They walked down to the grazing horses to wait for the approaching riders. The jahar splashed over the ford and halted beside them. Most of the riders wandered aimlessly around the ruins, curious. A few drank at the spring. Ishii and Garii and Rakii made the most cursory of inspections before returning to their horses.
Ishii came up to Bakhtiian. 'We have seen what we need here. We can go on.'
If this surprised Bakhtiian, he concealed it very well. The entire company set off westward, Tess and Bakhtiian waiting till the rest had gone.
'So it is a temple. I knew it.'
'I beg your pardon?'
'The khepelli asked to see the zhapolaya, didn't they? Did they ask to see this place as well?''
He blinked. 'I am beginning to think the prince has curious concerns. What do you mean?'
'Oh, hell,' she said under her breath, but she had no one else to ask and she needed to know. 'Specifically, by name.'
'Ah,' said Bakhtiian, meaning by that breath of a comment nothing Tess could fathom. 'Yes, they did. Why do you ask?'
She grinned. 'I'm searching for the truth.'
He smiled. 'Have it your way. For now. I'm patient, and our journey is a long one.' He reined his horse out, over the ford.
Tess lingered a moment, staring up at the cliffs. The touch of the gods. She was glad that this place had nothing to do with the Chapalii, that it did indeed have gods, that it existed for itself alone. And she was relieved that the Chapalii didn't know everything there was to know about Rhui, that they had believed these ruins might be of interest to them. In which case, did that mean they had known that the transmitter was a transmitter, or not? Neither prospect was reassuring. She sighed and followed Bakhtiian.
They rode southwest through low hills. In the early afternoon the ground broke under them, the uniformity of the plain disturbed as abruptly as a pebble breaks the still surface of a pond. At first, steep hillocks and low sheer slopes radiated out, and then the earth itself fell away on either side, a few rivulets descending past curves, lost to her sight. Coming around the last of the little hills, they pulled up.
Tess saw the lake first, a pale jewel at the center, before her gaze fanned out to the huge basin that cradled this circle of blue. It was an ancient crater; nothing else could form such a distinctive shape, could be so unnaturally round. Or could account for the strange hills, flung out like debris from some massive impact. A meteor, surely-and then
Myshla shied away from the bright wink of sunlight, glancing off a smooth surface embedded in the ground. Bakh-tiian, ahead of her, had not noticed.
Tess pulled up Myshla and stared down. Dirt had eroded away from a plate of metal. It gleamed, uncorroded. A shock of grass obscured most of the plate. In days, Tess thought, the entire patch would be grown over. She dismounted and tried to pry it out, but it was too thick. Where the grass ended, the plate disappeared back under earth. She drew her knife and dug down, working quickly. A third of a meter down there was still no break. This was not the artifact of a primitive culture. Bakhtiian called back to her, and she mounted and urged Myshla forward to catch up with him.
Staring around at the steep slope of the crater, down to the flat-bottomed basin below, she wondered how big a ship, crashing or purposefully blown up, would make such a mark in its leave-taking.
At the same time, she realized that it was not the deepness of the crater but the pall of smoke over the land below that gave the bottom an indistinct tinge. She saw neatly laid out fields, some still green. Others looked strangely altered, as if they had been trampled.
It was the town that was on fire, flames licking up from some of the houses huddled inside the earth wall that from this height seemed pitifully insignificant. In another quarter, a whole street lay blackened, smoking like cold breath on an icy afternoon. Figures ran and labored under the sun. A broken line extended out to the lake, a tenuous string to the water.
'Curse them,' said Bakhtiian. 'Come on.' He turned his horse to ride along the edge of the crater.
'We're not going down there, are we? I didn't know there were settlements out here. What do you think happened?'
'I don't know.' His voice, like his shoulders, was as taut as a strung bow. 'But see, there are vultures.'
She saw the birds, circling near a few squat trees. Below, none of the hurried figures took any notice of the pair far above them.
'I'm sorry,' said Bakhtiian suddenly, 'that you have to see this.'
They weren't trees. They were posts, driven into the ground. Six posts stood in a semicircle just above the well-trodden path, marked by a solitary seventh post, that led down into the valley. The birds cried out raucously and flapped away as Tess and Bakhtiian approached. The stench hit, fetid, overwhelming.
Three jaran men, clad in red shirts and black trousers, had been tied to the posts. All three were dead, and while one, perhaps, had died naturally of his wounds, the manner of execution of the other two was quite obvious.
'They may have been my enemies,' said Bakhtiian quietly, 'but I can only hope that they were dead when that was done to them.'
A bird, emboldened by their stillness, settled onto the slumped head of the farthest body.
'Go away!' Tess kicked Myshla forward. The bird squawked and fluttered away. She found herself on top of the scattered and half-eaten entrails that littered the ground in front of the men. Insects swarmed over the remains. Jerking Myshla hard to the left, she pulled away, gagging, to halt in front of the solitary post that marked the descent of the trail.
'Look here,' she said quickly, desperate to stop her gagging, to not have to look behind her and see the burnt-out, bloody eye sockets, the gaping abdomens- 'There's writing posted here, but I can't read-here at the bottom it's a bit like Rhuian. I think that's a 'b' there and some vowel, I think an 'o' maybe, and I'm sure that's a 'c' but it would be a hard 'c' if it was related to the northern dialect that the sailors in Jeds spoke and then that must be-my God! It's your name.' She put one hand over her mouth.
'It was the obvious choice,' said Bakhtiian, so close behind her that her startled gasp almost made her retch. 'Don't be too proud to be sick if you have to,' he added, more gently.
'Not as long as I don't have to touch them. Can you read what it says?'
'A little. Evidently a jahar attacked and set fire to this settlement. I suppose their goal was to blame the attack on me, and thus make the khaja hatred for me greater than it already is. My enemies have done this before.'
'Do you know who they are?'
'Oh, yes. They're Doroskayev's men. You never saw them.'
'No,' she said faintly.
'We'd better go.' He reined his horse around. 'Look. They've seen us.'
'Bakhtiian!' In her outrage, turning Myshla after him, her gaze flashed past the three strung-up bodies to follow his back. 'Aren't you even going to bury them?'
He kept riding. 'Bury them? You'd condemn them to burial for raiding a village?'
She came up beside him as they rounded the curve of a steep hillock, the crater and the site of execution shut out by the slope. 'Condemn? I don't understand.'
'Let's get away from here.' He urged his horse to a canter. Emerging onto the plain, rolling here toward a range of low hills, they slowed the horses to a walk.
'Forgive me if I was hasty,' he said after a silence. 'Burial is the worst thing that could happen to the jaran. But perhaps in other places that isn't-' he shuddered- 'true.'
'It isn't. Why is it so bad?'
He turned his head to stare at her, amazed. 'To be trapped beneath the earth, forever separated from the sky, never again to live where the wind can touch you? That is only for the sacrilegious.'
'Is it better to be torn to pieces by the animals?'
'But they are the gods' creatures, scattering our bodies back to the wind. And the wind gathers us up and pours our spirit into the womb of a woman ripe for conception, and the world receives us back again.'
Tess was silent, staring out at the wide stretch of plain, that sudden sink of land lost behind them like a dream. Around them the grass seemed empty of any life but the wind's. 'But I thought you burned the dead.'
