suddenly glad of Elisande s heat to distract notice from her own.
'You could take us in then, couldn't you? Of course you could
...'
'...
But of course I won't. Quite so. I'll stand with you at his gate, for as long as you choose to linger; I won't help you break into his privity.'
'I could summon my djinni, have it carry us through.'
'You could summon it, yes. Would it come?'
'I don't know,' in a sullen mutter.
'No. Well, rather than finding out and being disappointed, why not try a little quiet patience? I've never known the King be wilfully discourteous—'
'—Unless you want to count forty years of silence,' which came from the Princip, unexpectedly taking his granddaughter's part against his friends, which has always seemed discourteous to me.'
Specifically to me was
how he meant it, meaning that the Kings voice raised on his behalf could have eased a generation of pain and fear.
'Was I so silent?'
'On Surayon, yes. And were you so very much him?'
'If the King chose not to speak of Surayon,' Fulke hissed, as though even the full use of his voice in this company was too much taint, came too close to a contact he could not bear, might it not be because speaking was so unnecessary, because his subjects could see for themselves what was rancid, and smell for themselves what was corrupt?'
'When the Church Fathers could see it and smell it all the way from the homelands, you mean, and so sent you to burn it out?'
'But this is his Kingdom,' Coren said swiftly, his voice just strong enough to stand between them, 'and not yours, nor theirs, nor mine. The King makes his own choices - which is why all of us' - though his glance at Fulke corrected that,
most of us
—'are here, to ask questions to which he if any man should have the answers. Otherwise we must ask the djinn, and that might prove unfruitful.'
Despite the doubts, despite the bickering, they did not in truth remain long at the gates of the Dir'al Shahan.