Читать книгу Snare - Katharine Kerr - Страница 7

In the warm night, the scent of true-roses hung over the palace gardens. Among the red spear trees and the obsidian statuary, water splashed in fountains and murmured in artificial streams. In a cluster of orange bamboid two persons sat side by side in the lush true-grass, one a young slender woman, shamelessly bareheaded, and the other a heavy-set soldier with a touch of grey in his dark curly hair. Anyone who saw them would have known that they were lovers, but Captain Idres Warkannan was hoping that this truth would hide another, that they were also plotting high treason. Lubahva Shiraz acted her part by giggling in the most vapid way she could manage. Her gold bangles chimed as she laid a slender, dark-skinned hand on Warkannan’s arm.

‘Do you see why I thought you needed to hear this?’ she whispered. ‘Right away?’

‘I certainly do. Send me another note if you hear more.’

‘I will. We’ll be doing the dinner music tomorrow for the same officials. They forget about us once we’re behind that brass screen.’

Lubahva kissed him goodbye, then got up and trotted off, hurrying back to the musicians’ quarters. Alone, hand on the hilt of his sabre, Warkannan made his way through the palace grounds. As an officer of the Mounted Urban Guard, he had every right to be in the Great Khan’s gardens, but he hurried nonetheless, cursing when he found himself in a dead-end, striding along fast when he could see his way clear.

The palace buildings rarely stood more than a single storey high, but they dotted the gardens in an oddly random pattern. Beautiful structures of carved true-wood housed palace ministers and high-ranking officials. Squat huts of pillar reed and bamboid sufficed for servants. In the warm night windows stood open; he could hear talk, laughter, the occasional wail of a tired child, but no matter how domestic the sounds, he knew there might be spies behind a hundred different curtains.

Beyond the buildings, low walls of filigree moss and high walls of braided vines transformed the hillside into a maze made up of mazes. Down some turnings, the cold pale light of star moss edged broad paths that ended in thickets of bamboid. Down others, fern trees rose out of artificial ponds and towered over him, their fronds nodding and rasping in the evening breeze. Among their branches, the golden-furred eekas whistled and sang; now and then two or three dropped suddenly down to dash in front of him on their spidery legs. Once Warkannan took a wrong turn and ended up caught in an angle of mossy walls, where half-a-dozen eekas surrounded him. They joined their little green hands and danced around him in a circle, squeaking and mocking. When he swore at them, they darted away.

The outer wall at last – he’d reached it without being challenged. Gates of gilded true-wood stood open in the living walls of thorn vine, woven into bronze mesh, that guarded the compound. Two guards in the white tunics over black trousers of the infantry stood at attention on either side. When Warkannan held up his hand in salute, one stepped out to talk with him: Med, an old friend, smiling at him.

‘I thought you were on long leave,’ Med remarked.

‘I am. Just came by to see one of the palace girls and pick up my salary.’

‘Those girls don’t come cheap, do they?’

‘No. She’s got her heart set on a necklace she saw in town, she tells me. God only knows how much that’s going to set me back! It’s a good thing I’m doing some investing these days.’

‘Well, good luck with it, then.’

‘Thanks. I’m going to need it.’

Warkannan sauntered through the gates while he wondered if his excuse would hold. Would someone high up in the chain of command learn that he’d returned to the palace in the middle of his leave?

‘Charity, sir, oh charity?’ A crowd of ragged children rushed forward and surrounded him. In the lamplight Warkannan could see their pinched little faces, their bony hands, the rags flapping around prominent ribs. ‘Oh please sir!’

Warkannan dug into the pocket of his uniform trousers; he’d taken to carrying small coins, these days. The children waited, staring at him. There was only one way to give charity without being followed and mobbed. He held up the handful of deenahs, glanced around, and saw a patch of well-lit grass.

‘Here.’ Warkannan tossed the coins into the grass. ‘Go get them!’

The children dove for the coins, and he hurried downhill, jogging fast till the street curved and hid him from their sight. Every day, more beggars, he thought. When is this going to end?

The Great Khan’s compound lay on the highest hill of Haz Kazrak, a city of hills. Far below to the west lay a sea-harbour, embraced by stone breakwaters where red warning torches glowed and fluttered, staining the water with reflections. In the cloudless sky the Spider was just rising in the east. This time of year the entire spiral would be visible by midnight as a swirl of silver light covering a tenth of the sky. Already it loomed over the eastern hills like the head and shoulders of a giant. Over the open ocean the two Flies, small glowing clouds, were scurrying to the horizon ahead of their eternal enemy. The rest of the sky stretched dark.

As Warkannan walked on, the Spider and its light disappeared behind a hill, but the soft glow of oil lamps bloomed in the twisting streets. The neighbourhood around the palace was safe enough. The compounds of the rich lined the wide streets, and most had lanterns at their gates and a doorman or two as well, standing around with a long staff to keep beggars and thieves away. Further down, though, the private lamps disappeared; the streets narrowed as they wound along the slopes. The squat little houses, made of bundled reeds or bamboid, stood dark and sullen behind kitchen gardens that smelled of night soil and chicken coops. Warkannan stayed out in the middle of the street, where the public lamps shone, and kept his hand close to the hilt of his sabre.

Down by the harbour the way broadened and brightened again. Here among the shops and warehouses people stood talking or strode along, finishing up the day’s business or drawing water from the public wells. A good crowd sat drinking with friends in the cool of the evening at one or another of the sidewalk cafés. In the centre of the harbour district lay a large public square, and in its centre stood a six-sided stone pillar, plastered with public notices and religious dictates from the Council of Mullahs. Whores lounged on its steps or strutted back and forth nearby, calling out to prospective customers. Warkannan noticed one girl, barely more than a child, hanging back terrified. She’d been forced onto the streets to help feed her family, most likely. It happened more and more these days.

Warkannan crossed the square, then paused to look up at the velvet-dark night sky. In the north he saw the Phalanx, as the Kazraks called them: six bright stars zipping along from north to south, tracing a path between the Flies and the Spider. Since they appeared every night at regular intervals, he could get a rough idea of the time, enough to figure that he was late. In the light of a street lamp he took out his pocket watch. Yes, a good twenty minutes late. He put the watch away and hurried.

Fortunately his destination lay close at hand, where the street dead-ended at a merchant’s compound. Over the woven thorn walls, the fern trees rustled as the breeze picked up from the ocean. The outer gate was locked, but a brass bell hung from a chain on the fence. When Warkannan rang, the doorman called out, ‘Who is it?’

‘Captain Warkannan.’

‘Just a minute, just a minute.’

Warkannan heard snufflings and the snapping of teeth, low curses from the doorman, and a collection of animal whines and hisses. Finally the gate swung open, and he walked in cautiously, glancing around. Huge black lizards lunged on their chains and hissed open-mouthed as they tried to reach his legs. When the doorman waved his staff in their direction, they cringed.

‘They can’t get at you,’ he said, grinning. ‘Just stay on the path.’

‘Oh, don’t worry about that.’ Warkannan fished in his pocket and found a silver deenah to tip him. ‘Thanks.’

The gravelled path led through the fern trees to an open space around the house, a rambling structure, all one storey, woven of bundled rushes and vines in the usual style, but overlaid with a small fortune’s worth of true-wood shingles. At the door, Nehzaym Wahud herself greeted Warkannan and ushered him inside the warehouse. Although she never told anyone her age, she must have been in her late forties. On her dark brown face she wore the purrahs, two black ribbons tied around her head. The one between her nose and upper lip marked her as a decent woman who observed the Third Prophet’s laws of modesty; the other, around her forehead, proclaimed her a widow.

‘How pleasant to see you, Captain,’ Nehzaym said. ‘I’m glad you could join us tonight.’

‘My pleasure, I’m sure. I’m extremely interested in this venture of yours.’

‘If the Lord allows, it could make us all quite rich, yes.’

Warkannan followed her across the room. Against the walls, covered with a maroon felt made of dried moss, stood a few lonely bales and sacks of merchandise left over from the winter trading season, a big desk littered with documents, some battered cabinets, and a tall clock, ticking to the rhythm of its brass pendulum. Nearby a bamboid door led into Nehzaym’s apartment. She ushered him through, then followed. In the middle of the blue and green sitting room a marble fountain bubbled, pale orange ferns in bright pots stood along the walls, and polished brass screens hung at every window. Just in front of the fountain stood a low table, spread with maps of pale pink rushi, where other members of their circle sat waiting for him.

‘Sorry I’m late,’ Warkannan said.

Sitting on a heap of purple cushions, Councillor Indan Alwazir looked up. The old man kept his long white robes gathered round him as if he were afraid he’d be polluted by the incense-laden air. Warkannan’s nephew, Arkazo Benjamil, a young man with a beaky nose and a thin-lipped grin, was sitting cross-legged on the floor and holding a good-sized glass of arak between thumb and forefinger. When Warkannan frowned at him, Arkazo put the glass down on the floor and shoved it under the table in one smooth gesture.

Standing by the marble fountain was the most important man in their venture. Tall and slender, Yarl Soutan was wearing the white shirt and loose white trousers of a Kazrak citizen, but his blue eyes, long blond hair caught back in a jewelled headband, and his pale skin marked him for the infidel stranger he was, a renegade from the Cantons far to the east of the khanate. Although he looked Arkazo’s age, his eyes seemed as old and suspicious as Indan’s, squinting at the world from a great distance. As always, Warkannan wondered just how far they could trust a man who claimed to be a sorcerer.

‘We have been waiting,’ Indan said to Warkannan. ‘For some while, actually.’

‘I had to go up to the palace. You’re about to hear why.’

Indan raised an eyebrow. With a demure smile for the men, Nehzaym barred the door behind her, then perched on a cushioned stool near the councillor.

‘All right,’ Warkannan said. ‘Someone’s laid an information against us with the Great Khan’s Chosen Ones.’

Arkazo swore. Indan went pale, his lips working. With a little laugh, Soutan turned from the fountain.

‘I told you I saw danger approaching. These things always send omens ahead of them.’

‘You were right,’ Warkannan said. ‘This once, anyway.’

‘May God preserve!’ Indan was trembling so badly that he could hardly speak. ‘Do they know our names?’

‘Calm down, Councillor,’ Warkannan snapped. ‘Of course they do, or we wouldn’t have anything to worry about. They’re wondering if we’re really going to prospect for blackstone.’

‘Is this anything special?’ Arkazo broke in. ‘As far as I can see, the Chosen are suspicious of everything and everyone all the time.’

‘I don’t know what they know,’ Warkannan said. ‘All that Lubahva heard was that someone bragged about our investment group. He implied it might be more important than it looked. The Chosen don’t ignore that kind of rumour.’

‘Indeed,’ Indan said. ‘Who was it?’

‘Lubahva doesn’t know yet.’ Warkannan paused to glance at each member of the group in turn. ‘I’m not doubting anyone here, mind, but our circle’s grown larger recently. I knew we’d reach a danger point.’

The suspicion in the room hung as heavy as the incense. Everyone looked at Yarl Soutan, who strolled over and sat down.

‘And would I run to the Chosen after throwing in my lot with you? The Great Khan wouldn’t give me a pardon for spilling your secrets. He’d have me killed in some slow painful way for having come here in the first place.’ Soutan laid a hand on the maps. ‘I wonder – someone must suspect that I brought you something besides those old maps.’

‘That’s my worst fear,’ Warkannan said. ‘If they do, they’ll send a man east to the Cantons just to see what he can learn about you.’

‘Oh good god!’ Soutan snarled. ‘That could ruin everything.’

‘Exactly,’ Indan said. ‘Why do you think I’m terrified?’

Soutan nodded. For a long moment they all looked at each other, as if the information they so desperately needed could be read from the empty air.

The Crescent Throne of Kazrajistan ruled these days by the sword and terror. Gemet Great Khan had gained the throne by sending his Chosen Ones to kill everyone in his own extended family with a good claim to be a khan, a word that had come to mean a man fit to be the supreme leader by blood and so sanctified by the mullahs. Now Gemet lived in fear of revenge, and with good reason. His brothers and half-brothers had married into the best families in the khanate, and with their murders and the confiscation of their lands, those families had lost sons and property both. Since he knew that any more confiscations would make the armed aristocracy rebel, he’d turned on the common people with taxes for teeth.

The last heir, young Jezro Khan, had been serving on the border, an officer in the regular cavalry. The assassins came for him, as they had for all the others, but no one ever found his body. With his assumed death, the khanate had settled into ten years of paranoid peace. Just recently, however, Soutan had ridden into Haz Kazrak and brought Councillor Indan a letter in Jezro’s handwriting. Jezro Khan was alive, living as a humble exile far to the east. After some weeks of weighing risks, Indan had contacted Warkannan, who’d served with Jezro in the cavalry. Warkannan could still feel his shock, could taste his tears as he looked over the familiar writing of a friend he’d given up for dead. Together he and Indan had gathered a few trustworthy men and made contacts among those families who’d suffered at the current emperor’s hands. Soon they had pledges of soldiers and coin to support the khan’s cause if he returned. Things had been going very well indeed – until now.

‘If we’re going to prevent disaster, we have to move fast,’ Indan said. ‘We need to shelter Soutan above all else.’

‘Just so,’ Warkannan said. ‘And we’d better do it tonight. Councillor, you have a country villa, don’t you?’

‘Oh yes, and my servants there are most trustworthy.’

‘Good. You and Soutan get yourselves there. I’ll stay in the city and keep in touch with Lubahva. If we all bolt at once, the Chosen are likely to draw some conclusions.’

Indan’s face went ashy-grey.

‘I’ll be sending you word as soon as I can,’ Warkannan said. ‘Lubahva’s group plays for every important man in the palace, and she hears plenty.’ All at once he smiled. ‘She’s always complaining that they treat the musicians like furniture. It’s a damn good thing, too. We’ll find this traitor yet.’

‘So we may hope.’ Indan sighed, looking suddenly very old and very tired. ‘But I see ruin ahead of us all.’

‘Oh come now, don’t give up so soon.’ Soutan turned to the councillor. ‘You forget that you have powerful magic on your side.’

‘Indeed?’ Indan said with some asperity. ‘But if it can’t read the minds of the Chosen, it’s not much good to us.’

‘Perhaps it can.’ Soutan gave him a thin-lipped smile. ‘Don’t mock what you don’t understand.’

When Indan started to snarl an answer, Warkannan leaned forward and cut him off.

‘Patience, Councillor,’ Warkannan said. ‘We don’t know what the Chosen are going to do. They may look us over and decide we pass muster.’

‘They might,’ Indan said. ‘Or they may have sent one of their spies east already. Or a dozen of them, for that matter.’

‘It should be an easy thing to find out.’ Nehzaym glanced around the circle. ‘Most of our allies are on the border. If we warn them, they’ll keep watch.’

‘The Chosen are very good at what they do.’ Indan’s voice seemed on the edge of fading away. ‘Doubtless, when they send off their man, no one will suspect a thing.’

‘Don’t be so sure.’ Warkannan got up with a nod for Arkazo. ‘Let’s go. Gentlemen, I suggest you leave with us. We’ll walk into the town square together and talk about our maps and our profits. Remember, we want to be noticed doing ordinary things.’

Warkannan, with Arkazo in tow, headed for the door, but when he glanced back, he noticed that Soutan stood whispering with Nehzaym near the fountain. What was the charlatan up to now? Indan joined him, followed his glance, and raised an eyebrow.

‘Soutan?’ Indan called out. ‘We’d best be on our way.’

‘Of course.’ Soutan strolled over to join them at the door. ‘Of course. Our lovely widow was merely asking my advice about a small matter.’

Nehzaym glanced at Warkannan as if inviting comment. He merely shrugged, then turned and led the men out.

The Spider hung at the zenith on her thread of stars by the time that Soutan returned to the compound. Nehzaym was reading in the sitting room when she heard the lizards outside hiss and the chains clank. She took a lamp, hurried into the warehouse, and crossed to the door just as the sorcerer opened it. With a little bow he stepped inside, then turned to shut the door behind him.

‘Well, that was a waste of time,’ Soutan said. ‘Warkannan’s idea of acting normally is to sit around in a café and argue about anything and everything.’

‘Don’t underestimate him,’ Nehzaym said. ‘He’s quite intelligent whether he acts it or not.’

‘Really?’

‘Really. Shall we go in?’

‘By all means. I’m anxious to see this treasure of yours.’

‘I just hope you can tell me what it is.’

She led the way back into the apartment. They walked down a short hallway to her tiny widow’s room, which sported a window on one wall, a narrow bed at one end, a small threadbare rug on the floor, and little else. Out of habit she still kept her clothes, her jewellery, the chests of bed linens, and the like in the large room she’d shared with her husband. One of the treasures he’d given her, however, she kept here, where a thief would never bother to look for anything valuable. She set the lamp down on a wooden stand. Soutan sat on the floor, cross-legged, while she knelt by the rug and rolled it back to expose the sliding panel under it.

Inside the hide-hole lay a book, bound in purple cloth, and what appeared to be a thin oblong of grey slate, about twelve inches by nine, lying on a black scarf. As she was taking the slate and scarf out, Soutan craned his neck to look inside the hole; she slid the panel shut fast. He laughed.

‘By all means,’ Soutan said, ‘you’d best keep that book hidden. The Sibylline Prophecies, isn’t it?’

Nehzaym shrugged, then laid the slate down between them on the scarf. It hummed three musical notes and began to glow.

‘God is great,’ Nehzaym sang out. ‘The Lord our God is one, and Mohammed, Agvar, and Kaleel are His prophets. In their names may all evil things be far away!’

‘Amen.’ Soutan leaned forward, staring.

In the centre of the panel the glow brightened to a pale blue square, which slowly coagulated into the image of a round room with a high ceiling. Floors, walls, the dais in the middle, the steps leading up to that dais – they all glittered silver in a mysterious light falling from above.

‘Whenever I take it out, I see that picture,’ Nehzaym said.

‘Does it show you others?’ Soutan said.

‘Only this one. And look!’ Nehzaym pointed to a narrow red bar of light, pulsing at one side of the slate. ‘When this light flashes, a minute or two later the image fades.’

Already, in fact, the room was dissolving back into the pale blue glow. The red light died, leaving the slate only a slate. Soutan made a hissing sound and shook his head. ‘Where did your husband get this?’

‘In Bariza. He bought it in the marketplace from a man who dealt in curios.’

‘Curios? Well, I suppose the ignorant would see it that way. Do you know anything about it?’

‘Only that you have to feed it sunlight every day. I take it to the garden. In the rainy season it doesn’t work very well.’

‘No, it wouldn’t. Our ancestors knew how to bind spirits into their magicks. They feed on sunlight. When they’re hungry, they refuse to do their job.’

‘I can’t say I blame them. Are the spirits immortal?’

‘What a strange question!’ Soutan smiled, drawing back thin lips from large teeth. ‘Everything alive must die, sooner or later.’

‘And when all the spirits die?’

‘There won’t be any more magic, just like your Third Prophet said. No doubt you Kazraks will celebrate.’

‘We’ve chosen to live as the First Prophet wanted us to live, yes.’ She paused, choosing her words carefully. ‘And how will your people feel about losing their magic?’

Soutan shrugged, his smile gone. ‘Let’s hope it doesn’t happen for a good long while, a thousand years, say.’ He pointed at the panel. ‘What do you think that room is?’

‘I was hoping you could tell me.’

‘I can’t, not for certain, but I’ll make a guess. You have a copy of the Sibyl’s book. Have you read the part about the empty shrine?’

Nehzaym felt her clasped hands tighten.

‘I see you have,’ Soutan said. ‘One of these days you might see the Fourth Prophet standing on that dais.’

‘If God would only allow, I’d happily die.’

‘You’d be happier if you stayed around to see what happened next. Now. Let me see if I can show you something interesting. May I pick it up?’

‘Certainly.’

Soutan took the slate and peered at it in the dancing lamplight. He ran one long finger down the side, paused, fingered the back of it, then suddenly smiled. He took a full breath, and when he spoke, the sound seemed to come from deep inside his body and buzz like an insect. The words made no sense to her at all. The spirit in the slate, however, must have understood them, because the panel chimed a long note in answer.

Soutan laid the slate back down on the floor. A new picture was forming of a different room, inlaid with blue and white quartz in a diamond pattern.

‘Another shrine?’ Nehzaym whispered.

‘Perhaps. Wait and see.’

Slowly the room became clear – a half round, this time, and just in front of the flat wall stood two slender pillars, one grey, one white. Between them hung what appeared to be a gauzy veil, yet it shimmered and sparked with bluish light. Nehzaym twined her hands round each other. A pale blue thing shaped like a man appeared in the centre of the room. He waved his hands and seemed to be speaking, but she could hear nothing. Suddenly the thing’s face filled the image. Its eyes were mere pools of darker blue; its purple lips mouthed soundless words.

Nehzaym shrieked, a sound that must have frightened the spirit inside the slate. Once again the red light began to flash. The image disappeared.

‘May the Lord preserve!’ Nehzaym said. ‘A ghost!’

‘Do you think so?’ Soutan looked at the panel for a long silent moment. ‘If I had gold and jewels to give, I’d heap them all in your lap in return for it. Unfortunately, I don’t.’ His voice dropped. ‘Unfortunate for you, perhaps.’

Nehzaym started to speak, but her voice caught and trembled. Soutan rose to his knees and considered her narrow-eyed, his hands hanging loose at his sides, his fists clenched.

‘Take it,’ Nehzaym said.

‘What?’

‘If you want the nasty thing, it’s yours. I work and pray for the coming of the Fourth Prophet, but this is evil sorcery. I don’t want it in my house.’

Soutan sat back on his heels and stared at her slack-mouthed.

‘I suppose I must look superstitious to you,’ Nehzaym said. ‘I don’t care. Take it. It’s unclean.’

‘Who am I to turn down such a generous gift?’ Soutan scooped up the slate.

‘Take the scarf, too. I don’t want it, either. It’s touched something unclean.’

With a shrug he picked up the length of black cloth and began wrapping up the slate.

‘May the Lord forgive!’ Nehzaym said. ‘I’ll have to do penance. Necromancy! In my own house, too!’

‘Oh for god’s sake!’ Soutan snapped. ‘It was only an image of a ghost, not the thing itself.’ Soutan cradled the wrapped slate in the crook of one arm. ‘I’ll have to look through the books in Indan’s library. I wonder just whose ghost that was?’

‘I don’t care. You shouldn’t either.’

Soutan laughed. ‘I’ve learned so much from your scholars that it’s a pity I can’t stay in Haz Kazrak. But all the knowledge in the world won’t do me any good if I’m dead.’

‘If you bring Jezro home, you’ll have an army of scholars to fetch your impious books.’

‘Oh, stop worrying about impiety! You’re too old to shriek and giggle like a girl.’

‘I what? That’s a rude little remark.’

‘You deserve it. I must say that you Kazraks have the right idea about one thing, the way you train your girls to stay out of sight. But you’re an old woman, and it’s time you learned some sense.’

‘I beg your pardon!’

‘You should, yes.’ Soutan shrugged one shoulder. ‘I’d better get back to Indan’s townhouse. He wants to leave early.’

After she showed Soutan out, Nehzaym told the gatekeeper to loose the lizards for the night. Before she went back to her apartment, she stopped in the warehouse to wind the floor clock with its big brass key. As she stood there, listening to the clock’s ticking in the silent room, she suddenly remembered Soutan, talking about wanting the slate and looking at her in that peculiar way. She’d been so upset at the time that she’d barely noticed his change of mood. Now, she felt herself turn cold.

He might have murdered her for that slate.

‘Oh don’t be silly!’ she said aloud. ‘He’s a friend of Jezro Khan’s. He wouldn’t do any such thing.’

But yet – she was glad, she realized, very glad, that she’d seen the last of him.

Beyond the Great Khan’s city, true-roses rarely bloomed, and the grass grew purple, not green. All the vegetation native to the planet depended for photosynthesis on a pair of complex molecules similar to Old Earth carotenoids, producing colours ranging from orange to magenta and purple to a maroon verging on black. At the Kazraki universities, scholars taught that the plant they called grass should have another name and that the spear trees were no true trees at all, but the ordinary people no longer cared about such things, any more than they cared about their lost homeland, which lay, supposedly, far beyond the western seas.

Not far south of Haz Kazrak, on a pleasant stretch of seacoast, where grass grew green in a few gardens but purple in most other places, stood a rambling sort of town where rich men built summer villas. Fortunately, Councillor Indan’s lands were somewhat isolated; graceful russet fern trees hid his hillside villa. Behind the orange thorn walls of his compound lay a small garden and a rambling house of some thirty rooms – just a little country place, or so Indan called it – arranged on three floors. When Warkannan rode up, the gatekeeper swung the doors wide and looked over the party: Warkannan and Arkazo on horseback, and behind them, a small cart driven by a servant from Indan’s townhouse.

‘I’ve brought the councillor a present,’ Warkannan said. ‘A carved chest from the north.’

Since wood hard enough to be carved meant true-oak, an expensive rarity, Indan’s servants saw nothing suspicious about the way Warkannan hovered over the well-wrapped chest and insisted that he and Arkazo carry it themselves. All smiles, Indan greeted them and suggested they take the chest directly upstairs. Soutan helped them haul the six-foot-long and surprisingly heavy bundle up to a third-floor storage room.

The sorcerer watched as Warkannan and Arkazo unwrapped the rags and untied the rope holding the chest closed. It was indeed a beautiful piece of true-wood, sporting an intricate geometrical pattern, but someone had spoiled it by drilling a pair of holes in one narrow end. When Warkannan opened the lid, he found his prisoner nicely alive, still bleary from the drugs, but unsmothered.

‘Hazro!’ Indan whispered. ‘I would have never suspected him. One of the Mustavas – unthinkable!’

‘He bragged to someone, saying he was more important than he looked, the usual crap. Somehow it got back to the Chosen. We need to know how and who.’

‘Lies,’ Hazro mumbled.

Warkannan and Arkazo pulled him out of the chest. When he tried to stand, he sagged and nearly fell. When Warkannan shoved him back against the wall, he whimpered and glanced around with half-closed eyes.

‘I tried to reason with him,’ Warkannan said. ‘Hazro, come on! One last chance. Tell us the truth. That’s all I’m asking you. Just tell us the truth.’

‘Nothing to tell.’ Hazro tried to stand straight and defiant, but he nearly fell. ‘You – how dare you – your family started out as a bunch of blacksmiths.’

Warkannan glanced at the councillor. ‘This is what I’ve been up against. He won’t tell me a thing.’

‘May the Lord forgive us all!’ Indan said. ‘By the way, I’ve figured out a way to blame the Chosen for his death. We’ve got to keep his father on our side.’

Hazro whimpered and let tears run.

‘He’s still drugged,’ Warkannan said. ‘I’ll question him later.’

‘Good.’ But Indan looked queasy with anticipation. ‘This room has thick walls, and no one will hear a thing.’

That night they dined in a room with a splendid view of the ocean. Servants brought fresh seabuh, a spikey, six-armed creature in a purple carapace, a mixed vegetable salad, and ammonites dressed with sheep butter. As they ate, Warkannan told them what Lubahva had learned.

‘The Chosen suspect Soutan of being up to no good, but they’re not sure what.’ Warkannan nodded at the self-proclaimed sorcerer, who was stuffing his mouth with as much ammonite as it could hold. ‘They’re making inquiries all over the city.’

Soutan shuddered and wiped his mouth on a napkin.

‘Let’s assume the worst,’ Indan said. ‘If they’re making inquiries here, they must have sent a man east.’

‘Probably so,’ Warkannan said. ‘But it’s going to be damned hard for him to make his way east alone.’

‘Who says he’ll go alone?’ Arkazo asked.

‘The Chosen always do,’ Warkannan said.

‘Not that this makes life easier for their enemies.’ Indan glanced away slack-mouthed. ‘For us, that is.’

‘Oh yes.’ Warkannan leaned back in his chair and considered him. ‘If the Chosen find out that the khan’s still alive, we have no cause, gentlemen. They’ll find a way to kill him no matter where he is. So we’d better make sure this spy doesn’t find him. I’m going after him.’

‘You can’t do that,’ Indan said. ‘Your leave from the Guard’s almost up.’

‘I sent in my letter of resignation before we left the city. I’ve put in my twenty years, and I told them that this investment venture looked too good to pass up.’

For a long moment Indan studied Warkannan’s face; then he sighed. ‘That’s quite a sacrifice,’ Indan said. ‘The cavalry means everything to you.’

‘The cavalry I joined did. In the past few years –’ Warkannan shrugged. ‘Gemet’s paranoia is going to poison the whole khanate, sooner or later.’

‘Unless we supply the antidote?’ Indan smiled, a wry twist of his mouth.

‘Just that. It’s a tall order, but if God wills, we’ll succeed. If He doesn’t, well, then, who am I to argue?’

Outside the sunset was darkening into twilight. A servant slipped in and began lighting the oil in silver lamps. While he waited for the man to leave, Warkannan looked round the table at his allies, at the luxurious room, at all the comforts of life that he might never see again. As the lamp flames grew, they sparkled on silver, on crystal, on the enormous ruby at the centre of Soutan’s headband. The fitful light seemed to be illuminating not just the room but the moment, a point of history upon which the destiny of the khanate would turn. The servant bowed and left the room.

‘Warkannan,’ Indan hissed. ‘If the Chosen find any evidence at all to back up their suspicions, leaving the Guard will brand you as a traitor. You’ll never be able to ride back to Kazrajistan.’

‘Oh yes I will. At the head of an army.’ Warkannan turned to Soutan. ‘It’s time Jezro’s letter got an answer.’

Soutan considered him with a thin smile. His puzzling old man’s eyes were unreadable in the shadows.

‘I always intended to take someone back to Jezro,’ Soutan said at last. ‘And you’ll never make it across the Rift alone, so I’d better go with you.’

‘Someday you’ll be the vizier of a Great Khan in return for all this.’

‘If your God allows. But there’s nothing left for an exile but one gamble after another, is there? We might as well deal the cards.’ Soutan took a slice of pickled blakbuh from a silver tray and nibbled on it. ‘The omens say the time is ripe for a change in the Great Khan’s fortunes, and it’s not a good one. A malefic current is forming a vortex around his personal symbols – a time of budding danger for him.’

Arkazo laughed. ‘Then let’s help the malefic along.’

Soutan favoured him with a look of contempt. ‘That, my dear child, is my point and not an occasion for bad jokes.’

Indan leaned forward before Arkazo could reply. ‘And what about your nephew, Captain? You’d better send him back to his father’s estate before you leave.’

‘No!’ Arkazo slammed his hand down on the table and made the oil dance dangerously in the lamps. ‘All my life I’ve been shut up, either on Father’s lousy estate or at university. Now I’ve finally got a chance at some excitement.’

‘My dear young fellow,’ Indan began.

Warkannan raised a hand and interrupted him. ‘He’ll have to come with me, Councillor. He’s been staying in my bungalow. If the Chosen decide we don’t pass muster, he’s the first one they’ll arrest.’

Arkazo laughed with a toss of his head.

‘Listen, Kaz,’ Warkannan said. ‘This isn’t any joke. It’s going to be dangerous, and your mother’s going to curse my very name for this.’

‘Not once she’s got the favour of the new Great Khan’s wife. Mama’s always been the practical sort.’ Arkazo turned abruptly sour. ‘Why else would she have married my father?’

‘This is no place to bring that up.’ Warkannan took the silver flagon and poured them both more rose-scented water – Indan kept a pious table. ‘I wish to God I’d kept you out of this.’

‘You tried. It didn’t work.’

‘It’s too late now, anyway. The dice are thrown, and if it weren’t for you, I’d be glad of it. I’m sick to my gut of all this creeping round and worrying about spies.’

‘Spies, indeed,’ Indan said. ‘Which reminds me –’

‘Just so. We’d better get this over with.’

Everyone pushed their chairs back and stood, suddenly grim, suddenly quiet, even Arkazo.

Warkannan fetched a bucket of hot coals from the kitchen – he told the cook that he wanted to take the chill off his room – then followed the others up to the attic. As stiff as a rolled-up rug, Hazro lay on the floor. When Warkannan set the bucket of coals down, he whimpered and twisted in his ropes. Warkannan knelt beside him and pulled him up to a sitting position, propping him against the wall. Hazro’s dark eyes flicked this way and that.

‘Arkazo?’ Warkannan said. ‘You can leave. You don’t have to watch this.’

‘What are you going to do to him?’ Arkazo was staring at Hazro.

‘You don’t need to know that.’

‘But I –’

Warkannan got up and took one long stride to come face to face with his nephew. His own disgust with what he would have to do in this room turned to cold rage. ‘Get out of here,’ he snapped. ‘Now.’

‘Yes sir.’ Arkazo stepped back sharply. ‘I’m on my way.’

Warkannan waited to ensure that Arkazo was following his orders; then he closed the door and locked it. Indan stuffed a threadbare bit of carpet into the crack at the bottom of the door. When Warkannan knelt down next to him, Hazro moaned under his breath, then steadied himself, forcing defiance into a tight tremulous smile. Warkannan drew his dagger and looked at him over the blade.

‘Listen, boy. This is your last chance. You wouldn’t be refusing to tell me unless you had something to hide.’

Hazro said nothing.

‘Why?’ Indan stepped forward. ‘Why won’t you tell us?’

‘There’s nothing to tell,’ Hazro said.

‘Yes, there is,’ Warkannan said. ‘You’ve been giving information to someone. Who?’

‘No one.’

‘Then why do the Chosen suspect us?’

‘They suspect everyone.’

‘You told them about us.’

‘Never. I didn’t betray Jezro.’

Warkannan made a cut on his cheek, just under his eye. ‘I’m going to keep doing this till you tell me. If your face isn’t sensitive enough, I’ll work on your balls.’

Sweat glazed Hazro’s forehead. ‘I didn’t tell anyone anything.’

Warkannan made another nick, then another till Hazro’s face was sheeting blood. When Warkannan took the lid off the bucket of glowing charcoal, Hazro fainted. Warkannan slapped and shook him to bring him round while he fought his own honest revulsion. He hated extracting information this way, but if he didn’t, what then? The Chosen might well gather them all in, and worse things would happen to his friends, his mistress, his allies, his nephew, down in some hidden room under the Great Khan’s palace. Indan pulled over a wooden storage box and sat down, his eyes weary.

‘Now,’ Warkannan said to Hazro. ‘Who did you tell?’

Hazro shut his bloody lips tight. Warkannan pulled up Hazro’s tunic and made a nick on his scrotum. Hazro screamed.

‘I’ll put a bit of charcoal on that cut next,’ Warkannan said. ‘That’s the procedure – a nick, then a bit of fire, all the way up your cock.’

When Hazro hesitated, Warkannan took the small tongs and fished a glowing coal out of the bucket.

‘It was Lev Rashad. Rashad of the Wazrekej Fifth Mounted. I didn’t realize at first he was one of the Chosen.’

Warkannan felt as if he’d been kicked in the stomach. He knew Rashad, just distantly, but he knew him. You never think it’s going to be someone you know, he told himself.

‘What do you think he was going to do?’ Warkannan said. ‘Announce it in the regimental mess?’

‘I – I –’

‘Wait!’ Indan looked up. ‘You said you didn’t know he was one of them at first. This must mean you realized it later. How?’

‘He must have been the one.’ Hazro started gasping for breath. ‘It couldn’t have been anyone else.’

‘Oh?’ Indan said. ‘He must have dropped some hint. Why didn’t you come straight to us then? You were dangling us like bait in front of him, weren’t you? You were using us to try to buy your way into the Chosen.’

Hazro made a small choking sound deep in his throat.

‘How much did you tell him?’ Warkannan said. ‘Did you mention Jezro?’

‘No, never, I swear it! All I said was that I was on to a good thing with this investment group. I thought he’d join us. We’d been drinking, and I –’

‘You stupid little bastard!’ Warkannan raised the knife. ‘What did you tell him about Jezro?’

‘Nothing!’

‘Why did you want to join the Chosen?’

‘I didn’t. I didn’t.’

Warkannan kept working on him until the smell of charred flesh hung in the room and Hazro was gibbering, not speaking. A bit at a time, Warkannan extracted the information that Hazro had mentioned Soutan, come from the east with ancient maps that might show deposits of blackstone. He admitted bragging, hinting that perhaps he was a man who knew important things.

‘But not Jezro, never Jezro.’ He was sobbing, twitching when his tears touched the open cuts on his face.

‘Indeed? Are you sure of that?’

Over and over he denied having mentioned the name, even when he was at the point of shrieking and writhing at the very sight of a piece of charcoal. Warkannan finally laid down the tongs and sat back on his heels.

‘I believe him. A man in this state tells the truth.’

‘So do I,’ Indan said. ‘As for this business about his wanting to join the Chosen –’

‘I didn’t!’ Hazro tried to shout, but he was gagging on his own blood. ‘I just thought –’

‘What?’ Indan said. ‘What were you thinking?’

‘Insurance.’ Hazro started to cough, then gagged again and spat up bloody rheum. ‘If –’

‘If they were on to us, you were going to turn informer.’ Warkannan finished the thought for him. ‘That’s why you wouldn’t tell us.’

Hazro slumped back against the wall, his bloody lips working.

‘Yes,’ Indan said. ‘I think we finally understand.’

Soutan stepped closer to stare at Hazro’s mutilated manhood, what was left of it. ‘What are you going to do with him now?’

‘Put him out of his misery.’

Hazro screamed, choked again, and tried to speak, but Warkannan grabbed his hair, forced his head back, and slit his throat in one quick stroke. When he looked up, he saw Soutan smiling, his eyes bright, as if from a fever. Soutan nudged the dead body with the toe of his sandal.

‘Do we throw him in the ocean?’

‘No. The Chosen have recognizable ways of torturing a man, and this was one of them. The councillor is going to find something big enough to hide the body. We’ll take it back to Haz Kazrak, and I’ll dump the corpse over the wall of Hazro’s father’s garden at night for the slaves to find. His father won’t suspect us. He’ll think that the Chosen have killed his son, and then he’ll be more loyal to Jezro than ever.’

They left the body in the attic. Warkannan stayed out of sight while Indan ordered the servants to bring up a tub of hot water for his guest room. Once the tub was ready and they were gone, Warkannan could at last bathe away the stench and the gore. He only wished he could wash away his revulsion as easily.

Hazro had been a stupid young fool, a snob and apparently a coward as well. But to think that Lev Rashad – Warkannan shook his head. The very curse of the Chosen was simply that they were secret and very good at staying that way. An army within an army, they existed to spy on their fellow soldiers as well as do the Great Khan’s dirty work among civilians. They lived in the same barracks, ate at the same mess, carried the same insignia as the other members of their regiments, but somewhere in their career, they’d been taken aside and initiated into a brotherhood with rules of its own.

And they force the rest of us to sink to their level, Warkannan told himself. Maybe that’s the worst evil of all.

In the morning, when they set off for Haz Kazrak, one of Indan’s servants followed them in the cart which was laden with an enormous woven basket filled with dried fruit and other delicacies, or so the servant thought. Certainly it smelled of rich spices and rose petals. Once they reached the city, the servant and the cart both headed for Indan’s townhouse, while Warkannan and Arkazo went openly to Warkannan’s cottage, which he kept as a relief from officers’ quarters when off-duty.

Down on one of the lower hills in town lay a district full of these places, decent accommodations, complete with stables, for aristocratic officers like Warkannan, who had income from property but who weren’t wealthy enough to keep townhouses with a full staff. Warkannan’s little bungalow sat at the back of the communal garden, six irregular rooms bound together by vines and furnished with shabby wicker chairs and old rugs. When he and Arkazo walked in, his only servant, Lazzo, met him with a letter.

‘It’s from headquarters, sir.’

‘Ah. I wonder if they’re taking my resignation?’

Warkannan took the sheet of pale pink rushi over to the window. The letter read exactly as he’d hoped, a bland official statement of regret at losing such a good officer. He was to report one last time to determine his pension settlement.

‘So that’s that,’ Warkannan said. ‘If they’re so sorry to lose me they might have promoted me.’

‘I’m glad now I never enlisted.’ Arkazo flopped onto a wicker sofa.

‘Oh, I don’t know. The discipline’s good for a man. I don’t regret –’

One sharp jolt like the slap of a giant hand made the room sway. The flexible walls creaked and chafed against their binding vines as they rippled in the shock. Warkannan braced himself and glanced at the wall. A long strand of blue beads hung on a leather thong attached to a plaque of true-wood, marked out in numbered, concentric circles. The beads swung back and forth against the gauge. As he watched, the quake died out in a long shiver. The beads quieted and hung steady.

‘Just about a five,’ Warkannan said.

‘It didn’t feel like much, no,’ Arkazo said. ‘Anyway, you’ve always talked about the discipline. That’s one reason I don’t want to join up.’

‘Huh! Well, you’re going to learn about discipline now. You follow my orders, or you stay at home.’

Lounging on overstuffed cushions Arkazo raised one hand in salute. ‘Yes sir!’ he said and grinned. ‘At your service!’

‘All right. For starters, you can pack my clothes as well as yours.’

They went into Warkannan’s bedroom, where, in a chest woven of pale orange reeds, Warkannan kept what few civilian clothes he owned – khaki trousers, shirts to match, a broad-brimmed riding hat, worn brown boots. He dumped the lot on the bed, then looked away, startled at a feeling much like grief. Civilian clothes. Tonight he would be taking off the Great Khan’s uniform for the last time. As an honourable retiree he would be allowed to keep his sabre - but I’m a traitor, he thought. I have no honour. They just don’t know it yet.

‘Uncle?’ Arkazo laid a hand on his shoulder. ‘Is something wrong?’

‘No, no, nothing. I’ll just go report in to settle my pension. I want our gear properly packed when I get back. Make sure you have a hat with you. The sun’s fierce out on the plains.’

Just after sunset, Warkannan and Arkazo were sharing some smuggled wine in the study when Lubahva arrived from the palace. Normally she wore modest dresses and a headscarf when she left the palace grounds, but that evening she’d draped herself with the grey veils of the ultra-orthodox, which turned her into a pious bundle indistinguishable from a thousand other women. Her behaviour, however, was far from restrained. She giggled while she tipped the old servant and made a show of lifting her veil to give Warkannan a kiss. Once the servant was gone, Lubahva sat down on a divan and pulled the veil off to reveal her black hair, done up in rows of beaded braids.

‘Are you sure this is safe?’ Warkannan said.

‘Why not?’ She smiled briefly. ‘I told them I was on my way to a women’s prayer service, and I am. I’ve just stopped by for a minute with news. A Kazrak rode out from one of the northern border forts, a merchant saying he was going to take his goods out to the Tribes.’

‘Oh really? With the chance of running into prowling ChaMeech? That I don’t believe. We’ll leave from the north and try to catch up with him.’

‘You’re really going to go through with this?’

‘I don’t have any choice. Arkazo and I are leaving tomorrow. The sorcerer’s joining us on the road.’

‘Ah, Soutan!’ Lubahva said with a sigh. ‘Well, even fake magicians can carry letters. All right. I’ll keep in touch with Indan while you’re gone.’

As they walked to the door, she veiled herself, but she left the panel over her face down for one last kiss.

‘Idres?’ she said. ‘Will I ever see you again?’

‘That’s up to God, isn’t it? I hope so.’

‘I suppose it is, yes. I’ll miss you.’

‘I’ll miss you, too. Remember me in your prayers.’

‘Every day. I promise.’

Lubahva pulled up the veil, turned fast and started off down the path to the street. Watching her shoulders tremble, Warkannan realized that she was weeping. He was honestly surprised.

Deep in the night, after Arkazo had gone to bed, Warkannan put on his civilian khakis, hid a dagger in his shirt and took a stout walking stick as well, then hurried through the dark streets to Indan’s townhouse, some five blocks uphill from the compound owned by Hazro’s family, the Mustava clan. At the back gate Indan’s mayordomo, a man with years of loyalty behind him, met him in the darkness. Together they rolled the wicker basket down the silent mews to the Mustava garden. The white wall stood too high for the pair of them to lift or throw the grisly contents over. A porter’s little hut at the back gate, however, stood empty. Warkannan rolled the basket inside, tipped the mayordomo, then hurried away, trotting through back alleys, keeping out of the occasional pool of lantern light. He met no one and returned to his bungalow without waking Arkazo.

Warkannan lingered in the city the next morning to hear the news about Hazro’s corpse. It reached him early in the person of a light-skinned eunuch, Aiwaz, the supervisor of the court musicians, who knew both the Mustavas and the Warkannans. Swathed in white gauze robes he waddled into Warkannan’s living room and stood shaking his head, his face deathly pale, while he repeatedly wiped his mouth with a yellow handkerchief.

‘It was horrible,’ Aiwaz said. ‘Hazro’s father found the body. He went down to unlock the back gates, and there it was.’

‘What?’ Warkannan did his best to look shocked. ‘Just thrown onto the street?’

‘No. Here’s the fiendish part. There was a basket there, smelling of spice, just as if someone had left some sort of gift. Inside was the body.’ Aiwaz paused, swallowing heavily. ‘Mutilated. Cut and burned in the cuts. The poor old man fainted. Just let out one sob and fainted.’

Warkannan looked away fast. His memory of that night in Indan’s attic rose up and sickened him. He had never thought that Hazro’s father would find the thing himself.

‘Yes, the poor old man.’ Warkannan could hear his voice choking on the words. ‘I’m so sorry.’

‘So are we all.’ Aiwaz dabbed his mouth again. ‘Of course, none of the Mustavas could possibly know who did this.’ He raised a plucked eyebrow significantly. ‘But the boy’s uncle swears he’ll have his revenge. He seems to know whom he’d choose for a suspect.’

‘Ah, yes, I see what you mean.’

They shared a grim smile. Warkannan turned away to find Arkazo, wearing only a pair of white trousers, standing in the hall that led back to the bedrooms. From a window sunlight fell across his pale brown chest in a stripe and left his face in shadow. The boy stood with his back against the door jamb as if he thought someone might attack him from behind.

‘It’s a horrible thing,’ Aiwaz repeated. ‘I’d best be on my way. A couple of other families need to hear the news.’

Warkannan showed him out, then turned back to his nephew. Arkazo took a couple of uncertain steps into the room, staring at Warkannan as if at a stranger.

‘You’re wondering how I could do such a thing,’ Warkannan said.

Arkazo nodded.

‘Because all our lives depended on it. Because our khan’s life depends on it.’

Arkazo looked away, his shoulders high as if he feared a blow. Warkannan could hear Lazzo clattering dishes in the kitchen. The sound seemed to ring as loud as gongs.

‘Do you still want to go along on this ride?’ Warkannan said at last.

‘Yes.’ Arkazo turned back to him. ‘I just –’ He paused for a long moment. ‘I didn’t realize it was – well – real before. I mean, the whole idea of riding east and all that. It seemed like one of those stories they tell in the coffee houses.’ He forced a twisted smile. ‘It sure as hell doesn’t feel like that any more.’

‘Good. This is going to be the hardest ride of your life. Remember that.’

‘I will, sir.’

‘Good. Now get something to eat and get dressed. We’ve got to get on the road.’

Arkazo nodded and trotted back down the hall to his room.

Once they were ready to leave, Warkannan attended to one last detail while Arkazo went to fetch their horses. He wrote a letter to Indan asking him to take care of Lazzo and gave it to the old servant to carry out to the villa.

‘It’ll be a long walk for you, Lazzo, but you don’t dare stay here once I’m gone. Indan will tell you why.’

Lazzo’s pouchy eyes widened in fear.

‘Don’t linger, no,’ Warkannan said. ‘Leave before sunset, just in case. Don’t worry about the furniture. The Chosen are welcome to it if they want it.’

Warkannan gave him a small bag of coins for the trip, then slung his saddlebags over his shoulder and strode out. Soon, if the Lord allowed, by bringing Jezro home he would be freeing Haz Kazrak from a madman.

Nehzaym heard about their departure later that same day. She was working on her payroll accounts out in the warehouse office when Lubahva arrived, her arms full of bags and boxes from the shops. She laid them down on the floor, dropped her grey veils on top of them, and pulled a high stool over to Nehzaym’s desk. She perched on it with a sigh and wiggled her feet as if her sandals pained her.

‘Idres and Arkazo are leaving today,’ Lubahva announced. ‘They wanted to get an early start, so I suppose they’re gone.’

‘Well, it’s a good bit after noon now,’ Nehzaym said. ‘I was beginning to worry about you.’

‘I know, I’m sorry. I had a lot of shopping to do for the secluded girls.’

‘All right.’ Nehzaym laid down her pen. ‘I’m glad that things are finally moving. The longer Soutan stayed in Haz Kazrak, the more anxious I got.’

‘I hope the Chosen don’t suspect Idres, is all. He’d never break under torture, but I bet he’d tell them everything to save his nephew from it.’

Nehzaym felt her stomach clench. There was so much to fear, and all the time. ‘That’s true. Kaz has always been more like Idres’ son than his nephew.’ Nehzaym turned her palms upward. ‘Inshallah.’

‘Yes, whatever the Lord wills.’ Lubahva paused, thinking. ‘Are we meeting again tonight? I don’t have a rehearsal, so I could come.’

‘I don’t think it’s wise. You came here last night, and you’ve been out of the palace all morning. The eunuchs might wonder about you if you stay out for the evening as well.’

‘I can tell them the truth. They know we meet for women’s prayers. I don’t have to tell them what we’re praying for.’

‘Yes, but the Chosen also know that Soutan’s part of my new business venture. I don’t want anyone adding things up.’

‘You’re right about that.’ Lubahva considered, sucking on her lower lip. ‘The Fourth Prophet. Do you truly think she’ll be female?’

‘That’s what the Sibyl’s prophecies tell us.’

‘But what if the mullahs are right, and she’s a demon?’

‘The mullahs condemn anything they don’t understand. Now remember: we can’t tell if the Fourth Prophet’s meant to come in our lifetime. All we can do is watch and wait.’

‘But – no, you’re right. I won’t carp any more. If she comes to us, she comes. Inshallah.’

‘Oh yes. Inshallah.’ Nehzaym suddenly smiled. ‘But if she does come, she’ll find us waiting.’

On their second day out of Haz Kazrak, Warkannan and Arkazo met up with Soutan in the little resort town of Samahgan, famous for its hot springs. So many people flowed into and out of its spas and medical clinics that no one would question why a retired cavalry officer and his ward would turn up at the same hotel as a foreigner like Soutan. Still, all three of them pretended to great surprise when they met in the dining room. Soutan made a show of insisting they eat with him.

‘It’s good to see a familiar face,’ Soutan said. ‘I’m leaving tomorrow, though.’ He paused, letting a waiter get within earshot. ‘I have to be back in Haz Kazrak to meet with the bankers.’

‘We’re moving on ourselves.’ Warkannan spoke clearly for the benefit of a passing group of customers. ‘Now that I’m retired, I’m going to visit my sister, Arkazo’s mother, that is. She lives up in Merrok.’

‘Give me the address. When I know how much working capital we can raise, I’ll send you a letter.’

The waiter, young and shiny clean in his loose white pants and white tunic, showed them to a low table surrounded by velvet cushions. Soutan had chosen an expensive establishment. The dining room held a good fifty tables placed on fine carpets. True-wood panels hung from the reed and bamboid walls. The men all sat, arranging themselves while a young servant girl dressed in a white shift brought warm water, towels, and a large basin. The waiter rattled off the evening’s menu as they washed their hands, then helped the girl carry the utensils away. Soutan leaned close to Warkannan and spoke quietly.

‘We’ve had great luck, or else the Great Khan has had very bad luck. Either might be possible.’

‘I suppose so, if you want to split hairs,’ Warkannan said. ‘What was it?’

‘I was in the marketplace yesterday when I saw two cavalrymen ride in. They were official messengers from the look of their saddlebags, and they rode straight to the fort here in town.’ Soutan paused, glancing around him. ‘I have ways of learning things. They were carrying messages to Blosk.’

‘I’m sure they would have told anyone who asked them that.’

‘Indeed? Would they and their fort commander tell anyone who asked what the messages said?’ Soutan paused for another look round. ‘One of my spirits followed them into the post. They were discussing a certain officer down on the border who’s about to get cashiered and turned out of the cavalry. Both of them thought the situation was odd for some reason.’

‘So?’ Arkazo leaned forward to interrupt. ‘What does that have to do –’

The waiter came back, bowing and smiling. They ordered, he bowed again, three, four times, then strode away at last.

‘If the Chosen are sending a man east,’ Soutan said to Arkazo, ‘he’d never make it across the Rift alone. This time of year the Tribes come to the border, and he might well be able to travel with one of them.’

Arkazo’s mouth framed an ‘oh’. The waiter came back with a large brass tray of appetizers and set them down with a flourish.

‘Your first course, gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Shall I bring coffee?’

‘No, not yet,’ Warkannan said. ‘At the end of the meal.’

With narrow eyes Soutan watched the waiter leave. ‘I wonder if that boy is just a waiter,’ he remarked. ‘Probably so.’

‘Probably.’ Warkannan allowed himself a brief smile. ‘We’ll talk more once we’re in our cottage. You can see what it’s like, Soutan, to live with the threat of the Chosen.’

‘Yes, I can. I can’t say I like it.’

After the meal they left the dining room and walked outside, heading for the gardens and their guest cottage. Beside the outer doors crouched a woman, her face bound with the black ribbons of widowhood. Two small children clung to her.

‘Charity, sirs?’ she whispered and held out trembling hands. ‘Charity, oh please?’

The others hurried past, but Warkannan stopped. Beggars here, in wealthy Samahgan, even here! He fished a couple of silver deenahs out of his pocket and pressed them into her hand.

‘May God provide better,’ he said. ‘And soon.’

Out to the east of the khanate, all of the grass grew purple. No one kept a garden or tilled a field on the other side of the sunset-coloured hills that marked the khanate’s border. A treaty dating back to Landfall forbade it, a pact so sacred that not even the ambitions of the Third Prophet could force the Kazraks to break it. Besides, without the open grasslands, there would be no horse-herds, and without a large number of horses the Kazraks would have no cavalry. All ambitions would become empty, then.

On the night that Warkannan was dining in Samahgan, the Tribes brought their stock into the border town of Blosk for the spring horse fair. The comnees, as the travelling groups were called, came out of the lavender grasslands, herding their horses ahead of them. Most rode, but some of the women drove rickety orange wagons, made of lashed-together bamboid, heaped with their possessions. Down by the river that flowed near town, they set up round tents stitched together in a patchwork of coloured saurskins and grey horsehair felt. In the meadows they tethered their horses with tasselled halters and drew the gaudy wagons into a circle. By the third day over a hundred tents stood in clusters out on the grass.

Children ran and played in the impromptu village while their parents brought out hoards of dried horse dung to fuel cooking fires or walked from tent to tent to greet old friends. Everyone talked about the trading ahead. The Great Khan’s gold bought the necessities that only farmers could supply, such as grain, soap, and lamp oil, as well as trinkets like brightly coloured cloth and gold jewellery. Men and women both wore gaudy belt buckles, brooches, and clasps for cloaks, cast or hammered into the shapes of mythological beasts, such as the stag, the wolf, and the lion.

Ammadin picked the spot for her maroon and grey tent on the edge of the encampment, a good distance from all this convivial chaos. In silent respect, the members of her comnee, sixteen extended families in all, raised her tent, carried her possessions over from the communal wagons, then left her alone. Inside she arranged her belongings: her roll of blankets, her leather-and-wood folding stool, her two cooking pots, and the four big grey-and-blue woven tent bags that held her clothes and tools. Her most precious belongings never travelled in the wagons. In saddlebags of purple leather she carried her spirit crystals, her silver talismans, and her feathered spirit wands. The god figures of her tribe had their own pair of saddlebags, lined in fine white cloth from the Cantons far to the east.

Ammadin was arranging the god figures on their red-and-white striped rug when Maradin crawled through the tent flap. A blonde, handsome woman with skin the colour of gold, Maradin was the only person who dared enter Ammadin’s tent uninvited. She pressed her palms together and bowed to the god figures, squat stone carvings, wrapped in coloured thread and decorated with feathers and precious stones. Only then did she speak.

‘Dallador bought some mutton, and he’s making stew. Do you want to come eat with us?’

‘Yes, thanks. Have the Kazraks got here yet?’

‘A couple of their officers rode up a few minutes ago. Apanador’s taken them into his tent for some keese.’

In front of Maradin’s tent, pieced together from mottled purple and white skins, her husband Dallador was cutting chunks of meat from a haunch and putting them into an iron kettle. Their three-year-old son sat on the ground nearby and watched him. A good-looking fellow with hair so pale it was almost white, Dallador was dressed in the usual leather trousers of the Tribes and a red-and-blue cloth shirt; his belt had a palm-sized gold buckle in the shape of a horse, its legs tucked up, its head turned as if it were looking behind it.

‘I hear the Kazraks are in the mood to buy,’ Dallador said. ‘Are you going to sell that pair of greys?’

‘If they’re stupid enough to take them,’ Maradin said. ‘I’ll give them a dose of herbs before I bring them over.’

While Dallador tended the stew pot, Maradin brought out wooden drinking bowls and a leather skin of keese, a liquor made of fermented mare’s milk. She was pouring it round when Palindor strolled up to the fire. A handsome, almost pretty young man with strikingly large blue eyes and coppery skin, Palindor smiled once at Ammadin, then squatted down beside Dallador.

‘I invited Palindor to eat with us,’ Maradin announced.

Ammadin felt like kicking her – she was match-making again, damn her! Palindor accepted a bowl of keese with a murmured ‘thank you’ and looked at the ground. As an unmarried man, he had no standing in the comnee and no horses but the one his mother had given him to ride. He did, however, have a fine reputation as a warrior in the endless squabbles and raids that went on between the comnees. One of the bravest of the brave, men said of him, and as good with the long knife as he was with the bow. For the sake of that, Ammadin did her best to be pleasant to him during the meal.

By the time they were done eating, the skin of keese was empty, and Dallador brought out another. As he was refilling Palindor’s bowl, he splashed keese on the back of his unsteady hand.

‘Dallo?’ Maradin said.

‘I know. I’ve had enough.’ Dallador handed the skin to Palindor, then began licking the spilled keese off his hand while he smiled, heavy-lidded, at Maradin, who smiled back as languidly as if she were drunk herself.

All through the camp, fires glowed like golden blossoms among the tents. Here and there, men began to sing to the dahsimmer, a three-stringed instrument, one for the melody, two for the drone. Every time he had a sip of keese, Palindor would look at Ammadin so longingly that she realized that he was in love with her, not merely greedy for the horses a wife would bring him. Ye gods! she thought. What’s he doing, taking lessons from Dallo? She got up, excused herself, and went to her tent. Before she closed the flap, she listened for a moment to the clear strong voices of the men, singing of the two things they loved above all else: the hunt and war.

About an hour after dawn, the Kazrak officers rode down from the fort in Blosk to start the day’s haggling. The women and girls cut the horses they wanted to sell out of the herds and brought them down to the riverbank in a snorting, prancing procession. Their husbands and brothers stood nearby to make sure the Kazraks treated their women with the proper respect. Every man had the short curved bow slung over his back and in his belt, the leaf-blades steel knife, about eighteen inches long, that marked a man as an adult. In their red tunics, buttoned tight with silver pegs, and grey wool trousers, the Kazrak officers moved stiffly, their backs as straight as arrows.

When Ammadin brought down two bay geldings from her herd, the comnee women fell back to let her have the first place in line. A dark young officer introduced himself to her as Brison and began to examine the bays. He ran practised hands down their legs and over their chests, then looked into their mouths.

‘Four-year-olds, huh?’

‘Yes, and halter-broken.’

‘Very well. A gold imperial each.’

‘Two each.’

Brison hesitated, looking at her cloak, the entire black and purple mottled skin of a slasher saur, and a big specimen at that. Even for a comnee woman Ammadin was tall, but although she had the saur’s front paws clasped at her neck, the middle feet hung well below her belt and the hind set trailed behind her on the ground. Apparently Brison had been on the border long enough to know what the cloak signified.

‘Very well.’ He motioned to another officer. ‘Give the Holy One what she asked for.’

The assistant counted four gold imperials out of a cloth sack and handed them over. Ammadin put them in the pocket of her leather trousers and walked away without another word.

During the day, other comnees rode up to join the camp. The fair would go on for weeks, though it would migrate as the horses ate down the grass. Outside the town, which lay across the only hill for miles in this part of the grasslands, booths built of bundled rushes stood side by side with peddlers who spread their goods out on old blankets and shepherds selling raw fleeces and baskets of rough-spun yarn. Women hawking food in baskets mingled with the crowd; here and there, a juggler or story-teller performed for a clot of onlookers. Round it all swarmed the tiny flying yellabuhs, scavenging on scraps and spills.

That afternoon Ammadin and Maradin strolled through the market, looked everything over before they bought anything, and stopped every now and then for a cup of Borderland wine, which tasted as light as water for someone used to keese. Since their First Prophet had specifically forbidden wine, the Kazraks weren’t supposed to drink it, of course, but here and there a drunken cavalryman staggered through the fair. Ammadin bought fine coloured threads, glass beads, and dyed hen’s feathers to use in making magic charms. Maradin bought lengths of striped cloth, woven from the fine light thread spun in the water-powered mills of Kazrajistan. She lingered over a tray of brass buttons.

‘I should get some of these for Dallador,’ she said.

‘Why?’ Ammadin said. ‘You spoil him, you know, always fussing over him, always buying him things.’

‘Well, I happen to love him.’ Maradin hesitated, then turned away from the button seller’s booth.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ammadin said. ‘Something is.’

Maradin shrugged, and they walked a few steps on. ‘I just get so jealous when women look at him,’ she said at last. ‘I remember when I asked him to marry me, and Mama warned me that watching other women chase him would break my heart. She was right. He’s not the most handsome man in the world, but there’s just something about him. Women do flirt with him. You must have noticed.’

‘It would be hard not to.’

‘After all, you –’

‘That was before you were married.’

‘I know, just teasing.’ Maradin paused for one of her wicked grins. ‘It’s odd, isn’t it? If you looked at him and Palindor together, you’d think, oh, Palino’s so handsome, Dallo’s not. But there’s something cold about Palindor.’

‘Yes, cold and hard, like a face on a Kazraki coin.’

‘But my husband –’ Maradin hesitated, biting her lower lip. ‘My husband’s as warm as a winter fire. I was so proud when he said he’d marry me. Now, I worry all the time.’

‘Has he ever taken any of these women up on their offer?’

‘No. I just keep thinking he’ll meet someone with more horses.’

‘Maddi! Do you honestly think he’d leave you?’

‘I don’t know. I don’t think so. I just get so jealous and sulky. And then I say things.’

‘Things you regret?’

Maradin nodded, looking away.

‘What about the men?’ Ammadin said. ‘There was that fellow the last time we rode to Nannes –’

‘Oh, that doesn’t bother me. He can’t get them pregnant, and they don’t have any horses.’

Ammadin knew two kinds of spells and charms, those that worked because they had magic, and those that worked because the wearer thought they did. Love charms fell into the latter category, but usually they did their job.

‘I’ll bind you a charm,’ Ammadin said. ‘You can wear it on a thong under your shirt. When you feel jealous, take it out and hold it in your hand, and it will soak up the jealousy.’

‘Thank you!’ Maradin turned to her with a brilliant smile. ‘I should have brought this to you earlier.’

Before heading back to the encampment they stopped for a last cup of wine. Nearby a juggler sent four saur eggs spinning through the air, but the crowd at the wine booth was talking about a different kind of show to be held that afternoon. One of the officers in the fort was going to be publicly cashiered.

‘I’ll bet they waited until the fair to do it,’ a local weaver told them. ‘What’s the good of shaming a man if there’s no one to watch it, eh?’

‘Well, true, I suppose,’ Maradin said. ‘What’s he done?’

‘I wouldn’t know. They flog a man for any little thing out here on the border.’

When the weaver drifted away, Maradin turned to Ammadin.

‘Let’s go back to camp. I don’t have the stomach for things like that.’

‘Well, you can go back. I’m going to stay and watch.’

‘Ammi! Ugh! How can you?’

‘I’m curious, that’s all. I don’t understand the Kazraks, I never have, but I should, you know. We all should. They’re dangerous.’

At that Maradin hesitated, but in the end she left, taking Ammadin’s purchases back for her. Ammadin followed the crowd up to the town itself.

Out in front of the thorn walls of the big square fort lay the typical Kazraki public square, a bleak gravelled ground with a stone pillar standing in the centre. Already onlookers lined three sides, jostling for the best view. Things were dull in Blosk. To the sound of a silver horn, the true-wood gates swung open. A contingent of a dozen men marched a young Kazrak officer out to the six-sided pillar while others ordered the pressing crowd to stay back. Ammadin, who was caught against the wall of a house, climbed up on a trash barrel so she could see over the crowd.

Marked by the golden scabbard at his side and the narrow gold stripe down the sleeves of his tunic, the fort commander marched over to the unfortunate officer. At his barked orders, two of the troopers bound the officer’s wrists together with one end of a long rope, then tossed the other end over an iron hook embedded halfway up the pillar. When they pulled, they strung him up like a saur carcass hung to bleed so that his feet barely touched the ground. To steady himself the officer had to stretch himself out into a perfect target. Ammadin was close enough to get a good look at him: a handsome man for a Kazrak, with dark curly hair and black eyes above prominent cheekbones. His skin was a rich brown, darker than most of his people. While the commander conferred with the troopers, he stared out in front of him, his face utterly expressionless.

When she heard someone call her name, Ammadin looked round to see Brison, walking up to her unsteady perch on the barrel. He raised his hand palm out in the Kazrak gesture of respect.

‘So, the Holy One has come to watch?’ Brison said.

‘The show was here, so I thought I’d see it. What’s he done?’

‘It’s a strange story. When it was time for my unit to ride here for the fair, we were told to take him with us. He’d volunteered for the horse-buying unit, and I couldn’t figure out why anyone would. But a message came in that explained it all. Bad news for poor old Zayn. He’d been sleeping with the wife of this high-and-mighty court official back home, you see, and he figured he had to get out of the hot water before it boiled.’ Brison paused to give Ammadin a wink. ‘He didn’t jump quick enough. Her husband knew about it already, and he pulled strings.’

‘What? You’ll flog a man for that?’

‘Adultery’s against the laws of the Prophets.’ Brison paused for a sly grin. ‘Besides, this old boy has favours to give away, like a reassignment off this damned border.’

Out in the square, the commander yelled for silence. He ceremoniously pulled the sabre, inlaid with the golden crescent, from Zayn’s scabbard and threw it on the ground. Zayn set his lips tight and stared out at nothing while the commander unbuckled the sword belt and threw it after the sabre. He took a dagger from his belt, grabbed the hem of Zayn’s tunic, and slit it up the back and across the sleeves so that he could pull off the last trace of the khanate’s insignia and leave Zayn half-naked where he hung.

‘The man who disgraces his regiment disgraces the Great Khan,’ the commander said. ‘A man who dishonours the reputation of the cavalry will have no honour in any man’s eyes.’

Zayn allowed himself a small bitter smile. The commander stepped back and motioned to a trooper. As the trooper unrolled his long leather whip, the crowd pressed closer.

‘Begin,’ the commander said.

The braided leather thongs uncoiled and hissed through the air to snake across Zayn’s bare back. Blood welled up in a thin, precise stripe. Zayn’s eyes flickered briefly. Over and over the whip struck, lacing his back with lines of blood. Once he winced; once he made a stifled grunt; slowly his face turned from brown to a muddy grey. Other than that, the bloody stripes might have been no more than the slap of a gloved hand. At the tenth blow, Brison swore and turned away with a shake of his head, but Ammadin watched fascinated. The Tribes admired a man able to bear this kind of pain.

The whip uncurled and flew to him again and again – eleven, twelve, thirteen. Zayn’s dark eyes stared fixedly at some distant point, but his face was so pale that Ammadin was afraid that he’d break yet. His back was nothing but blood; the whip bit into old wounds each time it fell. Nineteen, twenty – Zayn tossed his head and grunted under his breath.

‘Enough!’ the commander barked. ‘The Great Khan’s justice is done.’

Zayn gathered his breath in a long gulp. ‘Is it?’ His voice cracked and wavered, but he spoke again. ‘You hypocrite!’

The commander snarled like an animal. He raised his arm and turned to the trooper, as if he was going to order a few more stripes, but Ammadin laughed loudly enough for him to hear. He shot a black look her way and said nothing. The panting trooper stepped back and began to clean the blood-soaked whip on a bit of rag. Two others stepped forward. One threw a bucket of water over Zayn’s back; the other cut him down. Zayn staggered, stumbled, then pulled himself upright by an effort of will. He even managed to smile at the two troopers when one caught his arm to steady him, a cold bitter smile of blazing hatred that made them step back and leave him alone. At the commander’s order, the other troopers came forward and dumped a bedroll and a pair of saddlebags at Zayn’s feet. The commander shoved a tiny pouch of what looked like coins into his hand.

‘There’s your exile’s wages,’ the commander said. ‘Walk wherever you want, but get out of my sight. You have three days to leave Blosk.’

Zayn looked at him, then bent over to pick up the gear on the ground. Ammadin caught her breath; she was expecting him to fall and faint, but slowly and carefully he straightened up again with the load in his arms. With the blood still running on his back, he turned and staggered off. The crowd began to jeer, yelling insults as they moved out of his way, but he held his head high and walked on. Ammadin jumped off her barrel and followed him. When she passed, the crowd fell silent.

Slowly, one painful step at a time, Zayn made his way out of the public square and turned down a narrow alley. He began panting for breath, and at times he staggered, but he kept walking until he’d left the crowd behind. He dropped his gear on the dusty street and leaned against the wall of a house.

‘Zayn?’ Ammadin said.

When he turned his head to look at her, he moved too fast and fell to his knees. Ammadin squatted down in front of him and spoke in the Kazraki language.

‘That’s your name, isn’t it? Zayn?’

For a moment he merely stared at her; then his mouth twitched as if he wanted to smile. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘Zayn Hassan.’

‘Do you have anywhere to go?’

‘No.’

‘Come with me if you want. I can use a man like you to tend my horses.’

He reached out a hand twined round with a runnel of blood and touched the edge of her saurskin cloak. ‘A witchwoman. Why would you bother helping the likes of me?’

‘Because you’ve got guts. And it seems a little harsh to be treated this way for bedding a woman who wanted you.’

Zayn managed a thin smile.

‘I thought so.’

He fainted, falling at her feet. Ammadin got up and went to the mouth of the alley. Out in the street four young comnee men hurried along, heading for the centre of town. She recognized none of them.

‘You!’ Ammadin called. ‘Come over here!’

They stopped, scowling, turned, hands on knife hilts. The tallest of them suddenly smiled.

‘It’s a spirit rider,’ he said. ‘We’re coming, Holy One. What do you want us to do?’

‘Carry this man and his gear back to my camp.’

The four trotted over and did what she asked.

Ammadin had them lay Zayn face-down in the grass behind her tent, then sent for Orador, the man who knew wound lore. He was a portly man, Orador, with a long drooping moustache, mostly grey, and a round face to match his belly. A young apprentice brewed herb-water at Ammadin’s fire while the master looked over Zayn’s wounds. Carefully he washed the blood off Zayn’s back with the herb-water, then poured keese over the stripes. When the liquor hit, Zayn’s fingers dug into the grass like a saur’s claws, but he made no noise at all.

‘That’ll keep the evil spirits away,’ Orador said cheerfully. ‘No bandages for you, boy. Air’s the best thing for these shallow wounds, and the bleeding’s stopped already.’

With a long sigh, Zayn turned his head and looked at Ammadin, hunkered down near him in the grass. His eyes were as distant from his pain as if he were merely taking the sun.

‘How soon can he ride?’ Ammadin said.

‘Today if I have to,’ Zayn whispered.

Orador laughed under his breath. ‘I like your guts, but you’ll need to rest for a couple of days, at least.’

‘Easy enough,’ Ammadin said. ‘The comnee won’t be riding for a while. When we do leave, Zayn, we’ll be heading east.’

‘Good.’ Zayn smiled briefly. ‘I’ve always been curious about the east.’

All at once, Ammadin felt danger, an odd intuition that seemed to rise out of no particular cause. For a moment she considered Zayn, lying utterly still in his exhaustion, his back as raw as a piece of freshly butchered meat. The warning came to her as the scent of anger. Puzzled, she stood up and found Palindor standing nearby with his arms crossed tightly over his chest. When he caught her glance, he turned on his heel and strode off. So that’s it! Ammadin thought. Well, I can handle a jealous young colt like him easy enough. She left Zayn under Orador’s care and went to find Apanador to tell him that she had a servant and the comnee a new rider.

After they left Samahgan, Warkannan led his men north rather than straight east, just as if he were indeed going to visit Arkazo’s family in their country villa. In this province, Zerribir, the larder of Kazrajistan, the land stretched out flat in a broad valley, all gold and red with crops – wheatian, oil beans, breadmoss, vegetables – tended by farmers who lived in white-washed cottages set among the rosy fields.

Graceful mosques, built of white-washed true-oak and adorned with minarets, rose out of the magenta view. Five times a day they heard the call to prayer, either carried on the wind from a distant spire or close at hand from a wayside shrine. They would dismount and stand in the road, holding their horses’ reins in one hand while they raised the other to point towards the sky, just as the Second Prophet had taught his people to pray when they were outside. Soutan would stand to one side, watching. One late afternoon Warkannan had enough of seeing him sneer.

‘And just what are you smirking about?’ Warkannan said.

‘Nothing.’ Soutan wiped the smile off his face. ‘Tell me something, Captain. Do you know what you’re pointing at?’

‘Of course. The holy city of Mekka.’

‘Which exists up in the air, floating along?’

‘Don’t be stupid! It’s a symbol of Paradise, where Mohammed’s soul went when he died.’

‘Ah. What would you say if I told you it was a real city, made of wood and vines like any other?’

Warkannan considered a number of blunt insults but discarded them. ‘Of course it was,’ he said instead. ‘Back in the Homelands somewhere. In a desert, if I remember rightly. That doesn’t mean it can’t have some sort of symbolic meaning as well.’

‘Yes, it was in a desert.’ Arkazo joined in. ‘And it was made of stones and mortar, not vines. They didn’t have as many earthquakes back in the Homelands.’

‘Very good.’ Soutan favoured him with a small smile. ‘There may be more to your mind than I thought.’

Arkazo’s face brightened with rage, but Warkannan cut him off. ‘Let’s get going,’ he snapped. ‘I want to make a few more miles before sunset.’

In this flat country the well-kept roads made travelling easy. Warkannan and his men managed a good twenty-five miles a day at a smooth, steady walk. Now and again they pulled their horses to the side of the road to allow a closed carriage to clatter past, drawn by four matched horses, carrying the womenfolk of some rich man behind its curtained windows. More often the roads ran beside canals, where they saw horse-drawn narrowboats glide by, piled high with produce.

‘It’s peaceful here,’ Soutan remarked one morning. ‘Peaceful and prosperous.’

‘For now it is,’ Warkannan said. ‘If there’s another round of new taxes, I don’t know what people are going to eat. The salt tax has damn near broken the farmers as it is. They have to work out in the sun, and salt’s no luxury to them. That’s something that Gemet will never understand, the greedy bastard – hard work and what it does to a man.’

‘Unfortunately, you’re quite right. I have no doubt that Jezro will take a very different view of the matter.’

‘Neither do I. God blessed us when He spared Jezro.’

‘As he damn well should, considering all the trouble you people have gone to for his sake.’

‘Now just what do you mean by that?’

‘Only that you left the Homelands to come here. Haven’t you ever wondered about those Homelands, Captain?’

Warkannan considered as they rode past a long maroon field of vegetables. Out among the rows farmers were harvesting, cutting leaves and piling them high in baskets. He could hear them singing as they worked.

‘From what I understand,’ Warkannan said at last, ‘we’re a lot better off here. The Homelands were filled with infidels and evil magic. It was so bad that the great Mullah Agvar was afraid the true faith would be lost.’

Soutan rolled his eyes heavenward. ‘No doubt that’s what you’ve been taught. Don’t you ever wonder if it’s true?’

‘No. Why would I? The mullahs are the ones who have all the old books and such. They’d know the truth.’

‘Maybe. What if they’re not telling the truth, though?’

‘Why wouldn’t they?’

‘To keep you from regretting what you’ve lost, the Homelands, I mean.’

‘Why would I regret a pack of filthy infidels and their tame demons?’

Soutan looked at him for a long moment, eyes wide in exaggerated amazement. ‘You belong in a museum, Captain,’ he said finally. ‘A pure example of a pure type.’

‘Now, watch it, Soutan!’

Soutan flinched as if he expected a blow. ‘Sorry. Didn’t mean to be insulting.’

Warkannan snorted, then changed the subject.

As they travelled north, they stopped now and then at a cavalry fort to see if they could pick up gossip or news that might point them to the Chosen’s spy. Warkannan’s twenty years of service had left him with plenty of friends, many of them stationed at one or the other of the chain of cavalry forts that bound the khanate together. It was at Haz Anjilar that he heard more about the officer cashiered out at Blosk.

Warkannan had left Soutan and Arkazo at the inn and gone alone to pay a courtesy call upon the commander, a colonel named Hikko who had once shared a border posting with him. Over glasses of arak, they agreed that the cavalry wasn’t what it used to be, that the young officers nowadays were slack and ill-educated, and that the enlisted men lacked a proper respect for authority.

‘What we need,’ Hikko said, ‘is a war. A good long campaign against the ChaMeech – now that would weed out the unfit. There’d be none of this lying around the barracks and arguing with the sergeants then.’

‘Can’t blame the men, I suppose,’ Warkannan said. ‘When you consider what they’ve got for officers.’

‘Now that’s true.’ Hikko shook his bald head sadly. ‘I’ve got a story along those lines. A fellow named Zayn Hassan. Everyone said he had a brilliant career ahead of him. He was stationed in Bariza, on his way up, but he couldn’t keep his hands off of some official’s wife.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He ended up cashiered, that’s what. Down in Blosk, they flogged him and turned him out. A comnee took him in, apparently. But you know what’s damned odd? No one knows the name of this very important cuckold or his wife. You’d think the womenfolk would have spread the gossip over half the khanate.’

Warkannan found himself very sober very fast. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘You’d think so. How many lashes did this Hassan get?’

‘Twenty.’

While Hikko poured himself more arak, Warkannan considered the matter. Twenty stripes – the thought made him wince. Would the Chosen inflict them on one of their own just to make his story more convincing? Possibly, considering what they were, but not likely. When Hikko offered him the bottle, Warkannan shook his head.

‘I’ve had plenty, thanks. You know, the husband in the Hassan case could have spread money around to keep his name out of it. Who wants to be known as a cuckold?’

‘Now that’s true. And the fellow must have been rich as a khan to get the cavalry to take his revenge for him.’

‘Rich or well-connected.’

‘That too. Damned poor way to run an army, letting civilians meddle with discipline, but there you are.’

Warkannan found himself thinking about Zayn Hassan as he walked back to the inn. Something about the story nagged at him. He kept coming back to the lack of names and realized that the tale required more detail to be fully convincing as juicy gossip. Still, Blosk lay nearly four hundred miles to the south, while Haz Evol, where their other suspect had turned up, stood only a hundred and eighty to the east. Warkannan decided they’d best stick with their original plan.

On the morrow they left Haz Anjilar early. Some five miles along the khan’s highway they rode up to an intersection where a square-cut stone pillar stood in a little island at the cross of the roads. Carved arrows pointed north to Merrok, west to Kazrikki-on-Sea, south back the way they’d come, and east to Haz Evol and the border. They paused their horses beside the pillar, and Warkannan pointed to the north road.

‘All right, Arkazo,’ he said. ‘What do you say you keep riding north and take some letters to your mother for me?’

‘No!’ Arkazo’s face flushed scarlet. ‘You said I could come! I mean, with all due respect, Uncle.’

Warkannan laughed. ‘Respect, huh? All right, Nephew. I wanted to give you one last chance to stay out of this.’

Arkazo shook his head, glaring at him all the while.

‘All right,’ Warkannan said. ‘I’ll just have to pray that your mother forgives me.’

They reined their horses to the east and rode off, heading for the border. Not far along the east-running road the land began rising in a long slope. Ahead a ripple of purple hills stood at the horizon like a fort wall, guarding the civilized life they were about to leave behind.

‘And beyond them lie the plains,’ Warkannan said to Arkazo. ‘And the ChaMeech. It’s a damned shame the Third Prophet didn’t wipe them out when he had the chance. Kaleel Mahmet, blessed be his name of course, but I can’t help wishing he’d driven them across the plains and slaughtered the lot.’

‘Indeed?’ Soutan snapped. ‘They’re not animals, Captain. They have language, they have feelings.’

‘So?’ Warkannan turned in the saddle to look at him. ‘They also have weapons, and they’ll use them on any H’mai they can.’

‘Horseshit! Do they ever attack the Tribes?’

‘Oh all right, then. They use them on any Kazrak they can.’

‘Now, that’s true enough. Of course, they feel they have reason to. Your southern provinces were theirs, originally.’

‘Well, hell, they weren’t using the land. They turned up there maybe once a year if that.’

‘They don’t farm. Their culture needs land for other things.’

‘Like what? Strolling around admiring the ocean view?’

Soutan rolled his eyes heavenward and sighed with great drama. ‘No, but I doubt if I can convince you,’ he said. ‘There are advantages to seeing things simply, I suppose.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Think about it, Captain, think about it.’ Soutan smiled, then nudged his horse with one foot and pulled ahead to end the conversation.

Warkannan exchanged a look of disgust with Arkazo. They rode on without speaking.

Like all members of the Chosen, Zayn Hassan – whose real name was Zahir Benumar – possessed odd talents that set him apart from normal human beings, but something prosaic had recommended him for this particular mission. Before the Chosen had discovered his existence, Zayn had spent six years on the border in the regular cavalry, where he’d known Idres Warkannan well, a useful thing in the eyes of his superiors, and the reason that they hadn’t simply arrested the circle around Councillor Indan and his mysterious sorcerer. When Zayn had insisted that Warkannan would never involve himself in anything the least bit illegal, his superior officers had accepted his opinion, then decided that he was the ideal person to piece together information about Yarl Soutan and Warkannan’s investment group.

Zayn had also learned the Tribes’ language, Hirl-Onglay, which he spoke with no noticeable Kazraki accent. He had a knack for learning that went far beyond any abstract intelligence. Just from meeting comnee women at the horse fairs he had soaked up more information about their customs than ten Kazraki scholars might have done. He knew, for instance, that the comnees admired a man with endurance and that they’d see his supposed adultery as no crime at all. All his superiors had to do was to ensure that his little charade got itself played out at a horse fair. So far, the plan was working splendidly; he’d even had the sheer good luck to be rescued by a shaman, a spirit rider as the Tribes called them.

But many times in the following days, Zayn had to admit that he had never realized just how much that flogging was going to cost him. He had seen men flogged during his days in the cavalry, but they had endured a few quick stripes, four at the most, delivered by a man who knew them and who kept the lashes as light as he could while his commander watched. Their ordeal had been nothing like his.

That first day Zayn could barely stand, and in fact, Orador insisted he lie prone. The pain burned on his back like a fire dancing on oil. Although he could keep control of his own actions, the world around him ceased to make much sense. People came and went, their voices came and went, the sunlight fell or shadows deepened. Orador’s round face would suddenly swim into his field of vision. His broad, scar-flecked hands would shove a piece of leather between Zayn’s teeth for him to bite on, then drizzle stinging keese over the wounds. When Zayn came round from the resulting faint, the apprentice’s hands, slender but still calloused and scarred, would hold a bowl of water so he could drink. Afterwards Zayn would sleep, only to dream of the flogging all over again and wake in a cold sweat.

Finally, somewhere around noon of the second day he realized that the pain was lessening. He was lying on his stomach in Ammadin’s tent when Orador came in, looked over the wounds, and told him that they were scabbing up ‘nicely’, as the healer put it. While they throbbed, they had stopped burning.

‘Don’t sit up yet,’ Orador said. ‘I don’t want you breaking them open again.’

‘Don’t worry,’ Zayn said. ‘Thank you, by the way.’

‘You’re welcome. I’ll be back around sunset.’

‘Wait – can you tell me something? I had a bedroll and some saddlebags when I left the fort.’

‘It’s all right here.’ Orador glanced around, then pointed. ‘Over there by the tent flap. Nobody’s opened them.’

‘Thanks.’ Zayn let out his breath in a long sigh of relief. He carried things in those bags that he wanted no one to see, lock picks and other tools better suited to a thief than a soldier. During his initiation into the Chosen, he’d learned that they’d started out back in the Homelands as special military personnel called commandos during dangerous wars that threatened the existence of entire countries. Now, the battles all seemed to be against their own people, though always, or so he’d been told, in service to the laws of the Great Khan.

After Orador left, Zayn stretched his arms out to either side and laid his face against the blanket under him. He found himself wondering yet again what had made him come up with this wretched idea. It’s for the Great Khan, he told himself, and for the honour of the Chosen. The Chosen had become his whole life and his reason to live. Before his initiation he had been nothing, worthless – worse than worthless, a man set apart by evil secrets. They had rescued him, or so he saw it, and he owed them any amount of suffering in return. He fell asleep to dream that once again he stood bound to the pillar of blue quartz in the fiery room, a masked officer’s glowing knife at his throat, to swear his vow to the Chosen and the Great Khan.

Voices – women’s voices – woke him from the dream. Just outside Ammadin was talking with someone, discussing the horse fair. In a few minutes the other voice stopped, and the Spirit Rider lifted the tent flap and came in, carrying a roll of cloth in one hand. She knelt beside him with a thoughtful glance at his back.

‘Orador says you’re healing,’ Ammadin said.

‘I am, Holy One,’ Zayn said. ‘I can think again.’

‘That’s always good.’ She flashed a brief smile. ‘Don’t push yourself too hard.’ She laid a blue-and-green striped shirt down by his head. ‘This is for you. Don’t put it on until you can stand the feel of it, though.’

‘Thanks. I won’t, don’t worry.’

‘Those cavalry trousers of yours are stained all down the back with blood. Other than that, are they still wearable?’

‘Oh yes. I’ll wash them when I can. I’ve got another pair anyway. And I’ve got a hat for riding.’

‘Good. I’ll let you get back to sleep now.’

Zayn stayed awake, however, to rehearse his new identity. He’d invented all the details of his supposed affair with the official’s wife, just in case someone demanded them. He spent a long time drilling himself on the story, along with his new name. Over and over he repeated, both silently and whispered, ‘Zahir Benumar is dead. I am Zayn Hassan.’ By nightfall he believed it.

When Orador finally allowed him to walk around, Zayn discovered that eighty-three people rode with Ammadin’s comnee, ranging in age from two infants to white-haired Veradin, who at ninety could still ride a horse, provided her great-granddaughter helped her mount. With the single exception of Ammadin, all the women were closely related, but the adult men had all come from other comnees. Even so, the men tended to look much alike. To the eyes of most Kazraks, the people of the Tribes all looked alike, men and women both, with their light-coloured hair and pale eyes, fine noses and thin lips, but a trained observer like Zayn could see plenty of differences.

Zayn pretended to make mistakes anyway and endured some good-natured laughter at his expense. One mistake, however, was an honest one. He came out of Ammadin’s tent and saw a young man walking past – Dallador, he thought, and hailed him as such. The fellow turned and laughed.

‘I’m his cousin,’ he said. ‘Name’s Grenidor.’

‘My mistake!’ Zayn said. ‘I’m sorry.’

As they shook hands, Zayn studied his face. He could have been Dallador’s twin.

‘Your mothers were sisters?’ Zayn said.

‘No, we’re much more distantly related than that.’ Grenidor frowned, thinking. ‘Our grandmothers had the same mother. I think. You’d better ask Dallo.’

‘Oh, doesn’t matter.’

And yet, Zayn felt, it did matter, that two men so distantly related would look so much alike.

After two more days of doing very little, Zayn’s back healed enough for him to take over the job of leading Ammadin’s horses to water; she owned a stallion, fifteen brood mares, four saddle-broken geldings, and twelve colts and fillies. One of the geldings, a sorrel with a white off-fore, would be his riding horse, she told him, for as long as he was her servant. When, some few days later, the comnee packed up and left Blosk, Zayn could ride well enough to keep up with the communal herd and watch over her stock.

Like all comnee men, he was expected to do the cooking for those in his tent. Since Dallador had gone out of his way to befriend him, Zayn asked him to teach him.

‘I don’t know a damn thing about cooking. Back home food is women’s work.’

‘You can’t eat very well, then. What do women know about preparing game?’

‘Well, we don’t eat much game. Sheep and chickens – that’s about it for meat.’

Dallador rolled his eyes in disgust. ‘Not much of a cuisine. Well, come watch me when I’m cooking. You’ll catch on quick enough.’

‘Thanks. I appreciate it. I don’t even know what’s edible out here. We had servants in the officers’ mess who took care of all that.’

Dallador laughed. ‘First lesson: don’t eat anything until I’ve told you it’s not poisonous.’

Since the comnee was hurrying to reach the summer grazing grounds, they never made a full camp at night, but they always raised Ammadin’s tent, because it housed the god figures, they told him, and the chief’s splendid white and red tent, because he was the chief and no reason more. After a meal at one fire or another, Zayn would take his bedroll and go sleep in the summer grass. In the morning he would return, toss his bedroll into a wagon, and make a fire to cook breadmoss porridge. Ammadin would join him, eat in silence, and then, after a few words about the horses, she would leave, saddling one of the geldings and riding alone in advance of the comnee.

In their brief times together, Zayn studied her. Unlike the rest of the comnee women, she wore little jewellery, only a true-hawk feather hanging from a gold stud in one ear. Her long, blonde hair was bound up in heavy braids, like a crown over her soft, bronzed face, oddly pretty and sensual for such a solitary soul. Her eyes, however, showed nothing but the hardness of someone who keeps a distance from the world. Fittingly enough they were the pale grey of steel.

Zayn had no idea of what to think of her magic, but everyone in the comnee believed in it. Ammadin would at times make them charms out of coloured thread and the chitinous portions of various native insects, ‘bugs’ as the first settlers had indiscriminately called the smaller life-forms that came their way. Most of the horses in the herd had bluebuh-claw charms in their halters to ward off lameness and colic; the children in the comnee all wore thongs full of reebuh charms around their necks to keep them healthy and free from evil spirits. Since the good health of the Tribes was legendary, and they had nothing between them and illness but the charms, Zayn could only conclude that somehow or other, the magic worked.

The comnee had been travelling nearly a week before he saw hard evidence that Ammadin did know things beyond the reach of ordinary people. Although the sun shone warm in a clear sky, she announced that it was going to rain.

‘When that happens, we’ll make a real camp and set up all the tents. You can sleep in mine, but you sleep on your side and me on mine. Understand?’

‘Never would I offend you, Holy One.’

During the day’s ride, Zayn would occasionally look up at the clear sky and wonder what Ammadin would say when the sunset came dry. He never found out, because in the middle of the afternoon the wind picked up, rushing in from the south and making the tall grass bow and ripple like the waves of a purple sea. Ammadin galloped back to the comnee; she rode up and down the line of march to shout orders to make camp. When Zayn looked to the south, he saw clouds piling up white and ominously thick on the horizon. By the time the comnee found a decent campsite near a stream, the sky was filling with thunderheads, racing in before the wind.

Everyone rushed to set up the tents and bring the wagons round into a circle. They unloaded the wagons, piled everything helter-skelter into the tents, then ran to tether the horses. The rain began in a warning spatter of big drops. The women as well as the men kept their shirts dry by stripping them off and tossing them into a tent. Just as they finished tethering the stock, the rain began to fall in sheets, sweeping across the open plains like slaps from a hand. The women clustered around Ammadin to ask her if there was going to be lightning that might panic the herds.

‘I don’t know yet, but I’ll find out. Zayn, you can go get dry.’

Zayn trotted back to her tent. He crawled in, stripped the worst of the water out of his hair, and let himself drip a bit before he put his dry shirt back on. Although a few drops came in the smokehole in the centre of the tent, the leather baffles kept the worst of it out. Zayn was pleased with the tents. About twelve feet across, they were solid, dry, and good to look at, too. It wasn’t a bad way to live, he decided, owning only what you could carry. He set to work sorting out their bedrolls, the woven tent bags that hung from hooks on the walls, the floor cloths of thick horsehair felt. When he tried to lay the floor cloths out, the tall grass sprang up and made them billow. He was swearing and trying to tread it down when Dallador joined him.

‘I thought you’d need some help. There’s a sickle in one of the tent bags. You cut the grass and pile it up under your blankets.’

Although the sickle had a bronze blade, not a steel one, it cut grass well enough. Thread-like leaves, tipped with red spores, fringed each long violet stalk. Dallador showed him how to grab a handful of stalks at the ground and harvest them in a smooth stroke. By the time Ammadin returned, they had the tent decently arranged.

‘Will there be lightning?’ Dallador said.

‘None,’ Ammadin said. ‘I’ve already told the women.’

Dallador bowed to her and left.

Ammadin laid two pairs of saddlebags down on her blankets, then knelt beside them. From one set she pulled out a red-and-white rug and the god figures. Zayn saluted them with hands together, then turned his back. It wasn’t his place as a servant to watch her set them out.

‘You’ve got some idea of how we live, I see,’ Ammadin said.

‘Well, I served on the border before. Before this last trip out, I mean.’

‘Ah. All right, I’m done now.’

Zayn turned back. Ammadin sat down on her blankets and undid her braids to let the long tangle of golden hair spill over her shoulders and breasts. Zayn had to summon his will to keep from staring at her. She began to comb out her wet hair with a bone comb while he got an oil lamp and set it on the flat hearth stones under the smokehole. Matches he found in a silver box inside one of the tent bags. As the light brightened, he sat down opposite her and noticed a strange pattern of scars on her left shoulder.

‘How did you get those scars?’ Zayn said. ‘They look like some kind of claw mark.’

‘That’s exactly what they are. The slasher I killed to make my cloak? He got a good swing on me.’

‘You killed it yourself?’

‘Of course. It wouldn’t have any power if someone else did it for me. Spirit riders have to get everything they use for magic by themselves.’

‘Makes sense, I suppose. How did you kill it?’

‘Arrows first, then a couple of spears to finish him off. He broke the first one.’

Zayn looked her over with a curiosity that had nothing to do with lust. She was about as muscled as a woman could get, he supposed; her shoulders and arms were strongly and clearly defined, heavy with sinewy muscles.

‘What’s wrong?’ Ammadin said. ‘You mean your women back home don’t kill saurs?’

‘Not that I ever heard of.’

‘Huh! Your women couldn’t even kill a yellabuh if it flew their way.’

Since she smiled, he allowed himself a laugh. She turned to look at him, and as the lamplight caught them her eyes flashed blood-red and glowed. Another movement, and they returned to their normal grey, leaving him to wonder if he’d imagined the change.

‘You have to do a lot of difficult things if you’re going to ride the Spirit Road,’ Ammadin went on. ‘I knew that from the moment I decided to ride it.’

‘When do you make a decision like that?’

‘When you’re a child, but they give you plenty of chances later to back down. I left my mother’s comnee when I was five to ride with the man who trained me.’

During a lull in the rain, Orador came by to invite Zayn to join the men in Apanador’s enormous tent. After the chief’s wife left to visit friends, the men of the comnee filed in and sat down round the fire burning under the smokehole. The married men sat in order of age nearest the chief; the unmarried men, Zayn among them, sat farthest away with their backs to the draughty door. Apanador opened a wooden box and took out a drinking bowl, gleaming with silver in the firelight. He filled it from a skin of keese, had a sip, then passed it to the man on his left. As it went round, each man took only a small ritual sip before passing the bowl on. When it came to Zayn, he saw that it was a human cranium, silvered on the inside. Zayn took a sip, then passed it to Palindor, who looked him over with cold eyes.

Once they’d emptied the ritual cup, Apanador filled ordinary ground-stone bowls and passed them round. The men drank silently and looked only at the fire unless they were reaching for a skin of keese. This was the right way to drink, Zayn decided, with neither courtly chatter nor the kind of bragging men do just to be bragging. Finally, after everyone had had three bowls, Apanador spoke.

‘It’s time to make some decisions about this summer.’

The unmarried men laid their bowls down and got up to leave. When Zayn followed them out, Palindor caught his arm from behind in the darkness. Out of sheer reflex, Zayn nearly killed him. He had his hunting knife out of his belt and in his hand before he even realized what he was doing, but just in time he caught himself, stepped back, and sheathed it. Palindor smiled at the gesture.

‘Listen, Kazrak. The Holy One was good enough to pick you off the street like a piece of garbage. Treat her with the respect she deserves, or I’ll kill you.’

‘I have every intention of treating her the way I’d treat the Great Khan’s favourite wife.’

‘Good. I’ll make sure you do.’

His tone of voice challenged, but Zayn had trained his emotions too highly to take offence. With a shrug, he walked off in the rain and left the comnee man scowling after him.

In the tent Zayn found Ammadin sitting close to the flickering lamp. Beside her, on a piece of blue cloth, lay four smooth spheres of transparent crystal, each a good size for cupping in a hand. The lamp light shone through one sphere and cast on the tent wall curving shadows of numbers and strange symbols. He focused his mind and captured a memory picture of them. When he returned to the khanate he would draw it for his superiors. Ammadin noticed him staring at the shadow.

‘There are tiny numbers engraved all around each crystal, like a sort of belt,’ she said. ‘That’s what you’re seeing.’

‘Interesting,’ Zayn said. ‘But should I be looking at them? I’ll leave if I’m breaking one of your Banes.’

‘It’s perfectly all right. They’re just glass at the moment. They don’t have any power unless you know the incantations that wake their spirits.’

As he sat down on his bedroll, Zayn tried to look solemn instead of sceptical. In the dim light, the crystals glittered as if they were faceted, but their surfaces appeared perfectly smooth.

‘Can the spirits answer questions?’

‘Oh yes, but only certain kinds.’

‘Can they tell me why Palindor hates me?’

‘What?’ Ammadin looked up with a laugh. ‘I don’t need spirit power to answer that. Palindor wants to marry me, and here you are, sleeping in my tent.’

It was just the sort of thing that might get in the way of his mission.

‘I can sleep outside under a wagon.’

‘Why? I’m not going to marry him, and he’ll have to get used to it. If he gives you any trouble, just tell me. I said you could sleep here, and that’s that.’

‘Look, I’m totally dependent on the comnee’s charity. I don’t want to cause any trouble.’

‘You’re a strange man for a Kazrak. Which reminds me. I’ve been meaning to ask you something. Every other Kazrak I’ve ever known prayed to your god five times a day. You don’t. Why? No one here would say anything against it, if that’s what’s bothering you.’

Zayn froze. He could never tell her the truth, could never admit that men like him were forbidden to pray, that prayers from such a polluted creature would only offend the Lord.

‘Uh well,’ he said at last. ‘I do pray, but silently. Usually we’re riding when the time comes, and I don’t want to advertise my piety or anything like that. The Lord won’t mind.’

‘The Lord? I thought his name was Allah.’

‘That’s not a name, it’s a title. It just means “the lord” in the sacred language.’

Ammadin nodded, then took pieces of cloth from her saddlebags and began wrapping up the spirits. She laid each crystal down in the exact centre of a cloth, then folded the corners over in a precise motion while she murmured a few strange syllables under her breath. Once wrapped, each went into a separate soft leather pouch; while she tied a thong around the mouth, she chanted again. As he watched this long procedure, Zayn felt his body growing aware of her. There they were, in the dim tent together, with the rain drumming a drowsy rhythm on the roof.

She was a comnee woman, not one of the chastity-bound girls at home. Ammadin raised her head and looked at him.

‘No.’

Zayn nearly swore aloud. What had she done, read his thoughts? When she looked him over as if she could see through his eyes and into his soul, all his sexual interest vanished. He got up and busied himself with arranging his bedroll on the far side of the tent.

The rain came down intermittently all night. When the morning broke grey with clouds, the comnee decided to stay in camp. After he tended the horses, Zayn went to Dallador’s tent mostly because Ammadin had told him to leave her alone – to work, she said, and he wondered what strange ritual she had in hand.

A fire burned on the hearth stones under the smokehole, and Dallador sat near it, carving slices of a red animal horn into the little pegs used to fasten shirts and tent bags. His small son sat nearby and watched solemnly and silently where a Kazraki boy would have been pelting his father with questions. Zayn joined them and studied the way Dallador cut peg after peg with no wasted motion.

‘Can I ask you something?’ Zayn said at last.

‘What?’

‘It’s about Ammadin. Uh, is there something odd about her eyes?’

‘Very.’ Dallador looked up with a quick grin. ‘You’ve seen them flash, I’ll bet.’

‘Yes. I certainly did.’

‘That’s the mark of the spirit riders. It shows up when a child’s about as old as Benno here. That’s how the parents know their child’s going to be a spirit rider.’

‘What if a person didn’t have those eyes but wanted to study the lore anyway?’

‘They wouldn’t have a hope in hell. No one would teach them. It’s a sign that they can see things ordinary people can’t. If they have the spirit eyes, then they have spirit ears, too, and they can hear spirits talking.’

‘Hear spirits? How?’

‘How would I know?’ Dallador smiled briefly, then laid his knife down and considered the little heap of horn pegs. ‘That’s enough to last us a while. Now let me show you how to shell land-shrimp. I found a whole nest of them this morning, and if they’re cooked right, they’re pretty tasty.’

When Zayn returned to Ammadin’s tent, he brought her a skewer of grilled land-shrimp and some salted breadmoss in a polished stone bowl. He found her sitting cross-legged on her blankets with her saddlebags nearby.

‘That smells good,’ Ammadin remarked.

‘Dallador’s teaching me how to cook.’

He handed her the food, then laid his palms together and greeted the god figures before sitting down opposite her. She plucked a shrimp off the skewer, bit into it, and smiled.

‘Very good.’

While she ate, Zayn considered the god figures, sitting on a multi-coloured rug opposite the tent flap. There were six of them in all, most about a foot high, carved of different coloured stones, then decorated and dressed with cloth and feathers. One figure was obviously human, but the others – he’d never seen creatures like them before. Two were roughly human in shape, but the green one had scales and a wedge-shaped head like a ruffled lizard’s, and the small black one had what appeared to be fish’s gills pasted on either side of its chest. Another seemed to be only half-finished: a torso, studded with bits of gold to represent what might have been eyes, rose from an ill-defined mass of grey stone. The fifth had furled wings of stiffened cloth, huge in relation to its frail, many-legged body, and the sixth, the largest of them all, resembled a worm with leather tentacles at one end and paddle-shaped chips of shell stuck at the other.

‘What do you think those are?’ Ammadin said abruptly.

‘Well, your gods. Or representations of them, I should say. I know you don’t worship the bits of stone, of course.’

‘Of course.’ She smiled, but only faintly. ‘Why do you think our gods look so strange?’

‘I have no idea.’

‘Neither do we.’

He waited for her to say more, but she merely finished her meal. When she handed him the dirty bowl he went to wash it out in the stream. Night had fallen, and the storm clouds had broken up. He could see the last of them off to the north, a lighter smudge on a dark horizon. When he turned to the east he saw the Spider glittering in the sky, a huge spiral of distant light, but the Flies had already set.

Zayn hunkered down at the stream bed and scrubbed the remnants of food out of the bowl with the side of his hand. Little flashes of blue light in the water greeted this gift from the heavens – tiny fish, dotted with luminescence, snapped at the crumbs as they sank. As a boy he’d wondered if the animals in grass and stream believed that their gods were the humans, those baffling beings who fed them or killed them according to some whim. We’d look just as strange to them as those bizarre little fetishes do to me, he thought. And what of Ammadin’s remark? Neither do we. Somehow, he knew, it held a challenge.

With the rising of the pale sun the comnee struck camp and moved on. Since the day promised heat, Ammadin folded up her saurskin cloak and put it away in its special tent bag. She had Zayn saddle her grey gelding, then rode out ahead, where she could think away from the noise and dust of the herds and wagons. No one, of course, questioned her leaving. Her people assumed that on her lonely rides Ammadin worked magic for the good of the comnee, perhaps invoking spirits to gain hidden knowledge or maybe driving away evil with powerful spells. In one way she was riding alone for their good, she supposed. How would it affect her people if they knew that their spirit rider, the guardian of their gods, their defender from dark forces, their healer and spiritual leader, was rapidly losing her faith in gods and magic both? Better that she take herself away than let her doubts show.

All around her the lavender grasslands stretched out to an endless horizon. As she rode, the grass crackled under her horse’s hooves. Yellabuhs swarmed but never bit. Now and again turquoise-blue winged lizards leapt from the grass and flew off, buzzing furiously at these huge intruders. Otherwise, nothing moved in the summer heat, nothing made a sound. Here and there she saw a cluster of blood-red pillars rising from the grass that meant distant spear trees and thus water. Eventually, when the sun was reaching its zenith, she headed for one of the groves to give her horse and herself some relief from the sun.

Along a violet stream bank, the red spears leapt from the earth and towered, far taller than a rider on horseback. Close up they appeared to have grown as a single leaf, wound around and around on itself to the thickness of a child’s waist, but down at the base, hidden by a clutter of mosses and ferns, were the traces of old leaves that had died back and withered. The spears grew in clumps from long tuberous roots, spiralling out from a mother plant. How the mother plants got their start, no one knew.

Ammadin unsaddled her gelding and let him roll, then led him to the stream to drink. When he finished she got a tin cup from her saddlebags and scooped up water for herself. She drank, then took off her floppy leather hat and poured a couple of cups of water over her head. While the horse grazed she sat on the bank in the blessed shade and gazed into the stream, running clear over pale sand. In a little eddy grew skinny reddish-brown leaves, trailing in the current, and among the leaves lay a clutch of spirit pearls, milky-white spheres about the size of a closed fist, that were absolute Bane for anyone, even a spirit rider, to harm in any way. Rarely did one find them in a stream this small and this far west of the Great River.

Ammadin ached to know what lay inside them. Something alive, like a lizard chick in its egg? It seemed a good guess. The name, spirit pearl, made no sense. Down at the southern seacoast there were Kazraks who dove to bring up shells with pearls inside – hard little things, no bigger than a fingernail. But since spirits had no bodies, they could never lay eggs, no matter how much like eggs these seemed. At times, when the sun struck the water very late or very early in the day, and a spirit pearl sat in just the right place, the light would seem to flow through it, and then she would see the faint shadow of something that might have been a curled chick. If she could only lift one out and hold it up to the light of a lamp, like the farmers on the Kazrak side of the border did with the eggs of their chickens and meat lizards, she would be able to settle the question once and for all, but the Bane upon them stopped her.

Bane ruled the life of the plains. This plant must never be eaten, that stream must never be forded. If anyone found a pure white stone, he had to leave it in place. Spirits lived in certain fern trees and might offer a shaman help. Other spirits in other trees were pure evil and had to be avoided at all costs. If anyone found a green plant, whether grass or flower, growing outside of Kazraki gardens, she had to pull it up immediately and throw it onto the next fire she saw. For years as a child she had memorized lists of these Banes and learned how to place them into her memory in such an organized way that she could sort through them at need. She remembered the boredom of those years so well that she felt like weeping still.

Why not just write them down, as the Kazraks wrote their lore? That, too, was Bane. The lists of Banes existed only in the spirit language, which could never be written down.

And why did that particular Bane exist? Her teacher had told her that the spirits disliked having their language frozen into letters, something that made no sense to Ammadin, not that she would have dared to say so. After all, the spirits never minded that shamans spoke their language to talk together about the most mundane things; some even used it to tell funny stories about Kazraks. Still, Bane was Bane, beyond argument.

Who laid down the Banes? The gods, of course. Of course. She remembered Zayn, making a clumsy attempt to hide his bad manners. At least he’d tried. Every other Kazrak she’d ever met had dismissed the tribal gods as stones and sticks and nothing more. Idols, they called them. But what if they were right? Just whom, or what, did those figures represent, then?

Ammadin got to her feet and looked out over the purple grass, shimmering under the summer sun. If there were no gods, then there were no spirits. If there were no spirits, then how could there be magic? Yet the magic worked. The Tribes people rarely fell ill, the spirit crystals told her things she needed to know, the holy herbs had exactly the effects they were supposed to have. How could there not be spirits and gods?

Or so thought every other shaman out on the grass. None of them shared her doubts, and yet her doubts remained. She could think of only one remedy – to find another spirit rider to watch over her comnee while she herself rode off alone on a spirit quest similar to those she had undertaken as part of her training. If she suffered enough, if she mounted a vigil for long enough, if she had the right dreams, if she saw the right visions, perhaps they would answer the question that had come to consume her life: who were the gods? why did they give us magic?

If she could see them, if they would come to her in vision, once again she could believe. But if they didn’t? If she discovered that her doubts were true? Fear clotted in her throat like dried moss.

By late afternoon the heat had grown so bad that the women began to worry about the pregnant mares and new foals. Along a good-sized stream they made an early camp. While the men raised the tents, the women drove the herd into the shade of a stand of spear trees. After the herd had drunk its fill, they tethered the vulnerable mares and foals in the shade and the rest of the herd, as usual, out in the grass. When Zayn offered to help, they laughed at him and sent him back to Dallador’s fire.

In a few minutes Apanador joined them, and Dallador brought out a skin of keese and three bowls. In daylight it was allowable to talk over drink, and Dallador and Apanador discussed the long summer ahead while Zayn merely listened.

‘When we reach the Great River,’ Apanador said, ‘we’ll have to be careful. We can’t turn directly south. Ricador’s comnee will be coming up from the coast about then.’

‘They’ll want another fight, that’s for sure,’ Dallador said. ‘We beat the shit out of them last time.’ He glanced at Zayn. ‘They tried to steal some of our women’s horses.’

‘Ah.’ Zayn had heard of the feuding out on the plains. ‘Do they always ride north the same way?’

‘Yes, they have a Bane on them.’ Apanador hesitated, then shrugged. ‘You don’t need to know more.’

‘Whatever you say.’ Zayn bobbed his head in the chief’s direction.

‘The hunting should be good this summer.’ Apanador changed the subject. ‘We’ll have to teach you how to handle a bow from horseback.’

‘I’d like that,’ Zayn said. ‘I’ve always loved hunting.’

‘The wild saurs came with us from the spirit country at the birth of the world,’ Apanador went on. ‘In time you’ll learn all about them, Zayn. The gods gave horses to women, and the saurs to us. Horses are fit for women, because they come when they’re called. But a man has to hunt his gifts, with the bow we received from the Father of Arrows, back in the dawn of time.’

‘I’ve heard a little about him. He’s not a god, is he?’

‘No. He was the first comnee man, and his wife was the first comnee woman – Lisadin, Mother of Horses. So you see, there’s a lot for you to learn.’

‘I’m just grateful you’ll teach me.’

‘You’re the first Kazrak I’ve ever met who admitted he had things to learn.’

‘Well, the only people you’ve come across are the cavalry. I’ll admit it: we’re an arrogant lot. Or I was, until I learned what it means to own nothing but dishonour and the charity of strangers.’

Apanador nodded in silent sympathy.

‘Ah, you can’t judge a herd by the geldings,’ Dallador remarked. ‘You can’t all be like that. I’ve heard about Kazraki poets, and wise men who write in books, and beautiful women.’

‘But they don’t come to the border. Come to think of it, I don’t suppose any other Kazrak has ever ridden with a comnee before.’ Zayn was only speaking idly, but the answer he got sent his mind racing.

‘There was one once,’ Apanador said. ‘I can’t remember his name, because he rode with another comnee in the south grazing, and he only stayed with them one summer.’ He glanced Dallador’s way. ‘You were still a boy then.’

‘If I heard the story, I don’t remember it.’

‘Kind of interesting, though,’ Zayn remarked. ‘What kind of man was he? Another cashiered officer?’

‘No.’ Apanador thought for a moment. ‘Stranger than that. A hunting party found a half-dead Kazrak, just lying there bleeding in the grass. His wounds looked like they’d been made with a ChaMeech spear, but when they took him back to the tents, he told them that he was an enemy of your great chief, and the chief’s assassins had tried to kill him. He kept saying that he wanted to die because he had nothing to live for, but they bound his wounds and told him he’d change his mind later. So then, some of the young men found his horse. It must have fled when its rider fell, you see, and it was wandering around half-starved thanks to those metal bits you people use. Once he had the horse back, this Kazrak suddenly decided he wanted to live after all, because there was a piece of jewellery in his saddlebags that meant the world to him. If he ever said what it was, I never heard.’

‘That’s a damned strange story. Was he a travelling merchant, then?’

‘Oh no, one of your cavalry officers, which makes it even stranger.’ Apanador paused for a rueful sort of smile. ‘He was still afraid, though, that the great chief’s men would find him and finish their botched job, so when the comnee went east to trade, he found a patron in the Cantons and stayed behind.’

‘Well, let’s hope the poor bastard’s happy. He’s a long way from his enemies now.’

Unless of course one of them was, all unwittingly, coming after him. His superiors would want to know about this Kazrak, Zayn figured: someone who’d angered the Great Khan, someone who should have been killed, but a clumsy paid murderer had let him get away – and then there was that mysterious piece of jewellery.

‘Apanador?’ Zayn said. ‘Do you remember when that happened?’

‘When Dallador was still a boy.’

‘I know, but what year?’

Apanador blinked at him.

‘Sorry,’ Zayn said. ‘How big a boy?’

‘Let me think.’ Apanador did just that for a long moment. ‘It would have been right before he gained his rightful name.’

Dallador laughed. ‘Ask the Spirit Rider,’ he said. ‘She’s the only person I know, anyway, who can reckon years the way you Kazraks do.’

As soon as Ammadin returned to camp, Zayn jogged out to meet her, catching up to her when she was turning her horse into the herd. She listened patiently while he explained.

‘I heard that story at the time,’ Ammadin said. ‘When was it in years, you want to know?’

‘Well, if it’s not too much trouble. I’m curious about this fellow.’

‘I can’t blame you for that. Carry my saddle back to camp for me.’

He picked it up, but she took the saddlebags herself. As they strolled back to the tents, she suddenly spoke.

‘Ten of your years ago, that’s when.’

‘Ah! Thank you. It would have nagged at me, not knowing.’

‘Really?’ She stopped walking and turned to consider him.

‘Well, yes. I like to get things straight, that’s all. In my mind, I mean.’

She smiled, shrugged, and resumed walking. As he trailed after, Zayn was considering the date. Ten years ago Gemet Great Khan was purging his bloodlines to remove any disputes about his right to rule. That piece of jewellery might well have been the zalet khanej, the medallion that proved a man had been sanctified as a khan and thus as a rival for the Crescent Throne. Maybe. He knew nothing for certain, but that simple date shone like one of Ammadin’s crystals: hold it up, and it sent light sparkling in all directions.

When Warkannan and his men had turned east, they had left all of their plausible reasons for being on the road behind. They also traded the public roads for narrow dirt paths, and the constant rise of the land slowed them down as well. As long as they travelled through Kazrajistan proper, they rode at night and by day either camped well off the road or bribed some farmer to let them sleep in his barn. They avoided every town that was more than a village and kept clear of the military posts and courier stations that stood along the Darzet River.

After some days of this slow riding, they reached Andjaro, a province that had gone from being ChaMeech territory to an independent nation until, a mere hundred years ago, the khanate had decided that an independent nation on its border was a threat. The low hills angled from the north-east towards the south-west, so soft and regular that they reminded Warkannan of the folds a carpet forms when pushed and rumpled by a careless foot. Among these rolling purple downs, Warkannan had allies, and the allies, large landowners all, had private armies. Each night Warkannan and his party stayed in compounds surrounded by thousands of acres of purple grass, dotted with flocks of sheep. At each, Warkannan received coin for the journey, supplies of food and fuel, pack horses when he mentioned needing them, and the assurance that Jezro would have a place to hide when he came home.

Early on their third day in Andjaro, they crested a down and saw, stretching below them, a valley filled with green, billowing in the wind like clouds. Arkazo reined in his horse and stared, his mouth half-open.

‘What is that?’ he stammered. ‘Water?’

‘No,’ Warkannan said, grinning. ‘Trees.’

‘I’ve never seen so many in one place. All that green! And they grow so close together.’

‘How observant of you,’ Soutan drawled. ‘The word for a lot of them in one place is forest. That university of yours seems to have taught you little of value.’

‘We studied the works of the Three Prophets,’ Arkazo said. ‘Nothing’s of greater value. Not that an infidel like you would understand why.’

They had reached the tax forests, stand after stand of true-oak, planted in regular rows and watched over by foresters. As part of their most solemn duty to the Great Khan, the border landowners put as many acres into the slow-growing forests as they could afford – more, in some cases. Although in the volcanic mountains every metal imaginable lay close to the surface in rich veins, fuel for the smelting of it was another thing entirely. So far at least, no one had ever found any of the fabled blackstone or blackwater that were supposed to burn twice as hot as true-oak charcoal. As a result, while any peasant could pan the easily-melted gold from a stream and work it, it took a lot of that gold to buy a little steel.

‘It’s a pity about our prospecting venture,’ Soutan remarked. ‘If we’d actually found blackstone we could have been as rich as a khan ourselves.’

‘If,’ Warkannan said, grinning. ‘Those maps of yours show likely spots, not sure things.’

‘Ah, but they’re copies of ancient maps – spirit maps, the Tribes would call them.’

‘Well, Nehzaym will take good care of them. As far as I’m concerned, we’ll have better odds backing Jezro Khan than looking for blackstone.’

Soutan turned in the saddle and considered him for a moment.

‘I’m inclined to agree with you,’ Soutan said at last. ‘Ancient writings exist that present strangely disturbing implications concerning the black marvels.’

‘And what’s that supposed to mean?’

‘Your manners are painfully bad, Captain. I see no reason to speak further and be mocked.’

Soutan kicked his horse to walk, passed Warkannan, and headed downhill. For a moment Warkannan considered returning the insult, then shrugged the matter away. Most likely the sorcerer thought talking in riddles impressed people. Damned if he’d encourage him in it.

Entering the forest felt like plunging into the ocean, all cool air and deep green light. All along the narrow road grew ancient trees, twining their branches overhead. In a few minutes Soutan paused his horse in the dappled shade and let them catch up. They set off again, riding three abreast with the sorcerer in the middle.

‘A question for you, Captain,’ Soutan said. ‘Arkazo says that nothing’s more important than the books of the Prophets. Do you agree?’

‘Well, it seems extreme, I know, but actually I do.’

‘I suppose it’s a question of following the laws of God. But other prophets have written books of those laws for other peoples, after all.’

‘True. But our books, our way – that’s what makes us who we are. We follow the Three Prophets, and that sets us apart from people who follow other religious leaders. If I stopped following the laws, I wouldn’t know who I was any more.’

Soutan frankly stared. ‘You must love your god a great deal,’ he said at last.

‘I don’t know if I’d call it love, not like love for your family or for a woman. It’s more like – well, what?’ Warkannan thought for a moment. ‘More like a sense of mutual obligation. I have a duty to serve God but in return, that duty gives me a place in His universe.’

‘God as the supreme commander of a celestial cavalry?’ Soutan drawled. ‘It would make sense to you, I suppose.’

‘I don’t like your tone of voice.’

‘Sorry.’ Soutan shrugged. ‘Just a figure of speech.’

Two nights later they arrived at the last Kazraki villa. Kareem Alvado’s compound stretched out like a small town, with his mansion and gardens, the cottages of the craftsmen, the barracks for his private troops, and the dormitories for the workmen who tended the flocks and the tax forests. Since Warkannan had served on the border with Kareem, and Kareem’s son Tareev and Arkazo had attended university together, they stayed for two full days.

On their last evening, the men sat finishing their dinner around the true-oak table in the dining-hall, a long room with walls of purplish-red horsetail reeds, twined together with pale yellow vines. At regular intervals ChaMeech skulls, bleached white and bulbous, hung as trophies. The older men had been reminiscing about Jezro Khan when Tareev interrupted. Like many Andjaro families, Kareem’s had some comnee blood that gave father and son both pale grey eyes and dark, straight hair, and they turned to each other with the same tilt of the head, the same crook of a hand.

‘A favour to beg you, sir,’ Tareev said. ‘The captain’s going to have a hard time guarding our khan with just a couple of men. Let me go with them.’

Kareem’s heavy-set face turned unnaturally calm.

‘Why should Arkazo get all the glory?’ Tareev went on. ‘It’s unfair. Let me go and invite the khan here personally.’

‘Now listen, boy,’ Warkannan broke in. ‘This isn’t going to be some pleasant little ride.’

‘I know that, Captain,’ Tareev said, still grinning. ‘That’s why you need me along.’

‘It’s up to your father. There’ll be plenty for you to do once the war starts.’

Kareem had a sip of wine, his calloused fingers tight on the goblet.

‘What about that girl you promised to marry?’ Kareem said at last.

‘What would her father want with a coward?’

Kareem smiled, a weary twitch of his mouth. ‘Very well, then. But you’re riding under Warkannan’s orders. What he says, you do. Understand me?’

‘Yes sir, I do.’

Warkannan glanced around the table. Arkazo was leaning onto the table on his elbows, watching, unusually solemn, while Soutan lounged back in his chair.

‘This might be a good time to make something clear to everybody,’ Warkannan said. ‘It’s dangerous out on the grass. I spent fifteen years of my life there, and I know. When we ride out, I’m the officer in charge of this little venture. Understood?’

‘Of course, sir,’ Arkazo said.

Soutan sighed, long and dramatically. ‘I was waiting for this,’ he remarked to the air, then looked Warkannan’s way. ‘Someone needs to be in charge of the boys – oh, excuse me, our young men, I mean – but no one orders me around, Captain. Understood? If not, you can try to find Jezro on your own.’

Warkannan took a long breath and let his anger ebb.

‘Let’s hope we don’t get ourselves into the kind of trouble where orders are necessary,’ Warkannan said at last. ‘But if there is trouble, sorcerer, then I’ll have to put the safety of the other men first, Jezro or not.’

Soutan got up, bowed to Kareem, and strode out of the room. He slammed the door behind him so hard that the wall bounced. Kareem let out his breath in a long whistle.

‘I don’t envy you this ride,’ Kareem said.

‘Thanks.’ Warkannan managed a smile. ‘The Cantons aren’t that large. If worse comes to worst, we should be able to track the khan down sooner or later.’

‘Well, inshallah.’ Kareem spread his hands wide. ‘All right, Tareev and Arkazo. You’d better have weapons with you. Let’s go to the armoury and see what’s there.’

Later that evening Kareem invited Warkannan to his study for a glass of arak. They settled themselves in comfortable chairs while servants lit oil lamps and bowed themselves out of the room. Once they were alone, Warkannan asked Kareem if he regretted putting his son in danger. Kareem shook his head no.

‘If he’d wanted to stay home safe, I’d have had some harsh words for my wife. I’d have known he wasn’t mine.’

‘I’ll do my best to keep him out of trouble.’

‘Let’s pray you can. If the Chosen have taken a hand in this –’ Kareem shrugged. ‘Who knows?’

‘That’s true, unfortunately. That reminds me, I’ve got something I want to leave with you. Suppose the Chosen decide to eliminate me and Soutan – I don’t want them getting their ugly paws on this.’

From his shirt pocket Warkannan took out a roll of rushi, protected by a leather cover stamped with a design of two crossed swords below a crescent: Jezro Khan’s crest. Kareem kissed it, then slid the rushi free with a snap of his wrist that unrolled the letter. The sheet had one long torn edge, as if the khan had ripped a blank page from a book in his haste.

‘It’s Jezro’s handwriting, sure enough,’ Kareem said. ‘Thanks be to God, merciful as well as mighty!’

Warkannan had read it so many times that he knew every word by heart.

‘To Indan, Warkannan, and all my friends in Kazrajistan,’ the letter began. ‘That is, of course, assuming I have any friends left. I wonder what you’ll say when you find out I’m alive. Will you celebrate, or will I only be seen as a damned nuisance, a ghost who should have stayed dead? I don’t even know what things are like in the khanate now. Warkannan, do you remember me? Consider this an invitation to come have a couple of drinks with me. I have some interesting things to tell you. I don’t dare say where I am, but Yarl Soutan has agreed to help me. All I can do is pray to God that he’ll bring you back with him without my brother finding out. Maybe a couple of men can slip over the border unseen. Yours as always, Jezro.’

The signature had touched Warkannan deeply, just a simple name, no longer the honourable and regal titles, just Jezro. With a sigh, Kareem finished the letter and began rolling it up.

‘Well, he’s going to find out what loyalty means, isn’t he? From what you’ve been telling me, Warkannan, we can count on four thousand men the minute he crosses the border.’

‘At least. And there’ll be plenty more as soon as we start marching.’

‘Should pick the khan’s spirits right up. I never thought to see the day when he’d sound so dispirited.’ Kareem tapped the roll on his palm. ‘But exile’s hard on a man.’

‘So it is,’ Soutan said. ‘And Jezro loves his homeland.’

Warkannan stifled a yelp and turned to see the sorcerer standing by the door. Soutan had a way of gliding into a room that set Warkannan’s teeth on edge.

‘The last time I saw the khan,’ Soutan went on, ‘he talked about Haz Kazrak as if it were Paradise.’

‘Well, there’s something about the place a man’s born in.’ Kareem glanced at the letter in his hand. ‘But it’s a shock to see him so hopeless. Especially since you were going to deliver his letter.’

‘He thought I’d never reach the khanate alive.’

‘I wouldn’t have bet good money on it, either.’ Kareem smiled, then turned thoughtful. ‘Ah God! When we were all young and on the border, if someone had told me that I’d end up a traitor to the Great Khan I’d have slit his throat!’

‘I’d have done the same,’ Warkannan said.

Soutan stood hesitating, then found a chair and sat down uninvited. Warkannan decided that the only way to smooth over the incident at dinner was to pretend it hadn’t happened; he handed the sorcerer a glass and the bottle of arak. Soutan smiled in what seemed to be a conciliatory manner and poured himself a drink.

‘I take it you served with our khan, too?’ Soutan said.

‘I did, and proudly,’ Kareem said. ‘The stories we could tell, huh, Warkannan?’

Perhaps it was the arak, or the shadows dancing around the ChaMeech skulls on the wall, but they ended up telling a lot of those stories that night. Soutan sat unspeaking, seemingly profoundly interested in tales of too much fighting, drinking, whoring, and the resultant hang-overs or disciplinary actions.

‘What surprises me,’ Soutan said at length, ‘is that the khan seems to have been treated just like any other officer.’

‘Exactly like,’ Kareem said. ‘When you’re riding down a pack of screaming ChaMeech, there’s no time for giving yourself airs.’

‘Imph, no doubt.’ Soutan tented his long pale fingers and considered Kareem over them. ‘Back in the Cantons we tend to think of the Kazraks as rigidly hierarchical – everyone knowing their place, everyone afraid to leave it, that sort of thing. What I’ve seen and heard while I’ve been here makes me think we’re wrong.’

‘Well, yes and no.’ Warkannan waggled a hand in the air. ‘The cavalry is one place a man can rise above his birth.’

‘And the university,’ Kareem put in. ‘Get a good religious education, and the faith will take you far.’

‘True,’ Warkannan said. ‘In the cavalry you get your education the hard way. At the end of a spear.’

The pair of them laughed while Soutan smiled, thinly but politely.

‘Jezro told me once,’ Soutan said, ‘that a man can rise from an ordinary trooper, get himself commissioned, and then be accepted as an officer.’

‘He can, yes,’ Kareem said. ‘And you can start off as an officer and get yourself broken down to the ranks, too, if you don’t obey orders. What counts in the cavalry is whether or not you meld with your unit. There’s no room for individual heroics or individual slackers, either. A lot of young aristocrats can’t seem to understand that.’

‘Quite so.’ Warkannan glanced at Kareem. ‘Men from the ranks – they know they live or die together. If they’re smart and capable, they can rise far. Remember what’s his name? The sergeant from First Company.’

‘Yes, I do, the man with only three fingers on one hand.’ Kareem looked exasperated. ‘Damn my memory! His name’s gone right out of it. And then there was Zahir Benumar. A damn good sergeant who made an even better officer.’

‘Ah,’ Soutan put in. ‘That name rings a bell. I think the khan may have mentioned him.’

‘Probably he did.’ Kareem turned in his chair to speak to Soutan. ‘Now if Zahir were drinking with us tonight, we wouldn’t be having all this trouble with people’s names. He had a phenomenal memory, Zahir.’

‘He certainly did,’ Warkannan said. ‘Unlike mine. Do you know where he is now, Kareem? He was transferred off the border, of course.’

‘Suddenly, too, now that you mention it. To the Bariza Second Lancers, wasn’t it? I lost track of him about then.’

‘So did I, and I’m sorry I did.’ Warkannan considered for a moment. ‘I did write him care of his new unit. Either they didn’t forward it, or he wasn’t interested in answering me.’

‘Don’t be an idiot!’ Kareem snapped. ‘The letter must have got lost somewhere along the way. Men who endure what you two went through together don’t forget each other that easily.’

‘I’d like to think so. When Soutan first turned up, I had thoughts of trying to find Benumar, to let him know the good news if nothing else. Zahir, Jezro – the three of us. We were a good team as officers. Worked well together.’

‘That’s one way of putting it.’ Kareem paused for a smile. ‘Well, if you bring Jezro back, Zahir’s bound to hear of it quickly enough. I did hear he was transferred again, out of Bariza, I mean. I can’t remember where. Must be the arak. Can’t be middle age.’

They shared another laugh, but Warkannan set his glass down. ‘I’ve got to get up before dawn,’ he said, ‘I think I’ll call it a night.’

‘Yes, tomorrow it starts.’ Kareem turned solemn. ‘And may the Lord guide you every mile of your journey.’

Just at dawn, they assembled in front of the villa, Warkannan, Soutan, the two young men, all holding the reins of their riding horses, who stamped and snorted as if they too knew that the journey ahead promised great things. After a last handshake all round, they mounted, took the lead ropes of the pack horses from the servants, and headed for the gates. When Warkannan glanced back at the house, he saw figures at the windows of the women’s quarters. Curtains fell, and the figures disappeared. Tareev turned in his saddle once to wave farewell to his father, but Warkannan never saw him look back again.

The road brought them free of the oak forest by noon, and by mid-afternoon they rode up to the crest of the last high hill. In front of them the downs of the north border fell away. Beyond, the view faded to a lavender haze, spreading endlessly, it seemed, under a harsh sun.

‘There they are,’ Soutan remarked. ‘The plains.’

‘Yes indeed,’ Warkannan said. ‘I started hating them after I’d been on the border for maybe a week.’ He turned in the saddle to glance at Arkazo and Tareev. ‘Very well, gentlemen. Let’s ride.’

The road dropped down through waist-high vegetation, purple and orange, red and russet, a tangled mass of thorns and fleshy leaves fighting over sun and air. Here and there hill trees – thick fleshy trunks topped by huge flabby pink leaves – rose above the chaparral and sparkled with beads of resinous sap. Over them insects swarmed like pillars of smoke. As the men rode through, they now and then heard the rustle or squeal of small animals fleeing the noise of their passing. Occasionally a chirper, a lizard about the size of two clasped hands, broke from cover and flew on a whir of turquoise wings.

The road would settle into shallow valleys, then rise again to another hill crest, but each stood lower than the last. Just at sunset they climbed the last rise and saw below them Haz Evol, a straggle of town along the reed-choked banks of a stream. The fort, a tidy square of thorn walls, stood just beyond.

‘Is it safe to ride in?’ Arkazo asked. ‘What if someone recognizes you?’

‘It’s a chance I’ll have to take. We need information.’ Warkannan ran his hand over his burgeoning black beard. ‘The last time I was on the border, I was clean-shaven and in uniform. It’s funny, but when you’re in uniform, no one much looks at your face. I’ll bet I can slip through.’

Haz Evol, a small rambling town, existed to serve the military and little more. Warkannan hired quarters for his party at a shabby little inn, made of stacked trunks of spear trees bound together with vines. He went immediately to their cottage while the others tended the horses and brought in the gear. They ate in, rather than risk letting someone get a good look at them in the public common room.

‘Now tomorrow, if anyone asks you why I don’t come out, tell them I’ve got some kind of a fever,’ Warkannan said. ‘That’ll keep people away.’

‘Just so,’ Soutan said. ‘We need to buy gift goods – charcoal, wheatian, matches, things like that. The Tribes are hospitable, but it’s very rude to not have gifts to give them in return. Besides, spending money will get the townsfolk feeling friendly towards us.’ He glanced at Arkazo and Tareev. ‘Let me do the talking. Neither of you has impressed me with his subtlety.’

When Tareev opened his mouth to snarl, Warkannan waved him silent. ‘Soutan’s right.’ He turned back to the sorcerer. ‘Go on.’

Soutan did so. ‘We need to find out if anyone remembers anything about this merchant we’re tracking. I consulted the oracle last night, and it said that we’re in grave danger of being deceived.’

Tareev and Arkazo snickered.

‘I wish the oracle had told us this earlier,’ Warkannan said.

‘So do I,’ Soutan said. ‘It has its little ways.’

‘Well, let’s hope we’re not on the wrong trail. If one of the Chosen’s already heading east, time’s short.’

‘Oh, there’s plenty of time. I don’t care how dedicated or highly trained this spy is. He can’t get across the Rift alone. He’ll have to talk a comnee into escorting him. Have you forgotten about the ChaMeech?’

‘I never forget the ChaMeech. Let’s hope they eat him.’

‘They will, if he tries to ride alone. There’s only one thing the ChaMeech fear, and that’s magic. A spirit rider can scare them off, and I’ve no doubt this Chosen One knows it as well as I do.’

‘And what about us?’ Arkazo said. ‘Do we have to attach ourselves to the stinking barbarians, too?’

‘Of course not,’ Soutan snapped. ‘You have me.’

All the next day Warkannan paced back and forth or sat near the window to keep watch. Now and then he would try to read – he carried a copy of The Mirror of the Qur’an everywhere with him – but doubts distracted him, even from the beloved teachings of the First Prophet. Fortunately, Arkazo and Tareev returned early in the afternoon with their armloads of supplies.

‘No one seemed to be following us, sir,’ Arkazo reported. ‘No one told us much, either. Soutan sent us back. He had the gall to say that we talked too much and got in the way.’

‘Ah.’ Warkannan thought that for once, the sorcerer was probably right. ‘Well, why don’t you two go out and get our horses some water? I’ll pack these supplies.’

Soutan came back late, bringing with him a skin of keese and a girl, a mousy little thing whose clothes reeked of grease and strong soap. Warkannan wondered about Soutan’s taste in women until the sorcerer announced that Vorika knew things of interest. At that, Warkannan sat her down in the best chair and poured her a cup of keese. Vorika, it turned out, worked as a kitchen girl in a local caravanserai that served the merchant trade. She was also flattered enough by all this unaccustomed attention to giggle, hiding her stained teeth behind one hand.

‘Well, I saw this merchant, but I didn’t know him. Everyone talked about him for days. He was crazy. I mean, just absolutely everyone said he was crazy, because he went out onto the grass with only a couple of men along.’

‘A merchant, huh?’ Warkannan said. ‘What kind of goods?’

‘Oh, axes and swords, stuff like that. Just absolutely everyone told him he was carrying ChaMeech bait – that’s what they called it, ChaMeech bait – but he wouldn’t listen.’

Warkannan and Arkazo exchanged a significant smile.

‘Come now, girl,’ Soutan said. ‘Tell them what happened to this merchant.’

‘Oh yes, sir. Well, you see, about a week after he left – I think it was a week, anyway – no, I tell a lie – it was ten days after he left, but anyway, he came back. His men said they were going to leave him out there alone if he didn’t. So he rode south somewhere for the next horse fair. A couple of the men who stay regular-like in our inn saw him there, you see, and they say they teased him ever so much about it.’

Warkannan swore so vilely that the girl flinched. He apologized, soothed her feelings with a couple of silver deenahs, and ushered her out. He returned to an uncomfortable silence. Tareev and Arkazo sat on the floor, looking at the carpet. Soutan had flopped into an armchair, and his smile carried barbs.

‘The oracle may be ambiguous at times,’ Soutan remarked to the empty air, ‘but it never outright lies.’

‘It doesn’t, huh?’ Warkannan sat down on the divan. ‘Well, I wonder if the Chosen sent this merchant as a deliberate false trail.’

‘Maybe they didn’t have to.’ Soutan glanced at Arkazo and Tareev. ‘Fools abound, after all.’

Arkazo started to speak.

‘Shut up,’ Warkannan said. ‘Now let me think. It’s possible that our spy’s slipped over the border without anyone knowing, of course, but that possibility gets us nowhere.’

‘There’s that cavalry officer,’ Arkazo said. ‘The one who was cashiered.’

‘Yes.’ Soutan drawled the word. ‘How providential, wasn’t it, that a comnee took him in? Are we going to ride along the border and ask about him?’

‘No,’ Warkannan said. ‘We’re heading out tomorrow. Sooner or later, we’ll find a comnee. If one of the comnees has taken in a Kazrak, the news will spread. They’re like that, passing things along. We’ll track him down.’

‘And what then? Ask him ever so politely if he’s one of the Chosen?’

‘No. We’re going to kill him. If he’s not the right man, well, I’m sorry for the poor bastard, but I don’t dare take any chances, not with Jezro Khan’s life.’

‘The Chosen aren’t so easy to kill, from what I hear.’

‘No, they’re not. We’re going to have to try, though. If God wills it, it’ll get done.’

Soutan rolled his eyes, then laid a hand on the copy of The Mirror that Warkannan had set down on the table.

‘What is this?’ Soutan said. ‘Not the Qur’an itself?’

‘No. No one can touch the holy book unless they’re ritually pure, so you can’t carry it around in your saddlebags with you. That would be sacrilege. This is just a translation into Kazraki.’

‘So it is a Qur’an.’

‘No, because it’s not in the old language.’

‘But the thoughts are surely the same.’

‘Maybe, but God spoke in the old language, not in Kazraki. That’s why the real Qur’an is so holy.’

Soutan raised a sceptical eyebrow. ‘What do you think would happen if you touched a copy when you weren’t pure, whatever that means? Fire from heaven?’

‘Of course not! The law’s just a sign of respect.’

Soutan had the decency to look abashed. Warkannan changed the subject.

They rode out from Haz Evol in the cool of dawn. Warkannan led his small caravan of four mounted men and four pack horses due east, heading for the Great River, where the comnees congregated during the summer. The last of the downs dwindled behind them until the plains stretched ahead, mile after mile of grass, turning from lavender to a deep purple here at the end of the spring rains. The grassland ran to a horizon as straight as a bowstring. Here and there a few orange and magenta fern trees or a stand of blood-red spears rose up to point at the sky; otherwise, there was only grass.

By their first night’s camp, the plains were beginning to get on Tareev and Arkazo’s nerves. It happened to men, their first time out; the cavalry called it border fever, a twitchy way of riding, a certain way of turning the head, staring this way and that, a certain slackness about the mouth as men realized that there was simply nothing and nobody out in the grass but the wandering comnees. Tareev and Arkazo had all the symptoms. At night, they hugged the pitiful excuse for a campfire, flinched at every strange sound, and talked much too loudly when they talked at all. In the heat of summer, raiding parties of ChaMeech rarely travelled any distance from the Rift, but still Warkannan kept a careful watch as they rode. Thanks to the Tribes, the big predatory saurs – the longtooths, the slashers, the grey giants – who once had ruled the plains were scarce these days, at least in the Tribal lands, a huge area from the northern headwaters of the river system south to the seacoast.

‘You never know, though,’ Warkannan told Tareev and Arkazo, ‘when you’ll run across one of the meat-eaters. The Tribes haven’t wiped them out by any means.’

‘They can be scared off,’ Soutan put in. ‘It takes several men to do it, but shrieking and clashing sabres together gives the saurs something to think about. They’ve learned they can find easier meals than H’mai.’

‘Good,’ Arkazo said. ‘But I wouldn’t mind seeing one.’

‘From a distance, I wouldn’t either,’ Soutan said. ‘The greater the distance, the better the view.’

They did regularly see the six-legged grassars, the herds of grazing saurs who provided meat to the Tribes and the predators both. The females stood about four feet high at the shoulder, the males as much as six, and where the bright red female heads were slender, the piebald males had broad skulls crowned with three long horns. Both sexes had thick pebbled hides and long tails ending in a spike of bone. Whenever they smelled the horsemen, the males would raise their massive heads, snort a warning, and slam their tails against the earth. In answer the females shrieked to call their young hatchlings back to the safety of the herd.

Warkannan would always halt his little caravan and let the grassars lumber away. Despite their solid size, their six legs gave them a surprising agility; they could begin a turn on the forelegs, stabilize on the middle pair, and swing the hind legs around to follow while the spike on their tails slashed any predator close behind them.

‘How do the Tribes kill them, anyway?’ Tareev asked.

‘With arrows and spears,’ Warkannan said. ‘They weaken them with arrows, then move in with the spears for the final kill.’

Tareev rose in his stirrups to watch the herd trotting off. He was grinning as he sat back down. ‘I’d love to join one of those hunts,’ he said. ‘Kaz, are you game?’

‘You bet,’ Arkazo said. ‘If we find a tribe that’ll let us ride along.’

‘The point of this trip,’ Warkannan broke in, ‘is to reach Jezro safely and get him home the same way. Charging around hunting saurs isn’t in the itinerary, gentlemen.’

‘Yes sir,’ Tareev said with a martyred sigh. ‘The way we’re going, we might not ever see any Tribesmen anyway.’

‘Oh we will,’ Soutan said. ‘I’m keeping a good look out. We need information.’

Every time they stopped to rest the horses or to camp, Soutan took a strangely-wrapped object from his saddlebags and walked off alone to stare into it. When one morning Warkannan asked about it, Soutan unwrapped the silk pieces to reveal a polished sphere of heavy glass, engraved with numbers and strange marks around its equator.

‘It’s a scanning crystal,’ Soutan said.

‘What do you see in it?’ Arkazo said, grinning. ‘Spirits and demons?’

Tareev snickered.

‘That’s enough, gentlemen,’ Warkannan snapped.

‘Thank you, Captain.’ Soutan looked the two young men over, then shrugged. ‘I see your university didn’t teach you good manners.’ With that he stalked off into the grass.

Warkannan turned to Arkazo and Tareev. ‘Front and centre, you two,’ he growled. ‘Soutan believes in his damned sorcery. We need his help. Hell, without him, we’ll get nowhere. I want you two to treat this magic business with every show of respect. Do you hear me?’

‘Yes sir,’ Tareev said. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It just goes against the grain, somehow,’ Arkazo muttered. ‘But of course, sir. Whatever you say.’

When Soutan returned, Tareev and Arkazo apologized.

‘Accepted,’ Soutan said. ‘By the way, there’s a comnee some ten miles ahead of us.’

‘You’re sure?’ Arkazo said.

‘If I hadn’t been sure, you young lout, I would never have mentioned it.’

‘I’m sorry. It’s just hard to believe that bit of glass is magic.’

Warkannan started to intervene, but Soutan smiled.

‘Why?’ the sorcerer said.

‘Because of the engraved numbers, I think,’ Arkazo said. ‘It makes it look like a tool or something.’

‘Very good! It does, yes. Think about that.’

Soutan walked over to his saddlebags and knelt down to put the crystal away. Tareev leaned close to Arkazo and muttered, ‘Huh! We’ll just see if this comnee ever shows up.’ If Soutan heard, he never responded.

All three Kazraks were in for a surprise when, after some hours of riding, they saw the comnee right where Soutan had said it would be. Warkannan and his men saw the horses first, and only then the sprawl of tents along a stream. Against the brightly coloured trees and the wild grass, the tents, so gaudy in themselves, blended in so well they almost disappeared. The comnee insisted that they eat the evening meal with them and brought out skins of keese to drink with the guests. When Warkannan asked his carefully prepared questions, he found that several of the men had indeed heard of a Kazrak exile who rode with a comnee. Somewhere to the south, they told Warkannan, and a spirit rider was the one who took him in. When Warkannan and his men were ready to ride out the following morning, Warkannan gifted their hosts with a sack of grain and received warm thanks in return.

‘No, no, I should be thanking you,’ Warkannan said. ‘For your company.’

And for your information, Warkannan thought. And yet, as they rode away, he felt heavy-hearted, to be hunting a man down like a saur. He’s one of the Chosen, he reminded himself. They’re more vicious than any beast alive.

In summer every comnee travelled to the Great River, which flowed, wide but shallow, from the north through the heart of the Tribal lands all the way to the distant southern sea. Apanador’s comnee arrived in the middle of a sunny day. Once the tents were set up and every scrap of fuel in the area scrounged and set drying, the men put out snares for small game. Along the riverbanks grew fern trees, spear trees, brushy shrubs, and mosses in a riot of orange fronds and yellow threads. In this thick vegetation lived the turquoise chirpers, the purple and grey spotted snappers, red-boys, and a dozen other kinds of meaty reptiles. They’d supply meat until the grassars came to the river to drink.

Ammadin had never thought of Kazraks as hunters, but Zayn had brought with him a perfect weapon for snaring tree lizards –three brass balls connected with leather thongs. Down by the river she saw him stalking a redboy. It scrambled up a fern tree, then made the mistake of shimmying out onto a frond, where it stood squawking on its six skinny legs. Zayn swung the balls around his head and made them sing like a giant insect, then let them fly from his open hand. The balls wrapped the cords around two pairs of the redboy’s legs and dragged it writhing from the tree. Zayn scooped it up with both hands and snapped its neck.

‘That’s amazing,’ Ammadin said. ‘You’ve got a good eye.’

‘For this kind of thing, maybe. I hope I can do as well with comnee weapons and bigger game.’

Handling a spear came to him easily, because he knew the lance from his time in the cavalry, but the bow was another matter. In the morning Ammadin rode out to watch him practise with the short bow, made of layers of horn and wood. Dallador had stuffed an old saurskin with grass and set it up as a target. Ammadin sat on her horse and watched as Zayn galloped by, guiding the horse with his knees and nocking an arrow into the bow. Zayn twisted easily in the saddle and shot three fast arrows next to, above, and beyond the target. With a whoop of laughter, he turned his horse and trotted back to Dallador. When he dismounted, Ammadin joined them.

‘There’s nothing wrong with the way you ride,’ Dallador said. ‘But you’re going to have to practise shooting dismounted for a while. You know, one step at a time.’

‘All right,’ Zayn said. ‘At home we hunt with a longer bow, and you hold it vertically, not across your body like this.’

On the morrow, the men rode out early. The women began their part of the food work: milking their mares, churning butter, setting yogurt to cure and keese to ferment. Ammadin saddled her grey gelding and rode out alone in the opposite direction from the men. Spirit rider or not, a woman would bring bad luck to the men’s hunt if she tagged along. She ambled south until she found, some miles from camp, a place where a shallow stream joined the river. She watered her horse, then tethered it out to graze.

On foot she pushed her way through the tangle of trees and ferns to the riverbank, where yellabuhs swarmed. Now and then a slender brown fish would leap open-mouthed from the water and scoop some of them up before falling back. The survivors would fly madly around for a few moments, then resume their swarm, only to fall prey to the next leaper. Ammadin knelt down and peered into the water to look for spirit pearls. Sure enough, they lay thick among the orange mosses and the red-brown river weeds, but it seemed to her that there were fewer this year than she was used to seeing in the Great River.

She sat on the bank and for a long while watched the pearls. Most lay inert on the river bottom; then suddenly and inexplicably one would float free and catch the current, only to sink again farther downstream. As she watched, most of the clutch jerked itself into the current and floated out of sight. Two, however, never moved, and they seemed wrinkled as well. Could they be dead? If so, there’d be no harm in her taking one out of the water, would there? She got up and considered the underbrush around her. Nearby she found a poker tree, so-called because its skinny orange branches stuck straight out from its fleshy squat trunk. She cut off a pair, then stuck them into the mossy bank next to the shrivelled pearls as a marker. If they hadn’t moved on by morning, she promised herself, she would consider examining one.

When Ammadin returned to camp, she found the men back already; they’d had splendid luck and surprised a herd of grassars as it left a stream. Out behind the tents they hunkered down to skin and clean the two kills, both of them fat from the summer forage and a good seven feet long from nose to the base of the tail. The children clustered round to watch with eager eyes for the fresh-roasted dinner ahead of them. Three of the men had already skinned one saur and were butchering the meat with their long knives.

Off to one side Zayn was kneeling beside a three-horned male with a skinning knife in his hand. Orador was standing over him and telling him how to separate the red-and-purple striped hide from its previous owner. Ammadin strolled over to join them.

‘What’s this?’ she said. ‘Did Zayn make his first kill?’

‘More or less,’ Orador said, smiling. ‘Someone else’s arrows crippled it – Grenidor, I think it was – but Zayn’s the one whose spear finished it off. Took some doing, too, so we awarded the kill to him.’

Zayn looked up, and she noticed the left side of his face, swollen maroon and purple around a bruise in the shape of a grassar hoof.

‘His first kill is an important point in a man’s life.’ Ammadin dabbled her forefinger in the bull’s dark blood and marked a cross on Zayn’s forehead. ‘You’ve brought home food for the comnee. The gods will honour you.’

‘Thank you.’ Zayn ducked his head in acknowledgment. ‘The Wise One honours me as well, and I’m pleased I could help feed us all.’

He’d answered as nicely as any comnee boy. Ammadin suddenly wondered just how and why he knew so much about Tribal ways.

While Orador taught him how to draw the carcass, Ammadin hung around and watched. Zayn was starting to attract her, with his exotic Kazrak features and lean well-muscled body. Years before, she’d taken a few casual lovers, just as any girl of the Tribes would do, but she’d always found them irritating after the first few nights. They followed her around, they got in the way of her spirit journeys, they begged her to marry them, they wanted sons. Dallador had been different, but she’d felt that having sex with him was like eating a good meal – fine while it lasted, but ultimately meaningless. He was so sensual that he could attract anyone, but when it came to keeping them, Maradin was the only person who’d ever really loved him. Ammadin only hoped that Dallo knew it.

Zayn, on the other hand: the easy set of his shoulders, the slow way he smiled, the sense of privacy, the reserve in his dark eyes – they intrigued her. She had to remind herself that he’d only be a nuisance during the day. As if he were aware of her study, Zayn looked up and smiled at her.

‘Do you want these horns? I’ve noticed that you people use them for all sorts of things.’

Orador laughed, a little whoop of mockery that made Zayn blush. So. Here was one bit of Tribal lore the Kazrak didn’t know.

‘I don’t think you understand what you’re offering,’ Ammadin said. ‘A man gives a woman the horns of his kill after she asks him to marry her.’

Zayn sat back on his heels and looked at her in pleasant speculation, as if he wouldn’t mind receiving such a proposal. Orador made a great show of cleaning his skinning knife on the grass. Ammadin turned and strode away, annoyed with herself far more than with Zayn for allowing this embarrassment to develop. He was only a man, after all, and men were always angling for a good marriage and the horses it would bring them.

That night the camp feasted. The men dug a pit and used some of the charcoal bought on the border to roast half of Zayn’s bull grassar. All afternoon the comnee smelled it baking, and by the time it was finished, a hungry crowd milled around the pit. In the gathering twilight the men hauled the meat up and laid it on the tailgate of a wagon. With his long knife Apanador set about cutting it up; the slow-roasted meat fell apart into rich brown chunks. He fed Ammadin first, then the other women, then the children, and finally the men. The keese flowed as everyone sat down in the grass to eat. Zayn brought his share over to Ammadin and sat down next to her. They were just finishing when Apanador and Dallador joined them, hunkering down in the grass.

‘Your servant’s going to be a good hunter, Holy One,’ Apanador said. ‘He can stay on a horse like a comnee man, too. It’s time for him to think about the future. I’ll offer him a place in the comnee if you agree.’

Zayn caught his breath.

‘What do you say, Zayn?’ Apanador said. ‘Do you want to return to your khanate and live as a shamed man?’

Zayn hesitated, thinking hard. ‘I’d rather ride with you,’ he said at last. ‘If you truly think I’m worthy.’

Apanador looked at Ammadin for her opinion.

‘You’re welcome to stay,’ she said to Zayn. ‘But only if you’re willing to become a man. I know you’re a man among your people, but to us, you’re still a boy. You haven’t gone on your vision quest and learned your true name.’

‘I’ve heard about that. Will the Spirit Rider tell me what to do?’

‘Of course. It’s one of my duties.’ She glanced at Apanador. ‘I’ll consult the spirits and find an auspicious day.’

‘Good,’ Apanador said. ‘Then we’ll head to the Mistlands when we break camp.’ He turned back to Zayn. ‘Our boys go to the Mistlands for their vision quests. Do you know about them?’

‘Every officer on the border has heard of them, but I’ve never had a chance to see them.’

‘You’re going to now,’ Ammadin said. ‘Boys vigil there in the summer.’

‘What about the girls?’

‘Girls quest in the winter, down in the swamp-forests by the ocean.’

‘That’s interesting. May I ask why there’s a difference? Did the gods –’

‘No.’ Ammadin paused for a smile. ‘It’s just not safe to go into the Mistlands in the winter. The lakes are swarming with ChaMeech then. They must come from all over.’

‘Why?’

‘I haven’t the slightest idea. Maybe they send their children on vigils, too.’

‘You can talk later,’ Apanador broke in. ‘Let’s put this matter to the comnee.’

Near the smothered fire-pit Apanador gathered the comnee together and put forward his proposal. Every adult had the right to speak out, either for or against allowing Zayn into the comnee; the majority vote would decide. One at a time, everyone agreed to allow him in, until Apanador turned to Palindor. Ammadin was far from surprised when Palindor spat out a futile no.

‘And what do you have against Zayn?’ Apanador said.

‘He’s a Kazrak. Isn’t that enough?’

‘No, it isn’t. He’s a Kazrak smart enough to leave his bizarre khanate and come to us.’

When the rest of the comnee laughed, Palindor rested his hand on the hilt of his long knife. ‘He’s also a man who offended the great chiefs of his country. He broke his own laws. Who’s to say that he won’t do the same to ours someday?’ Palindor looked around, appealing to the crowd. ‘Do you really want to ride with a man who’d lie to a chief?’

‘I never lied.’ Zayn stepped forward. ‘He never even asked me if I was sleeping with his wife, and by God Himself, if he had, I would have told him to his face. She was that beautiful.’

When this drew a good laugh, Palindor’s hand went tight on his knife’s hilt.

‘Palindor, the comnee’s already agreed,’ Apanador said. ‘If someday Zayn betrays us, well, then, you’ll have the wonderful satisfaction of saying I-told-you-so to all of us. You’ll have to be content with that.’

‘And if I’m not?’ Palindor snapped.

Some of the women gasped.

‘Then you’ll have to go back to your mother’s comnee,’ Apanador said. ‘Maybe your sister will let you guard her horses.’

Blushing a furious scarlet, Palindor strode off into the darkness. When Dallador started after him, Apanador caught his arm.

‘Talking to him right now won’t do any good. After he’s had a chance to think, I’ll take him aside. Zayn, let’s go drink in my tent. There’s a lot you need to know.’

In a group the men surrounded Zayn and led him off. All sly smiles, Maradin hurried over to join Ammadin.

‘Now isn’t this interesting? So you want to have Zayn riding with us, do you?’

‘You’re being tedious. It doesn’t take the spirit power to know what you’re thinking, Maddi, and no, I have no intention of marrying him.’

‘Hah!’

‘Oh, shut up! Why are you always trying to get me to marry some lout?’

‘Well, for the children, of course.’ Maradin seemed honestly surprised that she’d ask. ‘What are you going to do when you’re old, and you don’t have any granddaughters? Who are you going to leave your horses to?’

‘Your granddaughters, probably. You don’t understand. The spirit knowledge is all I’ve ever wanted, and it’ll be more comfort than a hundred daughters when I’m old.’

Maradin thought this over. ‘Well, maybe so – for you,’ she said at last. ‘But come on, you’ve got to admit that Zayn’s a handsome man.’

‘Take him as a lover if you like him so much. I’m not going to.’

‘Hah!’

‘Oh, stop saying hah!’

Ammadin turned her back on Maradin and strode away. She was beginning to regret ever picking Zayn up off the streets of Blosk.

Out away from the camp, in the quiet, her anger ebbed away. She lay down on her back in the crackling grass and considered the night sky. Just overhead hung the Herd, as the Tribes called the spiral of light that the Kazraks had named the Spider. Galloping down fast from the north came the Six Riders, silver and bright against the dead, dark sky. Shamans like Ammadin knew lore lost to the Kazraks, that there were actually sixty riders, ten groups of six apiece, that galloped in formations whose return and permutations were as predictable as the rising of the sun. These flying lamps – or maybe they were tiny worlds; opinions differed – controlled the spirits of the crystals.

And just what, she wondered, was the Herd? She sat up, considering. Her teacher had told her that powerful spirits had gashed the heavenly sphere to allow light from the spirit world to shine through and give the Tribes light in the darkness. Loremasters in the Cantons claimed that suns, thousands and thousands of them altogether, had clustered together to form the Herd. The points of light looked so small only because they lay at some unimaginable distance in the sky. Why would spirits perform such a mighty act of magic just to help the lowly H’mai? Or, if there were other suns, did other worlds circle them? Wouldn’t they bump into each other, in that case? Neither theory made sense.

In the morning, while the rest of the comnee packed the wagons, Ammadin rode back to the stream to check her spirit pearls. She found the sticks, and when she knelt on the bank she saw the two shrivelled pearls still lying where they’d been the day before. They had definitely grown smaller and more wizened overnight. The smooth spherical pearls that had lain near them had disappeared, twitching themselves downstream, she assumed. Why would the gods object if she took a dead thing out of the water? Despite the logic of her own argument, she had to summon courage before she could reach into the stream and pick up one of the dead pearls.

The surface felt like a saur’s eyeball, cold gel in a membrane. She brought it up and laid it on the flattened leaves of a red fern, but as soon as the air touched it, it began to shrink and pucker. She drew her knife and slashed it in half. The interior liquid spilled and ran, leaving thin milky husks to shrivel in the air. In the centre lay something as small as a bead. She slid the point of her knife under a little clot of tissue, touched with pale orange blood.

‘Exactly like the lizard eggs!’

Ammadin used her free hand to dig a tiny grave on the bank, then laid both embryos inside and covered them. She washed the blade of her knife clean, dried it on her tunic, and sheathed it. Apparently the spirit pearls were nothing but the eggs of some animal – a fish, perhaps?

‘But why would they be Bane?’

Witchwoman, help me! Our gods they leave us. Our children they die.

The voice rasped and hissed. She heard it not with her ears, but with the bone of her skull just behind her left ear – or so it seemed. A spirit voice, then. She crouched on the bank and listened.

Witchwoman, please hear me.

‘I do hear you.’ Ammadin spoke aloud. ‘Can you hear me?’

Please hear me. Please help me. I be Water Woman.

The voice disintegrated into a long hiss and crackle, then faded away. Ammadin sat back onto her heels.

‘Her children? Does she mean the pearls?’

It was possible that spirits were trying to be born into this world, and that the eggs were their means of taking on bodies. The theory struck her as clumsy. Questions, more questions, and the cold bite of doubt – the spirit’s voice made them urgent.

‘Water Woman!’ she called out. ‘Water Woman, can you hear me?’

No answer came, not even the hissing. Ammadin got up, rubbing her arms, chilly with gooseflesh still. She decided that she would supervise Zayn’s vision quest, then start looking for another spirit rider to tend her comnee. The questions would give her no peace until she tried to answer them. Besides, if she left on a quest of her own, her absence would keep Palindor from Zayn’s throat. But the trouble came too fast, flaring up like a spark in dry grass when she returned to camp. Most of the wagons stood packed and ready to move out, but the men were still breaking down the last few tents and stowing a few last pieces of gear where they could find room. Ammadin was putting her bedroll into a wagon when she heard someone shout in alarm. As she ran towards the sound, she saw Dallador and Grenidor grabbing Palindor by the arms and hauling him back. Zayn faced him, his hands on his hips. Just as Ammadin reached them, Apanador ran up. She stepped back and let him settle this men’s matter.

‘And what’s all this?’ Apanador growled. ‘How did it start?’

‘Over something really stupid,’ Dallador said. ‘Palindor said Zayn shoved him when they were loading the wagon.’

‘I won’t have this kind of trouble in the comnee.’ Apanador looked back and forth at Palindor and Zayn. ‘I can see that we need to do some hard talking.’

Palindor’s handsome face twisted. He shook free of the restraining hands, but he sheathed his knife.

‘I’m willing to settle this once and for all,’ Zayn said. ‘Let’s have our fight but with bare hands. The one who loses leaves the comnee.’

Apanador turned Palindor’s way and raised an eyebrow.

‘I’ll agree to that,’ Palindor said. ‘But you won’t have a horse and a sabre on your side, Kazrak.’

Zayn merely smiled.

The entire comnee came to witness the fight, held on a stretch of ground where the horses had cropped the grass down to good footing. Palindor handed his long knife and Zayn his Kazrak dagger over to Apanador. Ammadin was furious with both men; no matter what the rest of the comnee might think, she knew they were fighting over her like studs over a mare in heat. Apanador left the two standing about three feet apart and carried the weapons back to the waiting comnee.

‘Very well,’ the chief called out. ‘Begin.’

They dropped to a fighting crouch and began to circle round each other, hands raised, eyes narrowed. Zayn kept his hands open, not in fists, and moved as smoothly as a cat. They feinted in, testing each other, dancing back fast; then Palindor charged, swinging both fists. Zayn ducked, feinted, dodged, then landed a solid punch. The comnee shouted as Palindor staggered back with his mouth bleeding. Zayn closed in and landed a quick series of blows. When Palindor tried to dodge, his foot slipped, and he went down to one knee. Zayn waited as Palindor got up, gasping for breath, his face so dark with rage and blood that he looked like a demon.

The fall taught Palindor something. This time, he feinted in cautiously, keeping his hands low, aiming for Zayn’s stomach, not his head. Zayn danced in, slapped him across the face, and danced back before Palindor could hit in return. With a howl of rage, Palindor charged. Zayn let him close, then struck with half-closed hands, punching him in the face, blocking Palindor’s every blow while Palindor struggled and fought, swaying where he stood but still game. Suddenly Ammadin realized that Zayn could kill him with his bare hands if he wanted. She ran to Apanador and grabbed his arm.

‘Stop it! It’s gone far enough.’

With a nod of agreement, Apanador trotted out and yelled at them to stop. When Zayn stepped back at the order, Palindor threw one last punch. Zayn grabbed his wrist and swung him around, pulling him back against his chest with Palindor’s arm twisted in his grip. Palindor dropped to his knees and bit his lower lip so hard that it bled again.

‘He said stop.’ Zayn let him go with a shove.

Gasping for breath, rubbing his arm, Palindor refused to look up when Apanador walked over.

‘All right, saddle your horse,’ Apanador said. ‘Ride out.’

Palindor nodded, then staggered off, heading for the wagons to retrieve the few things he owned. For a few minutes Zayn stood alone, rubbing his bloody, swelling knuckles, until Orador brought him some herb paste to treat them. Together they went back to loading the wagons as if nothing had happened.

Ammadin waited until Palindor was ready to ride. When he led his bay gelding out, loaded with saddlebags, she joined him at the edge of the camp. He refused to look at her, merely twisted his reins round and round his bruised fingers while the horse snorted and tossed its head.

‘Find a woman who wants you,’ she said. ‘You’re too good a man to demean yourself this way.’

Palindor shrugged and twisted the leather tight. ‘When he betrays you, remember that I love you.’

He turned away and swung into the saddle. Ammadin watched him till he rode out of sight, a tiny figure, disappearing into the purple grasslands like a stone dropping into the sea.

When they were still some two days’ ride away from the Great River, Warkannan and his men came across another Tribal camp, an unusually small comnee led by a chief named Sammador. They rode in, dismounted, and found themselves in the middle of a swarm of young children, who stared at them silently with solemn eyes.

‘Where are your fathers?’ Warkannan said in Hirl-Onglay. ‘Hunting?’

The children said nothing. From one of the tents someone shouted; from another an older girl crawled out. When she called, the camp came alive, and adults surrounded the Kazraks. The girl, or young woman, really – Warkannan judged her to be fifteen or so – hooked her thumbs into the waist of her saurskin trousers and stood off to one side, staring at Tareev and Arkazo with undisguised interest.

Warkannan addressed himself to the young chief. After the usual greetings, Warkannan asked if anyone knew a Kazrak travelling with a spirit rider to the south. Luck favoured him. Sammador’s comnee had travelled to the Blosk horse fair, and they gave him names: Zayn was the Kazrak, and Ammadin, who rode with old Apanador’s comnee, the spirit rider. With this information, however, came ominous news.

‘Ammadin is a really powerful woman,’ Sammador told him. ‘All the other spirit riders say so.’

‘Really? Well, I’ll count myself honoured if I ever meet her.’

‘Good, good.’ Sammador glanced around at his people. ‘But I’m forgetting my manners. Will you join our camp for the night?’

‘Thanks, but no,’ Warkannan said. ‘I was hoping to make a few more miles before sunset.’

With a wave of his arm, Warkannan gathered up his men, mounted, and led them back out into the grass. When they’d gone about a mile, he stopped his small caravan; the other men guided their horses up to his.

‘Listen,’ Warkannan said. ‘We’re going to have to plan Zayn’s death carefully. If we kill the servant of a witchwoman, the Tribes will take it as an insult, and they’ll be crying for our blood. The Tribes practically worship their witches.’

‘It’s much more likely that she’d take her vengeance on her own,’ Soutan said. ‘This is a damned nuisance, Captain. I’ve never met a witchwoman yet who didn’t have the greatest power. They look primitive, these people, but their magic isn’t.’

‘I take it you know something about it, then,’ Warkannan said. ‘Their kind of magic, that is.’

‘There’s only one kind of magic.’ Soutan paused for one of his teeth-baring smiles. ‘The kind that works.’

That afternoon they made camp by a stream deep enough for bathing. The three Kazraks stripped off their clothes and waded in, passing a bar of soap back and forth. Soutan sat on the bank, however, and read a book he’d been carrying in his saddlebags.

‘Don’t you want to come in?’ Warkannan called to him.

‘Later perhaps.’ Soutan kept his nose in his book. ‘Not right now.’

His choice, Warkannan supposed. When Tareev and Arkazo lapsed into horseplay, threatening to drown one another and yelling mock insults, Warkannan left the water. Still naked he knelt on the bank and washed out his undershirt and shorts, then put them on wet. In the heat of late afternoon, they’d dry fast enough. He washed his socks and shirt, too, and laid them onto the grass to dry. Soutan looked up and shut his book.

‘Where did you get that scar?’ Soutan said. ‘The long one on the back of your leg.’

‘From a ChaMeech spear.’

‘It looks like you’re lucky to be alive. A few inches higher, and you’d have bled to death.’

‘Yes, that’s certainly true.’ Warkannan reflexively reached down and rubbed the scar. ‘But that’s not the worst thing they ever did to me.’

‘Oh?’ Soutan cocked an eyebrow.

‘I was taken prisoner by the slimy bastards – me and Zahir Benumar. Kareem and I mentioned him, if you remember. He was one of my sergeants, then; he was commissioned later. Anyway, we caught a pack of them trying to steal our horses, and they outnumbered us.’

Soutan winced. ‘That must have been unpleasant.’

‘You could call it that. They tied leather thongs around our wrists, tied ropes to those, then took off at a lope in the hot sun.’ Warkannan held up his hands so Soutan could see the scars, thick as bracelets, around each wrist. ‘Benumar has a set to match these.’ He lowered his hands again. ‘They dragged us along when we couldn’t run any more. Now and then they’d stop, let us rest, then take off again.’ Warkannan shook his head to clear it of the memory. ‘If it weren’t for Jezro Khan, we’d have been killed for their amusement. Very slowly.’

Soutan winced again, then put the book down on the grass beside him. ‘Jezro was an acknowledged heir then, yes?’

‘Acknowledged and sanctified. He had the zalet khanej around his neck.’

‘Ah yes, the medallion. He showed it to me once. He seemed quite proud of it, but it ended up being his death warrant.’

‘Once the old khan – his father – died, yes.’ Warkannan felt his rage, rising sharp in his blood. ‘Gemet turned out to be a murderous little swine.’

‘Indan told me that it wasn’t technically murder, that the oldest son has some sort of legal right to clear away excess heirs.’

‘That’s true, but it’s a very old law. Most great khans find positions at the palace or in the army for their brothers, or at least for the ones who are willing to swear loyalty. The recalcitrant ones are usually just castrated. Gemet had every single one of them killed, loyal or not, even the bastards.’

‘Except Jezro.’