The Secret Texts Read online

  She looked away, toward the western wall of the city, where Hasmal went about whatever it was he did during the day, and then she hung her head. She would have given almost anything she had to get his secret; she would not, however, chance ransoming her Family’s strength and honor.

  She looked back at Norlis and said, “Then let’s go to this last silk market for Tippa. She hasn’t managed to buy everything in the town yet.”

  Norlis said softly, “If there is something in particular you would like to get, I could go there once I’m off duty and purchase it for you.”

  “No. I just wanted to look around. But thank you for offering. You’re very kind.”

  Norlis smiled and turned away, and Kait closed her eyes for just an instant, feeling the inescapable evil that pounded at her skull, and the Sabir spy watching her and lusting after her as she lusted after him, and she mentally said good-bye to Hasmal and his secret, and to the possibility that she would ever find the sort of peace and self-control he carried with him.

  She wondered briefly if he even remembered her. Then she got back to the business at hand.

  * * *

  Hasmal, finally over the seasickness that had kept him in his tiny cabin for days, sat on the aft deck of the small Rophetian merchantman. Out of the way of the sailors who scrambled up and down the riggings, he enjoyed the pleasant breeze and the clear air and wondered why the ship seemed to be sailing steadily northeast.

  True to her word, Alarista had put him on the ship with orders to the crew that if he tried to get off, they were to kill him. She’d paid one-way passage for him to the Kander Colony on the other side of both the ocean and the world. The ship was supposed to already be heading there to trade silk and glass and grain for caberra spice. Alarista had given him his belongings and a final, passionate kiss, and had told him she would miss him like she’d never missed anyone in her life. And then she had walked away without even looking back, and the ship had sailed, and he had discovered that he didn’t have much stomach for the sea.

  Well, maybe he would never make a sailor, but he still had a sense of direction, and he knew that the ship had been heading due southeast when they sailed from Costan Selvira. When he tried to ask the captain or the crew why they had changed headings—for he had lost an unknown number of days lying in his hammock, too sick to move—they made the sign of the viper at him and quickly spit on the deck to ward off evil. He’d finally given up asking. He worried about the ship’s change of direction, though, and the fact that he was the only passenger, and the fact that everyone without exception regarded him with dread. He knew that they had found out about his doom—no doubt one of the Gyrus had let it slip—and he wondered if he was to be dumped into the sea and left for the sharks and the sea monsters.

  The cry of “Land!” brought him out of his reverie. He looked to the horizon, and to the northwest made out a low black smudge, like a line of clouds rising along the horizon. He squinted, and the line stayed a smudge, but after a while time brought into focus what his eyes could not. A large point lay before them, flat and green, with the land falling back to either side; the place had seemed tiny from the distance but grew as they drew nearer, until he wondered if he looked at a large island or the leading edge of a continent. Three of the soaring white towers that marked the work of the Ancients stood above the trees; he imagined that they were used as lighthouses. The merchantman cut sharply east and sailed some distance off the coast, running parallel with it. The wind hummed through the ropes and snapped the sails as the crew lowered the largest of them and raised smaller sails instead. The captain shouted his directions, the sailors shouted their replies, and everyone acted as if Hasmal didn’t exist.

  Before long, a town rose into view to Hasmal’s left; plastered houses painted vibrant shades of red and yellow and purple, with bougainvillea climbing the walls, sending cascading blossoms of fuchsia and lavender and crimson over the curved-tile roofs. Monkeys clambered over the houses and bounded into the palms and banyans and swung from the feathery fronds of date palms and shrieked; a flock of parrots screamed overhead; gulls spun in lazy arcs around the merchantman’s mast and pelicans trawled in the ship’s wake. People thronged the streets, most of them dressed entirely in white, so that they seemed to glow in the tropical sun. The merchantman heeled over suddenly and headed due north around a point that Hasmal hadn’t seen because the long line of coast behind it hid it, and a mass of tiny islands off to Hasmal’s right slid into view, while to his left he discovered a beautiful harbor, in which berthed easily fifty sailing ships of every imaginable description, their bare masts rising like a denuded forest. Among them, cockboats and rowboats and lean outriggers and catamarans slipped from ships to shore and back, ferrying passengers and cargo.

  The merchantman’s crew furled her sails and dropped her anchor, and the tempo and mood of the ship changed; it became slower and darker, and somehow ominous. In that lively, lovely place, Hasmal thought fear should be an obscenity, but he was afraid.

  The captain came back to him and said, “Get your things. You leave us here.”

  The look in the man’s eyes didn’t encourage questions, and Hasmal didn’t ask any. He ran below, grabbed the single bag that held his artifacts, his clothes, and his few other belongings, and scurried back up the ladder, in time to see four of the crewmen hoisting the ship’s longboat over the side. The captain was waiting for him. He said, “Go with them, and don’t give them any trouble. You’re lucky I didn’t drown you the first night out; the only reason I didn’t was because that band of Gyrus did me a favor once, and they asked that you be treated well. But favor or no favor, your trip with me ends here. I’ll rot in Tonn’s hell before I’ll drag you and your curse clear across the Bregian Ocean and chance the sinking of my ship.”

  Hasmal didn’t have any money, any place to stay, or even any clear idea of where he was; he thought perhaps he might be in the Fire Islands, or perhaps up along the Lost Souls Coast. But he didn’t protest. As much as he would have been happy to find himself in Kander Colony (which along with being clear across the world had the advantage of being settled by Sabirs—sure promise that his trouble wouldn’t follow him), he would get himself to land wherever he was and take stock of the twin blessings of being alive and of being farther from the Galweigh woman than he’d been before.

  He got into the longboat, rode in silence across the water to the shore, and at a sign from one of the crew, jumped into the water when it was knee-deep and waded to land. The four men in the longboat immediately began rowing back to the ship, and by the time he’d found a comfortable observation spot on a stone pier, the merchantman’s sails were already flying again, and it was headed back out to sea.

  He sat watching it until it disappeared around the point again; his sense of loss seemed stupid to him, but he couldn’t deny the feeling. That ship had been a tie to his old life and his old self, however tenuous, and when it sailed away, it left him wondering who he would become, and what he would be.

  At last, though, he stood; his leather pants were still damp, and he needed to find fresh water so that he could clean the salt out of them before they dried and cracked. He needed to make arrangements for a place to stay, and for some way to earn money. He needed to find a place to eat, too; his stomach, freed of the rolling of the sea, began to announce to him that food had been scarce of late and would be appreciated.

  And he needed to find out where he had come to ground. That last would be the easiest problem to remedy, if he could find someone who spoke Iberan and if he was careful how he asked the question. He didn’t want to start out his new life the way he’d finished his old one, as a man commonly known to be under a curse. He thought for a while about innocuous reasons why he might have been put ashore with no money and with no idea of his location—it took him a while, but at last he concocted a story that he thought would serve.

  Then he located a Rophetian sailor standing by the pier, both arms around a white-dressed girl, and went u
p to the man.

  “My comrades threw me off my ship,” he said. “I thought I had sure luck with the bones, and at the last throw the goddess deserted me, and I ended up owing more than I had . . .” He sighed and grinned. “And I’ve been drunk the last five days, and I don’t know where I am.”

  The sailor laughed, white teeth flashing behind the thick black beard. “The bones and the mead have landed more than one man on strange soil,” he said, “but if you’re an ass, at least you’re a lucky ass. You’re a stone’s throw from civilization. This here’s Maracada, on Goft.”

  “My thanks,” Hasmal said. He managed a smile that he didn’t feel, and walked away without stumbling, and looked for a place where he could hide. He fancied he could hear the gods laughing at him; Goft was a big island—perhaps thirty leagues in length—but it wasn’t big enough. A narrow strait separated the island from the mainland, and on the other side of that strait lay Ibera, and no more than twenty leagues from there lay Calimekka. The home of the Galweigh Family.

  He was closer to disaster than he’d been in Halles. He needed to find another ship, and he needed to get himself to sea, and he needed to do it fast.

  Chapter 12

  Darkness, the hard cold blackness of the station of Huld, when the presence of light and warmth seems like a dream that will never come to pass. Kait stood beside Tippa in the courtyard, watching Dùghall pace. Tippa kept sobbing, “How can I not have a wedding? I’m to get married today!” and neither Kait nor Dùghall had the patience to explain anymore that she was to have been murdered at her wedding along with the rest of the Family. The last airible should have already arrived, should have come during Telt, and had not. Something was wrong, and the three of them were going to be trapped in an enemy city in the midst of war. Kait kept very still, watching the sky, listening for the airible’s engines, for the soft thudding of the pistons and the beating of the rotors against the night air, but the beast inside of her already tasted panic and wanted to flee. To run, to go to ground, to hide.

  The Galweigh soldiers responsible for catching the airible’s tethers held their pose, torches lit, waiting along the line of fire that marked the embassy landing field. They would catch the tethers and pull the airible down to anchor; at least, they would if it ever arrived . . .

  Kait fingered the hilt of the longsword at her hip and tried to keep the monster inside of her still; tried to figure out what she could do to keep Tippa and Dùghall safe; tried to think not of becoming the Karnee creature, but of staying human and helping her Family as a human. But the walls of the invisible cage constricted, and her heart raced and her senses grew sharp with incipient Shift—and it was only then that she heard the steady, metallic thupp, thupp, thupp of the airible over the normal noises of the night.

  “It’s coming,” she said, and a murmur ran through the line of soldiers; they heard nothing, and said as much.

  Dùghall turned and stopped pacing and looked at her. “You’re sure?”

  “I hear it.”

  “Good.” He nodded. Waited a moment, and another, while to Kait’s ears the noise of the engine became impossible to overlook. But only when still another moment had passed, and the sound she heard began to drown out the background sounds of Halles with its predawn racket of peddlers and tradesmen rattling through the streets, did the first of the soldiers stare at her and say, “By the gods, I hear it, too.”

  Karnee ears. They were their own betrayal. She told herself to be more careful about her timing in admitting what she heard. At another time, in another place, perhaps revealing her acute hearing might be her death.

  The noise of the airible grew louder, then yet louder, and suddenly Kait could make it out against the sky, its shape a darker blackness that blotted out the stars. This time she said nothing, uncertain if human eyes would be able to mark the form so soon, and not wanting to seem a woman of too many miracles in one night.

  A moment passed, and one of the soldiers said, “There! Against the Shepherds.” He pointed north by east, to a constellation high in the night sky. The airible moved across those stars, blotting them out, and the rest of the soldiers nodded and bent to the groundlamps that would mark the readiness of the landing field. They put their torches to the lamps and, as the flames in the green glass lanterns flickered one by one to life, doused the open flames of the torches in the buckets that lay alongside. The airibles no longer used gaimthe, the burning gas, to fill their large balloons, but the fuel the engines used was flammable and dangerous, and the practice of never permitting open flame around an airible remained.

  The field, lit only by the row of green lanterns, looked eerie. The grass of the field seemed leached of color, and the people in it looked like week-old corpses. A chill crawled down Kait’s spine; the ghastliness of the scene seemed an omen to her, as portentous as the pulsing, unending waves of evil that rolled over Halles, or the inescapable certainty that the Sabir Karnee wanted her and was coming for her. She pushed it out of her mind; the airible dropped with surprising speed, and ropes snaked down out of the sky. The soldiers caught them with practiced hands and looped them around huge wooden pulleys anchored deep into the ground, and began winding in the rope, straining against the huge cranks.

  Within moments the airible hung just above the ground, tugging at its moorings. In the green light, the red and the black of the Galweigh crest blended on the garishly green-smeared silk of the airible balloon, rendering the whole an illegible blob. Men and women dropped out of both hatches in the long, enclosed basket, landing on the ground below with the soft clanks of muffled armor. The pilot appeared in the front hatch last of all and said, “Quickly, quickly, we must go. From the air I can already see the leading edge of dawn in the east.”

  The soldiers hoisted Tippa into the hatch, and then Dùghall; Kait refrained from jumping and allowed herself to be unceremoniously shoved upward. She was grateful that she wore sensible traveling clothes—sturdy boots and heavy leather pants and a cotton blouse with a wool tunic—instead of the delicate silk dress that Tippa had insisted on wearing. Entry into an airible was never a graceful thing, and even less so when in such a hurry. While she still lay on the basket floor, Kait heard the whine of the rope paying out, and felt her weight press her tight to the floor; they were rising fast, shooting upward so quickly that her eardrums felt as if they would burst.

  Dùghall said, “Why were you so late?”

  Kait sat up. The pilot, a Rophetian named Aouel, didn’t turn from his stopcocks and his rudder wheel. His back to all of them, he said, “We had a foul crosswind in the midsky that blew us south of course before I could rise out of it, and when I did, I found myself in a headwind that I fought all the way in. If you want the good news with the bad, though, we’ll have the same east-running wind all the way back, and this time it will speed us on our journey.”

  “I thought you weren’t coming,” Dùghall said.

  Aouel glanced quickly at Kait, and as quickly made the look take in the three of them. “I would have flown through Tonn’s hell itself to get to you,” he said.

  Which Kait suspected to be true; Aouel was a longtime friend of hers, since the day when she had wandered onto the airible field on the House grounds in Calimekka at the age of thirteen, and he had shown her the miracles of airible flight for the first time. In secret, in the following years, he had taught her to fly the smaller of the airships—those, like this one, that could be handled by one person. The two of them had discussed her dreams and his, and had remained in each other’s confidence even when Kait had been sworn into the diplomatic service and her time had ceased to be her own. The Family would have been horrified; a girl of Galweigh breeding and future high position learning the trade of a sailor, even a sailor of the air? A woman who would one day negotiate the fate of the Family the confidante of a Rophetian commoner? Unthinkable.

  As Kait was wont to do, she had cherished the friendship and guarded it as she guarded her own dark secrets and, giving a nod to Rophetian
theology, had decided the Family could go to Tonn’s hell if they couldn’t understand what Aouel meant to her.

  The airible rose higher and the first flat gray light of dawn that edged the horizon to the east suddenly illuminated the inside of the cabin. No sight of the sun yet, but it wouldn’t be long. Kait shivered at the narrowness of the margin of their escape; below, in the darkness that still blanketed Halles, eyes watched the sky, waiting for the first beam from the sun to fall across the top arch of the stone tower in the city square. That light would herald the arrival of the station of Soma, and start the ringing of the single alto bell that would mark the greeting of the new day and launch the “wedding” processions from Dokteerak House and the Galweigh Embassy into the streets. And would culminate in the destruction of the Dokteerak Family, and perhaps a large part of the Sabir Family as well.

  For an instant, staring into that pale light, Kait saw a reflection of the lean, hungry face of the Sabir Karnee, and for an instant she felt his touch. And in that instant, her traitorous heart hoped that he would escape destruction.

  * * *

  The first beam of sunlight struck the top arch of the black Tower of Time through cloudless skies, and at once the bell ringer filled the air with the single, repeated tolling of the station of Soma. First station of morning, the First Friend of the New Day.

  As if the gates of the Galweigh Embassy were linked to the bell, they swung open at the first note, and ten trumpeters and ten drummers stepped into the street. They were gorgeously dressed in the Galweigh red and black, their faces covered from forehead to nose with fringes of gold beads, their instruments poised at the ready. Behind them came ten handbell players, and behind them, ten wood-flautists, and behind them, fifty dancers.