A Tremor in the Bitter Earth

BOOK ONE
Prologue
Tullier's first arrow killed the fair-haired knight. His second, loosed as he broke clear of the brush, took the neatly liveried groom high in the shoulder but did not finish him. That took a third arrow. By then Corbulo, Tullier's journey-master, already had three kills to the boy's two, and he'd paralyzed the servers' lady with a special black-tipped dart.
"Quickly now!" Corbulo urged.
The two assassins, novice and journey-master together, rushed down the slight incline to close on their prey.
Tullier, running full out, quivered with ill-controlled excitement. The ambush had gone so easily--every detail, every reaction, anticipated by his master. Smooth as an exercise, steady as a practiced form, yet here were five corpses on the ground, the tang of blood in the air, and the strange bedraggled-looking Tielmaran lady, Destra Vanderive, with her tangle of brown hair and her sun-darkened skin, lying paralyzed against the bole of the great chestnut.
The assassins reached the broad shadow of the chestnut. The big tree where the Tielmarans had made their picnic had given no shelter, and the ambush had come without warning. That showed in the blank expressions on the dead knights' faces, their empty sword hands.
Destra Vanderive heaved her willow-thin body against the tree, struggling without success to gain her feet. Her dark eyes were wild with fright. Her younger son, stiff with shock, buried his head in her skirtsand suckled her limp hand, as if hiding his face meant that nothing could harm him.
His brother, a bare handspan shorter than Tullier, met them at the edge of the tree's shade, brave but helpless.
"The Great Twins beg you, have mercy!" he beseeched them, and threw wide his hands in supplication.
Corbulo paralyzed him with a second black-tipped dart. The boy dropped facedown into the fallen chestnut flowers with an anguished cry.
Tullier, half-sick with the joy of victory, hardly heard him. He stopped at the corpse of the fair-haired knight: an older man, with silver at his collar and sleeves. Stooping, he plunged his Sha Muir knife into the body, below where the arrow had taken the man in the chest. Blood slicked the blade's thunderbolt figure--the Goddess Llara's sign. This, after so many years of preparation, was his first kill as a Sha Muira. Wetting his fingers with blood from the blade, Tullier marked his right shoulder with four short lines. Great Llara--He closed his eyes, tried to imagine the face of the gray goddess turned towards him, splendor and joy rising at her servant's first blooding. This kill is for you; for the Emperor; for Bissanty--He had trained more than a decade for this moment. Pictured it in its perfection, its glory--
"You almost missed your second man."
Breaking his prayer short, Tullier's eyes flicked to his second corpse--the groom--then across to his journey-master. The broadchested man, swaggering in full Sha Muir garb, moved quickly among his own kills, imprinting his blade with the three deaths. Unlike Tullier, Corbulo did not pause to mark his shoulders. The tall journey-master merely wiped his knife on the skirt of his robe and sheathed it. Shoulder-marking was for novices, that gesture told Tullier. "Finished there?" he asked. "Or are you taking the other one too?"
Tullier lifted his chin. "I'm finished." Set to him as a question, he couldn't--he wouldn't--mark his other shoulder with the blood of the second man he had killed. Not now. Not with Corbulo giving him such a sly look, dark eyes smiling down his nose to see if his new novice would mark his every kill, however contemptible, to the Goddess's name.
Corbulo was right, however hard it cut him to admit it. Tullier had rushed, and in rushing he'd fumbled his second kill; Great Llara would know. Unlike the knight, the groom had carried no weapon. It would mean nothing to dedicate that death to her.
Tullier sheathed his blade, his first thrill draining.
Lady Vanderive's guard had not been the challenge for which the young novice had primed himself, and even so, he'd managed to bungle one of his kills. The boy glanced, frustrated, at the rapidly blanching face of the knight he'd shot down. One kill for Llara. A second missed through clumsiness, right there for his master to see. For no reason, no reason at all, outside of his own haste.
He had been cautioned that killing freemen would be harder than despatching slaves. Warned that first-timers had to guard against haste, fear, and a kind of panicked admiration for those who struggled to preserve their lives. Already he'd failed to heed the first of those warnings.
He glanced around the little clearing, trying to convince himself that the rest of the mistakes would be easier to avoid. Fear and admiration? Though hurry had marred this first taste of freemen's death, Tullier could not see how it differed in its essentials from culling slaves in a practice yard. Corbulo's careful planning had reduced it to that. Spread among the fallen clusters of camelian-and-white chestnut buds were the pathetic remains of a picnic lunch: linen napkins; fresh white bread and early spring fruits; children's toys. Though the knights had been armed, the picnickers had been ready only for a day of pleasure. Corbulo, leaving nothing to chance, had waited until they had unpacked their luncheon and laid aside their weapons before striking. The lady's knights had died as they'd sported with the children, not a weapon in their hands.
Corbulo, Tullier thought, might have let one of the knights live long enough to fight. The Sha Muira would of course have prevailed, but the young apprentice might at least have learned something, facing such an enemy. Now all that remained was a babe in a folding canvas cradle, paralyzed children, and a bird-thin woman, also paralyzed, who was powerless to stop them. Where did glory for Llara lie in these killings? He could not see it. As he stood by the fresh corpse of the knight, the musky scent of crushed chestnut flowers mixed with the tang of blood. An inexplicable bitter gall choked his throat.
"Disappointed, youngster?" Corbulo pushed by, making for the slumped woman. "Don't be. There is more than death to Llara's honor here. For those who can abide it."
"I'm not sad for them," Tullier said angrily.
"Then why that clumsy second shot?"
Corbulo did wait for an answer. Moving on, he bent over the woman, turned back a fold of skirt, and exposed her younger son. The child's eyes were clenched shut, his small body tightly curled. Without a moment of hesitation, Corbulo raised his hand, sighted a dart fromhis wrist-launcher, and shot the child in the base of his spine. The boy, instantly paralyzed, whimpered and lost his grip on his mother's hand.
"Bastard! Oh, Goddess--" The words were a strangled noise in the mother's throat, but something in their tone caught Tullier's attention. Anger was there, as well as fright. The boy's interest sharpened. This was something unexpected. The woman's thin body had little extra flesh, and the paralysis poison had strength enough to fell a well-grown man. She should not have had the breath to resist.
"Help me," Corbulo said brusquely. He wrested the limp child's body free of her skirts.
Tullier, uncertain, reached for his knife.
"Not that," his master stopped him. "We must strip them."
The boys were dressed in boiled wool jackets, embroidered tunics, and soft trousers: nothing that would have marked them as gently born in Bissanty, where the nobles wore only silk and fine-stuff. Tullier heaved the older boy up by his shoulders, avoiding eye contact. Remembering the boy's brief, doomed stand, Tullier found himself comparing his body to the boy's as he worked. The novice was short for his age, and lightly built, while the boy was sturdy and long-limbed. The jacket Tullier pulled off the boy's back would almost have fit his own shoulders. He tossed it aside, something in him made angry, and split the tunic with his knife, deliberately ruining it. When he was done, the boy lay facedown on the fallen chestnut flowers, his smooth skin puckered with cold, a strand of silver links on his neck his last adornment. That had to come off with the rest. Not sure what to do, Tullier dropped the silver into the babe's cradle.
"The baby too?" he asked.
Corbulo, finishing with the younger boy, looked round, saw Tullier standing at the cradle, and made an angry gesture. "Llara's eyes, stop hurrying," he snapped. "What's rushing you now?"
"I wasn't--" Tullier protested.
"You want to argue?" The words rang with disbelief.
Tullier shook his head, recognizing the warning, however unjust. For a moment, he saw his master as the woman or her sons would see him: the lean menace of his figure, the blood-colored robes, the flapping braids, and, worst, the cruel set eyes, glittering in the death's-head mask of black-and-white paint. The paint-masked journey-master had every advantage over Tullier, with his youth and naked skin, with nothing but his own will to conceal his expression. Staring into his master's poison-rimmed eyes, Tullier discovered he had already overstepped a boundary.
"I want only to serve," the young novice said, forcing himself to speak humbly. "Llara's light in you--please tell me what to do."
"You're pestering me," Corbulo said, again unfairly. "Just keep out of the way and watch me. I'll tell you when I need you."
The clearing settled around them. Tullier, pretending to look at everything that wasn't his master's face, watched the older man covertly, struggling to read his mood. The unfairness wasn't like Corbulo, and that was dangerous. The ambush had been a success. Tullier's mistake with the groom had not jeopardized that success. Why then was his master so angry, so full of nerves?
Corbulo, no longer paying attention to his novice, stood over the older boy's body and pulled a box from a pocket deep in his robes: a wooden box, with stylized carvings of reeds around its sides. Touching a hidden spring, he popped the compact case into separated halves.
The swiftness of the man's motions had the smoothness of practice. Yet something in Corbulo's manner told Tullier he was not comfortable with the box or its contents. He was too delicate, too careful in his movements. Inside the cased halves were two coiled straps, supple redtanned leather with black edges. Uncoiling these straps with elaborate care, Corbulo used the first to bind the younger boy's ankles.
The leather, touching the boy's skin, seemed to burn it. An acrid tang sprang out, strong enough to overpower the musky scent of chestnut blossom. Tullier could sense magic. A strong prayer had set the spell on the leather. He bent forward, trying to understand what he was seeing.
"Keep yourself busy." Corbulo glanced at his novice, his voice sharp. Tullier had a confused sense that his master did not want him watching, that despite his instruction that Tullier should watch, he was doing a thing he wished to finish without witnesses. "Give thanks to Llara that everything so far has gone smoothly. Goddess help us with this next--"
With a sudden powerful heave he jerked the strapped boy up by his ankles and lashed him, head down, to one of the chestnut's low branches. The acrid scent grew stronger. It smelled of burning, of ritual power.
Tullier, with all his training, could guess neither the ritual's purpose nor the source of its power. The ugly burnt odor did not smell like Llara's magic ... .
"Go on," Corbulo said roughly, seemingly reading his apprentice's doubts. "Bless Llara for letting you observe this." With the first boy secure, the journey-master nervously ran the second strap through his fingersand bent to bind the bigger boy. Now Corbulo was the one who was rushing, almost clumsy.
"Thanks be to the Thunderbringer," said Tullier, eager to demonstrate his obedience, but bewildered. The upended bodies, the way the ankles were strapped, reminded him more of stock hanging in a butcher's slaughteryard than of human bodies readied for death. He saw no signs of the Thunderbringer or of the rites of death as he had been taught them. Only the prayer that Corbulo called him to recite was familiar. He began: "Great Llara, our thanks for this kill, proof here of Llara's favor--"
Corbulo's next action cut Tullier's prayer short. A shocking, sharp interruption, as he drew a knife across the first of the boys' throats. There was nothing in the kill: just a slash with his knife, repeated for the second boy. A slash and a quick end.
"--proof here of Llara's favor," Tullier repeated, "and of Her Blessing on us." The boy stared at his teacher, appalled. The journey-master should not have made his kill with his apprentice's recitation unfinished. Not after he had specifically asked Tullier to recite the blessing--
"These young ones should have been locked behind warded gates." Corbulo wiped his knife on one of the discarded jackets and pushed it cleanly into the sheath on his thigh. He would not meet Tullier's eye. "It's a sign of Llara's support for us that they weren't. Don't be displeased, boy, that this part has gone so smoothly. It's not Lady Vanderive's fault Tielmarans are fools who left the treasury door of her blood unguarded. This has gone smoothly, thank Llara, smoothly. Bless the Great Thunderer for that."
Smoothly? Tullier shot a skeptical look at the fast-draining corpses, and then at his master. Corbulo was repeating himself too insistently. Something had gone awry. This was not the way of death that Tullier had been taught. There was something unpleasant here. Something concealed, something beyond what a master should keep from his subordinate.
"I thought Lady Vanderive was our target." The question was out of his mouth before he could quell it.
"She is."
"I thought she was our only target. You told me Bissanty was bringing Tielmark to heel, that we were here to teach Tielmark it is not free, not safe from Bissanty aggression."
"So?"
"This--" Tullier gestured at the strung-up corpses. He hesitated, but the words had to be spoken. "There is no hope in me that I couldfinish this work if you were to die." Novice stared at journey-master. For a moment, neither moved.
This was Tullier's inaugural mission. He had been well drilled in its terms. No Sha Muira could return to the home island with any part of his mission uncompleted. Because of this, the Sha Muir code decreed that a novice's first mission should be limited to a task he might hope to accomplish unaided, in the unlikely event that his master failed him.
Corbulo's eyes slipped away from his novice's. The older man sank to his knees, as if he meant to pray. "You want to know too much too soon," was all he said, avoiding Tullier's question. "Beg Llara for your answers, not me."
Tullier, dumbfounded at his master's refusal to give him a direct answer, had no choice but to drop to his knees and join him. He turned his eyes to the sky, seeking to empty himself for Llara. But he could not concentrate. His mind raced, question piling up on unanswered question. In such a state, he could not hope to feel Her touch.
Corbulo had completed twelve journeys as a Sha Muir warrior. An auspicious number. One mission for each of the gods. Back at the Sha Muira stronghold, Tullier had rejoiced to be paired with a master so distinguished as Corbulo. Now, with his Master's strange withdrawal, Tullier was left to guess--wildly--what his master's strange responses might mean for his own future. Had the Arkhons decided to test Great Llara's love by assigning Corbulo a peculiarly perilous thirteenth mission? Was there truly great honor to be earned in this mission, or only damnation, in calling on a magic power outside the Gray Goddess's? If so, why had they seen fit to risk a novice with him?
This was Corbulo's first venture to Tielmark, the Bissanty Empire's southern neighbor. It was unusual, the older man had told him, for the Emperor to order a full Sha Muir envoy to the Free Principality of Tielmark. More than unusual. Unheard of. Despite its backward ways, Tielmark had once been a Bissanty possession, dignified as the fourth quarter of the Empire. In recognition of this, only shadow-envoysspying ventures with no killing--went to Tielmark.
Corbulo had been frank with Tullier when they'd met for the first time, heeding the journey-herald's call. "I don't like this mission," he had told him. "You won't either, by the time our work is through. My thirteenth mission has been highly honored--our orders come from Emperor Sciuttarus himself. Unfortunately, Llara's will is such that this distinction may bring us more trouble than good. This mission won't simply be to cut throats."
Tullier, overwhelmed to learn that Llara's Heart-on-Earth had personally ordered their venture, had barely attended Corbulo's warning. Now, confronted with his master's nervous manner as he readied the Tielmaran lady's sons for ritual death, it took on new meaning. Corbulo, even before he had been told the full details of his envoy, had, the novice suspected, guessed that neither returning to Sha Muira Island to take up a fourteenth venture nor dying in glory for Llara would come easily. If the unfamiliar magic in the ritual belonged to some other God, not Llara, Corbulo's anxiety suggested that the dark journey-master was not certain that Llara approved its use here.
The baby sat up in the cradle and began to wail. Corbulo, deep in prayer, his braids fallen over his face, ignored it. Their situation, deep in a thick, moss-darkened forest, near a running stream, was over two miles distant from the rambling stone house where the woman who lay at their feet served as lady. No one would hear it. But the cry rasped on Tullier's nerves. Why should Corbulo be so cautious about the rest, where Tullier might have learned so much, and so casual about this? The boy unsheathed his knife.
The child tottered and stood against the canvas side of its cradle to greet him. It--she--was pretty, sturdily built like her older brother, with deep brown eyes and ash-blond curls: more toddler than baby. Between sobs, she reached out a chubby hand, too young to know better. Tullier offered her the edge of his blade.
"Not yet," Corbulo snapped coldly. "That's bait for another trap. Leave it."
Behind them, the child's mother made a protesting sound.
"Bait?" Tullier sulked, turning from the child to his journey-master. "What are you keeping from me, Master?"
"There's some at the Hold who claim you as the pride of your class," Corbulo said coldly, obsidian dark glittering in his eyes. Even on his knees, he inspired fear. "Yet here you are, running your mouth in front of the living. Look at her. Do you think she does not hear you?"
Tullier turned away, suppressing an unexpected stab of alarm. He stared at Lady Vanderive, hating her, wondering how it was that he kept on compounding his mistakes, when so much of the situation lay under their control.
The woman had fallen back on the grass. Before the dart's poison had set in, she'd thrashed her skirts over her knees, exposing slim ankles and long coltish legs. Staring at those pretty legs, Tullier felt his face go hot. She won't be living long, he told himself, teasing her by moving the knife still closer to the baby. Yet, once again, Corbulo wasright to rebuke him. In the expressive brown eyes she had passed to her children, rancor mingled with her fear. She had calmed enough to stop fruitless struggle, to concentrate her all on what she could do--which was to watch them.
One of the first lessons at Sha Muira Stronghold, a thing impressed on the youngest classes, was a demonstration of the raising of the dead. To the bloodthirsty circle of students, sometimes the demonstrations had been humorous, occasionally they had been almost sad, but the greater lesson had been that even the most profoundly mutilated corpses would find the means to communicate their assassin's name to their questioners, when they knew it.
There was only one punishment a journey-master could mete to a novice on his first mission. Tullier had to stop compounding his mistakes.
"You said bait," Tullier said briskly, trying to retrieve himself. "That doesn't tell me what you next require. Am I in your way? I'll stand with the horses if I am in your way."
Corbulo shook his head, laughing malevolently. "You can't escape so easily," he said. "You must play your part, as well as I." His tongue touched his lips, a nervous, too vivid shock of red in the painted mask of his face. "Stop hurrying, and follow me. Llara will watch over us."
Tullier froze. A dizzy wave of dread swept from his brain to his gut. He did not know if it was the nervous tongue, or the words, but he sensed with a deep and sudden certainty that his master was terrified; like a slave waiting for the cut of death, Corbulo was terrified.
Terror for a Sha Muira came only from one source: turning from Great Llara's path, losing Her favor. If his master was afraid--his apprentice must accept that he would have to share that fate.
What was in the fallen woman, in her sons, that might make a Sha Muira cross Llara's will?
Compared to the Bissanty nobles with whom Tullier was familiar, the lady was unimpressive: her wool dress somber, the hammered silver of her necklace a touch barbaric. Her hands were callused like a farming wife's, her broad face was pretty, but not exceptional, and the thin body did not inspire Tullier's young passion. She seemed hardly a sight to compel a Sha Muira to terror.
Yet Corbulo was so frightened he was almost visibly shaking.
Tullier instinctively drew closer, craning to see, to understand, without unduly drawing his master's notice. Gods' glyphs ornamented the boys' bonds. A pattern of stylized deer in flight alternated with an unfamiliar symbol: a broken spiral, bound round by a white circle. Itwas not the Gray Goddess-Queen's magic. One of the other twelve, then. Perhaps Huntress Elianté, Llara's oldest daughter. Elianté and her twin, Emiera, were the highest of the gods worshiped in Tielmark. He flicked an impatient look at the Tielmaran lady, desperate suddenly for her to be dead so he might have a hope of prying answers from his tight-lipped master.
Corbulo, prayer finally completed, rose from his knees. The last item from the carved box, a bone-bladed knife, was in his hand. He flourished it twice in the air, tracing a circle. The pommel, like the red straps, bore the broken spiral sign, encircled by a white rim of enamel.
"Give me your hand." His journey-master, looking up, did not seem surprised by Tullier's closeness. The acrid scent of the leathers was stronger now, past burning to bitter ashes. "The casting needs a taste of blood--your blood. And then we'll have some of the baby's."
Tullier, trying to prove himself true to his training, did not hesitate. He held his hand out, careful not to flinch as his master seized it.
Corbulo drove the blade deep into the boy's palm.
An unpleasant shock of power flashed through the knife into Tullier's sinewy arm and on down through his spine. It was power as strong as any the boy had felt standing before the main shrine on Sha Muira Island, bowing to Llara in Her darkest aspect. It numbed something deep in his body, low in his hips. He quivered involuntarily, shaken. Blood welled from his palm, looking strange--purple and dark--against the pale ivory of the blade. There was something eager in the way the bone edge sucked up the blood, something nauseating and strong. The magic was not under Corbulo's control.
"It wants more," Tullier said faintly.
"It's getting more." The journey-master jerked the blade back and stooped for the baby. The mother twitched, but the baby was too young to anticipate the threat. Her infant gaze fixed on the journey-master's face, intrigued by the hard contrast of the black-and-white paint. She stopped crying. Corbulo touched her thigh with the knife so slyly she hardly knew that the blade had gone in and out.
As the baby's blood spread on the bone edge and touched Tullier's, the whole of the bone blade went tar-black.
"Virgin to virgin," Corbulo intoned. He rotated to face the hanging bodies. "Blood calling blood." Bowing his head, his long braids falling forward, he braced himself: knife hand raised, the fingers of his free hand spread. It was as if, at that key moment, the journey-master felt off-balance.
"Witness my act, Great Twelve above!"
The knife drove into the older boy's chest, under the breastbone, deep enough to pierce the heart. A draft of wind swept the sultry, unseasonably warm air, and there was a clash, as if of thunder, though the sky was brazen blue, cloudless. Corbulo moved swiftly to the second boy. Again, the blade swept down. Again, the great clash rang out. The leaves of the chestnut and of the other trees shivered and sighed. The chatter of the stream faded.
Where the two corpses of the boys had hung, two young deer swung, raggedly butchered, tied by their hind legs to the tree. They swayed gently in the last tags of wind.
The bone blade, once more white and clean, was clasped in Corbulo's hands, its tip pointed to the sky. Tullier noted dark patches of sweat on his master's robes. Black paint from Corbulo's face had trickled onto his neck, staining the collar of his robe.
Wiping his neck, Corbulo gestured for Tullier to approach. The journey-master stood proudly to his full height, shook his braids back over his shoulders, and turned to the woman. For a moment, Tullier's heart lifted: the fear had left his master. He was once again Sha Muira, death-bringer, with no doubt in him.
"You were born for this death," Corbulo said, addressing her. "Pray to your gods and welcome it." He curled his painted fingers around the curve of her white arm, marking her flesh with poison. That instant, she was dead. She was too ignorant to know it. A Bissanty woman would have been screaming, anticipating the curdling pain of the poison that would soon bring her the horror of dying by Llara's black curse. Tullier would have sneered at her ignorance--but at that moment, the Tielmaran woman's composure was greater even than his master's. Corbulo, something relieved in him, was gloating. "Think on the sweetness, pretty one," he was saying. "You'll be Tullier's first woman. I'm giving your death to him. You'll make him a true Sha Muir man. He'll try to be gentle, and he'll likely be fast--but you'll have to help him, or you may find him fumbling."
The blood dropped from Tullier's cheeks. Names! The journey-master had named him! Not only had his master mixed his blood with the babe's to work the magic, but now he had named him to the lady's face! He almost cried out, the shock of betrayal was so great.
"I've done nothing." The woman fought to answer smoothly, but with her thick, poison-swollen lips and half-paralyzed lungs, her words came out a foolish stutter. Her angry-hurt eyes shifting from Corbulo's painted death's-head mask to the transformed corpses of her sons. "They did nothing either."
"You were born, they were born." Corbulo propped her, half-sitting, against the tree. Her thin body was as limp as a puppet. "That's enough. Blame your mother's mother for the legacy of bad blood that she imparted to you. And yourself, for birthing a new generation. Tullier and I are here to break a prophecy--if we can't, we'll at least make a cull that will weaken its strength."
Lady Vanderive's eyes widened, filling with enlightenment and wrath. "My children," she choked harshly. "Killed for my blood." Somewhere deep within her body, she made a mighty effort to collect herself. Her tongue protruded from her lips. One hand shifted, the fingers fumbled, sketching a spiral sign--similar to that which Corbulo had used to cast the spell, but not the same.
For all her callused hands, she was not a strong-looking woman. With the dart's poisoned tip deep in her body, with the dark stain of poison on her arm where Corbulo had touched her, she shouldn't have been able to move or speak.
"I won't die for you." With great effort, she forced out the words. "You can't have that. Goddess in me, you won't break prophecy through me."
There was magic in her. Magic strong enough to resist Sha Muir poison. Corbulo had given Tullier no hint that there was magic in their intended victim's blood. Alarmed, the boy shot his master a doubting look.
The Sha Muira were Great Llara's tools, the dagger in Her left hand to balance the sword--the Imperial Army--that She held in Her right. But prophecy was something that bound even the gods' actions. It could not be right for the Bissanty Emperor, even as Llara's Heart-on-Earth, to interfere with prophecy.
He watched, blood pounding at his temples, as his master dragged the Tielmaran woman to her feet and tied her by her wrists to another of the chestnut tree's thick branches--near enough to the transformed corpses of her sons that she could almost have touched them. Corbulo lashed the woman's arms high over her head, posing her so her breast jutted forward.
Back at rocky Sha Muira Island, Tullier would have sworn on his soul that his loyalty to the cult was beyond questioning. His training was the path that would lead him to Llara. Life and death were as one, in service to the Goddess-Queen. In Her name, every fear could be met and conquered. A glorious river of silver fire awaited those who served Her. To die in Llara's name and feel that everlasting fire was something to be welcomed, an eternal banishment of fear and pain. Whatneed of threats or bonds, compared to the fear of earning Her displeasure and losing that silver fire?
At the last Sha Muir ceremony, prior to the start of his mission, Tullier's spirit had rebelled against the seeming distrust that motivated the final binding. The priests, masked with gold for the ritual poisoning, had counted the black pearls onto the silver salver, impassive, seemingly unaware of his kneeling figure. The final test: to voluntarily consume the Goddess-blessed poison that would last the course of his mission.
He had flattered himself that he needed no poison vow to assure his loyalty, that he would voluntarily choose death over failure if his mission miscarried. But even with his eagerness to fight and die in the Sha Muira name shining bright in his eyes, the Arkhon priest had proffered the plate of poisonous black pearls, implacable. It was only the presence of Corbulo at his side, invoking the name of great Llara as he took each pearl from the silver salver, crushed it between his teeth and swallowed, that had steadied Tullier to submit. If Corbulo could count, with steady fingers, the antidote beads that were to be strung on his life necklace--one to void each pearl, one to keep the poison at bay each day as they fulfilled their mission--so must Tullier.
Now, watching Corbulo ready the woman for death, Tullier understood that the poison bond existed to free the Sha Muira to perform their duty. The hanging sword of death and pain gave them liberty to fulfill their duties without regret or hesitation. And where they failed--the poison would take them to Llara, and another Sha Muira would follow and succeed, taking to himself the Gray Goddess's glory. The poison gave them steadiness, surety.
"They'll come to avenge me," the woman said. Her voice, little more than a whisper, had cleared.
"We're counting on it," Corbulo told her, rubbing the knife along the curve where her ribs gave onto her stomach. "Your avengers have been hand-picked. And if they don't come"--he shrugged--"your daughter's life should serve as a more adequate lure." He nodded to the cradle. The baby, sensing the attention, giggled, moved, and caught his eye.
"Watch!" Tullier cried. As the journey-master's attention slipped, the woman's expression contracted with a tremendous focus, tremendous rage. "Watch her!"
She lunged onto the proffered knife.
The blade was too close, too full of hungry magic. Although her hands were bound high over her head and she had little leeway, it wasenough. The blade nicked her front. When Corbulo tried to jerk away, the knife hissed and twisted, eager.
It was over.
"Bitch." Corbulo slashed the corpse with the knife, dragging the blade so it carved jagged gouges in her skin. "Blood-cursed bitch." Standing back, he hid the knife in his sleeve and turned angrily to his young novice, but not before Tullier saw, with a dropping heart, that the edge of the blade was broken, the knife ruined. "That's the wages of too much talk," Corbulo spat. Fear ran high in his voice. "Load the boys onto the spare horse. I'll carry the babe."
Leaving the young woman's corpse hanging from the tree, they went to get the horses. Moving the transformed deer-boys was hard. The pack horse, smelling the tainted metal scent of blood and magic, fought against the loading.
There were questions the young novice wanted to ask--so many questions.
From Corbulo's mood, he guessed it could be worth his life to ask them.
More than anything, Tullier wished he knew what prophecy the pair of assassins had been sent to Tielmark to subvert.
Copyright © 1998 by Katya Reimann