The Diviner (45 page)

“And you did nothing to disabuse her of this notion, did you? Quite the rise, from humble peasant to confidant of royalty!”

“You know nothing about it!”

“The fact remains that you were a guest of the simple-minded Baetrizia for quite some time. How did you come to be a guest of the Shagara?”

“I'm here on purpose! Which is more than can be said for you!”

Ayia, she had him there. What puzzled him was why, if she was here in his room clandestinely, during all their conversation she had not troubled to lower her voice. Although he knew himself to be the only occupant of this particular floor (the third) of the building, and the clattering rain and rumbling thunder and occasional crash of lightning were admittedly very loud, surely someone ought to have heard their voices by now. “Did you drug or bribe your way in?”

“I don't know what you mean.”

“Having nothing but your delightful self to offer—and you really don't seem that sort of girl—it must have been drugs.”

Grudgingly, she said, “I have trouble sleeping sometimes. They're very good with medicines, you know. The Shagara won't fight, but they sent healers to tend our soldiers.”

So that much at least of Shagara capabilities was generally known. Interesting, that the imperative to use their healing gifts in service to others remained so strong. He nodded, his lips tickled by her wildly curling hair. “You did come here on purpose, then. You want the Tza'ab out of your country, and you thought you could convince the Shagara to help you do it.” By the way she stiffened—and not in response to thunder—and then sagged against him, he knew he was right. Smarter than a seventeen-year-old girl; his mother would be so proud. “You might as well explain all of it,” he invited, “in as much detail as whatever you used on the guards will allow.”

“Only about an hour,” she confessed. “Eiha, what do you want to know?”

“That lazy old king of Cazdeyya not moving fast enough for you, I take it? And you know what the Shagara can do by way of potions and—and things.” How much did she know? “Poor qarassia, aren't you aware of their history? They left my country because gr—greater men than they used Shagara knowledge in ways they didn't approve!” He'd almost said
great-grandfather.

“And thus they hate you Tza'ab almost as much as we do. In the end, we'll make common cause and throw you out. You don't belong here!”

“The land belongs to us now. You might as well accept it.”

“You don't belong here, and you never will! Just because your troops march all over a country doesn't mean you own it. Land belongs to the people who belong to it.”

This notion sounded vaguely familiar. He was distracted from chasing it down inside his head by her sudden wriggle to get free. To his surprise—and hers, to judge by her gasp—he let her go.

“The rain has slacked,” he said as he got to his feet in the darkness. “And it's been nearly an hour, hasn't it? You'd better lock me in. If you'll forgive me, I'll wait until you're outside before giving you back your knife.”

“Whoever you are, you're certainly a fool. An open door, sleeping guards—and you ask to be locked up again!”

“An open door, sleeping guards, and an entire fortress filled with many, many more guards between me and freedom. How far do you think I'd get?”

“How did I get here?” she taunted.

“Ayia, you are here, so why don't you have that look at me that you say you want so much?” He went to the corner where he'd thrown the candlestick, not surprised to find it in pieces. The candle was still intact, and he groped on his bedside table for flint. “I warn you, I'm not looking my best. I need my hair trimmed by someone who actually knows how, and a nightshirt isn't the most flattering of garments.” He struck her knife against the flint and the candlewick ignited. Turning toward the door, he smiled.

She caught her breath. He might have been pleased with the reaction but for the nature of her shock. “You—you're so young! And there are no scars—”

His brows arched. “The nature of your visions dismays me, qarassia. You saw a scarred old man and mistook him for me?”

“I only saw you lying there in the dirt,” she snapped. “I didn't see your face that clearly.”

“Yet you had an impression of age and scars? I must have looked even worse than I felt at the time!”

“You don't understand! Nobody ever understands!”

With her brown eyes flashing and her chin jutting out, she didn't look seventeen. More like five or six, and threatening an impressive tantrum. He had to laugh. She really was rather adorable. Not precisely pretty, not to his usual tastes, but the pale hair was intriguing, and he suspected she had an enchanting smile. Not that he was likely to see it anytime soon.

“I saw you
old
,” she hissed. “I saw it just as I saw Ra'amon al-Joharra's death in battle! And it came true! I saw it last summer, and this summer he died!”

“Ra'amon is dead?” Qamar had no time to feel anything. A deep and angry voice echoed off the stone walls all the way to the third floor, bellowing about lazy stupid louts who got so drunk they passed out while on duty. Fresh lightning and an immediate thunderclap couldn't drown out his roars.

Solanna flinched so violently that she dropped the key. Qamar bent to retrieve it, pushed her through the door, and blew out the candle.

“Go on, hurry! But don't forget the lock!”

Swinging the door closed, he heard her fumbling attempts to insert and then turn the key. More lightning, more thunder—and the enraged voice almost shaking the walls as the abuse went on and on. But it seemed the guards were in no condition to appreciate the creativity of his invective; most of the yelling consisted of orders to wake up.

“He'll have to go for help,” Qamar told the girl through the barred window. “If you're careful, you can slip out then. Will you lock the damned door and get out of here?”

She said nothing, but in the darkness he heard the clink of metal on stone on the floor within his room. He had to wait for the next flash of lightning to be sure. But it was indeed the key.

 

No one accosted him the next day to demand what had gone on in the middle of the night. Thus he assumed that Solanna had safely reached her own quarters, wherever they might be. Over the next few days, on his walks around the rain-grayed alleys, he looked for possible “guest” accommodations—or, better still, a glimpse of her—but had no luck.

As for the key—ayia, guards who got drunk on duty were also capable of losing keys. That was what got shouted the next morning, and Qamar was disinclined to correct the mistake.

He kept it in his left boot, and Solanna's knife in the right.

The building in which he was not quite a prisoner but not quite a guest was a narrow construction crammed against another building several stories taller. The entire fortress always smelled cold and harsh, for everything here was built of stone and iron. He missed the sweet fragrances of wooden floors and staircases polished with oils. But he supposed that this, like the stinking salve and the pungent herbs that flavored the food, was yet another example of working with what one had. The lowest floor was divided into treatment rooms and a dispensary; the second was a single large room with beds for recovering patients. The third floor's dozen little rooms were all equipped with barred windows and lockable doors. Qamar wondered if this had been the doing of the original builders or if the Shagara had turned this floor into a prison.

One morning the healer who had Tariq forebears was the one to unlock Qamar's door. After a silent walk downstairs, he was ushered into a room almost as small as the one he inhabited upstairs.

“Please sit.”

He did so, in a comfortable wooden chair at a table laid out with paper, pens, and bottles of different colored inks. Smiling brightly, he asked, “Am I to write my own ransom note?”

“You may be worth more than money.” From a pocket he drew a much-folded sheet of paper. “Copy these symbols using the green ink.”

What in the Name of Acuyib the Inscrutable was going on here? During boyhood he had spent a year with his Shagara relatives, but having no talent for even the most rudimentary talishann he'd been perfectly happy tending and training the horses instead. His Haddiyat cousins were forever writing and rewriting the protections at the family residences, and a few times Qamar had been bored enough with his other pursuits to watch. None of the symbols on this page looked familiar at all.

Shrugging, he opened the bottle of green ink, noting that the stopper was carved of green moss agate into the shape of a rather pretty flower he didn't recognize. He dipped a pen and made his copy.

“Now write my name at the top. Zario Shagara.”

Qamar glanced up. “That's unusual.”

“It commemorates the Cazdeyyan nobleman who gave us this fortress. One Shagara male at a time, and only one, bears the name. Do you want me to spell it?”

“Please.” He wrote as he was told. When he looked up, expecting further instructions, Zario was holding a small, thin-bladed knife.

“Your hand,” he said.

Qamar stared at him.

“I need a few drops of your blood. Hold out your hand.”

He very nearly blurted out
“No!”
They must think—they thought he was—but he wasn't, he couldn't possibly—

He tried to remember what most people knew about Shagara magic. He was wearing hazziri, so he had to know something, but how much?

“Your great-grandfather Azzad didn't believe until it was demonstrated to him over and over again,”
his great-grandmother Leyliah had told him a long time ago.
“Ayia, a very stubborn man! Your grandfather Alessid, of course, was told directly when Abb Shagara thought it time to do so. And now I will tell you. It is not just the talishann, nor the skill of the maker, nor the metal, nor the stones that make hazziri potent. Neither is it only the particular combination of herbs or flowers or the amount of wine or water or vinegar in a medication that gives it the power to heal.”

They thought him Shagara, and he was—but not
that
sort of Shagara. He was certain of it. So let Zario do whatever it was he would do, conduct whatever test this might be.

Qamar shrugged and held out his hand.

Zario didn't prick Qamar's finger. He drew a long, shallow scratch across his own palm. He watched the blood well up, a meditative and bitter smile curving his lips. Then he wiped the blade between his fingers and seized Qamar's hand and pricked his thumb. Before Qamar had time to cry out his surprise, Zario had squeezed drops of blood onto each of the six symbols and both words of his name.

“What do you—how
dare
you—” He looked from the smear of blood on his thumb to the Shagara's face—but blocking his gaze was the man's palm. His clean, whole, uninjured palm, without a mark on it.

“But I'm
not
!” he cried. “I'm not one of you—I'm not like you!”

The old man who was not really an old man eyed him with a certain grim satisfaction. “All evidence to the contrary,” he said.

“No—it's not possible—” He cast about frantically for some excuse. Some reason. Some escape. “It was your blood, not mine—your blood still on the blade—”

“Are you calling me a clumsy fool, boy? I've done the testing these twenty and more years. It's one of the privileges of bearing my name. There is only one of me, you see, and so only one person that the signs and the blood and the paper and the ink can touch.”

Qamar staggered up from his chair, dimly heard it crash behind him, backed away from Zario's shrewd, pitiless gaze. “
No! I can't be one of you
!”

“Certain of that, are you? Left a fine little collection of bastards behind you in Tza'ab Rih, did you?” He snorted a laugh, then drew himself up and squared his shoulders and said in cold and formal tones, “Qamar Tariq, it is my honor to inform you that you have been blessed by Acuyib and have the right to use the name Shagara.”