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One city was very much like another, each one being made after Oracle Mykrm’s design at the Prophet’s direction. It had been half a year since Meoraq had last been in Tothax, but he did not need the boy to guide him. He knew the way to the temple district in every city of his circuit and took himself easily down to the busy streets of the i
This was the living body of any city: the i
Gradually, the crowds loosened and the clamor faded. The many noisy bodies became a few strolling priests and even fewer scampering boys. Meoraq slowed his long strides to let his particular boy take a proper place before him.
The Temple gates were closing as he neared them, but the watchmen posted there gave the sabks riding at Meoraq’s arms a glance and opened them right up again.
“Exarch Ylsathoc—” one of them began, bowing, but shut his mouth at Meoraq’s upraised hand. He basked in the warmth of their uncomfortable silence as his usher exchanged himself for one of the temple’s own boys and then he walked on.
“I will meet with the abbot,” he said to his new boy, making certain the watchmen at the gates could hear. “And him alone.”
The usher, oblivious to everything but the naked blades adorning Meoraq’s harness, gave breathless obedience and set off.
Meoraq followed, thinking pleasantly vindictive thoughts of the faceless Exarch Ylsathoc pacing himself into a frothing fury in some priestly corner of the temple, and it was some time before he realized he was not being led to the cloister, but to the stronghold. He started to say something about it being the custom to show a Sheulek to his chambers before all else, but turned the half-formed sound to a wordless grunt instead. He had said he would meet with the abbot, so the boy was by-Ga
‘Life is filled with small lessons,’ thought Meoraq, casting a dour eye up at the soot-black ceiling and through it, to Sheul’s ever-watchful gaze. ‘I hear You, O my Father, and I am humble at Your instruction, but just once I would like to indulge a mortal failing without having to learn from it.’
Sheul did not reply.
The boy brought him into the hold as far as the doors to the Halls of Judgment and there delivered him with great importance to an amused council guard. They waited, showing each other the proper motions of dominance and submission with one eye on the boy until he was entirely gone. Immediately after the closing of the door, the guard dropped his arm mid-genuflection and gave Meoraq a slap to the chest.
“Ssh, you’re wet!” he said, shaking out his hand.
“It’s raining. Or has been. Ten days and nights. Here.” Meoraq thrust his damp, muddy pack maliciously into the other man’s arms. “You can carry that.”
“You are a low man, Raq.”
“The man who walks in the sight of Sheul walks the high path at every hour,” Meoraq replied piously and walked around the low wall separating them to help himself to the guard’s cup. Also nai, but quite cold. Meoraq drank it anyway, fingering thoughtfully at his new flask. “How are you, Nkosa?”
“Walking, working and getting dipped. Guess that means I can’t complain.” Nkosa folded his arms and watched as Meoraq forced the last bitter swallow down and turned the empty cup over on the wall.
They were somewhat related, Nkosa’s mother having been a servant in a house where Meoraq’s father had once stayed on a circuit. She claimed him for the sire, and even though she carried no scars to prove it, when the baby opened up male, Rasozul had paid for the boy’s placement at a training hall (or whatever passed for one in a city like Tothax). Of course, the woman had been swiftly married to one of her own caste, the man whose name Nkosa carried. Meoraq had known nothing of this until their first meeting, when Nkosa rather shyly asked if he was by chance related to Rasozul and the whole story had come out. Meoraq had seen no reason to query his father for confirmation. The Uyanes were Sheulek all the way back to the founding of the House; it was inevitable that he should find blood-kin. Really, it was a wonder he didn’t find more of them.
“You’re late,” Nkosa said now, cocking his head to a censuring angle.
“Impossible.”
“You come through twice a year, early sowing and second reaping, regular as a cattleman bathes or an abbot shits. Last harvest was a quarter-brace ago. You’re late.”
“A Sheulek moves at God’s hour.”
“Mm. Was it a woman?” Nkosa asked, with just a hint of wistfulness. During their infrequent and much-enjoyed chats together, he had confided that he had stood twelve years of the seventeen required of a Sheulek’s training before he had been culled, but he was still a bastard, even if he was one of Rasozul’s, and there never was much hope of him being called higher than he stood now. “It was my mother’s doing,” he liked to sigh at the end of this confession. “If only she’d been presented to him as a daughter of the House instead of some linen-girl who helped him rumple up the sheets before she changed them, I’d be wearing a set of my own blades.” Such things were not supposed to factor in a Sheulek’s selection, but of course they did. Politics had no place in Sheul’s sight, but this was Ga
“There was no woman,” said Meoraq. He did not consider it a lie. The woman who had given herself to him for healing during his long stay at Xheoth was no pleasure but a compulsion of Sheul’s granting and never entered his mind.
“Was it two women?”
“No.”
“Ten?”
“No,” said Meoraq, gri
“I would trade all the teeth out of my head to be you for one night,” sighed Nkosa, and turned his empty cup right-side up again.
“And it would be a fine night, I suppose, if you abused it right,” said Meoraq, flicking his spines dismissively, “but you would be toothless the rest of your life and I think you would remember that best.”
“I will eat soft bread and think of all the shoulders I have bitten.” Nkosa shivered elaborately, then sighed again and gave the wall a careful kick. “I suppose you heard I married.”
“No. It was only rumor when I was here last.”
“Omen, you mean. The ill-boding shadow of my inescapable future. I think her father owed my father some cattle or something,” he said vaguely, meaning, of course, the man his mother had married and not Rasozul. “It’s been a bad year for cattle, so we got the girl instead.”
Meoraq frowned.
Nkosa noticed and snorted. “It’s not like that, they tell me. The debt still stands, it’s just that her father has longer to pay us at a more forgiving price because, you see, we’re kin now. Her name is Serra. Serra! What kind of a name is that?”
Meoraq knew better than to ask if she was pretty, since that would have been the first thing his old friend would have mentioned, if true. Instead, he said merely, “How does she suit you?”
“Eh. She stays in the other side of the house most of the time, with my father’s wife and the servants. I hardly know her.”
“Your women share rooms with the servants?”
“We don’t all have Houses, Raq,” said Nkosa with a snort. “Some of us just have homes. But she’s all right, I suppose. I just wish I knew what to do with her.”
“Your father really should have explained that to you years ago,” Meoraq said with a concerned frown. He gave Nkosa a comradely tap and said, “Sometimes, when a man sees a woman, Sheul will give him certain urges—”
“You are such an idiot,” snapped Nkosa, shoving at him, and naturally that was what he was saying and doing when the door opened.
The man who had walked haplessly through that door frowned around at once, saw Meoraq, saw the honor-knives at his arms, and dropped the cup he had been idly stirring. It shattered on the tiles. Nai splashed over his feet, staining the hem of his neat, clerkish breeches, but it wasn’t hot enough to steam. “What did you say?”
Nkosa opened his mouth, but the other man gave him no time to answer.
“How could you—? Inexcusable! Representing this hall—!” Words briefly failed him. He floundered, then drew himself up and pointed two shaking fingers at Nkosa, saying, “This man will be punished, honored one, severely punished!”
Meoraq kept his hand on Nkosa’s shoulder and clenched it, preventing a repentant bow. He said, quietly, “You are intruding on a private conversation. If it is in me to take offense, it is far more likely to be with you. Remove yourself.”
He did, stammering apologies, but the mood was dead and there was no reviving it. Nkosa muttered something that might have been the other man’s name and some slur on his parentage, but he kept his head bent. They were almost brothers by blood, almost brothers under the Blade, almost friends just by nature…but only almost. Sometimes that was enough to bridge the gap between them. Sometimes it just wasn’t.
Meoraq released him. Nkosa went and started picking up shards of nai-damp clay. “I should tell someone you’re here,” he said, not looking up. “Some foreign official has been waiting on you for days.”
“Exarch Ylsathoc.” Meoraq flicked his spines dismissively. “So I hear. Do you know why?”
“You have to be better than a front-room watchman before they tell you things like that. I only see his name and yours on my duty sheet. It might be nice if someone here thought I could do my job,” he added at a mutter. “But if you want to hide from him, there’s a petition in the hall right now.”
“A Sheulek doesn’t have to hide from anyone,” said Meoraq. And frowned. “A dispute at this hour?”
“They’ve been here half the day. They brought their champion, so it must be serious. I didn’t hear the charges.”
Nor was there any reason he should. His sole responsibility was to this one gate in this one room. And assuming it was not ingloriously stripped from him for one moment’s thoughtless joking, it would be the most responsibility he ever had in all his service as a man of the warrior’s caste.
“I suppose I should put my name in,” said Meoraq, heading for the door. “It was good to see you, ‘Kosa.”