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  He looked at Caleb. The little man was frowning in thought.

  “What?”

  “You say she was afraid.”

  “So?”

  “It can be a fearful thing, to discover the sins of your father.”

  Neythan eyed him with a frown of his own. “What are you talking about?”

  “A father, a mother, they are all a child knows of the world. But one day perhaps that child grows, learns things, sees things. When young, the sins of a father, to a child, are not sins, they are the right acts, but when older, they see them as they are. They see their father as they are. It can be a fearful thing.”

  Neythan didn’t answer.

  Caleb stepped closer. “For you, me, her, our father has been the Brotherhood. We come to it as children. It teaches us, tells us what is to be thought, what is to be believed.”

  Neythan shook his head. “No.”

  “A man imagines the world to be whatever he has seen of it and nothing more. But a man can be wrong. Like you were wrong, before you discovered the Watcher.”

  “No, that’s not the same. You’re twisting things.”

  “Perhaps she discovered things too, Neythan, about the Brotherhood. Perhaps that night, she wanted to escape.”

  “You would defend her?”

  “Perhaps your friend woke to discover her fleeing. Perhaps she panicked.”

  “You would defend her, because you hate the order.”

  “And ought I to love it? After it betrayed me?”

  “You don’t know what was or wasn’t done. Yet you want me to hate the order as you do.”

  “I want you to think, Neythan.”

  Neythan turned away from him, back to the well. He was about to turn back and suggest, just to change the subject, that they go into the town to find their own shelter, when he glimpsed him. The cocoa-complexioned face, those long oval solemn eyes, bronzed skin, wispy long black hair, and that one thin long scar trailing from beneath his eye to under his jaw – the man who’d taught Neythan to read, who’d welcomed him to the village in Ilysia as a child, standing amongst the men who were not herdsmen. Neythan stared. The man’s name dropped like a query from his lips.

  “Jaleem?”

  The man looked up, turning toward him, expressionless, his blank black gaze coming to rest on him and then, in that slowed and still moment, firing some unlooked-for instinct of alarm in Neythan. Jaleem’s long arm lifted, pointing.

  “There,” he said. “That is him. He is the one.”

  The other men turned to regard Jaleem, and then turned again, following his outstretched arm and pointed finger, to see Neythan. Then there was a lull, a brief fragment of time in which they looked at Neythan and Neythan simply looked back. Then one of the men reached beneath his sheepskin coat, breaking the lull. The men began to slowly come forward, like hunters to prey, drawing swords, axes and maces as they approached Neythan.

  “Get the beasts, Caleb.”

  “What is this?”

  “I don’t know.” Neythan drew his sword. “Get the beasts.”

  The girls squealed at the sight of drawn blades, buckets of water upended as they began to flee.

  Caleb backed away and started to quickly untether the horse and mules. The first man saw and stepped closer, his stance coiled and low, shoulders hunched, scrawny under the bulk of the sheepskin.

  He lunged forward, his blade swinging toward Neythan’s leg.

  Neythan stepped back, hopped, and stamped down hard as the man’s sword passed beneath his foot. The blade clanged to the ground as the man stumbled forward.

  Neythan swivelled his hips, lifted a knee. Crunch of bone. The man’s head caromed backward as he twisted and splayed to the ground.

  Now everyone was shouting, the shepherds running into the town. Sheep panicked, bleating and hopping around the well. A dog somewhere barked.

  The second man rushed in, burly and heavy-handed, swinging a mace from overhead. Neythan sidestepped and spun, swinging his sword as he pivoted. The blade sliced across the man’s cheek beneath the eye, sending him back into the next onrusher, hands clutching his bloodied face.

  Neythan stepped in and shoved again. Both men went down.

  Neythan turned to parry a sword from behind. Clang of metal. Swords locked. The blade bit at Neythan’s shoulder and drew blood. Neythan threw an elbow, freed an arm, then followed with a kick to the gut. He watched the man stagger back and hit the well’s ledge, legs and feet kicking upwards at the impact as he fell heels up and headlong into the hole.

  Caleb shouted from the saddle of his mule, holding the reins of the horse and other mule beside him, each animal now untethered. There were at least ten attackers, and more, seeing the chaos, now running in from the sloping plain beyond the well. Jaleem was nowhere to be seen. Neythan turned and sprinted toward his horse, waving Caleb to flee. An arrow whistled at his ear as he ran.

  “Come on!” Caleb screamed.

  Neythan leapt, one foot into the stirrup, swinging his other leg over. An arrow thudded into the horse’s rear. The horse whinnied vengefully and started with Neythan barely in the saddle, hanging on sideways. The other mule was already down, two shafts sticking out from its neck, its mouth wide and panting.

  “Into the town,” Neythan shouted ahead to Caleb. “We will lose them there.”

  “No. They don’t have horses. We’ll go to the country.”

  Neythan, still side-hung on the horse, tried to pull himself up, yanking on the reins for leverage. He pulled on the bit and twisted the horse’s head, curving its way back to the well, the horse already limping from the shaft.

  A man caught up and leapt onto the other side, clawing at Neythan, trying to pull him off.

  The horse sagged. Neythan’s foot was tangled. The other attackers swarmed around, one coming from the other side to hack at him.

  Neythan heaved his weight and hit the man on the other side of the horse, jabbing his knuckles into the eye. The man hung on, old hand, fidgeting in his belt for a blade. Neythan reached for his own and tugged it free as the one on foot came near.

  He parried as the horse swung around again, hiding him from the onrusher. Turned back to find the hanger-on with dagger raised. Then a fleshy thud and grunt and the man turned rigid before slumping from the horse’s limping flank. Neythan glanced over the saddle to find Caleb opposite on the mule with his bow at the ready, having shot the attacker.

  “Hurry up! I’m always waiting for you.”

  Neythan kicked his heel up over the horse’s back, hauled himself into the saddle, parrying again as another ran in swinging at the horse to hamstring her. Then they were galloping away, Caleb on the mule, Neythan on horseback, as the men chased and harried. Neythan looked over his shoulder and saw Jaleem behind the men, still as a tree and watching calmly as the others gave chase.

  “They have called it madness for me to be as I am. To have done what I have done and to seek what I seek. But of what matter is that? Why should sparrows expect to understand the ambitions of a swan?”

  Karel the Young, king of Sumeria and first Sharíf of the Sovereignty,

  at the Battle of a Thousand Banners

  Book III of The Writings of Najjib son of Romesh,

  First Scribe of Hanesda, in the third year of our king

  Seventeen

  D E C R E E

  The marketplace seemed to hum around Chalise as she walked along the aisles between the stalls. Hands wagged and clapped. Vendors and merchants shouted as the crowd jostled and shouldered through the narrow passages of the bazaar.

  “Rugs for you. Finest oxhide. Twenty shekras. For you, ten.”

  “Silk from Kaloom.”

  “Five shekras, then. Now I rob myself.”

  Chalise let the loud bartering and bickering wash over her, ducking occasionally where the canopied stalls stood too close together.

  Sidon was soon to meet his bride in Qadesh. Chalise had decided it would be good for him to select a gift to greet her with
. He’d decided asking the dressmaker’s attendant, Iani, to help him choose would be a good way to rankle his mother. And so he walked on ahead with the slavegirl in tow as a dozen guardsmen pushed a furrow through the mob.

  The boy was so unlike his father. Helgon had always refused to venture among the stalls. The baying bustle of the traders was an unruly chaos to him, a riot waiting to happen. Or so he’d call it. Always so cautious that way, Helgon. Stiflingly so. Sidon, it seemed, didn’t share the habit.

  “He is young, Sharífa.”

  Chalise blinked and looked down to find Elias at her elbow, watching her as she watched her son.

  “He does not have the luxury of being young,” she said as she turned her attention back to Sidon. He was standing at a potter’s stall up ahead, talking to the dressmaker’s girl as she nodded excitedly. Chalise sighed. “He is sharíf.”

  It was another half hour before they neared the west quarter. Fewer stalls. More people. An amber-cutter sat with his tools in a stone alcove on one side. Tawny feathered chickens preened in the doorway. The damp mesh of old netting hung overhead, crossing the narrow span between the wall and the stalls opposite and casting plaited shadows as Chalise and the guardsmen passed beneath. She’d ordered most of the men to stay with Sidon, along with Casimir, one of two Shedaím Gahíd had sent to guard them. Apparently, the elder was growing nervous of the renegades he was still yet to find.

  The other Shedaím, Abda, walked beside Chalise. A tall angular woman with black hair tied in thick muscular braids fastened so tight they seemed to pull her face taut.

  “Sharífa.”

  Chalise looked down at Elias again. The diminutive chamberlain gave a small jerk of his head and strayed from the corridor of people into the din of stalls. Chalise and Abda followed whilst the palace guard, as instructed, continued on with Sidon.

  Elias led her through a clutch of stalls and then on beneath a large canopy. The vendors fell still as they passed, glancing away from Abda’s flat cold stare as she followed behind the sharífa.

  They eventually emerged at the market’s fringe, passing the last of the stalls and coming out onto the traders’ square. Chalise squinted as they stepped from the stall shadows. She glanced at the children running along the tops of the high walls of housing, the sandstone tenements set against one another like pebbles in a purse.

  It was then she saw Gahíd.

  The elder stood by a low wall fencing the street. He met the sharífa’s eye, nodded once, and then leaned back against one of the wooden support posts that marked the lengths along the market boundary.

  Chalise drifted across to him. Gahíd gestured at Abda, who’d come trailing behind. The Shedaím peeled away to stand watch on the street beyond the low wall. Which was annoying, Chalise thought, Gahíd’s commanding her like that, reminding Chalise the bodyguard was not her own.

  “Good to see you, General,” Chalise said.

  Gahíd grimaced and bowed.

  “I always forget you do not enjoy the title. But how else for your comings and goings here to not be thought of? Do you wish we’d never given it to you?”

  Gahíd scanned the shore of stalls she’d approached from.

  “Yes. Of course you do. But then we all wish for a great many things, don’t we, but how often do we find them?” She glanced at the empty street. “Must we always do this?”

  “Prying ears are the rot of any throne, Sharífa.”

  “Yes… So it is said.” She lowered slowly to the low wall and sat.

  Gahíd did the same.

  “So,” Chalise said. “What does the blind woman see?”

  “She sees little.”

  Chalise looked sidelong. “Is that so? That’s not like her.”

  “No. It is not.”

  “Is there a reason?”

  Gahíd shifted on his seat. “She says it is my fault.”

  “Your fault?”

  “She warned us of this, Tarrick and me, three years ago.”

  “Of this?”

  “Something like this. She said Arianna would prove difficult. Tarrick and I believed she could be taught. The girl is gifted; we did not want to discard her talents needlessly… Safít says our refusal has closed her sight in the matter. She has no counsel.”

  “So, what do you plan to do? One dead Shedaím is discomfiting enough, but a second? And now you say there is a third? Maybe more? It’s almost slovenly, General. I will abide a day of snow in summer, but when there is a second, one has questions.”

  “I know.”

  “No. You do not. You’ve weeds in your garden. Such a thing makes one wonder at the habits of the one keeping it.”

  “Weeds are not the fruit of the gardener.”

  “No, though they are often evidence of his neglect. The Shedaím are meant to prevent these things, not become the cause of them… What is the counsel of the elders?”

  “They are yet to convene.”

  “Yet to convene?” Chalise’s gaze snatched back from the market. “More pressing concerns, have they? Some other engagements they must first keep?”

  “The eldership convenes just once a year, Sharífa.”

  “Three of you were together barely a month ago to anoint this new sharím of yours.”

  “We anoint a new sharím but once every eleven years, as you know. In any case, it takes more than we three to declare a heretic.”

  Chalise stared at the elder. Slowly it dawned on her. “You’ve yet to give the order.”

  “All must be there to decree against them. Not just the Three.”

  “You’ve two of your…” Her jaw shivered and clenched. She glanced around and forced her voice to lower. “Those two are running free about my lands, killing and pillaging and who knows what else, and you are yet to send after them?”

  “I have sent some.”

  Chalise’s gaze narrowed.

  “It’s why I’ve come.”

  Chalise, still watching, exhaled heavily through her nostrils.

  “Thirty men, soldiers from Calapaar. Very capable. And a ranger, Jaleem, from Ilysia. He knows their faces and ways well. They have been hunting them together.”

  “Thirty men and a ranger? After the countless times you’ve lectured me on how feeble the sword of a soldier is before one of your vaunted Shedaím? And now you say foot soldiers are what you have sent after them? Why not send pups after wolves?”

  “The betrayers are young, Sharífa. Talented, but young. And Jaleem is… special. With these soldiers in his hand he will find and at least slow them. It will give us time to prepare to send those of the Brotherhood.”

  “And when will that be?”

  “The council has been called. I am returning to Ilysia to meet it. From there word will be sent to the remaining Shedaím. The betrayers will be declared heretics, and the Brotherhood shall hunt them. And then there shall be no way of escape.”

  Chalise stared at the elder for a long time and then stood. She surveyed the terraces. “Why, Gahíd?” She turned and looked down on him. “These betrayers – Neythan and Arianna – why are they doing this?”

  “I do not know, Sharífa.”

  “And the blind woman, Safít, she does not know either?”

  “She does not.”

  The sharífa shook her head. “What use a mystic who gives no answers?”

  Gahíd watched the market.

  “And you are certain these two are the ones responsible?”

  “I have seen the bodies of the slain myself, those that have been found – Yannick in Godswell, Sha’id in Parses. Qerat’s too, not far from where the first was found. Each slain by the same method.” He lifted two fingers to his throat, drew them across to demonstrate. “And each time the work of a left-hander, just as Arianna is. And then there is always the bruising, where they’ve been held down by larger hands – Neythan’s hands… I too would rather it were some other way, and that these two were not our enemies, but with each passing moon another body or two of the Brotherhood i
s found. To take the life of one from our order is an uncommon thing, Sharífa. To take the life of more than one… Well, unless by a troop, a very large troop, there are none who can. None save those who have belonged to our order.”

  Chalise paced restlessly, watching the terraces again. “You will fix this,” she said. “It is nearly new moon. My son is to wed less than a month from now. Nothing can be allowed to disrupt this.” She turned to face the market, staring at the endless motion of it, the men and women going back and forth pursuing their trade.

  There were twenty-two seats on the Sovereign Council, including the rulers of every major city in the Sovereignty and, by law, the mother and wife of the sharíf. With both Játhon and Chalise’s father, Sulamar, already on the council, if all went well her family would control nearly a quarter of the court by the end of the month. And it was control she needed. Sufiya, the governor of Qareb, was already agitating for a return to the old ways and the supremacy of Sumerian blood. And there was King Jashar of Harán to think about, whose house had been a rival to the house of Salíph since before even the Cull.

  Never mind that Jashar’s daughter, Satyana, was married to Játhon. Jashar and Sufiya still wanted more. More say in whose grain stores went where, and their pick of the best crop yields and trade routes, or cidlewood and cedar for whatever Haránite creation Jashar was seeking to build next. And the problem was they were gaining it. Influence. The favour of the court. Elia, the governor of Qalqaliman, had already turned to them, and there were rumours Geled’s governor, Zikram, was preparing to reject Calapaar and do the same. Two more council members to cause further delay and opposition to Chalise’s aims. Her only comfort was that she had finally chosen Sidon’s bride. A girl she had handpicked carefully, who would soon sit on the council, and who Chalise would be able to groom and prepare until she was ready to…

  “Sharífa.”

  Chalise started. She turned back to face the general.

  “Did you hear what I said?”

  She looked at him blankly.