“Do you like our road, King Olin?” she called out.
“Is that you, Mistress Qinnitan?” They had talked a few times, whenever their cages were near enough. Her command of the northern tongue had improved during her time in Hierosol. She was embarrassed by how wordless she had been at their first meeting.
“Who else?”
She heard him laugh a little. Some of his bearers looked up at her, their faces full of resentment that the prisoners should talk and joke while they worked so hard.
But I think you would not really change places. Out loud she said, “The Golden One makes a big road down into this mountain. Doesn’t he fear the mountain will fall on him?”
“He doesn’t seem to fear anything,” said Olin. “In another man I might admire that, but I think your Golden One does not believe anything can happen except that which he desires.”
“Not my Golden One,” she said. “He is a pig—a mad pig!” She repeated it even louder in Xixian for the benefit of the bearers. Several of them stumbled in frightened surprise.
“I wish you would not do that,” Olin said.
“Why? What can Sulepis do?” And at that moment she truly did not fear him or any tortures he might use on her. “We are as good as dead. Even the autarch cannot kill us more than once!”
“It’s not that. Whatever you said made the men carrying me almost drop me down this ravine. You likely cannot see it from where you are. In any case, I would prefer not to die that way.”
Because you are afraid you would be leaving me to be the sacrificial goat in the Golden One’s ritual. That was what he meant, she knew. But she only said, “I apologizing, King Olin. I try not to do it again.”
They bumped along for a little while before she said, “Once you say I remind you of your… daughter? Is that the word? Your girl-son?”
He laughed again. She could not quite see him now. The nearest torch was behind him, and his face was in shadow. “My girl-son. It is funny you say that, because she has never liked having to wear women’s clothes.”
“Truly? She is like a man?”
“Only in that she wants to use her own wits instead of relying on a man to think for her.” Olin’s voice warmed. “You would like her. From what you have told me you two are much alike. Like you, she has escaped from her enemies again and again.”
“You have pride of her.”
“Yes, I do. And of her brother, too, although I haven’t told you about him. He was given more to bear than any grown man should carry when he was only a child.” The king went silent for a little time. “I have done him wrong, Qinnitan. That is my greatest sadness. I don’t fear death, but I hate that I will not see them again.”
“Until Heaven.”
“Of course. Until Heaven.”
Qinnitan woke from a thin sleep when the bearers set down the heavy cage, groaning and mumbling like oxen given the tongues of men. The torchlight showed they were in a strange, narrow passage, the roof only a few arm’s lengths above Qinnitan’s head. The paramount minister himself, Pinimmon Vash, as old and shriveled as a piece of sandal leather lost in the desert, was giving out orders to the soldiers guarding her and the northern king.
“I apologize, King Olin.” Vash spoke the northern tongue as though he had been raised with it. “But here we must descend many steps and move through many narrow spaces. The cage and its bearers will not fit. I fear you must walk.”
“But I will still be bound,” Olin said.
“Regrettably, yes, your hands will be tied. After the recent incident… well, you understand.” Outwardly Vash seemed bored and formal, but there was something else in his manner as well, an odd brittleness. Was he afraid of these crushing deeps, so far beneath the sunlit surface, or was there something else? Although Vash hid it well, Qinnitan, who had been well schooled in the constant smiling deceptions of the Seclusion, thought Paramount Minister Vash seemed almost to be afraid of Olin. But why would that be? Clearly, despite his one attempt on the autarch’s life, the king was no longer a threat, any more than she was.
“Of course,” Olin said, and there was something subtle beneath his words as well. “What else can you do? None of you wish to see anything happen to the Golden One.”
He was goading the old man, she could tell—but why? Over what?
They took her out first as a hostage against Olin’s good behavior. Occasionally she could hear the dull roar of men fighting nearby, louder than the ghost murmurs that sometimes floated to them. So the battle was close, Qinnitan thought; that meant that enemies of the autarch were also close by. Was there any chance she could escape? She would gladly take her chances in the dangerous confusion of the fighting.
But such a chance was not to be. The soldiers handled her as though she were a captured killer: they tied her hands firmly behind her back and looped a cord around her neck before bringing her out of the cage. When they had her surrounded with soldiers, one holding each arm and one behind her, they just as carefully removed Olin from his cage.
“I feel like Brann’s white bull,” he said. “Fed and cozened all year only to have his throat slit on Orphan’s Day.” His face was ashen. “May Lord Erivor’s mercy cover us all.”
A chill passed through Qinnitan, and it was all she could do to keep upright as the soldiers led her into the narrow passage and down the ancient, rounded steps into a darkness even the torches could not fully illumine.
“Chew, man, chew! Curse you, I told you this must be done.” Tolly shoved another piece of the gritty black bread at Tinwright. “Swallow it and take more. Blood of the Brothers, are you weeping?”
Matt Tinwright wasn’t precisely weeping. Tears had welled in his eyes because he was choking and he could barely breathe. The black bread, tinted with cuttlefish ink and baked without salt or leavening, was foul and dry, and his mouth was so full of it that when he coughed pieces flew out like cinders from a fire.
“Just be grateful I couldn’t find a black dog,” Hendon Tolly said, “or I would give you a meal that would make you weep for true. Now pull on those grave rags—Okros said the summoners must dress thusly to speak to the dead lands beyond.”
But Okros died like a mouse half-eaten by a cat, Tinwright thought miserably. There was no escape from this. Any way he turned, bleak horror waited. Elan stood swaying between two guards with her face a shuttered window, so pale she might have been one of the newly dead herself, evicted from one of the coffins that lined the vault’s six walls. The infant prince Alessandros, destined for sacrifice, was sleeping restlessly in Tinwright’s arms, exhausted by his own tears.
Matt Tinwright was trapped as no one, not even the sacred Orphan himself, had ever been so utterly trapped, and no bright goddess would step in to save his soul as Zoria had rescued the Orphan’s. Tears? The ocean itself did not contain enough salt and water for all the tears Matt Tinwright ached to shed.
The garments one of the guards now pulled out of a bag stank so badly of decay that he dared not guess where they had been obtained. As Tinwright dragged them on, rotted fabric tearing at each pull, Hendon Tolly wrapped himself in a much more presentable black cloak, although it, too, gleamed with pale mold and smelled of the grave. Tinwright could not bear to think of what was about to happen. He finished wrapping the cerements around him and stood, hopeless and miserable, waiting dumbly for Tolly’s next order.