The Killing Moon

15

It was the hottest time of the day. Sunandi had fallen asleep on a couch in the second-floor breezeway when Etissero’s son Saladronim prodded her awake. “Jeh Kalawe. A man.”

She sat up, bleary from sleep and the heat. A dry, dust-laden wind blew into the house and set the curtains a-billowing; she yearned momentarily for the cool moist breezes of Kisua. “Tell him I’m not interested.”

“At the door, Jeh Kalawe. He said he was a merchant but he didn’t look right. He asked after the mistress of the house. I told him we were Bromarte, we leave our women at home like sensible people. He said that was all right because he wanted to see the Kisuati mistress of the house.”

That woke her up. “What did this man look like?”

“Tall. Black as you. Shaven bald but for two long braids at the nape. He didn’t act like a merchant either, Jeh Kalawe. He never smiled.”

“Bi’incha.” She knew who it was. “Did you tell him I was here?”

Saladronim gave her a do-you-think-me-mad? look. “I told him there were no women here at all, but there was a timbalin house down the street if he was desperate. Then I closed the door on him.”

“I doubt—” But she did not finish her doubt, for the curtains stirred again and the Gatherer stood there, framed in the breezeway door. Her eyes widened. Saladronim followed her gaze, caught his breath, and stumbled back.

The Gatherer inclined his head to each of them, keeping his movements slow and making no move to enter. That drove back Sunandi’s terror enough for her to unclench her throat, though she still had to swallow before speaking. “Priest. You nearly scared the life out of us. Or is that your intention today?”

“The abeyance holds,” he said to her. His eyes fixed on Saladronim. “Please forgive me for attempting to deceive you, but I had need to speak with this woman.”

Saladronim opened his mouth and squeaked, then cleared his throat. “I won’t allow you to harm Jeh Kalawe. She is a guest of my father.”

Sunandi almost smiled at Saladronim’s bravery. He reminded her of Lin, though Lin would never have shown such bravado unless she had a weapon hidden to back it up. To her surprise, the Gatherer’s face softened for a moment as well.

Thinking of his apprentice killer, no doubt.

“I will not harm her,” the Gatherer replied, and Sunandi almost relaxed before she remembered that he didn’t consider killing her to be harmful. “May I enter?”

That calmed her at last. Gatherers never begged pardon or asked leave when they were on Hananja’s business, which meant he’d come here for his own purposes and not the Gathering. She hoped. Saladronim glanced at her, querying; after a wavering instant, she nodded. Taking a deep breath, the boy nodded as well.

The Gatherer stepped over the threshold, flicking the curtain back into place behind him. As he did so, Sunandi recalled Saladronim’s words: he didn’t look right. No he did not, she agreed, noting that the Gatherer still had on the same loindrapes he’d worn two nights before. He looked more exhausted than the heat could account for, his shoulders slumped and movements noticeably sluggish. In Yanya-iyan, she had guessed his age at around forty floods—though it had been hard to tell for certain, for he and the Prince shared the same peculiar, handsome agelessness. Now he looked all of his years and then some.

Intuition sparked understanding and she said, “They’ve turned on you, haven’t they?”

His head jerked up and he stared at her in something like hatred, but that lasted only a moment before pain replaced it. He looked away.

Answer enough. She took a deep breath and decided to try diplomacy for a change. “Your apprentice?”

He shook his head, eyes fixed on the floor. “I am alone.”

“And why have you come?”

“To return to the Hetawa and my life, I must complete your Gathering.”

He said it gently, yet the words sent a chill through her in defiance of the afternoon’s heat. Beside her, Saladronim stiffened.

“You said I was still in abeyance,” she said.

“You are. I don’t accept bribes. Not even when the offer is peace, which…” The Gatherer closed his eyes and sighed. “Which I crave more than you can imagine. But it would be a false peace if I simply Gathered you and went back now. I have too many questions.” He focused on her. “I require your aid to find answers.”

Sunandi nodded to cover her shock. She glanced at Saladronim. “Go inform your father that he has another guest.”

Saladronim stared at her in mute disbelief. She stared him down, and after a moment he shook his head and trotted out of the breezeway. She heard his feet slap against the stone steps on the way down, and bet herself three gold coins that he would creep back up to eavesdrop.

But for the moment they had the illusion of privacy, so she turned her attention back to the Gatherer. “It’s not my place to offer you hospitality in this house, but I know its owner and he follows true guest-custom. He would not want you to stand when you so clearly should sit.”

He hesitated; for a moment she thought he might refuse. But then he moved to the other couch in the breezeway and sat across from her, straight-backed and formal. “Thank you. My path… we sleep in the daytime.”

“Civilized of you.” She relaxed enough to fan herself, hoping that would encourage him to relax as well. “So you want my aid. I don’t know if I can give you the answers you seek, priest. I’m woefully short on such things myself. All I can offer is information, and I have nothing new to tell you since last night. I might be able to send you more, once I reach Kisua.”

“What sort of information?”

She gave him a thin smile. “Are you certain you want to know? All the information was gained through corruption.”

He shook his head. “Corruption is a disease of the soul, not mere words or information.”

She would have liked to argue that point, but knew better. “Kisua has a network of spies throughout this continent, the east, and in the northlands. Some are common folk. Some have rank, like myself. All that we know, we send back to the Protectors.”

“And you believe they would therefore know something of Gujaareh’s Reaper? Why would they care?”

She stared at him in frank surprise. “Every nation from the icy reaches to the southern forest watches your land, priest. Some watch to imitate or compete, but most watch out of fear. Gujaareh is too powerful and too rich and too strange. Those who live in the shadow of a volcano would be fools not to watch closer, when it starts to smoke.”

He frowned. “There’s nothing strange about Gujaareh. If we have prosperity and strength, that is only Hananja’s blessing.”

“So you say, priest. Those of us from lands not so blessed see it differently. And the warning smoke is hard to ignore: Gujaareh’s army swollen to greater numbers than ever before, Gujaareen ambassadors weaving secret alliances with the northernmost lands. We notice when our ambassadors die mysterious sudden deaths as soon as they have something to warn us about.”

The Gatherer shook his head again—not in denial this time, she guessed, but in confusion. “I know nothing of these things.” Nor do I care, he did not say, but Sunandi read it in his face. “What have they to do with the Reaper?”

Perhaps everything, she did not say, and hoped he could not see that in her face. “I don’t know for certain. But I know your Prince is behind it.”

His eyes narrowed. “Not the Hetawa?”

“Why would the Hetawa keep a monster as a pet?”

“Why would the Prince?”

She hesitated, then decided to risk trusting him a bit further. “There are rumors. Only rumors, mind you.”

“Of what sort?”

“Of the sort that keep Kisuati children awake at night, priest. We tell them stories about your kind, you know. ‘Be good, or a Gatherer will get you.’ ”

His face twisted in disgust. “That’s a perversion of everything we are.”

“You kill, priest. You do it for mercy and a whole host of other reasons that you claim are good, but at the heart of it you sneak into people’s homes in the dead of night and kill them in their sleep. This is why we think you strange—you do this and you see nothing wrong with it.”

The Gatherer’s expression became stony, and Sunandi caught herself before she might have launched into another denunciation. She dared not attack his beliefs any further. Much as it might disgust her, his rigid orthodoxy was the only thing keeping her alive.

“Why would the Prince allow a Reaper to roam the city?” he asked again, his voice flat.

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Centuries ago, when your Inunru founded the Hananjan faith in Kisua, there were none of the rules and rituals you use now to control the magic. No one knew what a rogue Gatherer could do until the first Gatherers did it—and the horrors they inflicted on Kisua are the reason narcomancy was outlawed there. They say a Reaper can breathe death through the very air. They say they devour souls rather than sending them elsewhere. There are stories of them draining the life from dozens, even hundreds at a time without sating themselves…”

He was shaking his head even before she finished. “Impossible. I can carry the dreamblood of two, perhaps three souls within me. It’s taken me twenty years to build up to that.”

“I only repeat the stories, priest. In the early days, the Hananjans in Kisua recorded many examples of what Reapers could do, and the ‘uses’ of their terrible magic. Those records were outlawed along with the rest of dream magic, but the stories are told to this day. We use them to frighten children—but what if someone heard those tales and believed? What if someone with power, who wanted more of it, decided to see for himself whether the tales of Reapers’ magic were true?”

The Gatherer said nothing to this. Sunandi saw that his posture had become even more rigid, his brow furrowed in clear disquiet. Abruptly he stood, startling her, and began pacing back and forth in the narrow breezeway. “That would be insanity. The creature is a walking pestilence, hunger without a soul. No one could control it.” He almost spat the words, speaking so harshly and quickly that the words almost tumbled over each other. “There was no one around to direct its attack. It acted on its own madness.”

It took her a moment to understand what he meant, and then Sunandi caught her breath. “You’ve seen it!”

The Gatherer nodded absently, still pacing. She noticed, with some concern, that his hands shook like those of a sick elder when he wasn’t clenching them in agitation.

“Last night,” he said. “It attacked us in an alleyway after we left Yanya-iyan—” He stopped pacing and looked at her in sudden horror, as if he’d only just remembered something. “Indethe etun’n ut Hananja,” he whispered. Sua, though with an archaic flavor Sunandi had seen only in the oldest poems and tales. May the gaze of Hananja turn outward upon thee. Their version of a blessing, though Sunandi preferred Hananja keep Her gaze to Herself.

But it was the pity in the Gatherer’s eyes that troubled her most. “What is it?”

“The Reaper,” the Gatherer said. He spoke as softly as he had the night before, compassionate even with death in his eyes. “When we encountered it, it had already killed. Your northblooded child—”

Sunandi’s heart shattered.

Through a dim roaring in her ears she heard the rest of his words. “The alley was dark, but I did see the body clearly. Please forgive me. I would have given her peace, seen her safely to Ina-Karekh, if…”

If there had been anything left to Gather.

Sunandi was not aware of screaming at first. It was only when hands caught her wrists that she realized she had lifted them to claw at her scalp. And it was only when something scraped in her throat that she noticed the strangled, anguished cries echoing from Etissero’s walls. Through a haze she saw Etissero at the top of the stairs with a knife in his hand, staring uncertainly at the scene before him. Then the Gatherer’s arms folded about her and she crumpled into them, too lost in anguish to care that she wept on her sworn killer’s shoulder.

“I would ease this for you if I could,” the Gatherer whispered to her through the roaring, “but I have no peace left to share. I still have love, though. Take it, daughter of Kalawe. As much as you need.”

There will never be enough, she thought bitterly, and let the grief close about her like a fist.