Alexandria (14 page)

“Why?” Jack knows why.

“You’re on to bigger things. Sent for you special.”

“Oh.”

“Next time I see you, you’ll be on the short shift, I suppose. I’ll miss you, Jack. You’ve a better eye for detail than a lot of men twice your age.” Karus spits and wipes his sleeve across his mouth. “How old are you now, anyway?”

“Fifteen, I think. I lost count.”

Karus coughs out a hoarse laugh. “Wait till you’re as old as me. I’m somewhere between fifty and a hundred.”

“Thanks, Karus.”

“It’s all right. You’ll do fine, don’t look so torn about it. Most men put their time in eventually.”

Jack nods and stares into the fire.

Lia passes the knife to young Tarina and rubs her back warmly. The scared child holds the knife as she would a venomous snake.

“Remember how I showed you?”

“Yes,” Tarina says meekly. She stares at the mound of potatoes in the basket.

“Do you want to try one yourself?”

Tarina shakes her head rapidly and tears up. “I want to go home.”

Lia crouches down and pulls the girl close, smoothing back her hair and brushing a tear track from her cheek. “I know you do, honey. I’m so sorry.” She gives her a tender hug and whispers in her ear.
“It gets better, I promise
.” Lia sets the knife back on the counter and leads Tarina back to the water trough. “We’ll keep you on washing duty for now. If you need anything, you come talk to me, okay?”

“Okay.”

“Lia?” Calyn shuffles in from the prep room.

“Yes?”

“Bree forgot this. I need you to take it over to the King’s rooms.” Calyn hands her a basket of steaming flatbread and sends her off.

Lia walks down the skinny service hall, unescorted, and steps toward the sentries standing rigidly by the parlor entrance.

“We forgot to send this,” she says, holding back the cloth cover and showing the contents.

One of the sentries steps inside to announce her arrival, and after a long moment he reappears and opens the door wide for Lia. She holds the basket out and he waves it away.

“He asks that you bring it to him.”

Her stomach tightens and she enters. Arana’s parlor spans the entire upper frontage of the Temple, with a lavish bedchamber in the far corner. The walls are covered with the hides and crudely taxidermied mounts of animals his father once killed, several paintings, tanned writings, and a dispersal of artifacts recovered from their journeys. A candelabra of buck’s horns illuminates a prominently mounted plaque, dark crimson with rust, engraved with an image of the picturesque landscape surrounding the Temple’s provinces.

At the far end of the parlor, Arana’s two child-bearers lounge by the fireplace, each resting in their final weeks. Freja pulls a comb hypnotically through her long hair, and Mazi sits warming her feet at the fire, lazily working a pair of knitting needles. A housemaid stands to the side, ready to attend them.

Lia walks meekly toward Bree, standing next to the heavy rectangular dining table. Keslin carries on talking, but Arana has stopped eating and watches her approach.

“Bread,”
she whispers, and gives the basket over to Bree.

“Bring it here,” says Arana. Bree takes a step and Arana raises his hand. “No,” he says, fixing his eyes on Lia, “you, please.”

Her leaden feet drag her around the table and she places the basket before Arana and he reaches out and takes her hand.

“What is your name?”

“… Lia.”

“Lia
.” He stands and takes her other hand and looks deeply into her. “Where are you from?”

“I work in the kitchen.”

“Clearly.”

Keslin quiets his rambling and smiles over his shoulder at Freja and Mazi. They look on icily as Arana surveys the new girl.

“You were brought from the forest?”

Lia parts her lips but no words come out. Arana leans forward and smells her, taking long, slow inhalations. His breath is bitter with wine. Her once small frame has grown womanly and he turns her in a circle before him and runs his hands down her side, feeling her contours, then turns her again and cups her breasts. She stands perfectly still and watches helplessly. He brushes back her hair and thumbs her eyelids wide open.

“Look at her eyes, Keslin, they look like wolves’ eyes.”

“They’re very nice.”

“Thank you, Lia.”

“You’re welcome,” she says, trembling.

Arana retakes his seat and dismisses her with a flick of his wrist. She dips her knees and gives a slight curtsy, then turns and takes one deliberate step after another toward the door, fighting the urge to run as fast as she can.

Jack fidgets on a bench with three other boys of his age on the Temple’s high terrace, the omnipresent warriors watching over them. He looks off at the horizon. They used to say that the world is a circle like the other bodies in the sky, and that if a man travels far enough in one direction he will sooner or later double back on himself, but as Jack looks out toward the furthest reaches he thinks it has all the appearances of infinity, like he could take a never-ending swim if he lit out on a straight enough path.

Arana jogs briskly up the last few steps and Keslin pulls his aging body along after. The three boys at Jack’s side stand immediately, and he jumps up quick to match them.

“Brave men, Keslin. And you
are
men now,” he tells them. “Children no longer. This day marks your passage.”

He motions them to join him by the rail, then puts his arms around their shoulders and together they look out across the expanse. Far below, people are traversing the garden paths and Jack scans their faces as best he can from this distance. None look familiar.

“This is not my Temple,” says Arana, talking low and with tremendous gravity. “It is yours—if you defend it, it belongs to you. Look at all of them, and over there, every one of those homes has a family living inside. You must be willing to give your lives for these people, to fight and die for them, if that’s what it takes. If you can do that, if you can make that promise to me and to the Temple, then your rewards will be endless. Look at me.” They look. “You have been Nezra since birth,” he tells Jack’s companions. “We are blood. And Jack, you’ve come from far away, but I know you are able. Will you make this promise to defend your family?”

Three of them nod. Jack does not.

“Tell me then. Look at me and tell me,
I promise to defend this family with my life
.”

Down the line they go, each boy reciting the promise. Jack is last. This moment has been on his horizon for over two years and he wonders if it is even possible for him to say no. He has envisioned himself declining the call to service and being thrown back into his cell and locked away and forgotten until some future detachment pries open the sealed trap and finds the skeleton of a fifteen year old boy, chained and grinning. In the end, it is that same inner force that commanded him to eat even when he wished to starve that speaks for him. He looks Arana squarely in his crystal blue eyes, mindful of the occult powers they have been known to possess, and recites the pledge.

“I promise to defend this family with my life,” he says.

A sick numbness spreads through his body and he wonders if the King is working some strange magic on him.

“Very good,” Arana says, and Jack can see the victory on his face. “Keslin, meet these new Sons of the Temple. Men, this is Keslin. He handles all matters of defense, and has since the earliest days. You are in his control now.”

“Welcome, men,” Keslin declares grandly, surveying them with keen eyes. “You are in for quite an adventure. Follow me.”

He leads them to the clothier and waits in the corridor while Railek outfits them. After a short span, the four novices emerge wearing the standard attire—high-cut boots, black cloths around their waists, and belts fitted over their shoulders. Jack flinches when he looks down and realizes he looks exactly like the armed warriors at his side, with only one exception—his hair has not been shorn.

He guides them out past the amphitheatre and on toward the outer provinces. People stop and give encouraging smiles as they pass. Jack stares straight ahead and tries to block them out. They diverge from the quarry road and march single file past the stables. In an open field, Keslin stops and unties the belt that cinches his shirt closed.

“I want you to have a full understanding… of what it is we do… and why we do it.” He pulls back his shirt and lets it fall. The boys gasp. Across his torso, starting from his left shoulder and cutting a mean path to his beltline, is a texture of flesh that would look unhealthy on a corpse, pinkish and boiling, gruesomely marbled with old scar tissue. “I was here…” he avows, “when everything burned, I was here. I carried my dead child in these arms.” He raises them, palms up, and his forearms are a spider’s web of gnarled and mottled disfigurement. “I will not let it happen again.”

They behold him grimly, unable to look away.

He slips his shirt back over his shoulders and ties his belt off, then leads them the rest of the way in silence. They walk to a slatted wood structure set back from the quarry road, and when Keslin enters the men milling around stop and face him rigidly.

“Come meet your new recruits,” he calls out.

A man rises and approaches from the rear of the barracks, stout as a boulder, with lithe, twitching muscles that look distinctly engineered for this grisly business. He inspects the four young men in a vaguely reptilian fashion.

“This is Taket. Obey him.”

Taket is a well-seasoned scout. On a long, dark night nearly three years back he sat perched in the high branches of a great sequoia and watched Jack perform his ceremonial Fire dance with thoughts of heartless murder on his mind. He proceeds down the length of the aisle, his great bulk and long stride making it seem as though his footfalls would shake the whole flimsy barracks with each step, yet he treads silently. Jack and his fellow recruits watch him leave. Keslin leans back against one of the bunks and grins.

“I think you’d better follow him,” he says.

They hustle out the front entrance to catch up. Taket walks past a battery of warriors and accelerates until he is sprinting away, and the recruits fall in with the rest of the team in pursuit of his swiftly receding form. He leads them down a trail that veers northward along the bluffs, waves slushing over the tumbled rocks below, the path cutting dangerously close to the edge, a sheer drop straight down to a jagged shore.

Jack huffs along as the path curves inland through piney scrag. A steep upslope slows their pace as each man shambles to the top, stepping from boulder to boulder. Taket runs them hard, stopping only at small streams to drink then racing off again. Before long Jack’s breathing turns ragged and a hot throb burns in his chest, but he does not slow. Their path weaves through the forest and back along the coast. In the late morning they struggle up another rocky incline, pale dust sticking to their sweaty skin.

Taket stops and stretches, waiting for his team to collect. Jack is second to last and when he reaches the top he staggers and pants and looks around. Behind them, a line of smoke landmarks the Temple, some distance away now. The path winds down the other side of the hillock and ends at an alluring crescent of sandy beach, shrouded on both ends by immense outcroppings. Taket stands with his feet spread and his arms crossed, appraising his men. He looks toward his four new additions.

“Do you know how to swim?”

“Yes,” say three of them.

Jack shakes his head
no
.

“Then today,” says Taket, “you will learn something.”