The Black Wolves Page 10

  Clifflike slopes protected the summit of Demon’s Eye Peak, but from the air the maze was easy to trace: a hexagonally shaped spiral path etched into the rock around a central bowl-like depression. Its twisting lines resembled veins of gleaming copper, and from a height it appeared painted onto the ground. At the coil’s center shimmered a pool of polished blue like palest turquoise that had something of the texture of water even though no one actually knew what it was. No person could walk the maze; only demons could. She had tried once many years ago on a different coil and come within a handbreadth of dying when the coil had expelled her with a jolt that almost flung her over the side of a ledge.

  On this patrol she’d not seen any demons or their winged horses although she always watched for them. Yet she could not help wondering if it was merely a coincidence that the prisoners had taken cover so close to a demon’s coil. Helping criminals escape the king’s justice was exactly the sort of thing demons would do to destabilize the king’s rule.

  She reined Terror back around for one last look at the coil, then glided down into a narrow spur of the Elshar Valley that tucked right up against Demon’s Eye Peak and a neighboring hill.

  In this secluded vale lay a substantial estate whose forecourt overlooked the headwaters of the River Elshar. The main building with two wings and a tower marked it as the country estate of one of the Ri Amarah clans, a secretive people who had immigrated into the Hundred about five generations ago although most Hundred folk still thought of them as foreigners.

  She admired the extensive garden enclosed within walls as thick and high as those of a fortress. Seen from the air, the vast grounds had a precision that would have appealed to her father, each section tidy and discrete: a terrace abutting the back of the house, a fountain of flowers, a slope down to the lower garden shaped by shrubs and trimmed cypress hedges, a court of grapes, several workshops and garden sheds, and herb beds that gave way to an orchard. A woman walked out from the back portico of the house, spotted her, and ducked back inside in the usual way of Ri Amarah women who, according to their peculiar foreign customs, never bared their faces in public.

  As she turned Terror to head back, a flash caught her attention. She twisted in her harness in time to see three more spasms of light flare in a rhythmic pulse from Demon’s Eye Peak.

  The hells!

  Yet when she flew back over the peak it lay as quiescent as before, nothing to see except the faintly shining thread of the coil embedded in rock like a ribbon pressed into the earth.

  8

  The months when her city cousins came to rusticate at the estate to escape the heat and Flood Rains in the city were the worst part of Sarai’s year. When they were here she couldn’t pretend she wasn’t an outcast among her own people. She concealed herself in the shadows at the top of the stairs until no one was in sight, then quickly descended and hurried along the central atrium that ran the length of the main building. The men still sat at breakfast in their wing of the house. Women and children ate first, and she heard their genial talk and careless laughter from the kitchen along with the squeals of children playing in the kitchen yard.

  Doors at either end of the atrium had been slid open to let air through. Sarai went out the back onto the portico that overlooked the estate’s grounds. As she stepped out from under the portico a huge shadow rippled across the upper terrace. She ducked back under cover to avoid being seen. Overhead, a giant eagle flew down the valley. Sarai could just make out a reeve strung from a harness and dangling beneath the eagle, one of the wardens of the Hundred, the loyal servants of King Jehosh the Triumphant, son of Atani the Law-Giver, son of Anjihosh the Glorious Unifier.

  What would it be like to be able to travel wherever you wished with no one telling you what was permitted and what was forbidden?

  A glare of sun flashing out from behind clouds piled up along the eastern hills hid reeve and eagle from her sight. But it wasn’t the sun. The flash winked three more times in a steady, intensifying pulse like a soundless boom Boom BOOM. Her breath caught in her throat as she shaded her eyes in the direction of Demon’s Eye Peak.

  What did the flash mean? Was the reeve on the trail of a demon?

  A bright voice sang out from the atrium. “I saw Sarai go outside.”

  She hastily stepped into the shadowed corner of a decorative latticework screen. Three of her city cousins strolled out onto the portico. Waving painted fans against the heat, they shaded their eyes into the glare of the rising sun.

  “I don’t see her anywhere, Garna.”

  Garna was a pretty girl four years younger than Sarai. “I am sure I saw her. I need her to pick out the embroidery on my new silk shawl because I don’t have time now that I’m betrothed. She has very deft fingers. She’s quite clever.”

  “I’m surprised you would let her touch your bridal shawl, considering how she is tainted,” said the girl who had first spoken, a friend Garna had brought as a guest to the estate and with whom she spent all her time. “Just to look at her you can see it.”

  “It’s unkind to speak of something she can’t help,” objected Garna with more graciousness than Sarai expected from a girl who had mostly ignored her all the years she had been visiting the family’s country estate.

  “Is it true what they say?” asked the third girl, a younger cousin just this year old enough to be allowed to sit up late in the hall after the children under thirteen were sent to bed. “That she hasn’t left this estate since she was brought here as a baby? My brother told me that wolves carried her out of the mountains in their teeth and dumped her by the back doors because even wolves didn’t want someone tainted like her.”

  “People tell such stupid stories!” Garna clucked her tongue in displeasure. “The Black Wolves aren’t wolves, they were terrible soldiers who lived in the old days and were so cruel the king finally had to get rid of them all.”

  “Did those terrible Black Wolves kill Sarai’s mother?” asked Garna’s friend in a tone of quivering eagerness.

  Sarai wanted nothing more than to run so she didn’t have to hear, but if she moved they would see her and their embarrassed apologies would be worse than their gossip.

  The younger girl broke in. “Yes! Black Wolves killed her mother, while her mother was holding her in her arms!”

  “For shame!” Garna cut the girl off so sharply that a stab of gratitude lanced right through Sarai. “It is women’s business, not for the ears of ignorant girls. If you understood anything you’d know that our history and magic must be kept secret. Always!”

  “You are so high and mighty now you are about to be married, aren’t you?” muttered the young cousin, and she stomped back into the house.

  “The truth is I pity poor Sarai,” said Garna to her friend. “No one will ever be able to marry a son to her, even though she has a rich brother living in the richest clan of all. Not that she is ever allowed to visit him. She’s four years older than us, and yet because she’ll never be allowed to marry, she’ll never learn women’s knowledge. She’ll be a girl all her life. Stuck living out here, never to leave. Don’t you think that’s sad?”

  Their voices faded as they went inside.

  Poor Sarai! Usually she could shrug it off but today she counted by prime numbers until the mental exercise calmed her irritation. The moment she was sure they had left the atrium, she dashed across the drive. As she descended the terraces into the garden her tension twisted out of a knot of humiliated frustration and into a brisk stride of expectation. There was nothing she could do about her lack of marriage prospects. But maybe she could discover what a flashing light from a demon’s coil portended.

  The dark clouds boiling up from the southeast would keep the other women indoors. The outside gardeners didn’t come until afternoon. So no one was around to see her unlock the forest gate painted with the four-tiered tree that was the badge of their clan. She slipped outside the estate wall, as Ri Amarah women were never meant to do alone or with their faces uncovered.

>   Stone steps led up through the trees to the top of Vista Hill. Metal posts lined the path. On festival nights lamps would light the way. In the rainy season the lamps were taken down, and even though the path was paved with stones its surface was slick with puddles.

  She climbed quickly toward the long hillside pergola overlooking the estate where in good weather the women of the house would eat an outdoor dinner or celebrate a festival. When she reached the terrace with its pillars and lattice roof woven with heavy vines, she climbed steps carved into the rock face, meant for the gardeners so they could reach the vines growing along the roof beams. On Vista Hill’s rocky crown a narrow trail curved along the steep hillside through blooming curtains of blue and white starfall. No one ever went this way, because everyone pretended Demon’s Eye didn’t exist. But demons were like poisoned threads in the tapestry that was the Hundred: They were woven through the land, inescapable.

  Yet nothing was inexplicable, not if you could learn enough about it. She had long hoped to climb the cliff and reach the coil but could not manage the climb alone. The one time she had suggested such an expedition to Elit, her beloved had rejected the idea with such impassioned horror that Sarai never mentioned it again. But after Elit left the village four years ago, Sarai had nothing to lose.

  She crept under an overhang of wild fistir into the shelter of a shallow cave from whose lip she could look across the deep cleft that separated the two hills. The sight of the coil’s mysterious shimmer never failed to bring out a dizzy smile. She would uncover its secrets.

  As her beloved great-aunt Tsania often told her, If your mind has wings then you can always fly.

  Using a large square board and surveying instruments hidden in the cave, Sarai measured the coil whenever she had a chance. Setting the board on the ground as her table, she unrolled a fresh sheet of rice paper and weighted its sides with stones. With a ruler and compass to calculate angles and dimensions across the gap, she outlined the pattern of the labyrinth onto the paper with brush and ink. Through repeated observation she had discovered occasional changes in the path: a shift in the tangent of an angle, or a lengthening or shortening of one of the straight sections.

  Today’s drawing shocked her.

  Four angles into the twisting path one of the branches had been entirely erased, gone as if it had never existed except for a murky patch of what looked like silvery mud dried into ripples. The path forked around the absence to stay unbroken.

  She bounced in excitement. Was the four-part flash related to the disturbance?

  The scuff of a foot on stone startled her.

  “Who in the hells are you? What are you doing?” said a youthful voice.

  Jolted, Sarai dropped both ruler and brush and looked up.

  A woman stood on the lip of the rock overhang, above Sarai, poised like a person on the verge of plunging to her death over the cliff. Not much older than Sarai, she wore a laborer’s short kilt fluttering around her thighs and a sleeveless vest barely laced closed over full breasts, their half-glimpsed curve like an invitation. An iron ring depicting a wolf’s head hung from a chain around her neck. Her feet were bare, smeared with a red clay dirt that Sarai had never seen in these parts. Her curly black hair was wildly blowing in the stiff wind, strands obscuring her brow and then whisking away to reveal beautifully lashed brown eyes. She was magnificent. The recklessness of her stance and the air swirling around her, flashing with threads like strands of blue fire, made her look like a character from one of the tales Elit had often sung and danced in the outside servants’ parlor at night:

  The firelings kidnapped the girl and made her a demon of fire and air

  never more bound to earth!

  Just as Sarai opened her mouth, trying to force out any word, the young woman caught her gaze as with a hook.

  “Not that cursed song again. Don’t sing it!” She didn’t look one bit like the locals, and although her speech was perfectly intelligible it was obvious she came from somewhere else in the Hundred. “You are Sarai.”

  “Who are you and how do you know who I am?”

  “I’m a demon, of course.”

  Sarai was too stunned and curious to be frightened. “Did you just walk on the coil? Is that why the maze changed? Of what substance are coils made? What do they do?”

  “Are you always so full of questions?” retorted the young woman with a laugh.

  “Yes.”

  “No time to answer. There are reeves on the hunt and we have to clear the area. Hurry home, Sarai. Go by the garden shed on your way. You’ll find someone you know. As for me, remember nothing.” The voice slammed right through Sarai’s head as though the vision had fixed fingers into her eye sockets and tugged her skull open.

  The earth jerked beneath her like a bucking horse.

  She woke lying facedown on the pergola terrace, cheek resting against stone pavement made damp by a spray of rain. A headache gnawed at her eyes. Flies buzzed around her face. She waved them away, then sat up. It was already halfway through morning.

  She tried to rub the headache out of her brows as she retrieved her shawl, which was draped over a stone bench. The city girls had been giggling all night in the dormitory so she hadn’t gotten much sleep. It was just odd she hadn’t used her shawl as a pillow, and now it was too late to make a measurement of the demon’s coil. She had to get back before Aunt Rua wondered where she was.

  Wind skittered through the eaves of the pergola. Overhead an eagle glided closer, as if looking for someone. She hurried down the path, through the gate and the garden, and dashed into the workshop just as rain broke over the valley. Its downpour rolled thunderously on the roof. She shook off her damp sandals and climbed the step to the raised plank floor. The glorious smell of rain wafted along rows of troughs and counters crowded with plants.

  Aunt Rua sat on a stool at a table, bent over a dead, plucked sparrow whose wings were spread out and pinned to a board. She was teasing apart the musculature with tweezers and a scalpel. The work so absorbed her that Sarai was able to tiptoe past without her looking up.

  The potting room had its own sliding doors screened with opaque rice paper. Her great-aunt had insisted on it, for the potting room was Tsania’s only domain since she had never married. As Sarai quietly slid the screen shut behind her, her great-aunt turned in her chair, head bobbing with the effort. Tsania’s twisted back and palsy were all many people saw of her, but Sarai had flourished under an intelligence and affection that were as nourishing as sun and rain. As always her smile made Sarai grasp her aunt’s hands and, with an answering smile, kiss her gaunt cheek.

  “There you are. The rain.” These days Tsania’s voice was a whisper.

  Sarai waited out her aunt’s coughing fit before she replied. Overhead the rain was already easing. “Aunt Rua didn’t see me. Verea Yava, a good morning to you.”

  “A good morning to you, Sarai.” Yava was a Hundred woman from the neighboring village, not Ri Amarah. Powerfully built and strong enough to lift and carry Tsania, Yava had acted as Tsania’s attendant for over thirty years. She was also Elit’s mother. “I will go fetch tea.”

  She closed the screens as she left.

  “Are you cataloging Uncle Abrisho’s seeds?” Sarai asked, for the oversize ledger was open.

  “Waiting for you. His factor sealed the packets too tightly.”

  “I’ll undo them.” Sarai sorted the seed packets by the names Abrisho’s factor had written on each envelope. “The girls were talking all night in the dormitory. I was going to make a measurement of the coil but I fell asleep instead.”

  Illness had pared Tsania to skin and bones, yet she pinched her lips with concern for Sarai. “Are you well? You have shadows in your face.”

  When Sarai shut her eyes, flashes of light made her woozy. For an instant she glimpsed a woman standing atop the rock as if about to walk across a bridge woven out of air. She grasped the table to steady herself as the image faded. “Just tired. Is this sunspear?” She pushed
a packet toward Tsania. “We’ve never grown this before.”

  “Sunspear has eight varieties. I want to produce new color varieties…” She coughed.

  Aunt Rua’s voice carried from the other side of the closed screens. “Tsania? Have you seen Sarai? She never came in. I don’t trust what she might be about, the sly girl.”

  Sarai looked down at her betrayingly wet clothes. “I’ll go down by the garden shed. You can say I’ve been thinning the ruvia all morning in the rain.”

  She grabbed clippers, canvas gardening apron, and wooden clogs from a hook and fled into the lower garden. The rain had stopped except for spatters. Sunlight slashed open the clouds, streaming over what everyone called the women’s garden because these plants had a special efficacy for women. The rows were marked with Aunt Rua’s tidy labels: Bright Blue to stem bleeding; muzz to bring on menses; lady’s heart to ease cramps; moro to bring in milk. Ruvia was mashed and eaten to strengthen pregnant women and elders so they tired less easily.

  The ruvia plants were too crowded to grow to their best size. When she had an apron’s weight of trimmings she carried them to the compost beds that lined the wall.

  Because the estate was so huge, the clan employed outside gardeners. These men came only in the afternoon, at which time Aunt Rua and any other Ri Amarah women would leave the garden. They had their own garden shed on the outside, and entered the estate through a locked gate. Because Aunt Rua often consulted with the outside gardeners, their shed was built into the wall, abutting the gate; that way Rua could speak to the men without being seen by them.

  To Sarai’s surprise she heard a man singing even though it was well before the usual time for the gardeners to come. His deep and mellow voice intoned the words of a song Elit had often sung to her, “The Sad Girl and Her Happy Lover.”

  She frowned so deep that her heart became a crater

  But when her lover smiled the dry bowl became a lake.

  How her heart beat hard at the sound of a friendly voice! She was so lonely since Elit had left the village. She glanced toward the workshop to make sure the doors were shut and no disapproving aunt was looking this way.