grills. Halfway down to Tradesmen's Pier, a big rounded bread oven was being cleaned out. The smell of that fresh bread made Kesh's mouth water.
The lad beckoned them through the gates. 'Heya!' he called to a pair of youths loitering in the shade. 'Get down to the pier. You were already supposed to be there.'
They walked into the Heart Garden, a square courtyard surrounded by blank walls. Three closed inner gates beckoned, one painted golden yellow and one the pale silver of moonlight. The third, opposite the bronze-colored outer court gates, was painted as white as the walls and in fact was rather difficult to discern against the white walls. The lad motioned to benches placed within pools of shade cast by a dozen vine-covered arbors and surrounded by beds of bright yellow-bells, blood roses, and blue and violet stardrops. This time of day it was quiet, and the scent of the flowers, particularly the glorious stardrops, was piquant and heady, like a drug. They sat in the shade and waited while the lad vanished through the white gates.
At intervals, Talker and Silent glanced at the litter. They knew its weight and balance, but they asked no questions. Kesh rubbed his hands as if washing them. He had never been as anxious in his life as he was at this threshold, not even when he had faced down Master Feden. A hush had fallen. Somewhere unseen, a door scraped open and slid shut. He jumped up when one of the white doors slid open. An elderly woman appeared. She beckoned.
'Bring the litter,' he said.
The procession arrived at the white gate. The old woman was tiny, with chains of delicate dancer's bells circling her wrists and ankles. Her long hair was gone to silver and bound back into a braid brightened with moss- green ribbons.
'Set your burden down just inside and then return out here,' she said to the bearers in a high, light voice. 'We'll call you when you're needed.' To Kesh she said nothing.
Past the white gate, a screen blocked their view of the courtyard beyond. Talker and Silent set down the litter, and as soon as they retreated the lad appeared; he closed the doors by going out after them, leaving Kesh alone with the old woman. She wore blue silk, and smelled of sweet ginger.
She moved away around the screen without looking back at him and with a remarkable and agile haste. He followed the chime of her bells into a court grown so lush with vines and hedges and carefully pruned trees that the scent of green watered growing things made the air almost too thick to breathe. Around every corner of the labyrinthine pathway a new and different tiny glade was revealed, soft and shadowed and usually ornamented by some cunning, tiny waterfall trickling along a sculpture shaped out of rock or pipewood. At length his steps led him to a graveled open space at the center. A fountain splashed, water caressing the flanks of a statue depicting a man and a woman in the grip of the Devourer.
'Crude, but it was placed here long before my tenure. I would never have chosen something so unsophisticated.' The voice was low, harsh, and female.
He turned all the way around. He was alone, although the dense foliage offered a hundred hiding places.
'With what desire do you come to worship at the altar of the Merciless One?' the voice asked.
'I do not come to worship. I come to complete a transaction begun ten years ago. Where is Zubaidit?'
'She's not available right now. You can't see her.'
'I'm not here to see her. I'm here to buy out her debt.'
At a distance, a bell jangled. Nearby, he heard a hissed breath, the scrape of a shod foot on rock, and the whisper of dancing bells. The old woman, too, must be spying on him.
'She won't go! She is a true hierodule of the Devourer. Our best student and most devoted worshiper.'
He heard her words with a contempt that made him snarl. 'That's not true.'
It can't be true!
'I know who you are. It has been two years since you have seen her. Many things can change in that time. She thinks you've given up on her, and she's turned her heart entirely to the goddess. She doesn't want to speak to you again.'
Perhaps it was all for nothing. All those weary mey trudged; all the deals, the bargaining, the cold nights and hungry days and the endless hells of Master Feden's house that he had endured for twelve years because each morning upon waking he could take in a breath that was a promise, that he would be free. And that she would be free.
'That's what you say! I'll hear it from her own lips, not yours.' He stooped, picked up a handful of pebbles, and cast them wildly toward a concealing thicket. They spattered. She mocked him with a laugh that made him grit his teeth. He fixed his gaze on the pour of the water as it coursed down the deep valleys made by the mingling of limbs, woman to man.
'You know the law,' he said at last. 'I've come, as the gods of the Hundred give me the right to do. You must accept my payment if the hierodule agrees.'
Her voice hissed out of the shadows. 'Spare yourself this humiliation. She won't leave the temple.'
'Then she can live here freely, after I've spoken with her. She must tell me herself with her own voice. Unless you've cut out her tongue! But your hierodules need their tongues, don't they?'
'Impious scrat! The Devourer will eat your testicles!'
'I'll take my chances.'
Branches rattled as if a rat scrambled away through the undergrowth. As he waited, he became convinced someone was staring at him. Scanning the under-growth, he saw nothing at first, but then, as his gaze picked out shapes, he distinguished the snout of a ginny lizard, shadowed under drooping striped-firecanth leaves. The creature stared intently down at him, from a branch higher than his own head. It bobbed its head at him but did not otherwise move; it watched him as if it were a sentry. A second head joined the first, an arm's length away, and this one bent first one eye at him and then the other, head turning almost flirtatiously.
Footsteps scraped on earth. He turned. A woman walked into view from underneath a tunnel woven of interlaced leaves. Of middle years, she had a bountiful figure wrapped in a patterned taloos covered by an undyed work shirt. But she only looked Keshad up and down with a measuring smile in a manner very like that of the second ginny lizard, and stood at the edge of the clearing to wait. Others appeared, exactly like loitering shoppers who canvass the market with no intention of buying. About twenty people filtered into the courtyard, strung around the clearing like so many jewels about an old granite-skinned widow's neck. He sensed a few standing concealed within the drowsy growth. A young pair sauntered up to lean on the sun-warmed stone rim of the fountain. Arms crossed, the lanky girl with luxurious hair and a lazy smile looked him over in a way that made him shiver. The youth, wearing only a kilted wrap around his hips, settled beside her; he nudged her foot with his and whispered into her ear. She narrowed one eye almost to a wink as if promising Keshad his heart's desire. When she shifted her buttocks on the rim, her long tunic, cut high, slipped to reveal a sleek flank. He flushed, and her companion snickered, but after so long in the south he had almost forgotten that Hundred women were the most beautiful of all, dark and lovely, although this one could have used a little extra flesh to round her curves.
Hundred women were the most beautiful of all-except perhaps for the captain's wife-and he looked down to hide his face so none of these, vultures all, could feed on any scrap of truth his expression might reveal. A steady step crunched on rock. When he looked up, there was Zubaidit striding barefoot around the curve of the fountain. She had grown since he last saw her, and even then she had been tall. She wore a tight, sleeveless, short jacket and a knee-length wrap of plain linen kilted low around her hips, leaving her brown belly bare. A jewel gleamed in her navel. She was well muscled, like an acrobat, and her skin glistened with oil and sweat, just as if she had come from exercise.
She saw him, and halted. Her eyes flared with surprise, while her left hand curled into a fist. A purpled bruise mottled her left cheek. Aui! Had they been beating her?
When she did not acknowledge him, he said nothing, and when he said nothing, she shrugged a shoulder and twisted to look behind her. Everyone swiveled heads as the tiny silver-haired woman who had let him into the inner court glided into view. She walked with a pitter-pat step that made her seem dainty, but her shoulders had the square stubborn cant of a swordsman's.
The lanky girl coughed, and her friend smirked.
'Are you the Hieros?' Kesh asked without preamble.
'I am,' said the old woman.
'I am here to pay off the debt of Zubaidit.'
Bai looked at him, gaze dark and intense, and her eyelids flickered as if she were sending him a
