“I come,” he said simply. The Leopard guard turned smartly on his heel and strode out of the room. Vash paused in the doorway.
“I will be back very soon,” he told his servants. “If the nightingale robe is not in the closet, all of you will go up the gangplank limping and weeping. If the robe is not in excellently clean condition, I will be taking other servants on my voyage. You three will be floating down the canal past your parents’ houses, but they will not recognize you to weep over you.”
The look on their faces was almost worth the tedium of having to go and listen to the ravings of his mad and extremely demanding monarch. Vash was an old man and he enjoyed the few simple pleasures left to him.
The autarch was being bathed in a room filled with hundreds of candles. Vash was all too used to seeing his master naked, but he had never quite grown unused to it. It was not because the autarch’s nakedness was an ugly thing, not at alclass="underline" Sulepis was a young man, tall and fit, if a trifle too slender for Vash’s taste (which tended toward round cheeks and small, childlike bellies). No, it was that his nakedness, which should have provoked thoughts of vulnerability or intimacy, seemed...unimportant. As though Sulepis wore a body only because it was convenient, or demanded by his station, but really would have been just as comfortable with nothing more than a skeleton or skinless meat or the stone limbs of a statue. The autarch’s nakedness, Vash had decided, had nothing much of the human about it. He never felt even a twinge of desire, shame, or disgust looking at the autarch, when any other unclothed man or woman would summon one of those feelings, if not all.
“You called for me, Golden One?”
The autarch stared at him for a long moment, as though he had never seen his paramount minister before—as if Pinimmon Vash were some stranger who had wandered into the monarch’s bath chamber. The candle-light rippled across the monarch as though his long body was something drifting at the bottom of the EminentCanal. “Ah,” he said at last. “Vash. Yes.” He gestured limply toward a figure on his other side, half obscured by the steam of the huge bath. “Vash, you must greet Prusus, your scotarch.”
Vash turned to the crippled creature, who swayed in his litter as though caught in a high wind. Many thought he was simpleminded, but Pinimmon Vash doubted it. “A pleasure, Scotarch, as always. I hope I find you well?”
Prusus tried to say something, grimaced, then tried again. His round face contorted as though he were in agony— speaking was hard for him at the best of times, and even more difficult in front of the autarch—but he only got out a few grunting syllables before Sulepis laughed and waved his hand.
“Enough, enough—we cannot wait all day. Tell me, Prusus, how do you pray? Even Nushash must lose patience with your jerking and mumbling. Ah, and our other guest, Polemarch Johar. Vash, you and Johar already know each other, yes?”
Vash bowed slightly to the spare, cold-eyed man, as almost to an equal. Ikelis Johar, high polemarch of the autarch’s troops, was a power unto himself and although he and Vash had not yet clashed over policy, it was inevitable that one day they would. It was equally inevitable that one of them would not survive the clash. Looking at Ikelis Johar’s cruel, humorless mouth, Vash found himself looking forward to that day. One could have too much leisure, after all. “Of course, Golden One. The Overseer of the Armies and I are old friends.”
Johar’s grin was as humorless as that of a lion sniffing the breeze. “Yes—old friends.”
“Johar is in a cheerful mood—aren’t you, Overseer?” said the autarch, stretching his arms so a slave could oil them. “Because soon he will have a chance to give his men some exercise. Life has been dull the last few moons, since Mihan capitulated.”
“With all respect, Golden One,” Johar said, “I’m not certain I’d call besieging Hierosol merely exercise. It has never fallen by force in all its long history.”
“Then your name will live in glory beside mine, Overseer.”
“As you say, of course, and I am grateful to hear it. The Master of the Great Tent is never wrong.”
“That’s true, you know.” The autarch sat up as if struck with a sudden and pleasing thought; one of his slaves, trying desperately to avoid an incorrect contact with his master, almost slipped and fell on the wet floor. “It is the god in me, of course—the blood of Nushash himself running through me. I cannot be wrong and I cannot fail.” He sat back just as suddenly as he had risen, making the water rush back and forth in waves from one end of the large tub to the other. “A very comforting thing.”
But if that is so, my very great lord, Pinimmon Vash could not help thinking, it did not save your brothers, who also had the blood of the god in them, from losing a great deal of that holy blood when you took the throne. This thought naturally stayed private, but he could not avoid a pang of fright when the autarch looked at him and smiled with wicked amusement, as if he knew just what heretical ideas his paramount minister was harboring.
“Come, there is much to do—even for one like me who cannot make mistakes, eh, Vash? Someone take the scotarch to his chambers. Yes, farewell, Prusus. No, save your breath. We all must prepare for the ceremonies of departure, the consecration of the army, and everything else.” The autarch’s smile twisted. “I need my most loyal servant at my side. Will you stay with me while the slaves dress me?”
The old minister bowed. “Of course, Golden One.”
“Good. And you, Johar, doubtless have many details to see to. We depart at dawn.”
“Of course, Golden One.”
The autarch smiled. “Two strong men but the same obedient words. The harmony of infallibility. What a beautiful, melodious world this is, my dearly beloved servants. How could it be better?” The autarch laughed, but with an odd harshness, as though he fought some kind of doubt. But the autarch never doubted, Vash knew, and the autarch feared nothing. In all the years he had known Sulepis, from his silent, studious childhood to his sudden and violent ascension to the throne, Pinimmon Vash had never seen the autarch anything other than confident almost to the point of madness.
“It is a beautiful world indeed, Golden One,” Vash said in the silence after the laughter, and despite the sudden chill that squeezed his heart he did his very, very best to sound as though he meant it.
She walked right out the door and no one stopped her. One moment all was light and warmth and the reassuring sound of her brothers and sisters breathing in their sleep, the next moment Qinnitan had stepped into the sudden, surprising cold of a night with no moon.
The houses and shops of Cat’s Eye Street were only shadow-shapes, but it didn’t matter. She knew the place as well as she knew the geography of her own body, knew that Arjamele’s doorway would be just here, and the loose stone of the next doorway along would catch her toe if she didn’t step over it. She knew the shape of everything, but she also knew that something was different—something in the dark, cold street had changed.
The well. The lid was off the well.
But that was impossible: the well was always covered at night. Still, even though she could not see it—could see almost nothing but the indistinct shapes of the buildings looming around her, black against the deep velvety purple of the sky—she knew it was uncovered. She could feel it like a hole in the night, a deeper black than anything she could see with her eyes. And worse, she could feel something in it—something waiting.
Still moving helplessly as though led by some god, she walked forward, feeling her bare soles against the gritty sand. The stones of her street, a street almost as old as Xis itself, had long since surrendered to the flowing sands which got into everything. No matter how hard the women of Cat’s Eye Street swept, the stones would never be seen again. But it was said that some of the oldest houses had cellar rooms with doors that had once let out onto this very street when the stones had still been visible, although now those doors could no longer be opened, and would admit only centuried dust if they were.