Dreams of Steel

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Narayan was not in a pleasant mood. “The whole temple has to be purified. Everything has been defiled. At least they committed no willful sacrilege, no desecration. The idol and relics remain undisturbed.”

I had no idea what he was talking about. All the men had long faces. I looked at Narayan over our cookfire. He took my look for a question.

“Any unbeliever who found the holy relics or the idol would have plundered them.”

“Maybe they were afraid of the curse.”

His eyes got big. He glanced around, made a gesture urging silence. He whispered, “How did you know that?”

“These things always have curses. Part of their rustic charm.” Pardon my sarcasm. I did not feel good. I did not want to spend any more time hanging around the grove. It was not a pleasant place. A lot of people had died there, none of them of old age. The earth was rich with their blood and bones and screams. It had a smell, psychic and physical, probably pleasing to Kina.

“How much longer, Narayan? I’m trying to cooperate. But I’m not going to hang around here the rest of my life.”

“Oh. Mistress. There will be no Festival now. The purification will take weeks. The priests are distraught. The ceremonies have been moved to Nadam. It’s only a minor holiday usually, when the bands break up for the off season, and the priests remind them to invoke the Daughter of Night in their prayers. The priests always say the reason she hasn’t come yet is we haven’t prayed hard enough.”

Was he going to dole it out in driblets forever? I guess no one of any religion would have spent much time explaining holidays and saints and such, though. “Why are we still here, then? Why aren’t we headed south?”

“We came for more than the Festival.” We had indeed. But how was I supposed to convince these men I was their messiah? Narayan kept the specifications to himself. How could the actress act without being told her role?

There was the trouble. Narayan believed I was the Daughter of Night. He wanted me to be. Which meant that he would not coach me if I asked. He expected me to know instinctively. And I did not have a clue.

The jamadars seemed disappointed and Narayan nervous. I was not living up to expectations and hopes, even if I had discovered that their temple had been profaned.

In a whisper, I asked, “Am I expected to do holy deeds in a place no longer holy?”

“I don’t know, Mistress, We have no guideposts. It’s all in the hands of Kina. She will send an omen.” Omens. Wonderful. I had had no chance to bone up on omens the cult considered significant. Crows were important, of course. Those men thought it wonderful that Taglian territory was infested by carrion birds. They thought that presaged the Year of the Skulls. But what else was significant?

“Are comets important to you?” I asked. “In the north, last year, and once earlier, there were great comets. Did you see them down here?”

“No. Comets are bad omens.”

“They were for me.”

“They have been called Sword of Sheda, or Tongue of Sheda, Shedalinca, that shed the light of Sheda upon the world.”

Sheda was an archaic form of the name of the chief Gunni god, one of whose titles was Lord of Lords of Light. I suspected the Deceiver cult’s beliefs had taken a left turn off the trunk of Gunni beliefs a few thousand years ago.

He said, “The priests say Kina is weakest when a comet is in the sky, for then light rules heaven day and night.”

“But the moon...”

“The moon is the light of darkness. The moon belongs to Shadow, put up so Shadow’s creatures may hunt.”

He rambled off into incomprehensibility. Local religion had its light and dark, right and left, good and evil. But Kina, despite her trappings of darkness, was supposed to be outside and beyond that eternal struggle, enemy of both Light and Shadow, ally of each in some circumstances. Just to confuse me, maybe, nobody seemed to know how things really lay in the eyes of their gods. Vehdna, Shadar, and Gunni all respected one another’s gods. Within the majority Gunni cult the various deities, whether identified with Light or Shadow, got equal deference. They all had their temples and cults and priests. Some, like Jahamaraj Jah’s Shadar Khadi cult, were tainted by the doctrines of Kina.

As Narayan clarified by making the waters murkier he got shifty-eyed, then would not look at me at all. He fixed his gaze on the cookfire, talked, grew morose. He was good at hiding it. No one else noticed. But I had had more practice reading people. I noted tension in some of the jamadars, too.

Something was about to happen. A test? With this crowd that was not likely to be gentle.

My fingers drifted to the yellow triangle at my belt. I had not practiced much lately. There had been little time. I realized what I had done, wondered why. That was hardly the weapon to get me out of trouble.

There was danger. I felt it now. The jamadars were nervous and excited. I let my psychic sense sharpen despite the aura of the grove. It was like taking a deep breath in a hot room where a corpse had been rotting for a week. I persevered. If I could take the dreams without bending I could take this.

I asked Narayan a question that sent him off on another ramble. I concentrated on form and pattern in my psychic surroundings.

I spotted it.

I was ready when it happened.

He was a black rumel man, a jamadar with a reputation nearly rivalling Narayan’s, Moma Sharrael, Vehdna. When we’d been introduced I’d had the feeling he was a man who killed for himself, not for his goddess. His rumel moved like black lightning.

I grabbed the weighted end on the fly. I took it away before he recovered his balance, snapped it around his neck. It seemed I’d played this game always, or as though another hand guided my own. I did cheat a little, using a silent spell to strike at his heart. I wasted no mercy. I sensed that that would be an error as deadly as not reacting at all.

I would have had no chance had I not sensed the wrongness gathering around me.

No one cried out. No one said a word. They were shaken, even Narayan. Nobody looked at me. For no reason apparent at the moment, I said, “Mother is not pleased.”

That got me a few startled looks. I folded Moma’s rumel as Narayan had taught me, discarded my yellow cloth and took the black. No one argued with my self-promotion.

How to reach these men without hearts? They were impressed now, but not indelibly, not permanently. “Ram.”

Ram came out of the darkness. He did not speak for fear of betraying his feelings. I think he might have stepped in if Moma’s attack had succeeded, though that would have been the end of him. I gave him instructions.

He got a rope and looped one end around the dead man’s left ankle, tossed the rope over a branch, hauled the corpse up so it hung head down over the fire. “Excellent, Ram. Excellent. Everyone gather round.”

They came reluctantly as the summons spread. Once they were all there I cut Moma’s jugular.

The blood did not come fast but it came. A small spell made each drop flash when it reached the fire. I seized Narayan’s right arm, forced him to put his hand out and let a few drops fall on his palm. Then I turned him loose. “All of you,” I said.

Kina’s followers do not like spilled blood. There is a complex and irrational explanation having to do with the legend of the devoured demons. Narayan told me later. It has a bearing only because it made the evening more memorable for those men once they had the blood of their fellow on their hands.

They did not look at me while they endured my little ceremony. I used the opportunity to hazard a spell that, to my surprise, came off without a hitch. It turned the stains on their hands as indelible as tattoos. Unless I took it back they would go through life with one hand marked scarlet.

The jamadars and priests were mine, like it or not. They were branded. The world would not forgive them that brand if its meaning became known. Men with red palms would not be able to deny that they had been present at the debut of the Daughter of Night.

Nowhere did I see any doubts, now, that I was what Narayan claimed.

The dreams were powerful that night but not grim. I floated in the warmth of the approval of that other who wanted to make me her creature.

Ram wakened me before there was light enough to see. He and Narayan and I rode out before the sun rose. Narayan did not speak all day. He remained in shock.

His dreams were coming true. He did not know if that was what he wanted anymore. He was scared.

So was I.