He hurried on, with the servant leading through more rooms seen only dimly as torches here had not been lit. They passed through another court with a pool, this one somewhat smaller and set like a blue jewel in a green garden. And from the far side of this court he could see what was presumably their goal, another set of rooms, where light and sound were spilling through an open doorway.
Glad to see an end to this journey, he followed the servant in and found himself in a room about the size of one of those that the officials had used. There were Ari and Nofret, bent over a table with something spread out over it. There were no torches here; instead, lamps provided much clearer, steadier light, including a lamp-stand at each of the four corners of the table. They were looking at a map, he saw, as he drew nearer. But it was the biggest map he had ever seen in his life.
A table to one side, pushed up against the wall, was laden with food: grapes, pomegranates, figs, flatbread and loaf bread both, honey cakes, butter and cheese, lettuce, green peas—and not that roast duck Kiron had scented but a glorious roast goose. It was missing one leg. The leg was in Ari’s hand, and the Great King looked very like the old Ari as he took bites as someone—from the war helmet, Kiron thought it might be Ari’s Captain of Thousands—pointed to something on the map.
“Kiron,” said Ari without turning around. “Get food and come over here and tell us exactly what you found. Kamas-hotet, where’s that map of Bukatan?”
A fellow with the sidelock hairstyle of a scribe went to a basket of scrolls and pulled one out without even looking at it, spreading it out on the table on top of the big map and weighing down the edges with little faience scroll weights in the shape of beetles so it wouldn’t roll up again.
Kiron didn’t have to be told what to do twice; his stomach felt as if it was pressed against his backbone. He heaped a platter with slices of goose, a slice of loaf bread spread with soft cheese, and grapes. “Kiron, come tell us everything you saw, from the beginning,” Ari said. “Here’s the map of the town you were in.”
Between bites, Kiron related everything that they had seen, from the moment they approached the place from the west, to the time the trail of the (presumably) now-captive townsfolk and soldiers ended and the trails of the slave traders began.
When he had finished, Ari and Nofret looked to the man in the war helmet.
“This was planned,” he said flatly. “It was planned for some time, and carefully executed. Let us leave aside how the townsfolk were bewitched; that is a matter for the priests to worry over. But look at this—”
He drew a line on the map with his finger, from the outskirts of the town to the place where Kiron guessed that the slavers had been, now marked with a red pebble. “I have planned many, many evacuations, Great Ones. I have had to evacuate towns and villages in time of war and in time of flood both. That distance is nearly exactly how long a group of people carrying children and infants can go before some begin to fall back because of exhaustion. I am speaking, of course, not of a measured and calm march, but of a forced one. In the ordinary sort of evacuation, people drop back all the time. In a forced march, fear bites at their heels, and only when the weakest are too tired to go on will you lose some. Whoever planned this knew all about such things. And whoever planned this did not want to leave so much as an infant behind.”
Ari nodded somberly. Nofret, however, looked sick and troubled. “Forgive me, but—as a Royal twin of Alta, where we bought and used many slaves, I know something of slave traders. It is not often they wish to be burdened with children; young children tire easily and cannot keep up with adults. They then must be carried or conveyed some other way. And infants—” She shook her head. “Infants on such a march? I never heard of such being taken. So why would they want all of the people in the town? It cannot be because they did not want to leave abandoned children to die—”
“You ask that—” came a low voice from a shadowed corner behind Kiron, so that he jumped in startled surprise “—whose land played host to those abominable Magi?”
There was a crisp tap on the floor of that corner as they all turned around to face the speaker. Nofret inclined her head. “It is something I would rather not contemplate, my Lord Priest,” she replied. “That some of the Magi could have survived . . .”
The shadowy figure seated there in the corner shook his head. “Bah. They learned their tricks from somewhere. It need not be the Magi of Alta behind this—though I would by no means be surprised to learn that some had indeed survived. It could be others of the same sort. It could be these are the source of their evil. It could be that this is evil of the same kind but a different source.”
Kiron made out more of the seated figure in the corner as his eyes adjusted to the shadows. It was a man in the simplest possible robes of a Tian Priest, with none of the ornaments that most boasted. With one difference. A clean bandage covered his eyes. He was blind.
“And don’t call me ‘my lord priest.’ I am no one’s lord. I am simple Rakaten-te. The name I was born with will do nicely.”
The bandaged, sightless eyes turned in Kiron’s direction. “So this is the young one you’ve put in charge of your new Jousters.” Kiron felt a kind of coolness pass over him, and had the sense of being weighed and measured, but for what, he could not have said. “He’ll do.”
Although the priest had a face that was unlined, and like all priests, his head was shaved so there was no telling if his hair was white or black, Kiron had the sense that he was long past middle age.
But there was that about the priest—not the least of which that he was seated in the presence of the Great King and Queen—that commanded a special respect. “Thank you, Rakaten-te,” Kiron replied, with the Altan salute.
“Oh, you would not thank me if you knew what I am, boy,” the priest said with a low chuckle. “I am the Chosen of Seft.”
Kiron blanched. He had only heard of the Chosen of Seft in the hushed whispers reserved for tales of angry ghosts and terrible revenge. Seft was worshipped, it was true—or rather, it was more true to say that that dark god, brother to Siris, was propitiated rather than worshipped.
Now all the gods had their dark side. The benevolent Haras was known to go quite mad at times and forget even who his friends and allies were. Nofet was the gentle goddess of night and women with child, but she also ruled over plague. And of course, there was the sun-disk of Re-Haket, which brought life but also death, both in the most fundamental of ways—light after darkness, but also the hammer on the Anvil of the Sun. Warmth that called seedlings out of the earth, and the fire that burned them where they grew.
Still! Seft! He of the underworld, through which the sun-disk must pass each night, he who murdered his own brother that he might have Iris to wife, the Father of Curses, the Brother of Lies . . .
“When you wish to catch a thief, young Captain of Jousters,” said the priest, a little smile playing over his mouth, “do you set a virtuous man to find him? Of course not. The youngest child will lisp the old saying, ‘set a thief to catch a thief.’ There is no one in all of Tia, aye, nor of Alta, that knows more about the dark magics than I. If you wish to hunt for the makers of the darkest of magics, you need someone who works such things himself. I am that person; I hold the Rod and Whip of Seft. It is why I was blinded when I was Chosen. The god himself marked me as his and made sure I could be nothing else.”