He followed the path downward for what seemed most of an hour, in places having to shoulder through men clustered around some half-done task or other. The autarch’s engineers and their slaves were still working in the tunnels even after the strange subterranean invasion had begun, widening and strengthening them. Vo could half-imagine that by the time they were finished the caverns would have become a replica of the Orchard Palace, all high ceilings and white stone facing. In fact, if the autarch stayed true to his youthful direction, perhaps the entire world would become a single Orchard Palace, and everyone in it either one of the autarch’s soldiers or whores or slaves.
It should have been me. But he is clever. He can see things as clearly as I can, almost, and he was born into power and riches. I never had a chance—but it should have been me. This should have been mine; the world should have been mine, not an Orchard Palace but a Palace of Vo as wide as the world… !
He wandered along the narrowing path, his mind filled with the thoughts of his world-palace and what each room would contain, until the complexity of the instruments he would need and the number of victims his schemes would require made his head whirl, and he suddenly stopped. For a moment, he thought the terrible gut-pain was coming back—it was just such a nervous stab that generally alerted him—then he slowly realized what it was that had stopped him.
The road had come to an end.
Daikonas Vo looked down at the blackness, the sudden, violent falling away of the earth. He had almost walked into empty air.
He turned and made his way carefully back up the path, only noticing now that it was very narrow indeed, that he had not been following a proper Xixian military road for some time. Had he turned somewhere? Several tunnels had crossed his track earlier, but they had all been smaller than the empty space through which he walked and he had passed them all by. What had happened?
Vo made his way back up the track, following it along the side of a deep drop that gradually grew shallower until the echoes all but stopped. He was circling a deep cavern on a path around its rim, and must be getting closer to the bottom with each circuit, but nothing he could find seemed anything like the wide road that had brought him here. It was not a small chamber: it took him the better part of an hour to go all the way around, just to make sure.
Still, after another long climb up another featureless stone track between two long, leaning slabs, with only an occasional army torch stuck in crevices on the wall to supplement the light he carried, Vo had to admit that this did not look much like anything he remembered from before. Some of it didn’t look like it was Xixian work at all. He wondered if they had foreign engineers and workers down here as well.
Whatever had happened, Vo had clearly lost his chance of catching up with the girl, at least by any conventional pursuit. Ah, gods, and now the pain was coming back again, he realized, the gnawing in his guts.
For a moment he could only stand, his shadow fluttering out behind him like a king’s coronation train. It hurt so badly! He tasted blood. Everything in him told him to escape it, but there was no escape… unless he tore it out… tore out his entire belly.…
A sudden movement made Vo go still as a statue, his killer’s instincts strong enough to overcome even the fire in his guts, if only for a moment. Someone was crossing the path a few dozen yards below him, crossing from one hidden passage to another on the far side of the path. Vo shrank back into shadow and watched with bated breath.
It was a boy—a northern boy, several years short of man’s age and height, with hair that even in this dark place seemed to gleam like palest gold, and he moved through the tunnel as though he felt comfortable there. It was like looking at one of his mother’s woodcut pictures of the Orphan. What could a child be doing in such a place by himself? What did it mean?
A sudden thought occurred to him—could it be the work of the gods? Had they decided at last to show Daikonas Vo their favor, after all his misery? To lead him to the girl so that he would receive the rewards he so richly deserved?
Vo made himself move forward. He had already passed through the Damnation Gate, through which Vo’s mother had always told him there was no return save the Orphan’s—and now, as if out of his mother’s rambling tales, here came the child, in a place no child should be. Could it truly be a sign? Vo decided he would be a fool to think otherwise: he would follow the pale-haired boy.
A perfect vessel of despair, a perfect agent of chaos, Daikonas Vo straightened his back and followed the golden child down into deeper darkness.
“She’s a skinny one. Do you think she’s really going to the autarch?”
“Maybe he likes them like that.”
“But they say his first wife has a rump like a prize mare.”
Qinnitan curled her lip and tried to ignore the guards, even though they were walking just behind her and not talking quietly at all.
“Still, look at her—scarcely more than a child.”
“She’s got that red witch-streak. They say that’s a sign of a temper—that they’re like cats, you try to have your way with one and they’ll scratch you into sandal straps.”
“Ho! That makes her sound much more interesting.”
Brother Gunis, the young priest, finally intervened. “Here, now,” he said, turning on the soldiers. “You are talking about the Golden One’s prisoner, which is bad enough, but if I had been listening to your filthy tongues wagging, I would have heard you insult Queen Arimone, too, and that could send you both to the royal strangler.”
The guards murmured an apology. Gunis turned around, his head held high.
“Prig,” she heard one guard say quietly.
“Never touched a woman, that one,” the other muttered. “No stones left.”
Some of the tunnels were narrow enough that Qinnitan and her captors had to back up if a cart was coming the other way so that the vehicle could get by. Most of the carts were loaded with dirt and chunks of ore coming back up from places where the engineers were still working, but others carried more disturbing cargo, corpses loosely wrapped in the soldiers’ own cloaks, bare feet protruding because their boots, which they themselves might have received from another dead man, had been passed on to another soldier.
What more proof did any of these men need, Qinnitan wondered, that they were nothing to their master Sulepis but murderous toys? When the life was out of one it was stripped of anything useful and then thrown on a midden heap.
The number of shrouded corpses that passed them moved Qinnitan in conflicting ways. She had long since given up hope of ultimate escape for herself, but she was heartened to see that these northerners were resisting the autarch. Still, every one of these shapes bouncing lifelessly past on the wagons was a young man of Xis or its dependent countries, no different from her own brothers or even poor, mad Jeddin.
But if the autarch won here, or did whatever it was he had come for, so far away from Great Xis, then it seemed soon the entire world would be nothing more than food for his greed and cruelty. Soon even the oceans would not offer escape from his rule—he would hold all lands everywhere in his grip. Sulepis was young enough and powerful enough, and he was certainly mad enough, to make that horror real.
They had reached the edge of the military’s subterranean camp. They were still far above any fighting, although Qinnitan could hear traces of it for the first time, faint, distant shouts and the occasional boom of something that almost sounded like cannons. The guards who stopped them now seemed much more intent and cautious than the others they’d seen so far, and certainly more so than the ragtag soldiers who had accompanied them down from the surface. A mulasim had even come out to question them, an officer wearing the infantry crest of the Naked.