Wheel of the Infinite (17 page)

The chief healer frowned. “Of being pursued by something, some creature. Also of the Year Rites.” He gestured helplessly. “Nightmares are often caused by these fevers.”

Maskelle laid a hand on the young man’s forehead. His skin was dry and hot to the touch, as the healer had said. His eyes turned to her, bloodshot and vague. Hair pricked her palm from where it had already begun to grow over his shaven scalp. She felt nothing of the darkness about him, nothing of that restless power that had taken the farmboy’s mind and soul and sent him to their camp with death in his hand.
But if it was there, it wouldn’t stay. It couldn’t, not in this place
. But before this she would have said that it was impossible for such a thing to enter the city at all, let alone the Marai or any other temple. And the powers that stalked her hadn’t the conscious wit to attack the Hundred Year Rite.
Circle a myrrh tree three times for luck
, she thought,
I hope they haven’t grown wits
. Then she shook her head at herself in exasperation.
Not everything is about you. Examine the problem from all the paths
.

“Do you know where you are?” she asked the young man softly.

His eyes darted aimlessly, then focused on her. He whispered, “The Marai.”

That’s interesting
, she thought. Was it delirium or something else? “What Day is it?”

“The twentieth Day of the Rite. The Hundred Year Rite.” Veran tried to sit up suddenly and Maskelle grabbed his shoulders and held him down. The attendant moved to help her and she shook her head at him. “It’s coming,” the young man whispered. “I have to be here. But I shouldn’t. . . It’s not my time—it must be a dream.”

It’s not his time
. Veran had replaced the Voice whose turn it was to work on the Rite. “I think he’s reliving what happened.” Perhaps over and over again?

“We thought so too, but he won’t answer questions,” Niare said, sounding weary. “The Celestial One tried for hours.”

Veran tossed his head and muttered, “I shouldn’t ... I shouldn’t... It’s coming... .”

Maskelle leaned forward and caught the young man’s chin, turning his face toward her, waiting until the bloodshot eyes focused on her. “What do you see?”

He gasped, tried to pull away from her.

She said, “The Adversary commands you to speak.”

There was a shocked stirring behind her, but she ignored it; this was what the Celestial One had brought her here for. She had no right to invoke the Adversary, but in the state Veran was in she doubted he knew that. The young man’s eyes locked on her; his dry bitten lips tried to form words.

“Tell us what happened when you were alone in the chamber with the Rite. Tell us and accept the Adversary’s protection.”

He opened his mouth, but his voice was a choked exhalation.

“The Adversary defends the just. He—” Watching him intently she looked, really looked, into the young man’s eyes.

It was then she realized he wanted to speak. He wanted very much to speak. She saw past the veneer of fevered delirium to awareness, and intelligence, and overwhelming desperation. He knew what had happened and he wanted to tell them, but something
prevented him. She heard a whisper of the Ancestors, but again it faded before she could understand the words.

“It’s all right,” she said quickly, wiping the sweat from his forehead. The instant of clarity was passing and he looked like just another man being driven mad by some illness of the brain, but she knew better now. “I see it. I know. You’re trapped and you can’t get out.”

He slumped back with a strangled cry, but it was a cry of relief. She said, “Try to rest. Don’t try to talk anymore. We’ll think of some way to help you.”

She stood slowly. Niare was watching her, worried and still shocked. The chief healer and the attendant just looked shocked. Maskelle said, “It’s not fever or any natural sickness. It’s possession.”

“Possession?” The chief healer was incredulous. “Here?”

“Here,” Maskelle said grimly. “Use tamarisk, sandalwood, myrrh—”

“I know what to do for possession,” the healer interrupted. He looked down at Veran, his face troubled. “Are you certain? How—”

“I’m certain,” she said. “But if I’m wrong, it won’t do him any more harm, will it?”

Niare lingered to speak to the chief healer, and as Maskelle and Rian made their way out, Rian asked, “Will he do what you ask?”

“Yes. He doesn’t like the idea, but that won’t stop him.” She added wryly, “He wants the boy to get well more than he wants me to be wrong.”

“I thought demons couldn’t get past the city boundaries.”

Maskelle stopped just outside on the hospital’s portico, out of earshot of any of the patients inside. The sky was lightening a little and it looked like the morning rain might hold off for a time. The Gila Stel stood across a square of grass and shade trees, its golden stone a little dulled by the weather. It was a small temple compared to the Marai, only about a fourth the size, with two stories of galleried courts supporting a three-level stepped pyramid, and five small, elegantly proportioned shrines atop that. Birds called in the trees and Maskelle could hear the bustle of a market just beyond the street wall. “They can’t. So whatever caused this isn’t a demon.” She looked at the Gila Stel and the morning mist rising from the canal behind it. “The Voices who are conducting the Rite would like to believe that whatever Veran did to the Wheel came out of his madness. I think that’s a fond and foolish hope. It’s far more likely a deliberate act by something that used Veran like a tool.” She started along the path toward the temple. “But I’m more used to looking for evil than they are.”

“That’s why the Celestial One sent for you,” Rian pointed out.

That
, she thought,
is true
. She added, “And the problem with looking for evil is that you then have to do something about whatever you flush out.”

There were two women coming up the path from the Gila Stel, both dressed in casually draped robes, though the richness of their jewelry marked them as Court Ladies, and probably High Court. Pearls hung in garlands from their belts, gold draped their necks and banded their arms and ankles. Their hair was elaborately dressed, plaited and wound up in buns, held in place by gold pins. One was young and very lovely, with high cheekbones and skin so fine it was almost translucent. After a moment Maskelle recognized her as the Court Lady who had been with the Celestial One when they had arrived at the Marai yesterday. She would have been an extremely beautiful woman, but there was no warmth to her beauty, no spontaneity in her gestures in her conversation with her companion.
The spirit dancers carved on the temples have more life to them
, Maskelle thought.

The second woman was older, grey woven through her hair, her robe more modestly draped. It had been seven years and Maskelle had managed to stop searching every face she saw for old enemies, so it took her a long moment to recognize the second woman as Disara.

Maskelle stopped where she was on the path. Disara’s eyes passed over her without recognition; she was speaking to the other woman, and foreigners and other strange people were always to be found near the hospitals. There were people sitting under the trees near the far side of the temple, probably the women’s attendants and servants.

Rian was watching her closely. “What’s wrong?”

She shook her head minutely. Disara might not recognize her, with her hair grown out and her face and body hardened by seven years of travel. She wanted to see if Disara would know her and how the older woman would react.

The two women reached the portico, just as Niare and the chief healer stepped out of the hospital. There were polite bows and greetings back and forth, then the chief healer stepped back inside, gesturing the women to follow him.

As Disara stepped up to the portico, her eyes met Maskelle’s. Maskelle saw the shocked recognition in Disara’s face, saw her expression harden to revulsion and anger an instant later. She swept on into the hospital, leaving the other woman behind.

Sounding relieved, Niare said under her breath, “That went as well as could be expected.”

Maskelle almost smiled. So she wasn’t the only one who had been curious about Disara’s reaction.

Instead of following her companion, the young woman was looking Maskelle and Rian over frankly. Since they hadn’t been introduced and no one was making any effort to do so, Maskelle stared back at her, hoping she looked as rude as she felt. Undeterred, the woman said calmly, “You are the Voice of the Adversary, lately returned to the city?”

Niare shifted uncomfortably and started to speak, but Maskelle said first, “No, I no longer hold that title. I lost it when I was cursed and exiled from the Empire.”

“Ah,” the woman said, unruffled. “I was misinformed.” Her eyes went to Rian again with a detached curiosity, as if she was examining a statue and not a person.

Maskelle said, pointedly, “I think your presence is required somewhere else.”

The woman stared at her a moment, expressionless, then made a sixth-degree bow that might be intended as a subtle insult and continued into the hospital. Maskelle shook her head and Rian muttered something under his breath in Sitanese. Maskelle guessed from the disgruntled tone that he didn’t approve of the young woman either. She turned to the path that led past the Gila Stel to the canal.

Niare sighed and turned to walk with them. Maskelle asked her, “Who was that High Court flower?”

“That is the Lady Marada. She comes from the Garekind Islands and is visiting at Court.” Niare hesitated. “She has the Celestial Emperor’s favor.” She was watching Maskelle carefully. “It is even rumored that he may make her a consort.”

Maskelle’s brows rose. “Really,” she said dryly. Perhaps manners were different in the Garekind Islands, then, and the woman had not intended rudeness. It was far to the south, a long and difficult voyage across the Rijan sea, and few of its inhabitants ever visited the capital. “And she visits the sick when she isn’t astonishing the High Court?”

“No.” Niare’s voice was amused. “She only visits Veran.”

“Veran?” Maskelle frowned.

“She had asked for instruction in the Infinite, and Veran was teaching her. Informally, of course. She has a great curiosity about the Path, but I don’t think she fancied the required service as a penitent.”

Well, that’s common enough
, Maskelle thought. And Veran must have many friends who visited him in his illness. There was no reason why she should feel uneasy at the thought.

Niare left them at the Gila Stel. There were a few boatmen, dicing on the stone bank near where their boat, its white silk awning trimmed with flowers, was tied up. Four women, dressed well but without the profusion of pearls and gold, were sitting on the benches under a stand of palms, fanning themselves and talking animatedly. Maids or waiting women, their eyes slid curiously toward the strange travel-worn nun and the Sitanese outcast. Maskelle could see the Celestial One’s boat coming down the canal toward the temple’s water steps. Waterfowl took flight, disturbed by the boat’s passage, and she saw the Celestial One had come for them himself. She gazed upward in mute appeal to the Ancestors.
Does he think I mean to try to escape
? Rian asked, “Who was that other woman, who looked daggers at you?”

Maskelle glanced at him. He was ostensibly relaxed, but not without that edge of tension. She said, “That was Lady Disara, my husband’s mother. The husband I killed.”

Rian stared at her. “You could have told me before.” He looked sharply at the people who had come with the two Court Ladies and managed to lower his voice. “How can I protect you if you don’t tell me these things? What is wrong with you? Were you run out of the Empire for being crazy?”

“That was one of the reasons.” Maskelle sat down on a bench under one of the trees to wait for the boat. She sighed and rested her arms on her knees. “I think maybe I might need a
kjardin
after all.”

As the Celestial One’s boat slid up to the water steps, Rian scanned the boatmen and the others near the canal, alert for betraying tension, a body deliberately held to conceal a weapon, any abrupt movement. Markand had been good training for this; everyone there, no matter how long in service or close in relationship, could be a potential assassin. Compared to that, looking for threats in a place where everyone was a stranger and he had no idea of the alliances, factions, and undercurrents was almost easy.

Again, the Celestial One was unaccompanied except for the boys who poled the boat and the young priest who helped him up and down steps. Maskelle grabbed one of the support poles and swung easily down into the boat. Rian followed her.

“You didn’t have to come after us,” she said to the Celestial One with some asperity. “Did you think coming here was a ruse for me to escape?”

“It crossed my mind,” the old man said grimly.

Water gurgled as the boys pushed the boat away from the portico. Rian saw Maskelle glare at the old priest and he automatically gauged the distance to the bank, which was lined with terraced wooden buildings with carved gables and pediments, in case they had to leave the boat suddenly. There were children playing on the water steps they passed, so the canals must be free of the predators that made the rivers so dangerous.

Still watching the Celestial One almost angrily, Maskelle said, “I’m an outcast. The upper ranks are going to object if you try to include me in the Rite, especially in a Rite as important as this one. Especially a Rite this . . . damaged.”

“That’s why you must no longer be an outcast.” The Celestial One was looking away, at the gardens along the opposite bank. He said quietly, “You’ve been punished enough.”

She said, “That’s not your decision.” Her hands were gripping the bench tightly, the blood draining from her knuckles.

The Celestial One frowned, showing a hint of the crotchety old man Rian suspected lurked just under the serene surface, and said, “It is my decision as far as the Order is concerned.”

She turned a sardonic gaze on him. “I took that road and I can tell you it doesn’t lead where you think it does.”

The Celestial One pressed his lips together. “Don’t lecture to me, child.”

Maskelle leaned forward, and this time the edge in her voice was dangerous. “I’m not your child.”

Rian shifted his weight unobtrusively. The boys poling the craft were far up in the bow and the stern and couldn’t possibly reach them quickly enough to interfere. He braced himself to dump the young priest, who was watching the confrontation with open astonishment, over the side.

The moment stretched. The Celestial One sat back, smiling slowly. “You have not lost your fire.”

“Don’t pretend that was a test, old man.” Maskelle eased back on the bench but didn’t relax. The young priest was saved from a swim in the canal, but Rian didn’t relax, either. Sounding more peevish than angry now, she added, “There’s always the chance my intervention would just make things worse.”

“I can’t think how,” the Celestial One said frankly. And unnervingly, Rian thought.

Maskelle shook her head in exasperation. “Why didn’t you just tell me what had happened when I got to the Marai yesterday? Why take me in to see it unprepared? Did you think I had something to do with it and you wanted to see if I looked guilty?”

The Celestial One sighed. “I wanted you to see it for yourself.” He looked at the far bank, rheumy eyes narrowed. “I wanted your conclusions to be untainted by any preconception. I have looked at it so much in these few days since it happened I no longer trust my own judgment.”

I must have heard wrong
, Rian thought,
that sounded almost rational
. Maskelle must have agreed, because she grumbled, “Why didn’t you say so in the first place?”

“You wouldn’t have listened to me then. You wanted an argument. Now you’ve had one. Perhaps you can be content now that you understand my reasons for all this.”

Maskelle just looked at the old man. Rian was a little reassured by the fact that the Celestial One could evidently be a real bastard when he set his mind to it.
Maybe the Koshans aren‘t that strange after all
.

At the Marai, the Celestial One led them straight to the inner court, where the central tower stood. In the portico around the base of the tower, Maskelle paused to tell Rian, “You can’t come in this time. We’re going to be doing some things that can’t be disturbed.” As an afterthought, she added, “And arguing. But mostly alterations to the Rite. You should go home.”

Rian ran a hand through his hair, frustrated. There were some servants sweeping the court across the way and a few priests talking in one of the colonnades, but no one was within earshot and no one was paying more than the ordinary curious attention to them. “Who else is in there?”

“Just the Voices, a few other priests, probably.” She smiled at him, somewhat fondly.

Rian swore under his breath. “This isn’t a game. You know something’s trying to kill you and you have enemies here.” He suspected that was a mild estimate of the situation.

“Yes, I know,” she said, glumly regarding the polished stone under their feet and dragging the toe of her muddy and travel-worn sandal over the edge of the step. “I’ll be with the Celestial One.”

“What’s that worth?”

“If violence takes place in the Celestial One’s sight, the whole Order and anyone outside it who follows the Path will have to go through a purification ritual.”

To the priests-shamans, at least the ones in Markand, “purification” involved fire, iron, and screaming, usually by a nonpriest. “Does that involve pain?”

Maskelle snorted. “No, worse. Fasting, abstinence, complicated meditation rituals. No one wants to go through that, not even to get rid of me.”

I‘ll
never understand these people
, Rian thought. He looked at the entrance into the tower. He hadn’t had a chance to explore it yesterday. “Is this the only way in?”

“No, there are a couple of others at the upper levels. I think.” At his expression she shook her head. “Rian, if anyone is going to make trouble, it will be me. Really. I’m the most dangerous person here.” Her mouth quirked wryly. “Especially to myself.”

“That I already figured out,” he muttered. There didn’t appear to be any other choice. “Fine. If you get killed, don’t send your shade crying to me.”

“I promise, on what’s left of my honor, not to haunt you.”

Rian didn’t think much of that promise, but the Celestial One, who was waiting in the archway, thumped his staff impatiently and glared. He let out his breath. “All I’m saying is just watch your back.”

“I will, I will.” She made shooing motions at him. “I was nursemaiding myself a long time before you came along to do it.”

She and the Celestial One disappeared inside the tower and Rian paced the court for a while, trying to judge how safe the temple really was. It wasn’t a bad place to wait, all things considered. The clouds had settled in and a light rain fell off and on, steaming off the smooth grey stones of the court and dripping from the figures of the Ancestors and spirits and hero priests and priestesses of the past carved into the walls and galleries and columns around him. A variety of people seemed to come and go in the court for various purposes, and few except the Koshans approached the central tower. It gave him time to think about what they had heard at the hospital, about poor spell-maddened Veran and the dead Voice Igarin.

Something or someone had assuredly poisoned the Voice. Rian mortally hated poisoners. It was an indiscriminate weapon and he had seen too many innocents fall victim to it. The worst time had been when poisoned must cakes meant for the Holder Lord had accidentally been sent to the rooms of his favorite concubine. The young woman had shared them with all the servants who happened to be with her that afternoon, and it had killed all of them, including an adolescent lamp girl and two pageboys so young their voices hadn’t changed yet.

Rian had smelled a poison murder as soon as the Celestial One had spoken of Igarin being so conveniently taken ill. People never took ill at convenient moments, and all these priests seemed to live to vast ages and be as hardy as cart horses. The Celestial One had said there had been no sign of poison, but Rian wondered how much these people really knew of such things, for all their herbs and magic. They didn’t seem much interested in killing each other.

Rian stopped, watching a group of priests walk along one of the covered colonnades that divided the court, the dark blue of their robes flicking in and out among the grey pillars. He had been shocked to realize that the temple guards the Celestial One had brought with him to the post compound really had been for their protection, that the highest priest in the Celestial Empire apparently went anywhere he pleased without guards, with only the boys who paddled the boat or the young priest whose main duty seemed to be to help him negotiate steps.
It’s not the Sintane
, he reminded himself again. That observation was a triumph of the obvious. Maybe no one in the city wanted to kill the old man. It was remotely possible. Maybe Rian had just been too long at Markand, with a lord whom most rational people looked for chances to murder.

A young Koshan woman was coming across the court with an armload of some kind of wooden packets. Rian watched her with idle curiosity, until it became apparent she was heading directly for him. She stopped a few paces away. Rian didn’t know how to read the rank tattoos yet, but hers looked fairly new on her shaven scalp. She cleared her throat, looked up at him uncertainly, and said, “My name is Sister Tiar. I was sent to give you instruction in reading Anrin.”

Oh, really
? On close observation he saw that the things she carried were books with wooden covers. Rian shot a glance at the entrance to the Rite’s tower. “Sent by who?”

“By—” She hesitated, then finished less confidently, “The one who was the Voice of the Adversary.”

Rian made a noncommittal noise. So Maskelle had remembered her threat to make him learn to read. He just stood there and stared at the young nun, hoping to scare her away.

It didn’t work. More determined than she initially appeared, she stepped briskly past him to the shelter of the tower’s portico, sat down on the step, and awkwardly deposited her armload of books. She picked one up and opened it, saying brightly, “Shall we begin?”

“Women,” Rian muttered under his breath in Sitanese, then gave in gracefully and went to sit next to her.

While she was explaining the basics of what she meant to teach him, he listened with half his attention, picking up one of the books and paging through it to look at the drawings. These Koshan books were strips of very thin smooth wood, written on with a variety of colored inks and then lacquered over to protect the surface, the strips then bound together with cords. They were kept in oilcloth cases to protect them from the ever present damp, though it seemed only the binding cords suffered from it. The drawings in this one were the same sort of scenes that were carved on the walls of the Marai. He hoped every book in the pile wasn’t about religion.

The nun Tiar was looking past him toward the archway into the tower. Now she said, “Do you know if there’s any progress? Everyone is very worried and no one will tell us anything.”

If such a thing had happened in Markand, there would have been panic and bloodshed in the corridors of the Hold. Here, everyone was “very worried.” From what he had heard, the Koshans hadn’t made much effort to conceal what had happened, but they hadn’t tried to spread the word, either. The knowledge was probably still confined to the upper ranks of the temples and the lower who were attached to the Marai. Rian said, “They don’t tell me anything either.”

She turned the pages of the book, running her thumb along the wooden edges, biting her lip. If she was trying to decide where to begin, it was evidently a taxing decision. Then she said slowly, “We’ve been wondering ... Not many of us who are in the lower ranks now knew the Voice of the Adversary before she left, and ...”

Rian waited unhelpfully. He wasn’t sure what she was getting at.

She finally looked at him, her face worried, and said in a rush, “Are you with her voluntarily?”

He stared at her, surprised.
So what did they think? That I was kidnapped, under a spell
? He grinned slowly. “Yes. She’s tried to get rid of me a couple of times, but it didn’t take.”

Her cheeks darkened and she looked away, embarrassed. “It’s just that there are so many stories about her and . . . Some of the others speculated that she had ...”

“Trapped me?” Rian finished, fascinated. There were a lot of questions itching at him that he couldn’t possibly ask a strange Kushorit woman who was a nun and barely out of girlhood into the bargain. And anyway she probably had no idea how many men Maskelle had had in the past and if any of them were better to look at than he was.

“Yes,” Tiar said hurriedly, and grabbed another book off the pile at random and launched into the lesson.

Rian sat pretend-patiently through what the various symbols in the written version of the Kushorit language meant. After Tiar had gotten over her attack of self-consciousness, he asked her, “Do you know Veran?”

“Yes.” She selected another book, troubled. “I hope he’ll be all right. He worked so hard. He would have advanced to the seventh level this year and many thought that eventually he would be made a Voice.”

So the disaster had ruined Veran’s chances for advancement, even if he did recover. It didn’t sound like the man had much reason to act against the Rite on his own. “That’s why they let him near the Rite?”

“Yes, there are always a few initiates to the seventh level who are given the opportunity to participate in the Rite in a minor way. The Voices perform the most important parts, but the others are allowed to take their places occasionally, to add to their knowledge.” She shook her head. “Veran was the youngest who had ever been given that honor.”

Rian leaned back against the pillar, watching Tiar sort through the books. If Maskelle was right, then something had gotten to Veran at some point before he had entered the tower to take the dying Voice’s turn at the Rite. If Veran was an involuntary participant, then it must have caught him unawares; if he had made some sort of deal with it, then regretted it later or been betrayed, it might make things more difficult. A guilty man would take steps to cover his trail. “He was teaching a lady from the Court named Marada?”