Shadowmarch

the little yellow Marash peppers.

“Now close your eyes, child,” Panhyssir told her in his deep, important voice as she finished draining the cup. “Let the god find you and touch you. It is a great, great honor.”

The honor came more quickly than usual, and it was no mere brush this time, no dreamy caress as in past days, but more like being grabbed and shaken by something huge. It started as a feeling of heat at the back of her stomach and then spread swiftly up and down her spine, both directions at the same moment like a crackle of fire through dry grass, flaring at last behind her eyes and between her legs so that she would have fallen off the chair if the younger priest had not grabbed her. She felt his hands as though they were far, far away, as though they touched a statue of her rather than the real Qinnitan. The rush of noise and darkness into her head was so powerful that for long moments she was certain she would die, that her skull would burst like a pine knot in a cook fire.

“Help me!” she screamed—or tried to, but the words only existed in her own thoughts. What came out of her mouth instead were animal grunts.

“Lay her down,” Panhyssir commanded. His voice seemed to come from another room. “It has well and truly taken her this time.”

“Is there anything… ?” Qinnitan could not see the young priest—she was in a night-dark fog—but he sounded frightened. “Will she… ?”

“She is feeling the touch of the god. She is being prepared. Lay her back on the cushions so she does not harm herself. The great god is speaking to her…”

But he’s not, Qinnitan thought as Panhyssir’s voice grew fainter and fainter, leaving her alone at last in blackness. No one’s speaking to me. I’m all alone. I’m all alone!

It grew thick around her, then—although she didn’t know, couldn’t even guess, what “it” was. She was having enough difficulty just holding what she was and who she was in her heart: the darkness threatened to suck it all away, all of what made her Qinnitan, just as winter nights of her childhood had yanked the warmth from her face when she ran outside in a sweat after jumping and playing with her cousins.

Now the darkness began to change. She still could not see anything, but the emptiness around her began to harden like crystal, and every new thought that passed through her mind seemed to make it ring, a deep, slow tolling like a monstrous bell of ice. She was heavy, heavier and older than any mere living thing. Qinnitan could understand what it was to be a stone, to lie in the earth without moving, measuring out thoughts as deliberate as mountains rising, how it felt to live not just flitting moments but millennia, each dream an aeon long.

And then she could feel something outside herself, but close—frighteningly close, as though she were a fly walking all unknowing on the belly of a sleeping man.

Sleeping? Perhaps not. For now she could sense the true size of the thoughts that surrounded and penetrated her, thoughts that she had for a moment imagined were her own, although she realized now that she could no more make sense of these vast ideas than she could speak the language of an earth tremor’s rumble.

Nushash? Could it be the great god himself?

Qinnitan did not want to be locked in this diamond-hard, resonant darkness anymore. The horrid shudder of the god’s slow pondering was too much for her frail thoughts, so far from her and so, so much greater than she or any mere man or woman could ever be, big as a mountain—no, big as Xand itself, bigger, something that could he across the whole night sky and fill it like a grave.

And then whatever it was finally noticed her.

Qinnitan came up thrashing, her heart battering at her ribs as though trying to leap from her breast. As she woke to the burning brightness of the lanterns in the small temple room, she was weeping so hard she thought her bones would break, with a taste in the back of her mouth like corpse flesh. The younger Favored priest held her head as she vomited.

At last, an hour later, when the female servants had cleaned up after her and bathed her and robed her, she was taken back to Panhyssir. The paramount priest held her face in his hard hand and stared into her eyes, not in sympathy, but like a jewel merchant evaluating facets.

“Good,” he said. “The Golden One will be pleased. You are progressing well.” She tried to speak but couldn’t, as weary and sore as if she had been beaten.

“Autarch Sulepis has called for you, girl. Tonight you will be prepared. Tomorrow you will be taken to him.” With that he left her.

* * *

The preparations were so exhausting and kept her up so late that even as she was being hustled down the hallways of the Orchard Palace to her morning meeting with the autarch, and having got out of bed only an hour before, Qinnitan was stumbling with fatigue. She was also still suffering the effects of the potion the high priest had given her the previous day, feeling it much more strongly than she ever had before. Even in these shadowed halls the light seemed too painfully bright, the echoes too persistent—it made her want to run back to bed and pull something over her face.

At the golden doors of the autarch’s reclining chamber, she and her small retinue had to step back and wait as the great litter she had seen once before was maneuvered somewhat awkwardly out into the passage. The crippled Scotarch Prusas pulled a curtain aside with his cramped fingers to watch the proceedings, then he caught sight of Qinnitan and his head twisted toward her, mouth hanging open as though in shock, although she thought that was more the slackness of his jaw than any real surprise at seeing a minor bride-to-be waiting for an audience with the autarch. He looked her up and down, his head trembling on his thin neck, and if the look he gave her was not contempt or even hatred, she was certain it was something close, a chilly examination made more disturbing still by his twitches and little gasps of breath.

Why would the most powerful man in the world pick such a frail, mad creature as this for his scotarch? Qinnitan could not even guess. The scotarchy was an old tradition of the Falcon Throne, meant to make sure an heir was always in place until an autarch’s own son was old enough to take power; it was designed to forestall crippling warfare that had often broken out between factions when the autarch died without an heir ready. The strongest and oldest part of the ritualistic tradition, however, was that if the scotarch died it meant that the autarch had lost favor with heaven and thus he had to give up his throne as well. This had been meant to stave off treachery from sons and relatives not likely to be named as heir, and because of this ancient Xixian constraint on even their god-kings, scotarchs were chosen not so much for their actual worthiness to rule but for health and likely endurance, prized like racehorses for brightness of eye and strength of heart Until a few generations back, they had always been chosen during ceremonial games in which all contestants but the winner might die. This had been deemed fitting, since the path to the Falcon Throne for aspiring autarchs also tended to work the same way, except that the deaths were not generally so public.

As Qmnitan watched the trembling figure of Prusas withdraw into the cushioned depths of his litter with a stammering cry that his bearers should hurry on, she could only wonder how anyone, especially someone like Sulepis with no suitable male heirs even born, let alone ready to rule, could have chosen such a pathetic creature as Prusas for his scotarch, a cripple who looked to be tottering on the lip of the grave (Qinnitan was not alone, of course: nobody in the Seclusion seemed to know the answer to that question, although it was much guessed-at throughout the entire Orchard Palace. Some brave ones whispered that it proved that Autarch Sulepis was either the maddest of his unstable family or, putting a more pleasant face on it, touched by the gods.)

The tall doors had barely swung shut behind the scotarch’s litter before they swung open again for Qinnitan and her pair of attendant maids and complementary pair of Favored guards.

The Reclining Chamber with its slender purple-and-gold columns was only slightly smaller than the great throne room, although there were many fewer people in it, only a dozen soldiers mostly ranged at the back of the dais and another two dozen servants and priests In any other circumstances it would have felt strange to be the object of so many male stares after so long in the Seclusion, but even with Jeddin one of those watching her, the Leopard captain’s eyes rapt but his thoughts hidden as though behind a curtain, Qinnitan’s gaze was drawn to the man on the white stone bench as though by a lodestone. It was not just the autarch’s obvious power that seized her attention, the way the others in the room stayed as close to him as they could while still obviously fearing him, like freezing peasants around a huge bonfire, or even the fierce madness of his eyes, pitiless as a hunting bird’s, whose force she could feel even from a dozen paces away. This time, there was another reason for her fascination except for the golden circlet in his hair and the golden stalls on his fingertips, the autarch was completely