Gods of Nabban (24 page)

“If the dog could sing, you mean?”

“Well, obviously. Ready to go on?”

Kaeo could have slept right there on the stones, damp and all, but he pushed himself wearily to his feet and fell in behind Rat as she led off across close-shorn grass and down a snaking sanded path. They had been walking hours, or so it felt, though the stars said not quite so long as all that. His legs felt each as though they were his own weight again and his bare feet, gone soft with only trudging the palace corridors or dancing in his prison, were bruised and tender and probably bleeding. The empress was going to discover his escape before they were out of the palace grounds, if they didn't find some way out soon. Perhaps she would have too many other important things to deal with this night. He had been getting the feeling her interest in him had waned. One day soon Buri-Nai would have given Oryo the order to kill him in one of his fits, and it would have been over. Better to be out walking beneath the moon with a whimsical not-a-cannibal spy. Take what little kindness life offered. Perhaps Rat would kiss him again.

The moon climbed until it was nearly overhead. Rat had fallen into silence, and Kaeo had dropped behind, stumbling along wondering if they would circle through the gardens forever or only until the dawn, when ahead, someone snapped out a challenge.

‘Stand, in the name of the empress.”

“Ah, cold hells.”

“I said—”

“Keep back.” She was gone in a rush, and someone yelled. Up to him to save himself, abandoned as the empress's dog would have been. Kaeo set his back against a tree and, feeling a fool, tugged the sword free. Heavier than painted wood, of course it was. But it felt unsettlingly familiar anyway. Shorter than the false court swords he had fought with playing Min-Jan and other heroes of legend. A soldier's sword. Thrust, don't slash, he heard Master Wey's voice telling one of the others, some comedy piece involving merchant's guards. No armour, no old-fashioned shield. Maybe he wouldn't be seen. Metal rang loudly and someone gasped and grunted. Someone else shouted, “There's another!” and he was seen, a wrong shape in the moonlight, not a tree, and they came out of the darkness. Two of them.

At least they didn't just walk up and kill him. They moved a little apart to come one from each side, as if he might know what he was doing. Foot had touched something. Fallen branch or root. Root was no use, but he dropped and seized it in his left hand. It was a dead branch as he had hoped and their rush at his movement found him on one knee on the ground, so he swung the branch sideways with all his strength across the knees of one man and then lunged up stabbing at the other, who leapt back and seemed to expect Kaeo to follow, but he backed up against the tree again. Stabbed with the broken branch at the other man's face as he closed in. It was a long branch. The man swatted it aside with his sword, and while he was doing that Kaeo yelled—because a good yell always pleased the audience in a fight, if there were no lines to say—and stabbed and the sword bit something and grated and the man yelled and stumbled. He jerked his blade clear and slashed around at the other man, forgetting the bit about thrusting—and what did Shouja Wey know, he was a theatre master not a swordsman. He hit something hard and yielding in one and felt the shock of it up his arm, dodged the thrust he knew was coming—back to the tree once more, dodged and fended off strike after strike and struck blows himself that twice found a mark, but his arm was shaking and so were his knees and his breath panted like a runner's. The man he'd first wounded was standing off and watching, hurt or confident in his friend, and suddenly he pitched forward and Rat was there behind him.

“Leave him,” she snarled, and put herself in the way. Kaeo slid down to the ground, fighting for breath, and now the man he had been fighting was fighting for his life and knew it. The blades flashed, catching light, and then the soldier was staggering back and falling and thrashing a little. Rat whirled around, watching for movement all about. There was none save the light, a moving light, and he tried to gasp a warning but she dropped down by him, took his face in her hands.

“All right?”

He nodded, unable to speak.

“Sorry they got past. There were four of them. I didn't think the patrols would come around so far with all the excitement at the gates and my nice little fire on the tower and all. And you took on two at once. Not bad for an actor.”

She did kiss him again. He took his fair part in it, this time, and was sorry when she sat back on her heels away from him. “Better get my kissing in while I can.” Her face twisted, a smile fighting to lay itself over something else, and she wiped at blood on his face. “Thought I'd got you killed before I even got you away.” He was fumbling for his sword and as his mouth opened on a warning, breath for it at last, she bounced to her feet again and spun around, loosing a torrent of words that sounded Nabbani and were not.

Allies. Ah. Dar-Lathan tribal warriors, with painted faces and not a torch but some sort of wizard-made light caged in a sphere of woven bamboo. It faded slowly away to the faintest of fox-light again once the man who bore it dangling from a long staff had recognized Rat.

There was a grove of pines near the wall, the landmark Rat's escort had used to find their meeting-place. They went back over the wall using ropes and grappling irons—more shame for him, because his grip failed him and they had to haul him like a sack. Down a steep bank. The flat grasslands of the marsh seemed to squirm and undulate in the moonlight. Water where there was water only during the bad typhoons, but not come over the dykes in storm and fury, water running up channels usually blocked against salt inflow by tide-gates, water flowing in breaches in the dykes, reclaiming the saltings that the Exalted Min-Jan had barred to them when he dyked the marsh for his hunting preserve and turned the old pirate-fortress island into his palace. Tall reed-grass stood in water, broken seedheads and leaf-tips of the previous summer lying on the surface. A herd of buffalo stood on an isolated stretch of dyke, statues against the sky, waiting for the tide to drop. Easy for small parties to come and go, but not unseen, not by daylight. For any force to come against the walls now on ground soft and getting softer, clay dissolving into mudflats, would be next to impossible.

A man whose face was all painted in dark slashes and swirls murmured something to Rat.

“We have canoes pinched from the imperial boat-pound, good. Can you swim, Kaeo?”

“Will I need to? Yes.” He doubted he could swim far, the shape he was in.

“Let's hope not, but it's good to know.”

They had three canoes, one an outrigger meant for the sea. Shadowy shapes about him, more than had been inside the palace. The lantern was dark and they all, even Rat, kept silent, running the canoes out into the strange sea of winter-grey grass. The water was not deep, but there would be hidden ditches and creeks and currents in them. No one offered him a paddle. He was a prisoner, he supposed, but no one took his sword from him.

His
sword. As if he had become a warrior by holding his ground even so short a time.

They paddled along the lines of drowned drainage ditches, where bordering bushes and wind-slanted trees would hide them. The moon was treacherously bright. It must be past midnight. Every other Dar-Lathan seemed to be an archer, and they knelt each with an arrow in hand, ready for the string, but no alarm was cried from the palace walls and nothing else stirred on the marshland. A frantic rabbit thrashed past. Three foxes sat together on a piece of flotsam, a heavy plank that had once bridged some ditch. Kaeo watched them watching the canoes, imagined them thinking, if only we had a paddle. He was delirious. Perhaps they smelt the rabbit. But the water was lower than it had been. The tide was ebbing. The shallow lagoon created by the dykes might not drain completely, but creatures would pick a way through puddles and pools and muck to move inland out of the softening ground.

Why worry about the foxes and rabbits? There were men and women dead in the boatmen's burning village and at the gates, and there would be more, hundreds more. But he hoped the foxes would come safely ashore. And the rabbit.

They took the canoes up a brook that had become a creek of the sea. It was guarded by a Dar-Lathan outpost that he never saw; there was only a brief exchange of low-voiced words, and they passed on by, though the party with the outrigger put into the bank and did not follow on up the narrowing water. When it became a ditch, they abandoned the canoes—or maybe left them guarded. At any rate, their numbers kept falling away, until in the end there were only five, including he and Rat, who came to where sentries guarded the crossing of a new-dug defensive trench on the rising ground. Kaeo was staggering with weariness by then; he sank down on his haunches the moment they stopped moving, but it was only a moment's rest. Rat hauled him up. Winding their way into a camp. Huts of brush, tents. The fires were mostly banked with sods, but a whiff of cooking smells started him retching. A dog barked and was hushed. There were few people to be seen. Asleep. Just guards here and there. From the height of the hill, the sullen dying fire of the burning moon-tower still made its signal in the gardens, and there was torchlight about the palace walls. Windows showed lamplit yellow where palace folk still planned, or panicked, or where wizards worked, preparing who-knew-what defences or attacks. He had never walked on grass, he realized, in all his time in the Golden City. He had not felt simple earth under his feet until Rat dragged him out into the gardens.

Priestess of a goddess centuries gone. What authority did she carry here? He wasn't any use to the Dar-Lathans; she said so herself. A whim. They didn't take slaves. Or prisoners, from what he had heard. Maybe someone would want a singer.

They paused outside an enclosure that was a not a hut but a circle, a brush wall enclosing firelight. Echo of one of the storied roundhouses, he realized, and there were, there really were, skulls, ivory-white, jawless, hung like fruit in bunches from two tall posts that marked an entryway. The high lord of Taiji? Commanders of the army of Dar-Lathi, lords of the city of Ogu? Surely they would not want his; he was only an actor.

Here, at last, came a challenge, and they had lost all their escort but the one man with the lantern. A man and a woman armed with spears barred a gap in the thorny fence. The wizard brought up his light to a golden brightness with a pass of his hand, swinging it to shine on Kaeo's face. Rat spoke, quick and urgent words. He heard his own name, the full Dwei Kaeo, and Buri-Nai's. The spearman made a gesture at Kaeo. His gown was flapping like a bat's wings, exposing his sword. Kaeo meekly began to drag the belt off over his head, but Rat's hand seized his arm.

“No you don't, my boy. You've earned it.”

Argument, brief. The man shrugged, stepped back. The woman likewise gave way, looking amused. Rat gave both of them a cheerful wave as she towed Kaeo through.

A woman in armour paced back and forth before a fire. Other people sat about under a thatched roof on posts, or stretched out sleeping, but most of them were already stirring, disturbed by the argument at the gate. The pacing woman paused long enough to prod another with her toe, and that one leapt up as if kicked, then launched herself at them, shouting something. Kaeo had an impulse to leap in front of Rat and an even stronger one to hide behind her, and ended up only twitching, as the older woman grabbed Rat and shook her, laughing. The other strolled up in time to fling her arms about both as they embraced, all talking at once.

“All right, all right.” Rat disentangled herself. “Here. This is Dwei Kaeo. He's a singer and actor and was a spy for Prince Dan until one of his fellows betrayed him under torture. He's also a prophet of the heir of the gods of the land, or was taken by the gods to be so, when the magistrates tortured him to the very threshold of the road, and the empress has been drugging him back there at regular intervals ever since with dreamer's yellowroot, though he's no wizard. He may be useful, if we want to talk to either Dan or whatever or whoever it is who's coming into the land to take the place of the gods. Kaeo—”

He was already bowing to the armoured women. They looked very close in age, their mid-twenties, maybe, older than Rat, but they shared her pointed face and keen eyes. Their armour was lacquered jade-green, mottled like the stone, and both wore jade pendants in their ears, jade rings braided into their hair. The elder was plucking at Rat's cropped head, scowling.

“It'll grow,” she said, distracted. “It's only hair. Kaeo, these are my sisters, Nawa and Jian.”

Father Nabban, she meant real sisters, not fellow priests or fellow commanders. Raised in the furthest wilderness of the highlands and the coastal swamps, hunted by the corps of wizards, hidden by the gods and goddesses of their many tribes. The Wild Girls. Daughters of the grim god Tai'aurenlo of the burning hills and a human mother. The queens. He hadn't heard that there were three of them.

A queen of the south thought him worth kissing? A halfling god did?

“Give him to the priests, then,” Nawa? Jian? said, dismissing him, and followed that with more in whatever the language of Dar-Lathi was called. People were gathering at the fire—some council meeting. The wizard took Kaeo's arm.

“Dwei Kaeo, come.” So he spoke Nabbani after all. Rat must have seen his frantic look around for her.

“Go on with Toba. He's more a shaman than a wizard, to put it in your terms. It's possible you are too. Anyhow, he probably knows what to do with someone half dead of overdosing on yellowroot. We're talking boring sisterly things—”

One of the queens laughed, not pleasantly, in his opinion. Said something about Buri-Nai.

“Well, if you wanted her head, Nawa, you should have told me sooner. Though odds are she'd have sent mine back to you. Nicely charred. So.” Rat left her sisters to run after him, take him by the shoulders. “You'll be fine. I told you, nobody wants your skull. You're safe. We're friends.” She wiped at something on his face. Mud, he hoped, and nothing worse. “Get some sleep.”