So far to go! Tzoja had seldom left the residence in Clan Enduya’s compound during the last years, and other than an occasional trip to the Animal Market, she only went out in Viyeki’s company, borne by litter on the back of carry-men. All this walking had exhausted her already, but she could not stop to rest. Her only hope was to remain unnoticed until she reached the level of the deep lake.
The overhanging houses here oppressed her. Uniformly dark, finished in the slate that had been fashionable centuries earlier, they seemed like a row of heads leaning in to watch her pass. Low, narrow windows facing the street gave them the slit-eyed stare of something that had just been awakened and was not happy about it. It felt as if every window held a watcher she could not see, that each step she took was being silently observed and judged, and that at any moment someone would raise an alarm about the intruder in their silent neighborhood.
She passed through a grave cache at the end of the road, a kind of fenced park built around a pile of stone slabs. Beneath it lay the crypt where the Hikeda’ya interred the ashes of those who sentiment forbade dumping in the Field of the Nameless, but who had not been important enough to earn a place in a family tomb or in the death-cote of one of the great Order-houses. The grave cache was largely overgrown with grass and black creeper, but here and there the bright bloom of a blood lily burned like a candleflame. A few offerings had been left before the crypt door, loose flowers and pairs of house slippers, which made her think that at least some of those entombed here must have been students from the Order of Song. Even the idea of dead Singers made her uneasy. She decided a slave who hurried through such a place would not attract undue notice, so she walked as quickly as she could.
On the far side of the grave cache she left the park and was able to move into the network of smaller streets surrounding the center of Nakkiga. Her heart finally slowed a little. There was much less chance that one of the lower caste folk living here would stop or question a slave, because any slave might be on an errand for someone powerful; just as slaves did not want to be noticed by anyone, lower caste Hikeda’ya, both Bound and Pledged, did not want to draw the attention of the Recognized, their high caste superiors. Utuk’ku’s people were reluctant to kill any of their own pure-blooded folk because they were now so few, but it was no gift for even a full-blood criminal to be allowed to live: the punishment for angering a noble was often far worse than mere death. But because of all these things, the closer Tzoja got to Nakkiga’s center, the less likely it was anyone would stop her.
Terror is a weapon with a sharp edge on both sides, she thought. That is its greatest weakness.
A rare memory of her father pushed up into her thoughts, of him telling her, “He who rules by fear can expect at best only obedience, and even that only as long as fear remains.” She had been too young to understand him at the time and had not thought of it for years, but suddenly it was as though he stood over her again. How tall he had seemed!
She had many memories of her dark-haired mother, strong and sour as vinegar, and of her second mother Valada Roskva singing wordlessly as she concocted her cures and simples, her thick, deft fingers sifting the herbs into loosecloth bags, but Tzoja could remember surprisingly little of her father, except how wonderful it felt when he came back from one of his trips to Nabban or Perdruin, how the house had seemed to glow, how easily words had become laughter—even the food had tasted better! Until that time he didn’t come back.
And that is another weapon with a sharp edge on both sides, she thought. A father’s love, or a daughter’s love for him.
? ? ?
It took her two bells to make her way across the broad city tier and down into the lower levels because she was doing her best to look like the kind of unimportant, shuffling creature that the Hikeda’ya nobles would not concern themselves with. The second bell from Martyrs Temple was so distant she could barely hear it the second time because, instead of following the well-traveled route to the Memory Gardens down into the ultimate depths, she had chosen that rarity in Nakkiga, a comparatively new road, the clean-edged tunnel that led outward from the city and down to Dark Garden Lake, an underground body of water that her master and husband Lord Viyeki had discovered when she herself was still an infant. Viyeki had only taken her there once, but she had no fear of getting lost because it was a well-known route. During Serpent’s Moon, hundreds of families would crowd this passage on their way to the lake to celebrate the end of the Days of Mourning. But more than half a year stretched between now and then: other than a few Bound and their fishing boats, Tzoja felt sure that the end of the lake where the houses of the nobility stood would be all but deserted.
The last part of her journey led her along a winding outer tunnel barely wide enough for a single noble family’s litter and baggage train. Plenty of those would be jostling down the passage when Serpent’s Moon returned, but just now she heard no sound but her own footfalls and what the Hikeda’ya called “the mountain’s breath,” the perpetual soft winds that moaned through these deep passages. She wondered how long she would have to stay hidden. A dark, anxious part of her imagined what it would be like to live here in a darkness even thicker than the city’s, chasing lizards for food when her supplies were gone; she shuddered, but reminded herself how fortunate she was to have this refuge.
While carving out a deep shelter during the siege of Nakkiga, a building crew under Viyeki’s command had broken through into a previously unknown cavern and found a lake there full of blind, white fish and crustaceans, more than enough of them to help save the starving population. As a reward for this accidental but invaluable service, Viyeki had been given one of the lake’s first festival houses when they were built, but for some reason that Tzoja did not understand, her master had never been entirely happy about that or comfortable with the place. In fact, he had decided only a few years later to give it to his own master, High Magister Yaarike, but the house on the lake had never actually changed hands because Magister Yaarike died in a rockfall shortly after Viyeki told him of the gift. The old magister’s family had not known about it, and Viyeki himself had been too busy to give it much thought after he was named Yaarike’s successor as leader of the Order of Builders. Best of all, Lady Khimabu, Viyeki’s wife, had been told that the festival house by the underground lake now belonged to Yaarike’s heirs in the Kinjada clan, and had never learned otherwise. Of all Viyeki’s intimates, only Tzoja knew the truth, because he had told her of it and brought her for a visit in the early years of their bond. Before his work had overwhelmed him, Viyeki had hoped it would be their place, far from gossiping servants, so Tzoja alone, of all his family and intimates, had the heavy key-bar that would open the house. As she made her way now through a forest of black dripstones toward the small estate, able to see only because of all the shining grubs on long, sticky threads that dangled above the edges of the lake, she found herself immeasurably grateful that things had worked out this way.
She thought of her mother, left behind so very many years ago. “A fox’s den never has only one entrance,” had been one of Vorzheva’s favorite sayings. “Always have an escape ready.” At least in this one way, Tzoja had proved herself her mother’s true child.
Her mother had shared that bit of wisdom long before their father disappeared, when the four of them had still been living peacefully at the inn called Pelippa’s Bowl in Kwanitupul and there had seemed no need even to think about such things. Now, all these years later, father and mother and brother lost to her for decades and her own original name little but a memory, Tzoja saw that her mother might have been an unhappy woman, bitter as wormwood, but she had been right about always being ready to run.
? ? ?
She was a long time hiking around the lake to the festival house in a darkness, illuminated only by the sparkling strands hanging above the water. The glowing grubs swayed so gently on their filaments that they appeared to flicker, which reminded her of her names both old and new.
“Derra? It means ‘star,’ my child,” her mother had told her when she was small. And so did “Tzoja,” the Hikeda’yasao name Viyeki had given to her when she had shared that little remnant of her past in the first days of their unexpected love. Once a star, always a star, he had told her.