Wheel of the Infinite (10 page)

“This is one of my temples,” Maskelle said, “or it used to be.” She shifted around to face him. “Why did you come to the Empire?”

He let out his breath and started to pull off his buskins. “It’s a long story.”

“That’s no reason not to tell it.”

He wrestled with a recalcitrant knot in the bootlace. She didn’t think he would answer, but then he said, “The Holder Lord died.”

She frowned. She could see that prying information out of Rian was going to be no easy task, even under the best of circumstances. “You were much attached to him?”

“More so than I thought, apparently.” He managed to wrench the buskin off, gasping in relief, and stretched out on his back.

Maskelle gave up any attempt at subtlety. “I can see why it’s a long story, if you tell it like this.”

He sat up on his elbows. “All right. I’d only been at Markand Hold a year. I was part of a treaty between Markand and Riverwait.”

“Part of a treaty? They trade . . .” She hesitated over the word he had used, then settled for “personal guards?”

“Not usually, but when the Holder Lord of Markand’s legion is on the border and he’s naming treaty terms and he points at you and says ‘And I’ll take that one,’ nobody has much choice about it.”

She watched him thoughtfully. “So Riverwait gave you up to an enemy.”

“The Lady Holder of Riverwait gave me up.” He looked away. “The Holder Lord of Markand had been coming to her hall for years and I was the first of her cortege. We didn’t get along. He chose me as part of the treaty because he knew what it would cost her in honor. She didn’t have a choice. Refusing to give me to him would have been refusing the treaty, and Markand would have overrun us within a month.”

“But she gave you up.”

“I know that part, we don’t have to go over it again,” he said, some annoyance in his voice. “I spent a year at Markand serving the Holder Lord.”

She frowned. “Serving how?”

He sighed. “As a
kjardin
. A personal guard.”

Maskelle sat back, wrapping her arms around her knees. She could imagine it all too readily. From what she had seen of Rian, he would have made no secret of his dislike when the Holder Lord had come to Riverwait on his earlier visits. The Holder Lord of Markand must have been something of a sadistic games-player to demand the favorite bodyguard of the Lady Holder as part of a treaty in the first place. And it must have been an interesting year at Markand for Rian, a virtual prisoner in the guise of a trusted retainer, and of course everyone else in the Holder Lord’s court would have known.

Rian was watching her face and must have followed her thought. “I made sure he didn’t enjoy it too much,” he said. “There are ways.”

“I can imagine.”

He laid back down and stretched, brows lifted ironically. “I think I overdid it, though.”

It was a nice sight; she had always been attracted to lean men with flat stomachs, even if his skin was a little light for her eyes. “Oh?”

“There’s an old custom, that when a High Holder Lord dies his best guards and servants go to the grave with him.”

“Go to the grave?” Maskelle repeated blankly.

“Continue to serve him in the sunland,” Rian explained. Seeing that she was still baffled, he spelled it out. “Get killed during the funeral, so the relatives can prove how much they really did honor the old bastard.”

She looked away to conceal her reaction. To a member of a religious order which had debated for ten years on whether it was acceptable to allow cut flowers as spirit offerings, the idea of a living human as part of burial goods came as something of a shock.

Rian added, “It’s fallen out of favor. But the priests read the omens and said the Holder Lord needed company on the journey into the sunland. Everybody, the family, the bodyguards, the wives, the clan leaders, the Guild Chiefs, all got together to decide who it would be. Guess who we picked?”

“I see. And I suppose the Holder Lord left detailed instructions about this to his priests before he died.” Intellectually Maskelle could appreciate the final refinement of cruelty, but then she had been told often that she seldom did much of her thinking with her brain.
The Holder Lord of Markand is dead
, she reminded herself. Which was fortunate, because otherwise she would have to go to the Sintane and kill him herself. “How did you get away?”

“I survived the funeral games, which they let me know was very inconvenient for them. The Holder Lord’s Heir wanted me put in the tomb alive, the way they used to do it. The guard captain, who was my lord officer, thought they should strangle me, which is also an old custom. But the chief priest decided to be magnanimous and had them give me a drug that would keep me unconscious through the burial rites, so I’d wake up just in time to suffocate.”

“Small favors.”

“Very small. But they didn’t get as much of the drug down me as they thought, and it took so long they were late for the beginning of the rite, which starts in the Hall of the Hold. I pretended I couldn’t stand, moaned and thrashed around, and they left me in the funerary chapel attached to the burial mound, with only a couple of guards outside. I was just conscious enough to put a finger down my throat and get rid of the rest of the drug. It almost took too long, but I was finally able to wake up enough to take one of the guards from behind and the other when he turned around. I got out of the chapel just before the procession came into sight. There was nowhere else to go, so I headed for the border into Gidale. The Heir sent hunters after me, so I had to keep going.” He sat up, unbuckled his belt, and half-drew the siri to show her the hilt. “See that? This isn’t mine, it’s the Holder Lord’s. I took it from the offering table. It had panthers and stags worked in gold; I sold those in Tirane.”

Maskelle grinned in appreciation of the irony, though she suspected Rian had regretted giving up the sword’s ornaments. “Why didn’t you want to tell me this, why make me pry it out of you?”

He set the sheathed sword aside, though still within easy reach, and laid back down, propping himself up on one elbow. “You’re a religious and I’ve been condemned as a sacrifice by priests, how did I know how you were going to take it?”

“I see.” If she was going to do what she knew she wanted to, it was time for a little honesty. “It’s not half so bad as some things I’ve done.”

“And what’s that?”

“I killed one of my husbands. Well, some people believe I killed all of them, and in a way, that’s true.”

Being Rian, he frowned and said, “You had husbands?”

“Three. The first one, Ilian, died because he trusted me too much. He followed me into danger and I couldn’t protect him. I killed Sirot, the second one, myself, because of a vision I had.” She looked up at the enigmatic face of the moon, framed by faint faded stars. She had gone over this so many times in her own thoughts, but she realized this was the first time she had spoken of it aloud to anyone in seven years. “I thought it was from the Adversary, but I made a mistake. I was using too much power, relying on it and not the words of the Ancestors.” Regret stung her again and she had to stop speaking to control her voice. She had hated Sirot by then, and everything had been a good deal more complicated than she was making it sound, but the essentials were really all that mattered. “My husband’s son, who was only a boy at the time, was one of the heirs of the Old Emperor. The vision told me that if he took the throne, the Celestial Empire would disappear in a storm of darkness and chaos.” She looked at Rian. “So I tried to stop that from happening, any way I could. My husband fought me and I killed him for it. The third husband, Vanrin, was a man who supported me out of love and folly and ambition, and he was killed in the fighting afterward.”

Rian was watching her worriedly, his brows drawn together in concern. “But you stopped the boy from being the heir?”

“No, he was made the heir, and when the old Emperor died, he took the throne. And nothing happened.” She laughed a little, bitterly. “The vision was a lie, a trick of the dark spirits, but I believed it completely.” She shook her head. “I’ve been in a great deal of difficulty and most of it’s my own fault. I betrayed my sacred duty to the Koshan Path. The Adversary will no longer speak to me, but while I still live there won’t be a new Voice to replace me, so the Empire has been denied the Adversary’s counsel for the past seven years. In the fighting I used too much of my power and gained the attention of the dark spirits, the things that live in the shadows. Like the river when it runs hard and wild like this, and whatever it was that killed that boy and replaced his soul with something else.” She smiled wryly at how long the catalog of her folly was becoming.

“They punished you for it?” Rian asked cautiously.

“No, I made my own punishment too, my own curse. Now whenever I manipulate the Infinite, use the power that most people call magic, it draws the attention of the dark spirits and they can find me again. And I can’t hear the Adversary. It’s like being blind and deaf.”
Or worse, because no one’s made blind and deaf because of their own idiocy
. She added tiredly, “At first I was evil, then I was an annoyance. Now I’m just pathetic.”

His voice serious, Rian said, “Not pathetic.”

“Maybe.” A wind stirred the trees somewhere past the temple, the sound coming to them like the distant rush of water. Rian was watching her, a faint worried crease between his brows. She said, “But of all the things I’ve done, I’ve never given up anyone to an enemy.” She leaned over, slid a hand into the soft warmth of his hair and kissed him.

When she drew back, he said, “I knew that when I first saw you,” and pulled her down to him again.

Maskelle had time to remember that her bones weren’t twenty anymore, no matter what the rest of her thought, and that the stone beneath them was unyielding, but none of it mattered enough to give her pause. It had been a long time since she had been with a man and longer still since she had been with one she wanted this much, one who wasn’t afraid of her, whose humor and stubborn temperament matched her own. All thought dissolved into lean hard muscle under her hands, first through tight fabric and then only hot bare skin.

At one point Rian managed to gasp, “Is the Adversary going to care that we’re doing this on his moon-viewing platform?”

“No,” she told him, laughing, “it’s a very ancient, very honored form of offering.”

Later, her head pillowed on Rian’s back, Maskelle drifted into sleep. He didn’t make a very good pillow, having no comfortable softness about him, so her sleep was light and the transition from waking world to dream was almost imperceptible at first.

The dream landscape was much like the real one, though the moonlight seemed to penetrate the heavy shadows of the trees overhanging the wall to a greater depth, so that she could make out the rough knotted boles hung with moss and the vines entangling the branches. Her physical awareness of Rian’s body was still intense; she felt she could have traced every line of muscle, every curve, every old scar. This melded with the dream until she could feel his breathing and his heartbeat as if they were her own. He lay on his stomach, his head pillowed on his arms, drowsing just on the edge of sleep and kept from slipping fully into unconsciousness by a need to listen for anyone or anything approaching. This gave her the freedom to move further into the dream, rising above the moon-viewing deck to a point near the top of the stepped tower, so that she could see the whole of the temple laid out below her in the dark. The three shrines were much as they were in the real world, as were the statues of the seated monkey men and the quarters for the attendants. But the lamps were not lit in the court and the wagons and oxen didn’t stand outside the wall.

I’m seeing it at another time
, Maskelle thought.
But is it later or earlier
? Then she saw a figure step out of the second shrine and go down the steps, and despite the moonlit dark she recognized herself. She could see that her head was still shaved so that her rank tattoo was visible.
Ah, so it’s earlier
.

Then a wave of darkness like a silk drape covered everything and Maskelle found herself looking at an entirely different landscape.

Intimacy on the threshold of the Adversary’s shrine had been used as an offering for generations since the Koshan Order first battled the worship of blood demons for the hearts and minds of the people of the lowlands. Some later Koshan philosophers contended that it had been some wily priest’s device to attract converts accustomed to the excitements of human sacrifice, that the spirits of the Infinite, not being anthropomorphized deities, were indifferent as to whether their followers had sex or not. But it appeared that those particular philosophers were dead wrong, because with Rian’s help she had gotten herself a dream vision straight from the Adversary.

The moonlight was the same, but the jungle and the canal were gone and in their place she looked down at a great dusty plain, limitless and vast, the purple-grey clouds of a recent storm overhead, the air dry and cool. The plain was empty except for strange small mountains that thrust upwards at intervals, towering several hundred feet above her. They were all oddly unmountainlike shapes, the nearest formed like a mushroom, with a round base supporting a domed top. And while her slow wits insisted that those couldn’t be mountains, that there was no sort of stone that could take these forms naturally, she saw pinpricks of light on some of the farther ones. She focused on the nearest clump and suddenly her vision altered as her brain transformed the image into reality. They were buildings, as large as the greatest temples of the Kushor-At in Duvalpore, carved out of smooth grey stone. The plain under them was not grey sand but grey stone, seamed with the even shapes of paving blocks. Miles and miles of paving blocks.

Then she was walking on those blocks, very near one of the buildings, her feet bare on the warm stone. She looked up at the great shapes towering over her, saw that the surfaces of them were rough and worked with strange unfamiliar carving, the shapes of the openings square and well-defined. There were balconies on some of them, or open galleries. A bridge high overhead connected two of them. She walked toward the door of the nearest, a round high opening in the base, wide enough to drive four or five wagons through side by side. She was too far to see anything of the inside but the flicker of yellow firelight.