“I am a chieftain of the Silent Court of the Hamakha Clan,” the officer said. “That is all you need to know.”
Such stiffness—such rote prosecution of duty! thought Viyeki. He wondered if the chieftain might be a halfblood like his daughter Nezeru; they were common these days, especially in the ranks of the Sacrifices and clan guards. How many of the Wormslayers here on his doorstep were the fruits of such couplings? They seemed to make up most of the soldiery these days—but were they, as his master Yaarike had once hoped, truly Hikeda’ya, through and through? Or were they merely crude imitations, attack dogs dressed up in the finery of the Garden?
What does it matter, he asked himself with a touch of dark amusement, if they are only here to lead me to execution? Even a trained hound could do that. “Very well . . . Chieftain,” he said. “I am ready to accompany you.”
As he stepped out the front door, past his household guards and into the wide, silent street, his wife followed them to the doorway. “Husband!” she called. “Do not disgrace our family.”
“How could I, kind Lady Khimabu,” he replied, “with your faithful support to hearten me?”
The last he saw of her—the last he might ever see of her, he could not help thinking—was her long pale shape in the doorway, ordering the servants back inside before the other denizens of the Noble Tier saw the family’s shame.
? ? ?
Whatever hopes Viyeki might have entertained that this was merely another summons to the palace vanished quickly. Instead of climbing the great staircase to the sacred Third Tier and the Omeiyo Hamakh, his guards led him downward instead into the labyrinth of the city. They passed across the deserted New Moon Market and along the edge of the ghostly, web-festooned Spider Groves as they made their way outward toward the edge of Nakkiga, through the mist clouds thrown up by the thundering Tearfall, then past the massive vertical column of Tzaaita’s Stone. At last they reached the Heartwall Stair and followed it down to the levels stacked below the city. Viyeki had given up trying to guess where he was being taken, because each new destination he could think of seemed grimmer than the last.
The first level was filled with the community temples and mass burial grounds of the lower castes, the sojeno nigago-zhe or “little gardens of memory.” Hikeda’ya who were too poor or too humble to have family tombs, but too proud to see their dead thrown into fiery crevices or left on burning ash heaps in the Field of the Nameless, had built the shared memorial parks, each full of symbols of the Lost Garden, each with its single, silver-faced Guardian, a simple upright stone figure presiding over those places of rest as the Queen herself ruled the waking world. As they passed, Viyeki could not help envying the sleepers in these humble shared graves: he feared he was fated for an even less exalted resting place.
But it quickly became clear to him that even the throat-burning sparks and the smoky gray winds of the Field of the Nameless would not be lowly enough for him: His guards passed the Fields and continued to descend, escorting him down, level by level, into the most profound depths. He thought he had been prepared for shame and execution, but it seemed the soldiers were leading him, not to the simple, swift ignominy of a disgraced noble’s death, but toward something altogether more disturbing.
Is it to be the Chamber of the Well, then? Viyeki felt his knees go weak at the thought of that ominous place, a vast natural vault of naked stone hidden deep in the heart of the mountain. The infamous chamber contained both the Well and the Breathing Harp, objects of terrible, legendary power. It was all he could do to stay upright.
Trust the Queen, he told himself with more than a touch of desperation. Remember the Garden. Trust the Way. But the old, reassuring refrain now felt as hollow as the ageless and unknowable mountain deeps that were slowly enfolding him.
Lower and lower they guided him, by stairs so infrequently used that they were completely dark and the soldiers had to hold his arms as they all inched down the steps together. Viyeki felt as though he climbed down the throat of some vast, impossible beast, and it was more than just frightful imagining: with each step the air was growing steadily warmer and thicker, and the very stones around him seemed half alive.
Once, as a young acolyte, Viyeki had been lowered by harness into one of Nakkiga’s deepest interior chasms. That throat-clutching, disorienting darkness had felt a little like this, but the smothering air here seemed to quiver to some slow, heavy pulse, a vibration he had never felt before, like the beat of a giant heart.
Remember the Garden. It was all he could do, all he could afford to think. Trust the Way.
? ? ?
The fear Viyeki had been trying to suppress since the dragon-helmeted soldiers first appeared at his door eased fractionally when they reached the convergence of stairways known as the Hawk’s Path. Several sets of stairs entered the wide, helical stairwell from different levels, and for the first time he could see that he was not the only well-dressed figure being escorted down the spiraling steps to the Chamber of the Well. Viyeki could not yet recognize any of his fellow nobles because of a curious thickness to the air here, as though they all swam through brackish water, but he counted at least a dozen different escorts winding their way downward. Was it possible that so many important Hikeda’ya would be brought together all at once for obliteration? That seemed too reckless for a planner as careful as Akhenabi.
At the base of the Hawk’s Path the different groups crowded together, waiting to enter a single narrow doorway, from which light of several unusual colors played across their faces—sickly yellow, deep crimson, and cadaverous gray-blue. Viyeki’s guards urged him forward, and for the first time he could see that his fellow guests (or prisoners) were not only magisters like himself but also lesser officials, dozens of clan leaders, influential clerics, and other important members of the ruling caste, both male and female. If Akhenabi intended to imprison or execute them all, Viyeki thought wonderingly, it would mean the destruction of nearly the entirety of Nakkiga’s ruling elite.
Then Viyeki saw that one of the others being led toward the arch by a troop of Hamakha guards was High Marshal Muyare sey-Iyora himself. Muyare was one of the most respected nobles, leader of all the queen’s armies, and though he was certainly one of Akhenabi’s chief rivals, he was also far too powerful to be led meekly through Nakkiga as a prisoner: Viyeki felt certain the marshal’s soldiers would never have let him be taken against his will from the order-house of Sacrifice. But even though the marshal must have come willingly, there was a deep bleakness to the commander’s expression that left Viyeki uneasy.
The crowd surged forward. As Viyeki and the other high officials and soldiers crowded through the archway and onto a single wide staircase leading down into the Chamber of the Well, the heat and the sense of smothering seemed to close in on him. When he put his foot on the first step, it felt as though he stepped not simply into another chamber in great Nakkiga but out into pure space, some absolute emptiness that could not be understood. For a moment Viyeki could not tell down from up, and he wavered in something close to blind terror until he felt someone take his arm and heard a quiet voice.
“Are you well, Magister?” It was Luk’kaya, leader of the Harvesters and one of Viyeki’s few allies among the ordinal elite.
“I thank you, High Gatherer, but it is nothing,” he said, although secretly he was grateful for her presence. “A misstep, that is all.”
Despite the many nobles and guards descending together, the narrow stairwell was nearly silent but for the feather-soft rustle of their footfalls. The smothering air seemed to grow even thicker and closer, but Viyeki found as he descended that with self-control he could breathe normally, if more shallowly than usual.