message.
'By what right do you claim the right to act in her favor?' demanded the Hieros.
'Blood right.'
The statement was a formality, so she dismissed it and went on. 'Show the tally bundle.' A young woman in an orange taloos unrolled a bundle of sewn-together sheets. Holding each end of the scroll, oldest to newest, forced her to open her arms wide.
'A tremendous debt,' remarked the Hieros with a caustic smile. 'Her purchase price, and the usual debits for lodging, drink and food, clothing, training as a hierodule.' She ran a finger from top to bottom of each flat tally stick as she traced the account of Zubaidit's service at the temple. 'Set against these debits, and in addition to the favor she accrued through her regular duties, she earned favor by comforting the gods-favored worshipers. Against this, additional training costs to the temple.'
' 'When a person sells their body into servitude in payment for a debt, that person will serve eight years and in the ninth go free.' That's what it says on Law Rock.'
She raised an eyebrow. 'No assizes will rule in your favor, not when legitimate debt has accrued on an account.'
He had known she would say it, but the distraction had allowed him a moment to calm himself, to ask the necessary question. 'What is the tally?'
The Hieros grinned exultantly. Indeed, her smile was almost ecstatic, and he supposed she had long years of practice, as old as she was. 'Thirty cheyt, seventy-one leya, and nineteen vey.'
One thousand eight hundred and seventy-one leya.
The number dizzied Kesh. He stumbled to the fountain, sat down on the rim, and rested his head on a hand. When had he gotten so tired?
The lanky girl whistled appreciatively.
Her friend chortled, nudging her foot again. 'I heard that one of the merchants of the Greater Council bought her only son the best stallion from the best herd off the grasslands and fitted it out with bridle and saddle trimmed with silver and gold-that was the price! Thirty cheyt! For a horse and gear! Can you imagine? And then it threw the fool, and broke his neck!'
'You've cheated me!' said Bai with a kind of parched hoarseness, as though her throat had been rubbed raw. Kesh looked up. She'd fisted her hands, as if ready to punch back.
He was genuinely shocked by the debt-he'd expected a similar price to his own, maybe a little more-but he'd known something like this might be coming. But what matter if the temple was cheating Bai? He raised a hand, thumb and three fingers curled and touching his little finger to his lips. Obedient to their childhood code, Bai subsided, turning her back on the Hieros.
'That's a staggering amount,' he said to the Hieros. 'Is that the full measure? Are there any other costs you aren't telling me, or that you mean to add on afterward?'
As her face relaxed, he glimpsed how she might look in the moments after satiation: a true devotee of the Merciless One, content only with the complete surrender of her victim.
'That is the measure in full, as of this meeting between us, now,' she said graciously. 'We'll set whatever coin you can offer today against her account. Next year, you can pay another installment.' And another and another, she meant, an endless procession of hopeless payments that would never catch up to the galloping pace of debits.
'No, Kesh,' said Bai urgently. 'Keep whatever you have as seed coin. Come back when you have the whole thing. Don't waste it out like this. I know what it means, that you've come today. You must use it as we spoke of before.'
At her words, he bent, splashed water on his face, and stood. The dizziness had fled. It was a relief, in a way, knowing that the sale of the Mariha girls would not have come close to covering the whole no matter what. The temple was cheating Bai, that was obvious, but it was also true she had no legal recourse given her circumstances, and neither did he, no matter what that reeve, Joss, had said. Knowing it had come to this, knowing he had made the right choices all along, made it easier to give up the treasure to free Bai.
He met Bai's gaze. She lifted her chin defiantly as he crossed his forearms at his chest, wanting to crow in triumph.
All done now! Finished. He had won that which he had sworn to do years back.
He nodded at the Hieros. For the first time, doubt flickered across her proud face. 'By the gate you'll find a litter,' he said. 'Have it brought here.'
'Rudely spoken, to command me as though I am your slave,' she said, but she believed herself safe and so she remained amused. At her command, four young bodies hurtled away. Another dozen people pushed to the edge of the clearing, come to watch. Probably the news was all over the temple by now.
Bai looked down at the ground for all the world like a shy bride, yet her stance betrayed a body honed and strengthened by hard exercise. It disturbed him. She had changed utterly since the day she'd been sold away from him, little sister and older brother on the auction block of Flesh Alley with aunts and uncle looking on dispassionately as they mouthed each rising tally, as the bidding went higher. Bai had been a thin stick of a thing, first clinging to him, then sobbing and wailing as the servants of the Hieros dragged her away. Twelve years ago.
He had lost the desire to revenge himself on his aunts and uncle. They were meaningless; like the old ruins to be found along every road, they mattered nothing to the caravan of life that must proceed on its way to its next destination. He was so close to success that he felt tears, and gulped them down, and shook as with a palsy. He knew suddenly and with complete conviction that the litter would be gone or the treasure vanished. How could he have left it alone? Had he really been that stupid?
But after all here it came, swaying raggedly with four bearers off-step and ungainly as they crunched over the gravel to set the litter down in the midst of the open space, about halfway between the edge of greenery and the centerpiece fountain. As Kesh approached, everyone except Bai and the Hieros backed away.
'The payment.' He hooked back the curtain, reached in, and grasped the first thing his hand came to, which was a braid. He tugged.
She came unresisting, as she had all along, and stepped out into full sun. She raised no hand to shade her eyes. Her body was hidden beneath her only piece of clothing, a voluminous cloak woven of a silverine cloth. She blinked several times as the light struck; that was all.
Breaths were caught short, or taken in hard. Several people skipped back, and one voice whimpered in fear.
'A ghost!' whispered the Hieros, crossing her forearms away from her chest to ward off the ill omen.
'Touch her. She is no ghost.'
He pulled the cloak back, each wing over one of her shoulders, and heard their moans of fear and gasps of surprise-and their sighs-as her body was revealed, as pallid as marble, as smooth as goat's milk and as creamy. Her hair both above and below was as pale as a field of harvest-ripe grain. Her eyes were not natural eyes. They were cornflower-blue. Demon-blue.
'What I offer, you must accept,' he finished.
Bai grinned in a way that terrified him suddenly. She leaped across the clearing like a cat, halting in front of the Hieros. With a laugh, she slapped her, a crack across that old face.
'Bitch! I've been waiting to do that for twelve years!'
No one moved.
Without lashing out in her turn or even losing her temper, the Hieros spoke. 'Do what impulse tells you, Zubaidit, but it will make no difference in the end. You are meant for the Devourer. You will see.'
Bai spat onto the pebbles. Grinning with a vicious glee, she tugged her slave bracelets from her wrists and dropped them on the ground.
'I'll meet you at Leave-taking Pier,' she said to Kesh. She dashed away into the greenery under an arched lacework of flowering vines. In her wake, the two ginny lizards rattled away into the undergrowth.
No one spoke, and no one moved, all in thrall to the vision standing among them, no stunning beauty, not like Captain Anji's wife-nothing so pallid could truly be deemed beautiful-but a thing of horrible and irresistible fascination. A whirlpool into which all are dragged and can never fight their way out. She was an evil thing, and Keshad knew it, but he did not care. He was rid of her, and by this means had gained everything he cared about in the wide world: his freedom, and his sister's freedom. The temple could take care of itself.
