More than a dozen Great Years had passed since Lu’uya’s death—almost eight mortal centuries—but what she had written of the White Garden was still true. The unchanging nature of Nakkiga was its greatest beauty.
As they drew closer and closer to the palace, uneasy thoughts followed Viyeki’s every step like Sun’y’asu’s beggars. He wanted to believe this summons was only part of ordinary protocol, the awakened queen summoning her highest ministers to an audience, but Viyeki knew that he had greater crimes on his conscience than simply reading forbidden verses.
He had colluded with his master Yaarike and others to hide the things they had done while Utuk’ku slept. What did it matter that they had acted for what they believed was the good of the Hikeda’ya people? The queen was not merely power, she was justice itself, the spirit and conscience of the race. How could he stand before her and not confess everything he had done or had even thought of doing? And if he did, how could his punishment be anything less than the end of honor and the utter destruction of himself and his family?
Breathe and grow calm, Viyeki sey-Enduya, he urged himself. You are a noble of the Hikeda’ya and a child of the sacred Garden. Even if death itself awaits you, do you wish to meet it like a cowering child?
High Celebrant Zuniyabe stepped up to meet him as Viyeki entered the palace’s front gate. At first it seemed an honor that ancient Zuniyabe had come himself instead of sending an underling, but today the masked high celebrant did not speak a word to Viyeki, only made a ritual gesture of respect before signing for him to follow. Viyeki showed no reaction to this ominous silence, of course, but only made a sign of assent and let the masked Zuniyabe lead him.
A guide through the royal palace was always necessary for visitors, although that guide was seldom anyone so elevated: the Omeiyo Hamakh was a maze in truth as well as in name, an unfathomably complicated puzzle of carved chambers and corridors, of slender bridges and apparently pointless staircases that led nowhere, a vast mystery that could never be untangled by chance alone. Only the highest Celebrants knew their way to the heart of the labyrinth where the queen waited.
As venerable Zuniyabe led him deeper and deeper into the maze, Viyeki could only think of who had summoned him, of who sat waiting at the heart of this web of stone. Utuk’ku the eldest, the Mother of All, the heart of our race. The honorifics he had learned in childhood presented themselves to his fretful mind, one after another. Wise beyond wisdom. Strong beyond strength. Immortal. All-Seeing.
At last they reached a corridor full of doors, each as plain and unprepossessing as the rest. Zuniyabe paused and laid his gloved hand on Viyeki’s sleeve. “Now I leave you,” said the High Celebrant, any expression hidden behind his ivory mask. He pointed to one of the doors. “She waits.” Zuniyabe made a courteous but abbreviated bow, then turned away.
For perhaps the half-dozenth time since leaving his house, Viyeki commended his soul to the Garden. Begone, beggars, he commanded the useless, plaguing thoughts as he opened the door and stepped through into shadows. Didn’t the old heroes say that one is only truly alive when death is close?
The darkness behind the door was not as complete as he had first thought. A single torch burned at the far end of a corridor of featureless stone, above a door as simple as the one he had just entered. For a moment he mistook the row of unmoving figures on either side of the hallway for statues, but then he saw they wore the unadorned, face-hiding helmets and snowy white armor of Utuk’ku’s personal guard, the Queen’s Teeth. These were no stone carvings; unmoving silence was their ordinary state.
Viyeki’s father Urayeki was a court artist, always sober and correct with his noble subjects but more high-spirited at home with his family, and on occasion almost fanciful. When Viyeki was a child his father told him that the Queen’s Teeth were actually the spirits of warriors who had fallen in the queen’s defense, their bravery earning them the privilege of guarding her for all eternity. Viyeki had eventually learned the truth, but the memory remained. And though they might not be spirits, none except for those in the highest precincts of the Maze and the Order of Sacrifice knew much about the Teeth, how they were chosen and trained, where in the great palace they were housed, or even any of their names. A drunken commander of Sacrifices had once told Viyeki that the queen’s elite guards surrendered their tongues to the knife during the ceremony when they donned their sacred helms of white witchwood.
What a world it must have been when witchwood was so plentiful, Viyeki thought as he passed between the rows of silent, helmeted sentries. Little of it still grew, and the sacred groves were now all but empty. Only the queen herself remains undying and unchanged. Everything else that belongs to the People falls away, grows slack, crumbles to dust . . .
As he reached the end of the corridor the door there opened, though none of the guards had moved and no one stood behind. Viyeki stepped across the threshold, back into space and light.
Faces. They were the first thing he saw, spread across every wall of the vast chamber and stretched across its ceiling as well—huge faces, some staring nobly, some grimacing in agony; and every face belonged to the same person. Viyeki had seen those features a thousand times on monuments and murals. He knew them as well as those of his own family. It was Drukhi the White Prince, the queen’s martyred son, who stared at him from all directions, most of the portraits rendered in srinyedu, a sacred weaving art that the Hikeda’ya had brought with them from the Garden, though even the tile floor displayed different moments of Drukhi’s foreshortened life. In the middle of the chamber, under the eyes of all those weeping, suffering Drukhis, a spherical, filigree frame surrounded a massive bed, both supported by a single plinth of black stone. And at the center of the bed, like an egg waiting on a nest, sat the silver-masked form of Utuk’ku herself.
Viyeki was in the queen’s own state bedchamber.
Shocked nearly witless by this realization, he dropped to his knees so quickly that he hurt himself against the hard floor, then pressed his head down on his hands in a pose of utter subjugation. He waited, eyes closed, but when someone finally spoke, the voice was not the queen’s.
“Greetings, High Magister Viyeki. You are welcomed into the presence of the Mother of the People.”
Still face down, Viyeki clenched his teeth. He knew those harsh tones all too well, and he did not like hearing them now. What was Akhenabi doing here, alone of all the queen’s ministers?
“Her majesty speaks, and we all obey,” Viyeki replied carefully. “Her majesty spoke and I obeyed.”
“Rise, Magister,” said the Lord of Song. “No need for excessive ceremony. The queen does not wish it.”
“All thanks to the Mother of the People,” he said, “and thanks to you for your welcome as well, Lord Akhenabi.” Viyeki climbed to his feet but still avoided looking too directly at the slender, shrouded white figure on the great bed. The high magister of all Singers made an easier, if more unpleasant, object for his attention.
“You may address the queen,” Akhenabi instructed him, as though Viyeki were some new-minted acolyte. “You are permitted.”
It was all Viyeki could do to turn toward his ruler, though he still could not gaze at her directly. His heart was racing like a stone bounding downhill. He had been elevated to high magister during her long sleep, and had never met her face to face. He had not thought he would be so overwhelmed by the queen’s presence, but every childhood story, every bit of his people’s long history under her rule, had suddenly risen inside him like a flood and swept away his other thoughts. What did it matter what he believed or intended? Viyeki’s entire existence belonged to the mind behind that shining, imperturbable silver mask; his life was utterly hers. How could it ever be otherwise?
Still, he could not help noticing that the Mother of All seemed a surprisingly small figure in the great bed with its spherical canopy of filigreed witchwood. Despite its great size, the canopy was as delicate as fine jewelry, as boldly beautiful as a ring of ice around the moon. Viyeki realized after a little discreet study that it was meant to resemble the porous casing around a witchwood kernel. And by that shape, he then realized, the canopy announced that the queen herself was the kei-in, the holy witchwood seed from which everything else sprang—the beginning of the Hikeda’ya people, as well as the source of all their race’s gifts. Small wonder this was where she held audiences with her servitors.