the others were close enough to have seen this act of murder, and Tlayesha’s involuntary protest was lost in the babble of voices. The tanner might have heard, however, for he glanced in her direction.
A soldier panted up with a rope, and soon the body was hauled feet first from the swamp, dripping wet, yet wealed and puffed all over as though burned by fire.
The officer in copper armour now approached the captain of the road guards and produced a document. The latter scanned it briefly, shrugged, and handed it on to the commander of the Shen contingent. The first man signalled to his remaining three troopers.
A billet of wood was found and lashed to the tentpole to serve as a crosspiece. The soldiers stripped the boy of its kilt, methodically inserted the point of the tentpole between the legs, and pushed until nearly three handspans had entered the abdomen. They then lifted the limp form upon this improvised impaling stake and lashed it to the parapet railing.
Tlayesha turned away, nauseated in spite of herself. She had once seen an impalement-a living victim who shrieked and beat at his belly as the terrible stake pushed up through his entrails- but this senseless degradation of a man already dead was somehow worse. It seemed to deprive him of any last shred of dignity. How would he appear before the Ferryman to Lord Belkhanu’s Isles of the Excellent Dead? To humiliate a noble corpse in this fashion meant a great crime against the Imperium-or against someone of awesome power!
She stumbled back into the slave boy. Without any conscious volition, her arms went out to embrace him, and his came up to encircle her waist. She had no idea whether she needed to console him, or whether she herself wanted comforting. They stood together for what felt like aeons while people around them chattered and pointed and stared and finally began to drift away.
The boy’s fingers cradled her cheek. They did not tremble at all. Before she could react he lifted up her face to look directly into her eyes. She wondered, confused and astonished, if he was about to kiss her! But then he pressed her head firmly on around so that she looked into the throng still gathered beneath the limp body upon its stake.
The boy’s mouth was open, his jaw muscles working with the strain. Then he spoke. In clear, perfect Tsolyani, he said:
“The tanner-is-a Mihalli. Of-Yan Kor… Soldiers-from Prince Dhich’une-Sarku. They seek me-and Eyil, the girl, the one given Zu’ur.”
He could say no more. His eyes closed, and two tears squeezed out upon his cheeks. His shoulders began to shake in the spasms of the shaking sickness, and let Tlayesha go to stumble back into the darkness.
She was left to stand, openmouthed, gazing first after the slave boy and then into the crowd where the tanner and his apprentice had been.
Now they were gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Nothing more could be learned from the ’nameless slave boy during the night. In the grey drizzle that accompanied the dawn Tlayesha picked through her meagre array of drugs and medicines, but nothing suggested itself. The flawed yellow crystal she had purchased in Jakalla did not capture his soul, as its seller had sworn it. would. She then had hopes of an infusion of pounded Ngaru-bark; sometimes that kept a person on the borderland of sleeping and waking, leaving the mind free to speak what was sealed within the heart. But the slave only went to sleep, exhausted. The rest of her pharmacopoeia-soporifics, anaesthetics, simple stomach remedies, bandages and potions that could clean a wound or slow menstrual bleeding-were of no use at all.
As soon as they got to Purdimal she could go to the drug-sellers who sat in the Court of Cries below the black pyramid of Lord Ksarul’s temple. Chnesuru’s fellow-countryman, evil-visaged Gdeshmaru, had his apothecary’s shop there. He would know how to restore the boy’s wits if anybody could. Gdeshmaru was unlikely to betray her. She knew of a score of instances in which he had aided Chnesuru, and the plump slaver still lived. Moreover, Tlayesha had had dealings of her own with him: was there not the affair of Chnesuru’s slave girl and the governor’s clan- niece, a matter in which Gdeshmaru had provided a handful of bitter little seeds to break the latter’s infatuation? The niece was happily married now into the Clan of the Golden Sunburst, and her new kinfolk would not take kindly to revelations of behaviour more suited to a devotee of Dlamelish-or virginal Dilinala, who loved other women-than to Lord Hnalla.
Something very wrong had happened last night, a thing far too momentous for Tlayesha. It might be a matter too high even for Gdeshmaru, who handled the peccadilloes of the aristocracy as smoothly as a ship sails downriver. She could of course remain silent, pretend ignorance, and hope to keep the impaler’s stake out of her belly. Perhaps she had already seen too much.
Fear struck her like a wave. In the name of all of the Indigo Aspects of Lady Aventhe, what was she about?
She tried to put the events of the night aside, but her mind kept nibbling at them as a Hmelu — calf chews its mother’s udder. She cursed herself for a fool. One of her earliest memories was of her clan-mother laughingly accusing her of being a living incarnation of Shaka’an, the Little Girl Who is Curious, one of Lady Avanthe’s Lesser Aspects. La, what had been meant as a loving gibe might well have been a forecast of her death!
There was more to it, of course: more than stupid inquisitiveness! What were her feelings for the wretched slave boy? Did she want to lie with him, tie herself to him? No calm, brave, noble provider he! Not the sort of husband about whom a giri weaves her dreams! Nor did she want to be a mother to him, nurse him, and clutch him to her as a clan-wife dandles her babes! Lady Avanthe’s maternal instincts could be allowed to go only so far!
She threw her jars back into her bag, angry at herself for even thinking such confused thoughts.
Whatever the boy knew was fraught with danger. He had mentioned the dread name of Prince Dhich’une, and she herself had seen the copper-trimmed armour and the blazon of the Worm upon the soldiers’ breastplates. She shivered. Stories of the secret societies within the temples trickled like underground streamlets along the trade routes of the Empire. Rumour had it that one of these, the Society of the Copper Tomb of the Temple of Lord Sarku, was headed by the Emperor’s youngest son himself. Beyond this the wagging tongues babbled a myriad tales, but who knew what was true and what was no more than the embroidery of imagination?
To add spice to the sauce, there had also been mention of Yan Kor, though she could not remember the boy’s exact words.
What was the other thing he had said? That the tanner was a Mihalli? She had heard the legends: once the alien Mihalli had shared Tekumel with mankind and the other nonhuman species. They had lived someplace-she racked her brain to recall-far away to the northeast, beyond the Empire, beyond Saa Allaqi which was the homeland of the Baron Aid, the man who was now overlord of Yan Kor, beyond Jannu and wild Kilalammu, somewhere in the unknown lands where nobody went. The Mihalli were famous as shape-changers. The market storytellers used them in their plots: almost every tale-cycle had a Mihalli villain in it. What they looked like Tlayesha was not sure. The puppeteers in Bey Sii had a beast-like creature with many heads painted in gaudy colours, and in the Story of Garu, which she had once seen acted in Jakalla, the costume had been that of a serpent-like creature with the face of a man. Most of the tales agreed that a Mihalli could always be found out by its eyes, however; these never changed no matter what form it put on: they invariably glowed red and were hollow, with no pupils.
The slave boy had been certain that there was a Mihalli among the crowd on the parapet. Whatever other symptoms the shaking sickness had, it did not bring on hallucinations. The boy really believed that there was a Mihalli here somewhere. Superstition? An ignorant Livyani peasant-lad, who saw monsters in every tree? He did not impress her as such. Not at all.
This morning Tlayesha wandered the length of the platform, peering into tents, talking to everyone, and listening to a hundred different accounts of the incident of the previous night. Of the tanner and his apprentice there was no sign. Travellers came and went, of course, and they might have departed before Gayel set. But then why would a tanner wish to journey by night along this dismal, dangerous road?
Itk t’Sa added to her apprehensions when they met over breakfast by the sick-cart. The Pe Choi looked at Tlayesha and whispered, “What did the slave see?”
Not “What happened?” or any of the more likely questions she might have asked.
Tlayesha dared not confide in the creature-not yet. She only shrugged and grunted a noncommital reply. The
