Grada followed, pausing now and then to wave off flies and to keep her distance. In the Maze narrow alleys kept the heat of the day, the flies quieted with dusk but rose in buzzing clouds when provoked. Some climes suffered flies of the stinging kind, or that suck the blood. In Nooria the flies stabbed.
The woman stopped once to inspect a stall. She showed no signs of guilty conscience, no sign that she was engaged in sedition. The finding of a Mogyrk church in Nooria had never been hard nor easy. The church buildings themselves were plentiful but had served new purposes for so long that the people around them no longer remembered what they had been. Two years ago she might have been inside of one and never recognised it for what it was. But since the loss of the Many the Longing had drawn Noorians into all manner of new pursuits, new ways to fill the void inside, and the Mogyrk priests had answered their call. Now statues of their dead god shone behind silk-draped altars, and the people of Nooria drifted in and out of their doors, in secret, out of sight of the royal guard.
Grada’s mark grew furtive, quickening her pace, throwing glances left and right, but never behind, never where Grada walked, openly following her. The woman veered into the narrow gap between two buildings, gone. Grada passed by, turned at the corner and came back, taking the same path. The gap proved so narrow that Grada had to draw her shoulders together.
“The second austere…” She strained to hear more, but only the buzzing of flies met her ears.
The alley ended in a high wall and a low heap of refuse, so pungent it drew tears to Grada’s eyes. A doorway veiled in beaded strings gave to the left just before the heap and Grada pushed on through. Incense sticks smoked in niches to either side of the entrance, filling the corridor beyond with a haze that gave battle to the reek from outside. The low drone of prayer came from somewhere up ahead. Grada patted through her robes for the dagger at her hip then descended a stair and through a second curtain to enter a low basement, the bead strings streaming from her shoulders, clicking one against the next.
Six or seven people knelt on the dirt floor, lamps in niches affording enough light to avoid tripping over the worshippers. A man stood by the entrance, swaddled in sand robes, but said nothing. Grada moved to kneel beside the woman and her limes. She bit down hard on the gasp that wanted to escape. Something warm and liquid tricked down her ribs below her wound. She hoped it was only sweat.
“…was born of Yi-ith, and she begat Jedah. And Jedah brought the word of Mogyrk to the people of Mythyck in the time of Ansos…”
Grada risked a look around at her fellow faithful. Five women, two men, one of those fat with flour on his apron. She wondered how he had made it between the buildings. Perhaps he was greased specially for the occasion? Her lips twitched at the thought. Once she would have shared it with Sarmin. He would have laughed. The other wore the head cloth of a dock-counter, up from the river quays with his abacus under his tunic no doubt. She wondered if it were a good sign that he had to travel so far to find a church, or a bad sign that his need was so strong he would brave the Maze to worship.
“…into the desert that we might follow. Praise be his name.”
“Praise to Mogyrk.” Grada muttered it with the others.
She knelt in the heat, her knees starting to ache, listening to the droning priest and wondering what hold such a dull faith had on her fellow citizens. The basement held no statues, no fearsome warrior god to inspire, no toothed horror to breed a righteous fear. Just words and more words. And after a while one realised that the stink of the alley over mastered the incense to reach in even here.
“Praise to Mogyrk,” she repeated with the others into the pause.
“For Mogyrk went before us, brothers, sisters, to prepare a house of many rooms. And in this house there is a place for all men, for each of us and everything, for each blade of grass and grain of sand. So it is written, and so shall we be unwritten. Death waits for every man, life is but a heartbeat, death eternal, and into this eternity Mogyrk threw himself, for me, for you, his love for the world boundless. In this house we shall be many, no one of us alone, held within the love Mogyrk died for.
“Praise to Mogyrk.” The words came unsought. The Many. That’s what Mogyrk offered. Faith in togetherness. Grada felt it, the promise, the temptation. The priest walked among them now, between the kneeling faithful, a clay cup in his hand, letting each person drink.
“The dead god’s promise.” And he tipped the cup to Grada’s lips. She drank deep. The promise tasted only of water, giving no hint as to whether it were poison or cure.
CHAPTER NINETEEN
Sarmin sat once more on the carpet, gritty with the debris of ruined walls, and lay back to watch the gods. In the shadow and soft flicker of his lantern they returned his inspection, Herzu hooded, with just the gleam of his eyes on show, Mirra full of grace, her compassion wrought in five lines by the skill of an artist long gone to dust. Meksha with fire in her eyes, Ghesh wrapped in midnight, Torlos of war, battle dressed, many others. Beyond the door sword-sons stood guard. The Fryth waited on his presence while viziers, generals and priests waited on his word; provincial lords travelled up and down the Blessing; babies sucked their mother’s milk and knew nothing of the emptiness growing in the heart of the empire. But in here, in this high tower, this small room, nothing had changed.
Sarmin returned to the undamaged wall below the window, to the place where the design had spoken and lit visions within him. Twice the pattern had spoken to him. Not in the old way, through some devil or demon concealed in plain sight within the intricate sprawling scroll of the ancient decoration, but in a new voice, a raw and powerful voice that rang him like a bell and woke echoes among the Many that remained trapped within him.
Sarmin’s fingers had learned to fear the tight-woven lines of the design but he over-wrote their reluctance with his will and set them trembling against the patterning. The voice had warned of a woman who approached, and he’d seen her through the eyes of a mountain boy. Seen an ancient woman who spoke of the Pattern Master as an old friend, a mentor, a lover maybe. “Show her to me,” he said. “Why is she coming here?”
“She comes!” The voice pulsed through him once again and the boy’s life swept over him.
Gallar stands alone, uneasy in the woods — burdened by the exhaustion of his escape through the high passes, the ache of his long descent into Fryth running in each muscle from heel to hip. The mountain-born are used to seeing mile upon empty mile, used to the wind and silence, the surety of rock-in this forest every direction ends in tree, soon or sooner still, everything is malleable, even the trees have give, and each part of it whispers or creaks or rustles.
The outpost announces itself first with the smell of wood smoke, then with the smoke itself seen rising into an evening sky through breaks in the canopy. Mule dung on the trail, the buzzing of flies, the stink of men lingering among the trunks, and the path breaks without preamble into a wide clearing.
The trading post stands three stories high, a log-built hall with stone foundations, turf roofed, surrounded by a score of buildings that are no more than shacks, stables to the rear, trade goods beneath awnings to the fore. Gallar stops in the tree-line. Nothing moves in the lengthening shadows, save a scrawny yellow dog sniffing between the lean-tos. A mule brays from the stables. Silence.
Far back, past the shack, among the trees on the far side of the clearing, something catches his eye. In the gloom beneath the foliage… something moving, things moving, not men though, or if they were, not moving like men. He frowns, takes a step back.
“Hold.” The sharp point of a blade pricks him between his shoulders. Yrkmen! They beat me here! Gallar raises his hands. “I’m just a traveller.” “Hold.” Noises from the bushes, rustling. He has walked right past them and now they’ll kill him. He had wanted to be brave but fear unmans him, trembling in his raised hands, the tingling of pins and needles across his cheekbones, making him want to piss himself like a child.
Two men walk around him, knives in hand, both hung about with cut vines. Each of them wears an iron helm of strange design, white enamelled, also wreathed in vines. It seems impossible that he had missed them. The elder of them, tall with a grey speckled moustache, watches him a moment through narrowed eyes, cocking his head to the side. Gallar tries to return the look but his gaze keeps slipping to the dagger point held between them.
