Qinnitan felt the well before she saw it, the waist-high ring of stone with emptiness at its center like an untended wound. She thought she could hear a faint noise as of something in the depths gently pushing the water to and fro.
She leaned forward, although she did not want to, although every sense she had screamed out for her to turn back toward the house and the safety of her sleeping family. Still she leaned farther, until her face was over the invisible hole, until the faint noises were rising straight up to her ears —slish, splush, slish, something gently stirring down in the darkness.
Was it a monstrous eight-legger such as she had seen in the market, a sort of wet sea spider with limbs as slippery and loose as noodles? But how could such a thing get into the well? Still, whatever it was, she could feel it as well as hear it, sense its inhuman presence somewhere below her.
Now she could feel it moving. Coming upward. Climbing, with inhuman strength and patience, up the smooth, clammy stones, climbing right up toward her where she leaned helplessly over the well mouth, her limbs stiff as stone. She could feel it in her head as well—cold thoughts, alien wishes unclear but unmistakable as fingers around her throat. It was climbing toward her as intently as if she had called it... “Briony! Help me!”
At first she thought the startling voice came from the thing in the well, but it sounded like a real person—a young man, frightened as she was frightened. Was someone calling her? But why call her by that unfamiliar name?
The thing in the well did not stop or even slow the sticky slap of its climb. Qinnitan tried to scream, but could not. She tried again, but the scream could only build and build inside her until it seemed she would burst like a flooded dam.
“Briony! I’m here!”
She could feel him, as if he stood just on the other side of the well—could almost see him, a pale, pale boy with hair as flame-red as the streak in her own dark locks, a boy staring at her without seeing, his eyes haunted... “Briony!”
She was terrified. The thing’s wet fingers were curling on the lip of the well and the boy couldn’t even see it? She wanted to know why he called her by that strange name, but instead when she found her voice at last she heard herself ask him, “Why are you in my dreams?”
And then the blackness burst up from below and the boy blew away like smoke and the shriek at last came rushing out of her, rising, ragged....
Qinnitan sat up, gasping. Something had a grip on her and for a moment she struggled fruitlessly against it until she realized it was not huge and chilly but small and warm and...and frightened. It was Pigeon. Pigeon was hanging onto her, grunting with fear. He was terrified, but he was trying to comfort her.
“Don’t worry,” she said quietly. She found his head in the darkness, stroked his hair. He clung to her like a street musician’s monkey. “It was just a bad dream. Were you frightened? Did you call me?”
But of course he couldn’t have called her—not in words. The voice had been a dream, too. Briony. What a strange name. And what a terrible dream! It had been like the nights when she had lived in the Seclusion, when the priest Panhyssir had given her that dreadful elixir called the Sun’s Blood, that poison which had left her feverish and terrified that it was stealing her mind.
Remembering, Qinnitan shivered helplessly. Pigeon was already asleep again, his bony little body pressed against her so that she couldn’t lower her arm, which was already beginning to ache a little. How could she have believed that the autarch would simply let her go? She was a fool to linger here in Hierosol, only a short distance across the sea from Xis itself. She should pack up in the morning, leave the citadel and its laundry behind.
As she lay cradling the boy in the darkness, she heard something moaning: outside the dormitory, the winds were rising.
A storm, she thought. Wind from the south. What do they call it here? “Red wind”—the wind from Xand. From Xis... She rolled over, gently dislodging Pigeon. His breathing changed, then settled into a low buzz again, soothing as the drone of the sacred bees, but Qinnitan could not be so easily calmed. Winds push ships, she thought. Suddenly, sleep seemed farther away than the southern continent.
She got up and made her way across the cold stone floors to the main room, reassuring herself by the sound of the sleeping women she passed that all was ordinary, that only night’s darkness was making it seem strange. She stepped to one of the windows and lifted the heavy shutter, wanting a glimpse of moonlight or the sight of trees bending in the wind’s grasp, anything ordinary. Despite evidence of the ordinary all around her, she half-expected to find Cat’s Eye Street and the uncovered well outside, but instead she was soothed to see the high facades of Echoing Mall. Something was moving on the otherwise empty street, though—a manlike figure in a long robe walking away down the colonnade with casual haste. It might simply have been one of the citadel’s countless other servants returning home late, or it might have been someone who had been watching the front of the dormitory.
Holding her breath as if the retreating shape might hear her from a hundred paces away, Qinnitan let the shutter down quietly and hurried back across the dark house.
There were times that the great throne room of Xis seemed as familiar to Pinimmon Vash as the house in the temple district where he had spent his childhood (a large dwelling, but not too large, a dream of wealth to the servants but only one residence out of many that belonged to the eminent Vash clan). This throne room was the Paramount Minister’s place of work, after alclass="underline" it was understandable that he might sometimes fail to notice its size and splendor. But sometimes he saw it for what it truly was, a vast hall the size of a small village, whose black and white tiles stretched away for hundreds of meters in geometric perfection until the eye blurred trying to look at them, and whose tiled ceiling covered in pictures of the gods of Xis seemed as huge as heaven itself. This was one of those times.
The hall was full. It seemed as if almost every single person in the court had come to see the Ceremony of Leavetaking —even twitching Prusus was here, who generally only left his chambers when Sulepis demanded his attendance, and who Pinimmon Vash was seeing for an almost unprecedented second time in one day. Vash was glad to see that the scotarch, nominal successor to the monarchy, had been dressed as was fitting in a sumptuous robe too dark to show the spittle that dripped occasionally from his chin.
The monstrous chamber was so crowded that for the first time since the autarch’s crowning, Vash could not see the pattern on the floor. Everyone was dressed as if for a festival, but instead they had been standing in silence for most of the morning as the parade of priests and officials filed past to take their places in front of the Falcon Throne, dozens upon dozens of functionaries who only appeared on these state occasions: The Prophets of the Moon Shrine of Kerah The Keepers of the Autarch’s Raptors The Master of the Sarcophagus of Vushum The Chiefs of the Brewers of Ash-hanan at Khexi The Eyes of the Blessed Autarch of Upper Xand The Eyes of the Blessed Autarch of Lower Xand The Oracle of the Whispers of Surigali The Master of the Sacred Bees of Nushash The Scribe of the Tablet of Destinies The Wardens of the Gates of the Ocean The Supplicators of the Waves of Apisur The Wardens of the Royal Canals The Keeper of the Sacred Monkeys of Nobu The Sacred Slave of the Great Tent The Master of the Seclusion of Nissara The Chief of Royal Herds and Flocks The Master of the Granaries of Zishinah The Priests of the Coming-Forth of Zoaz The Guardians of the Whip that Scourges Pah-Inu The Wardens of the Digging-Stick of Ukamon The Priests of the Great Staff of Hernigal There were other priests, too, many more: Panhyssir, high priest of Nushash and the most powerful religious figure in the land next to the autarch himself, along with priests of Habbili and priests of Sawamat (the great goddess who, truth be told, had far more priestesses than priests, but whose female servants, like the priestesses of the Hive, were subordinated to their male masters and had only a token presence)—priests of every god and goddess who ever lived, it seemed, and of a few that may have existed only in the tales of other deities.