Bao nodded.
“You came to me knowing the Oneness already,” Mintel said. “Sometimes I wonder if I’ve taught you anything at all.”
The bells rang outside, distant. Bao looked toward the tent flaps, outlined faintly with light. “It is time.”
“So it is.”
After years of preparation, it was time. Bao looked at the man who had adopted him. “I came here for this, you understand,” Bao said. “For this only. I did not expect it to take years. Attachments are irrelevant. Only this matters.”
Mintel’s smile broadened, lines spreading from his eyes and mouth. “To want, to receive, to understand.” It had the way of a quote about it, likely one of the proverbs of Kongsidi, the great servant. Mintel was abrishi, after all.
“And that means?” Bao asked.
“All men want something,” Mintel said. “All men receive something. Not all men understand the nature of what they have received. You came to us for one purpose, but it was not the purpose that the Grand Tapestry planned for you. That is not uncommon.”
Bao flexed a hand, then pulled off his glove. The back of his hand had been scarred with a terrible burn in the shape of a circle, with three sinuous hooked knives stabbing out from the center toward the perimeter, their tips turning until they blended with the line outside.
“If I survive this day,” Bao said, holding up his hand, “I will do with my power things that some will call evil.”
“Good, evil,” Mintel said with a wave of his hand. “These words are the words of the ulikar, the outsiders. Our ways are not theirs. Our ways are not yours. We are only concerned with what must be done and what must not be done.”
“As the Tapestry unravels…” Bao said.
“As the Tapestry unravels,” Mintel said, “so the lives of men unravel a little each day until we reach our end. You have come to us, as prophecy said. Our lives have been chosen for us up until this moment, this time. From today, fate will no longer be decided. We give our lives to you. It was what we were created to do, since the days of the very first Sh’botay. Go, my son. Go and be victorious.”
Bao pulled his glove back on, then strode out into the light.
Bao pulled his horse to a halt at the lip of Abyrward. The massive rent in the ground spread out for what had to be leagues, though the people here did not use that term. It had taken him months to understand their complex measurements of distance, weight, and time. He still had to call in a member of the counters’ guild any time he wanted to be certain of a calculation.
Mintel rode at his side. The ancient man had spent most of the trip with his eyes closed in meditation, as was the way of the abrishi. No man—not lord, not bandit, not slave—would interrupt an abrishi in meditation. A man would rather take his own hand off at the wrist than risk the unfavorable fate caused by such an action.
As the horses stopped, Mintel’s eyes fluttered open. He breathed in deeply, and Bao knew that he was appreciating the grand sight. It was one of the most beautiful in nature. Short kingdom trees lined the edge of the rift. Though other places in the Inner Land were filled with dead trees only, here in this sacred place, they grew vibrantly. Their bright green leaves were the food of the silkworm, a symbol of the Inner Land as old as the symbol that had been burned into the back of Bao’s hand.
The trees were in bloom, the blossoms hanging in clusters on short stalks below the leaves. The air smelled sharply of pollen. In front of the trees, the ground fell away into the deep chasm, the strata of rock making stripes on the walls. A stream ran down below. Angarai’la, the River of Souls. It was there that Bao hoped to find the object of his long search.
Around him, the Freed moved up to the chasm’s lip. That was the name they had taken for themselves. Bao had given the men shirts, and they had ripped them into strips and tied them around elbows and knees. They moved like animals as they reached the chasm and looked down, not speaking, bare backs to the sky, feet unshod. The tattoos on their backs and shoulders wrapped around their necks, then formed into claws or barbed branches below the chins. Their heads seemed to be held from below by the tattoos.
“Where is Shendla?” Mintel asked.
“She will come,” Bao said.
And she did, right on time. As the sun reached its zenith behind the clouds, Bao picked out her crew moving up the side of the chasm from below. Slender and dark of skin, Shendla wore woodsman’s clothing. Thick boots, a rugged coat. She carried two long knives strapped to her back, handles up over her shoulders. Bao had never seen her in a skirt, and didn’t care to.
She reached the top of the chasm, then bowed to him, not pausing to drink or rest despite the long climb. “The way is prepared.”
“No man entered the shrine?” Bao cautioned.
“None. We only scouted the path for you, Wyld.”