Shadowmarch

face a confusion of joy and terror.

He tried not to be upset that the first thing she did was throw her arms around the senseless boy, even though it nearly upset the litter. He was even wearier than he had realized, and could only struggle to hold his end up and shake his head in silent dismissal of his neighbors’ questions. Burly Antimony helped clear a path to the door.

“He isn’t dead,” Opal said, kneeling beside the boy. “Tell me that he isn’t dead.” “He’s alive, just… sleeping.”

“Praise the Elders—but he’s so cold!”

“He needs your nursing, dear wife.” Chert slumped onto a bench.

She paused, then suddenly rushed to him and put her arms around his neck, kissed his cheeks. “Oh, I’m so glad you’re not dead either, you old fool. Disappearing for days! I’ve been fretting over you, too, you know.”

“I’ve been fretting over me as well, my girl. Go on, now. I’ll tell you all this strange story later.” Antimony helped Opal move the boy to his bed, then turned down her distracted offer of food or drink and went out instead to placate the waiting crowd with some unspecific answers. Chert suspected the acolyte didn’t find this too dreadful a chore. From what he knew, the temple brothers, especially the younger ones, didn’t get much chance to come up to Funderling Town the market trips and other such opportunities for distraction and temptation were reserved for the older, more trustworthy brothers.

He could hear Opal in the bedroom, crooning over the boy as she took off his dirty rags, cleaning him and checking for injuries just as the Metamorphic Brothers had done. Chert didn’t think fresh smallclothes would be the thing that woke the boy, but he knew very well his wife needed to do something.

Chert looked up at a rustling noise, aware for the first time that he was not alone in the room. A very young woman, one of the big folk, sat on their long bench in the shadows against the wall, staring back at him with an air of patient detachment. Her dark hair was gathered untidily and she wore a dress that did not quite fit her thin frame. Chert had never seen her before, could thmk of no reason on or under the earth why someone like her should be in his house, even on a day of such bizarre branchings and cross-tunnels.

“Who are you?”

Opal came out of the back room with a look close to embarrassment on her face. “I forgot to tell you, what with the boy and all. She came about the second chime or so and she’s been waiting ever since. Said she must speak to you, only to you. I… I thought it might be something to do with Flint…”

The young woman stirred on the bench. She seemed almost half-asleep. “You are Chert of the Blue Quartz?” “Yes. Who are you?”

“My name is Willow, but I am nothing.” She stood up; her head almost touched the ceiling. She extended a hand. “Come. I have been sent to bring you to my master.”

35. The Silken Cord

THE CRABS:

All are dancing

The moon is crouching low for fear

He will see the naked Mother of All

—from The Bonefall Oracles

His the great hand closed around her, she felt it ringing like a crystal, a deep, shuddering vibration that had nothing to do with her, but which ran through that monstrous hand like a blood pulse, as if she were bound to a temple bell big as a mountain. The impossibly vast shape lifted her and although she could not see its face—it stood in the center of some kind of fog, light-shot but still deeply shadowed, as if a lightning storm raged inside the earth— she could see the greater darkness that was its mouth as it brought her nearer, nearer…

She shrieked, or tried to, but there was only silence in that damp, empty place, silence and mist and the dark maw that grew ever larger, spreading above her like a rolling thundercloud. The titanic thing was going to swallow her, she knew, and she was frightened almost to death… but it was also somehow exciting too, like the shrieking, terrified childhood joy of being whirled in the air by her father or wrestling with her brothers until she was pinned and helpless…

Qinnitan awakened wet with perspiration, heart galloping. Her wits were utterly jangled and her skin twitched as though she lay in the middle of one of the great hives in the temple covered in a slow-buzzing blanket of sacred bees. She felt used by something—by her dream, perhaps—even defiled, and yet as her heart slowed a languid warmth began to spread through her limbs, a feeling almost of pleasure, or at least of release.

Qinnitan slumped back in her bed, breathing shallowly, overwhelmed Her hand strayed down to her breasts and she discovered the tips had grown achingly hard beneath the fabric of her nightdress. She sat up again, shocked and disturbed. The idea of that dark, all-swallowing mouth still hung over her thoughts as it had hung over her dream. She leaped to her feet and went to the washing tub. The water had been sitting since the previous night and was quite cold, but instead of calling for the servants to bring her hot water, she squatted in it gladly and pulled her nightdress up to her neck, then splashed herself all over until she began to shiver. She sank down into the shallow bath, still trembling, and put her chin on her knees, letting the water wick up the linen nightdress until it clung to her like a clammy second skin.

The rest of the day was quieter and more mundane, although the torments of the endlessly droning prayers and the drinking of the Sun’s Blood were as bad as ever If Panhyssir or the autarch were trying to kill her with that potion, they were taking a ridiculously long time about it, she had to admit, but whatever they intended, they were certainly making her miserable.

Just after Qinnitan’s evening meal the hairdressing servant came to dye her red streak—her witch streak, as her childhood friends had named it— which was beginning to show at the roots again- Luian and the other Favored had decreed within days of her arrival that such a mongrel mark had no place on one of the autarch’s queens. The hairdresser also dried her hair and arranged it into a pleasing style, on the one-in-a-thousand chance the autarch should finally call for her that very evening Qinnitan tried to sit quietly, this hairdresser had a way of poking you with a hairpin—and then apologizing profusely, of course—when you moved too much.

I doubt she pulls that trick with Arimone.

But Qinnitan didn’t like thinking about the Paramount Wife Since the day Qinnitan had gone to her palace, there had been no further invitations and no outward sign of hostility, but it was not hard to see the way those wives and wives-to-be who considered themselves friends of the Evening Star watched Qinnitan and made clear their dislike of her Well, they might think themselves friends of the great woman, but she doubted Arimone looked on them the same way; Qinnitan felt sure there was little room for friends or equals of any kind in the world of the Paramount Wife.

The hairdresser was finishing up just as the soldiers on the walls outside began to call out the old ritual words for the sunset change of the guard— “Hawks return! To the glove! To the glove!” Qinnitan, reasonably certain that the autarch was not going to break his nearly year-long habit and summon her tonight, was looking forward to an hour or two of time to herself before sleep and whatever unsettling dreams might come with it. She thought she might say her evening orisons, then read. One of the other brides, youngest daughter of the king of some tiny desert land on the southern edge of Xis, had loaned her a beautifully illustrated book of poetry by the famous Baz’u Jev Qinnitan had read some of it and enjoyed it very much—his descriptions of sheepherders in the and mountains who lived so close to the sky they called themselves “Cloud People” spoke of a freedom and simplicity that seemed achingly attractive to her. The young desert princess seemed quite nice, really, and Qinnitan entertained a hope that one day they might become friends, since they were two of the youngest in the Seclusion This did not mean she had abandoned all sense, of course. She never touched the book without wearing gloves. The tale of a Paramount Wife from a century or so before who had dispatched a rival by having poison painted on the edges of a book’s pages was one of the first cautionary stories Qinnitan had heard upon coming to her new home.

That tale spoke much of the Seclusion, not just the murderousness of the place, but the fact that the older