Agnes stumbled and fell and Fergil began to shriek. She caught them both up in her arms and limped away from the square. She was in a part of the town she hardly seemed to know at all, but everything had become something else on this ghastly night it might be her own street for all she could be certain, her own house that she staggered past as barking, whistling shapes came pouring out of the windows like beetles from a split log. Overhead, the stars had vanished Fmneth couldn’t understand that either. Why were there no stars, and why had the sky turned that dull, dark red? Was it blood—was the whole town bleeding up into the sky? Then she knew. It was the smoke of burning Candlerstown itself, hiding what was happening even from Heaven.
She found herself in a crowd of people, although it was more river than crowd, a heedless wash of screams and waving arms that flooded down the Marsh Road, past the Trigonate temple. The outer walls and roof of the temple were crawling with something that looked like moss but which glowed like sullen lightning. The priests had nearly all been slaughtered, although some of them were still crawling despite terrible, obviously mortal wounds In their haste to flee, the shrieking crowd was trampling the survivors, which might have been a mercy. Even Finneth stepped on a motionless human figure and did not care—it was all she could do to keep upright. She could not stop, could not turn, certainly could not waste pity on the dead and soon-dead. She was hemmed in on either side and all she could think of was holding Agnes and Fergil tight against her, so tightly that even the gods could not pull them from her.
All who fell now were crushed underfoot. The crowd moved like a single living thing, rushing to the open Eastside Gate and the darkness beyond, toward the blessed cold fields where no fires burned.
Finneth ran until she couldn’t run any farther, then shoved her way to the outskirts of the torrent of people, which was beginning to slow and scatter.
They were outside the walls, knee-deep in the stubble of a harvested field, when she fell to the ground at last, exhausted and helpless. She wondered if she, too, might be dying, she was not wounded, but it seemed impossible anyone could experience such a night and live. She clutched her son and daughter and wept, every sob clawing painfully at her smoke-scorched throat.
Gone, all gone —Onsin, her house, her few possessions. Only these two small, precious, panting creatures kept her from running back to throw herself into the flames of Candlerstown. Most dreadful of all, as she lay with her shivering children on the cold ground just outside the murdered town, she could hear the destroyers of everything she had, and they were singing. Their voices were painfully lovely.
Darkness claimed her then, but only for a while.
28. Evening Star
WHITE SANDS:
See the moon scatter diamonds
His work is bone and light and dry dust
In the garden where no one strays
She had lost track of how many different Favored had taken her up as though she were an ill-wrapped package, walked her to the next way station, and then turned her over to another functionary, but at last she was led into the receiving room of the paramount wife Arimone looked up from her cushions and smiled indulgently as Qinnitan abased herself. “Oh, do get up, child,” she said, although she looked not much more than a girl herself. “Are we not all sisters here?"
If we were all sisters, Qinnitan could not help thinking, I wouldn’t have gone down on my knees in the first place. The invitation had arrived that morning and Qinnitan had spent hours under the expert ministration of a half dozen slaves, a mix of Favored and born-females, until her appearance had been polished to a blinding brilliance like a gemstone, after some consideration, she was then deconstructed and redressed in slightly less formal splendor.
“After all, we don’t want the Evening Star to think we aspire to become the Light of the Morning, do we?" a Favored named Rusha had said with mocking severity. “We shall be beautiful—but not too beautiful.”
Luian, who had been a bit absent of late, as if ashamed of her part in bringing Qmnitan to meet Jeddin, had not been involved in the preparations for the audience, but she had sent one of her Tuani women to help Qinnitan arrange her hair, which was now piled atop her head and held in place with jeweled pins. Qinnitan had been quite taken with her own image in the glass when it was done, but that seemed like pure foolishness now. Arimone, who was perhaps ten years older than Qinnitan, was unquestionably the most beautiful woman she had ever seen or even imagined, like a temple image of Surigal herself, her hair jet black and so long that even in a braid it coiled like a sleeping snake all over the cushions on which she sat. Qinnitan could only wonder what such an amazing cascade of hair would look like untethered and brushed out, she also felt certain everyone else who met Arimone, most assuredly including any whole men, were meant to wonder about that as well.
The autarch’s paramount wife had an arresting figure, small-waisted and wide-hipped, both features accented by her clinging robe, and she also had a perfect, heart-shaped face, but it was her eyes—huge, thick-lashed, and almost as black as her hair—that made her look as though she belonged with the other goddesses in Heaven rather than languishing among mere mortals in the Seclusion. Qinnitan, who was already frightened and felt a bit of an impostor in her fine clothes, suddenly felt not like one of the all-powerful autarch’s chosen brides, but like the dirtiest street urchin imaginable.
“Come, come, sit with me,” Arimone said in a voice so light and musical it suggested years of exhausting practice. “Will you take some tea? I like to drink it cool on days like this, with plenty of mint and sugar. It’s very refreshing.”
Qinnitan did her best to seat herself without tripping over any of the striped cushions mounded at the center of the room. In one corner a young girl played the lute with surprising skill. Several other servant girls, when they were not waiting on the paramount wife, sat talking quietly in the corners of the room. Two youths with the dewy, beardless faces of the Favored stood behind the cushions waving fans of peacock feathers. The decoration of the receiving room seemed designed to remind visitors of one thing and one thing only—a bedchamber, which was after all the root of Arimone’s power. She had not yet given the autarch an heir, but he had spent much of his first regnal year traveling through all his lands, so none of the other wives dared even whisper rumors of unhappiness in the royal bed. Should another year pass without sign of a male heir, of course, they would do almost nothing else.
“Forgive me for waiting so long before having you to visit,” said the paramount wife. “You have been here, what, half a year?”