“Yes. I am in the Golden One’s service,” Vo told him, “on a special mission. I must reach him as quickly as I can. But there are enemies, traitorous, high-ranking enemies who wish to stop me.… I have information the autarch must see!” He swayed, and that was entirely genuine, but it seemed to impress the quartermaster as well. Vasil Zeru was a hard man, but unlike most of the other officers his cruelty was impartial and meant as discipline. He had no wife, no son. The White Hounds were the closest he had to family, and he took his responsibilities very seriously. Vo, who had always made the other White Hounds uneasy, was exactly what Zeru liked in his unit—a clean-living, quiet and able professional soldier. So he believed, at least; Daikonas Vo’s other pastimes were unknown to him.
“I will help you, of course,” Vasil Zeru told him. “God’s blazing blood, of course I will! Is it that old pantaloon, Vash? There is a devil who never lifted a blade or a bow himself, but would be quick to have someone else done in.” He shook his head. “The kind that thinks nothing of sending soldiers to do every filthy task.…”
“May Nushash bless you!” Vo was able to make it sound convincing because of the relief he was feeling; the pain in his gut had suddenly lessened. “I will tell the autarch of your service to him, of how you helped when others would not.”
Old Zeru actually looked a little flushed with sentiment. “It is nothing,” he said, but he seemed pleased. “What any good soldier would do for our great Falcon!”
“Do you have some water?” Vo asked suddenly. The retreating agony had left his throat ash-dry and his head as light as smoke. “To drink? ” His voice sounded far away.
Then he fainted.
“By my ancestors!” said the young priest as he looked Qinnitan up and down. “What am I supposed to do with her?”
“Take her off our hands, Brother,” the soldier on her left said. “Captain said if we even had a bit of fun with her, they’d have our heads. She’s to go to the Golden One, or to His Radiance, the high priest.”
“Panhyssir himself?” The young, shaven-headed priest straightened as if that almost incomprehensible presence had just entered the room. “And the Golden One? Well, of course. That is, someone should take responsibility for this.” He swallowed, half-smiling, looking at Qinnitan but no longer seeing her. After her time in the Seclusion, she knew the look of all-conquering ambition. This creature wouldn’t let her out of his sight until he had made certain everyone had seen him deliver her to the highest circle he could reach.
Qinnitan slumped between the two guards; her chains rattled. In truth the irons were too big for her—the Xixian military generally expected most prisoners to be larger than a girl her age—and were scraping her skin raw. She could have slipped out of them easily, but a reflex told her not to give that away yet. Still, the guards themselves had not seemed very worried about her causing trouble.
The young priest was called Brother Gunis. He wasn’t just an under-priest of the War Chariot of Nushash, he explained as she slumped on the floor against the wall of the shrine-tent: he had already been chosen to become a true priest, but after he brought her to Panhyssir—or even to the Golden One himself, praises to his name, may the Falcon of Bishakh forever fly—he would almost certainly become a speaking-priest, a high honor indeed.
“But I have done nothing wrong,” she protested. “I am a priestess of Nushash myself—I was part of the Hive. I’m still a virgin. Do you understand that I will be tortured if you do this, Brother Gunis? That I’ll be killed?”
He paused for a moment and then his mouth set in a line, as if he was frightened something might get out… or in. “If you are a prisoner, then you should repent your crimes,” he said. “Everyone knows that the Golden One is generous beyond other men, forgiving beyond even the gods themselves!” He nodded. “Yes, give me your hand, girl. Let us pray for your forgiveness together.”
She did not have the strength to fight him. Qinnitan let Brother Gunis clutch her hand tightly in his own moist, warm grasp. The young priest had a gleam in his eyes that had nothing to do with her, or at least not with her fleshly presence: he was seeing the glory that might be in his future. Qinnitan winced as he began to pray aloud. It was the New Catechism, the one the young autarch himself had written. This Gunis was either very ambitious, or he was a true believer. Either way, he would do nothing to help her.
Gunis took a pair of guards with him, sullen Hakka Slingers who looked as though they’d rather be drinking fermented milk than dealing with a priest and—as they had clearly decided after looking her up and down in an unimpressed manner—a scrawny girl not even worth the effort of rape. They straightened up when they heard that she was bound for the Golden One himself, but clearly did not expect to get far up the chain of command before being relieved of the duty: ordinary soldiers did not get to meet the Master of the Great Tent.
The soldiers led her and Gunis across the camp and out toward the southwestern edge of the harbor, where the city ended in rocky beaches and a few piers used by some of the poorer Southmarch fishermen. Here the hills that ringed the side of the bay came down almost to the water, and wind-carved chunks of standing stone marched down even beyond the edge of the hills, so that some of them stuck up from the bay itself like crooked teeth. The rocky sides of the hills that loomed above the beach as though they had been sliced with a great carving knife were white and soft pigeon-gray with tracings of greenery at the top, but it was the black holes along the beach that caught her eye and held it. She knew she had no choice, but it was still all she could do to make one foot follow the other toward those dark, ominous openings.
Once, when she was a child, Qinnitan’s family had gone out to the coast of Xis for her great-grandmother’s funeral. Afterward, while the adults had been singing songs and drinking, some of her relatives had taken her and her siblings down to the ocean to look at the tidal flats. It had been a strange place, especially for someone like Qinnitan, used to being surrounded on all sides by buildings and people. One of her cousins had tried to pull her into the mouth of one of the bigger caves, but she had refused to go, even when her younger brothers had agreed. She had remained on the rocks instead, splashing in the shallow waters of the ocean pools, waiting for what seemed like hours. At last the rest of the children had come back and, although she had felt bad for being afraid, Qinnitan had not been sorry to miss the adventure. The dark holes had reminded her of what her father used to tell her about Xergal the Earth-lord, one of the enemies of great Nushash: “He lives in the ground, do you see? So far down that the sun can’t reach, and it’s cold, so cold. And he hates it there, and he hates Nushash and the rest of the Ugeni tribe for banishing him. And so he wants nothing more than to get his hands on bad little children who don’t love Nushash, and keep them for himself.”
He had been talking about wicked Xergal stealing those children’s spirits and keeping them in his harsh, dark underworld for all eternity, but it had been easy for Qinnitan to see that if you went under the ground, especially in a place as fearful-looking as those caves, you were as much as offering yourself to the cold, dark, angry lord of the earth.
Thus it was that when she should already have been as frightened as she could be, Qinnitan discovered that she had reserves of terror untapped until now. By the time they reached the elaborate guard post built at the entrance to the central cavern, she was fighting back tears of exhaustion and fright. Although the opening in the cliff wall stretched far above her head, she stared down at her feet as the guards, after an exchange with the young priest, ushered them past the gate and inside. Both guards took torches from the pile and lit them in the brazier by the gate. Within moments the doorway and the actual light of the sky were behind her and Qinnitan was being led down into immense, flickering darkness.