Spy, Spy Again Page 4

  Or, conveniently enough, a neck.

  And you, yourself, could run for leagues.

  It was excellent conditioning for the sorts of things a Sleepgiver had to do. And not so bad for the sorts of things the more ordinary members of the Nation might find themselves faced with.

  Aku was pleased to be heading homeward, so his trot was as smooth as he could make it right now. Which was not very.

  But Sira was used to it, and she allowed part of her mind to wander while the rest of her mind was on the lookout for the least hint of trouble, be it weather, wild beasts, or humans who should not be in the lands of the Nation.

  It was said that in the days before the Sleepgivers became a Nation and made the Mountain their home, they had been the silent, deadly guards for a great Wizard in the west and north. It was said that there was a great war of Wizards and that when it was clear that their master had lost this war, he had sent those of his guards on duty to protect his lesser kin as they fled. It was said that this had been no natural way of travel but that he had sent his people fleeing through gates in the air, to seek shelter wherever they landed, before he destroyed his stronghold and his enemy with it.

  This Sira believed, because she had seen the lesser versions of these gates in the air, linking the southern and northern Mage Schools of Amber Moon.

  But the gates of those far-off times had been much, much bigger and could send people to where there were no other such gates, needing no anchor. This she also believed, though it was hard. She was enough of a Mage herself to understand just how much power such things represented. And there had been dozens of them.

  It was said—said, because in those long-ago days the not-yet-Sleepgivers could neither read nor write—that those guards not on duty had gathered their herds and their families and the few Mages that were with them at the time and fled through the gate apportioned to them, as the lesser wizards had fled through their own. And that no one knew where they would end up, because that way the enemy could not anticipate where they would go and ambush them.

  And that was how they came to be in the least hospitable land in all of Ruvan. Which was not yet Ruvan in those days. It was an empty land of high plains and mountains, dry but not inhospitable. And it was very lightly inhabited. Except, fortunately, where the guards and their families and herds had landed, which was empty.

  She wondered what they had felt, those people, when they found themselves in that valley long ago. At least there had been water and grass, and the mountains themselves had given protection and shelter from storms.

  They were hard people, and she suspected that finding themselves in desert mountains dismayed them not at all. They found more water and more grassy valleys, they carved the mountains to suit themselves, they learned to grow crops that would sustain them and their horses, and if they did not precisely prosper, then neither did they fade. They kept their ways and their training, and they learned to be even more deadly than they had been in the past, so that, should they seek to serve another, they would never lose a master to an enemy again.

  But, so she had been taught, as time passed and their numbers grew, it became very clear that the Mountain could not sustain all their numbers. And when they ventured out of the range they called home, they found themselves in the heart of a land of people much softer than they were, as the land that sustained them was softer than the lands wherein the Sleepgivers dwelt. For while the Nation had been carving a life for themselves, others had been coming to inhabit the land around them, and they called that land their own without ever knowing of the presence of the Nation.

  Sira told all this to herself as she rode, as every Sleepgiver who was not also inhabited by an Ancestor must do, now and again, to remind herself of what she was and where she had come from.

  Those who had once been ridden by the Ancestors in the Talismans, of course, did not have to tell themselves these things, for the Ancestors dreamed the tale as a waking dream, day in, night out. But she did not have that kind of Talisman. And thanks to her father, neither did any other Sleepgiver of these days.

  And so, she recited to herself, in rhythm with Aku’s bone-jarring trot, it came to pass that the Elders gathered and said to themselves, ‘There is no lack of murder and warfare among the nations, even after the lesson of the Mage War. So let us sell our skills not as the guards against death but as the givers of Eternal Sleep. Guards are paid well, but not as much as one who can eliminate an enemy by removing his head and slipping away into the night unseen.’ And so they did. And so the Sleepgivers came to be.

  Not every person in the Nation was a Sleepgiver. Not even most. Only some, but that “some” was enough to keep the rest of the Nation in the sustenance they needed. In these days, the Sleepgivers were very, very highly paid. The best of them cost a king’s ransom. But, she thought, without hubris, we are worth it.

  The King of what had come to be called Ruvan—he, the First of that Name—very, very quickly saw the value of what the Sleepgivers had to offer and made the First Contract. He would grant the Mountain and all the land around it in perpetuity to the Nation. He would see to it that no one in all of Ruvan harmed so much as a hair on a goat belonging to the Nation. And he would interfere in no way with any contracts they should make, even if it be against one of his allies, so long as they took no contracts against the Royal House of Ruvan itself.

  And very wise of him, too, she thought with amusement. He very carefully protected himself and his line, effectively making it impossible for anyone in Ruvan not in the Royal House to prosecute a Sleepgiver for murder and opening up the possibility of contracts against anyone else in Ruvan.

  The contracts from those days were still in the archives in the Mountain, as were all contracts that had been made from that day forward, for the People were at last literate, and Sira had read some of them. They read like the contracts only an apprentice would take now—merchant against merchant, petty lord against petty lord, and almost nothing outside the borders of Ruvan itself. But over the years, that had changed . . . oh, how it had changed. Though most contracts were made with those in the south, the west, and a little to the north. The Karsites held themselves aloof from such things, probably preferring their own ways of treachery and murder, the Shin’a’in took care of their own need for vengeance, and very handily too, and anything north of Karse, north of Menmellith, was unknown. There was no interest from the Nation in places where there was no money to be had.

  Until the Heir to the Banner of the People went missing, and with him, his beloved.

  The Heir had been an only son, soft of heart, empathic of mind, most probably a Healer born, and with a great revulsion against killing, and had there been other siblings, he could have been passed over in favor of someone more suited to ruling the Nation. There was no dishonor in being a Healer; they were as vital to the Nation as Sleepgivers. But there were no other children of his father, neither male nor female, and so he was not to be excused by a Banner Bearer who had no interest in passing the Banner to a collateral line, however much he valued his own brother. And so this Heir had defied the will of his father; he had taken his beloved and fled.

  Probably because if he hadn’t, that old flint-hearted tyrant was going to force a Talisman on him. Heirs were not usually required to take a Talisman; such were known to dull the mind to original thinking, and the Banner Bearer had to be a man (or woman!) who could solve problems great and small. But Sira had no doubt that her great-uncle was the sort who would have let pride overrule good sense. She had not known her father’s uncle, but from all descriptions, he had not been the sort of man who would have sacrificed his pride for the happiness of his son.

  “Horses are often smarter than people, aren’t they, Aku?” she asked, and Aku’s ears flipped back in acknowledgement that he had heard her, though his pace didn’t falter.

  The oppressive heat of the desert was a little lessened in the valleys sh
e and Aku traversed. There was sparse grass here and often water, though you had to dig to find it or take it from the pads of the pear-cactus. Above, yellow and red mountains and flat-topped mesas kept the valleys in shade for most of the day. It was a hard land, and she wasn’t surprised it had spawned as hard a man as her own great-uncle.

  So the Heir ran, and ran in an unexpected direction. North and west. And so he and his beloved vanished. And the Nation sent out hunters to no avail, until it became too expensive to mount the hunts. The Nation above all was adept at conserving its resources, and after a time even the Banner Bearer had to admit that the cost was not worth the reward, when his brother could be Heir and had a fine son of his own who could be Heir after that.

  But that changed when the Karsites, casting aside every custom of the last centuries, came to the Sleepgivers with a contract to destroy the Royal House of Valdemar. That being the last direction the Heir had been heard of, the Lord of the Banner decreed that they would take that contract, and use the money from the Karsites to pay for the search for the lost Heir.

  I would have given a very great deal to have seen my great-uncle’s face when he discovered the son of his son was a Herald of Valdemar.

  Well, for a man who would have forced a Sleepgiver Talisman on a Healer, his own son, whom he knew and presumably cared for at least a little, it was of no matter whatsoever to decree that a Talisman must be forced upon Mags of Valdemar, a young man he knew not at all, in order to bring him back to take his proper place at his grandfather’s side. And he broke the contract with the Karsites.

  “My great-uncle,” she said to Aku’s ears, “was an idiot.”

  But if he had not been an idiot, my father would not now be the Bearer of the Banner of the Lammergeyer. And I would. . . . well, I would not be getting a great deal of practice in how to eliminate demon-summoners, so there’s that.

  * * *

  • • •

  It was the lammergeyers themselves, circling over the Mountain in long, lazy glides, that told anyone who did not know the way that they were very near the stronghold of the Sleepgivers. Lammergeyers had been chosen as the emblem of the spirit of the Nation before the Sleepgivers themselves even existed. What better emblem? The Lammergeyer not only lived on death—being a scavenger—it lived on the remains of death that nothing else could. They ate bone. Literally. They lived and thrived where no one could ever expect a bird of their size to live and thrive. And, as Sira knew from visiting the roosts where the falconers of the Nation tenderly nurtured the giant birds and their young, they were as great-hearted, clever, and personable as any eagle. More, in fact. They made friends of their falconers and of a few like Sira who chose to visit them regularly. Sira was fond of them, and they of her, and she knew all of them by name.

  They liked her brother, the Healer, even better. She didn’t begrudge him this. It was rare that he had anything to care for that didn’t in some way have blood on its hands. She often wondered if that runaway Heir, the father of Mags of Valdemar, had been like her brother. If so . . . it was too bad he could not have had Bey as his father.

  Too bad for him, that is. For herself, she very much liked things the way they were.

  The lammergeyers saw her and dipped their wings in greeting, but the sentries on the cliffs had long ago signaled that she was coming back—triumphant, of course, because the only way she would have come back without killing the Karsite would have been if for some reason she had needed to spare his life, and then he would have been most uncomfortably thrown over Aku’s haunches. The path she took, the only path to the Mountain, led through valleys that held many hiding places for herds and flocks and those who tended them, and at the first echo of hoofbeats approaching, those flocks would be whisked out of sight. And it didn’t matter that the rider was one of the Nation; that was the way things were done. That was how the Nation had survived, like the lammergeyers, where others could not. And, of course, the sentries were Sleepgiver-trained, if not apprentices; unless she had taken a considerable amount of time to look for them, she would never have seen them.

  But the Mountain . . . oh, the Mountain . . . that was a different matter altogether.

  It stood in a valley of three springs, surrounded on three sides by lush (for the area) meadows full of horses, and, where the land had been rotated to grow crops, gardens. There were trees—most of them fruit- or nut-bearing, the rest, incense trees whose resin was worth more than gold. And above it all rose the Mountain, the Home of the Nation, the training ground of the Sleepgivers, the hall of the Healers, the Archive of the Records and Contracts, and the Place of the Lammergeyer Banner. Carved by the patient hands of generation upon generation of the Nation, every vertical thumb length held green terraces and stone houses, and the fabric of the Mountain itself had been carved into spacious halls and home upon home upon home.

  And in the very top—her home, just below the aeries of the lammergeyers.

  She could not see it soon enough.

  Neither could Aku, who increased his pace to a spine-shattering gallop.

  She rose a little in her stirrups, leaned over his neck, and endured.

  3

  She dismounted at the base of the Mountain and did not even need to give Aku a swat to his haunches to send him on his way. He probably would have been affronted if she had. He trotted off straight to his stable, reins lax on his neck, where he would go on his own to his stall, drink the water waiting for him there, eat a bit of hay, and wait with the patience of a Sleepgiver for someone to come unsaddle him and rub him down. Not that he would have to wait long, if at all. Since her coming had been noted, the grooms were most likely waiting for him.

  As for her greeting, well . . . that would be some time in coming. First she would have to climb to the top.

  There was some help in that, at least: ingenious rope-lifts from terrace to terrace, operated by a boy or a girl. You turned up at the lift, pulled the string beside it that rang a bell at the top, and put one foot in the sling at the bottom of the loop of rope. At the top, the boy or girl would drop rocks into a metal basket until it equaled your weight, and you could pull yourself up the face of the rock with ease. A lock on the rope at the top enabled you to step off and be on your way, and the boy or girl at the bottom would unload rocks until the two children could lift the weight back up themselves. The rest of the rocks would go up in a second load, and the lift was ready for the next person.

  It was excellent strength training.

  But there were a great many of those lifts to get from the bottom of the Mountain to the top, and it was nearly sunset when she reached the terrace of her home.

  Sunset, and time for the evening meal. The smell of cooking coming up the Mountain on the updrafts from thousands of busy kitchens would have driven her mad if she had not been a Sleepgiver. But it did make her just a trifle impatient.

  When the Nation first came to this place, they had made use of natural caves at the base, and since there seemed to be no other people about, had not troubled with a defensive wall. As their numbers had grown, they had first created terraces from which to sculpt more rooms into the flesh of the Mountain itself; then they had expanded the terraces to build gardens onto them, then created staircases to make new terraces dug into the Mountain, then built gardens . . . until at last they had reached the peak. After that, those who were so inclined had moved themselves and their herds or farms into the surrounding land, the entire bottom section had been given over to the dormitories and training rooms for Sleepgivers and Mages and trades, and the top was reserved for the Banner Bearer and his (or her!) family.

  This was . . . an interesting reversal of advantage. The farther up the Mountain you were, the harder it was to get water—the harder it was to get anything—up to your home, and the more inconvenient it was to dispose of waste. In summer, yes, Sira’s home was the most comfortable . . . but summer was only half the year, and the winter wind
s could be bitter in the extreme. So although the Banner Bearer was literally as well as figuratively atop the Nation, that came at a cost to comfort—thus literally and figuratively reminding the Bearer at nearly every moment how dependent he was on the Nation.

  But it was a lovely home.

  The warm, cream-and-red banded stone had been sculpted not with the angles and peaks of conventional architecture that Sira had seen elsewhere in Ruvan, but in sweeps and curves and folds, as if the wind had done most of the work. The terrace garden, watered by the cisterns also carved into the rock above, had a sculpted, round-topped battlement along the edge that stood as tall as Sira’s collarbone—a must, given that there could be children romping about—identical to the battlements of every terrace, with one not-so-small exception. Lammergeyers in every imaginable pose had been sculpted in bas-relief all around it, and statues of lammergeyers as well as the birds themselves were perched upon it. There were many entrances onto this terrace, which, like all the others, held a functional, rather than an ornamental, garden. But Sira took the first, and most imposing, just off the staircase from the terrace below. This entrance had a lammergeyer with wings spread carved above it.

  It led into a single large room. Within that room was a table cut from the living rock of the mountain with bench seats likewise cut all around it. More rock benches had been cut out of the walls, and niches for lanterns cut into them, and at the back of the room was a single entrance into the living quarters of the Banner Bearer. The great embroidered Banner itself hung on the back wall, and before it was a stone bench softened by a cushion. The moment she entered the room, she felt a great weight dropping from her shoulders. At last she was home.

  By all rights and custom, Sira’s father, Beshat, the Banner Bearer of the Nation, should have been sitting on that cushion waiting for her to come to him.