Fox's Bride (13 page)

Guards hustled down a colonnade carrying Hiresha's sedan chair. Fox-tail carvings decorated the base of the pillars, and hieroglyphs inlaid the stone with glaze, silver, and gold. The enchantress recognized ovals that would contain the Golden Scoundrel's name: pictures of a fennec, a sun, and a broken jug.

Pilgrims flocked the causeway before the temple, contending for space with hundreds of man-sized totems left in homage to the god. They cried out in protest as guards on camels forced them aside. The camelry leaders drew their swords and shouted to clear a path.

A priest on a sedan chair beside Hiresha's mopped his face with a cloth. “You must be wrong.”

Hiresha said, “He has the Blood Judgment.”

Three men passed between the chairs going the other direction. They carried boxes under their arms.

The other priest's chin plumped into a ball as he frowned. “Inannis did emigrate from Jaraah recently.”

“With the highest recommendations from the temple,” the priest with the silver beard said.

“Inannis or a servant,” the large priest said, “the thief is soon caught.”

A pylon reared overhead on either side of the temple entrance. Murals colored the cliffs of sandstone blocks. The Golden Scoundrel was depicted with a fennec's head and stood as a colossus among stylized wives that reached only to his ankles. Below even these, real pilgrims thronged. They piled clay idols and glazed sculptures against the walls and prayed.

Beyond three guards at the temple entrance, a courtyard of blue pillars looked empty. One priest walked across it in a flutter of robes. Hiresha stepped down from the sedan chair. “Is Priest Inannis here?”

“Priest Inannis?” A guard clacked the bronze rods dangling from his flail against his thigh. “Hasn't left.”

Another said, “He's been sick for the last few days.”

“For the last few years,” Hiresha said. “Don't allow him to leave. No, permit no one to leave.”

A temple guard raised an eyebrow to a priest.

The priest sighed. “Do as the bride says.”

She wished to have brought more than eight guards with her, but she feared too much of a hubbub would alert the thief. Thirty more guards had been scheduled to surround the temple compound, coming two at a time. “You may now take me to the kennels.”

A priest asked, “The fennec kennels?”

“Where better to hide your fox god?”

Priests, guards, and enchantress pressed between the pilgrims and totems, around the pylon. A shorter stone building was situated to the side of the temple. The pyramid soared behind the structures, and the sun appeared to balance above its golden tip.

Hiresha whispered for the guards to surround the kennels. They would search one building at a time. Two guards and the pudgy priest accompanied her to the closest door.

A guard rested his bronze sword on his shoulder. “I don't hear any yipping inside.”

“The foxes sleep at this hour.” The priest opened the door with his key.

Sand covered the floor of the kennels. Hieroglyphs colored the walls, the room lit by two candles set on a pedestal. Several large urns and a box cluttered one corner. The smell of animal excrement rankled Hiresha's nose. Wicker cages were built into the far wall, each open and empty.

The priest gagged. “Where're all the fennecs?”

Hiresha spotted only one golden fox, lying asleep between the candles. An emerald collar and earring were set on the stone beside him. A guard gasped, and Hiresha thought he must also be surprised. Then Inannis stepped into her view to stab the other guard in the neck with a thin dagger.

The guards reeled and cried out. Inannis slipped two stilettos out of sight in his robes. His hands flicked, and the priest slapped his own neck, pulling out a dart. The center of Hiresha's chest glowed from the red diamond under her gown. Its enchantment Burdened objects approaching at unsociable speed, and a dart buried itself in the sand in front of her slippers. Her magic must have forced it downward.

The protective enchantment could only self-activate once more before she replenished its power in dream. Fear jolted through Hiresha, scorching her to alertness.

Inannis walked around the slumping figures of the men. He locked the door in the faces of rushing guards, and it began thumping from the outside.

The thief's voice was quiet but fierce. “I'm going to escape, and you're helping, Enchantress.”

“I should think not.” She forced her hands from her throat to her sides.
No reason to be intimidated,
she told herself. His poisons would only annoy her, and she could retreat to her dream laboratory before most stab wounds killed her.

The priest flapped his arms to try to ward away Inannis. The thief stuck the priest’s hand with a second dart, and his legs trembled then gave out, landing him next to the fallen guards. Not much blood trickled from them, but they could do no more than crawl and moan.

Inannis doubled over, coughed, and spit a red glob on the priest's blue robes. The thief licked blood from his lips, not looking at Hiresha as he spoke to her. “Your help, my information. A trade.”

She reached to a guard's neck. His pulse thumped, but his breathing was fading. “What poison did you use?”

“I'll give you the antidote.” He walked to the pedestal with the unmoving fennec. “And you'll want to know you were betrayed.”

Hiresha could enchant her own antidotes, and she had scant reason to trust him. “Betrayed?”

“After your flight from the inn, I was sent to tell the vizier. He already knew.” He dabbed the ear of the fox with an unguent. “And he knew where to find you.”

The news pricked Hiresha in a tender spot. She wondered if a Soultrapper had warned the vizier of her escape.
Or Lord Tethiel.
Stooping, she blew into the guard's mouth, forcing air in and out of his paralyzed chest.

Inannis said, “You want to free yourself from the Golden Scoundrel.”

Hiresha moved to the next guard and pressed her lips against his, helping him breathe. She tasted onions.

“You'll need to arm yourself.” The thief pierced the fennec's ear with the emerald stub. One paw twitched, and the fox's black eyes flickered open and closed. “The deadliest weapon you can wield is expectations.”

Hiresha considered that no advice at all. She looked at the thief as he slipped the emerald collar onto the fennec. “I do not believe that is the stolen fox. Their god.”

“I'm proud to say I forged the emeralds myself.” He tucked the comatose animal into his sash belt. Its tail and one ear hung out.

“Those jewels are paste?” Hiresha stiffened, rising from helping the big priest. His robes stank of urine.

“Glass and glaze.” The thief grinned.

Hiresha loathed forged jewels.
The worst of crimes.
Hot bursts of anger surprised Hiresha, and she glanced at a sickle sword, close to the slack fingers of a guard.
I should attack the thief.

The door shuddered. A priest's muffled voice shouted to stand aside, that he had the key.

She blinked and looked away from the sword.
I never planned to swing a weapon, and I don't intend to start now.
Matching her untrained bluster against the thief's stilettos—or a weapon of any kind—struck her as a losing proposition.

“I gave you information,” the thief said. “Now help me.”

Hiresha said, “I think not.”

“Then I'll take a garnet from your gown. To remember you by.”

“You know they're garnets?”

It was a silly thing to say, but Hiresha was dumbstruck. She had waited months for someone to notice purple garnets decorated this dress, not amethysts. To have a thief with god-cursed blood recognize them left her stricken. She wished Inannis could have been considerate enough to poison her instead.

The door slammed open.

A vial glinted between the thief's fingers, filled with a chalky powder. He threw it against the stone ceiling.

A white star burst in the room. The air curdled in misty bulges, and a cloud of garlic stench choked Hiresha.

Her diamond flared red again as it protected her from something metal. She heard a second door bang open.

Coughing, waving white smoke from her face, Hiresha saw a knife embedded in the sand at her feet. The outline of a doorway shone through the fog. She pointed, shouted. “He's running.”

One guard stumbled over a fallen comrade. Four more made their way past the wicker cages and urns, racing out the far door.

Hiresha had to believe they would catch Inannis. His Blood Judgment would exhaust him, and other guards patrolled the temple.

A priest peeked into the room at the four slumped bodies, “Are they dead?”

The enchantress knelt by a poisoned guard. His heart still beat, but his lips had purpled. “Help them breathe,” she said. “I'll determine the poison.”

Removing a glove, she wiped some of the blood from a neck wound onto her fingers then closed her eyes. Slipping into a doze after such an ordeal required immense skill. Fortunately, Hiresha's rare condition doomed her with a unique susceptibility to sleep.

In her dream laboratory, she learned the poison was from the jungles of the Dominion of the Sun.
The curare toxin.
A plant appeared in a mirror, its leaves the waxy green of toad skin, each blade pointing from the branch like a spear head. Hiresha knew the magic to disassemble the poison. She was confident she could stabilize the men with a few enchanted garnets.

“Oh, no!” The reflection lifted her yellow gloves to her cheeks. “Look at the room. The urns.”

Hiresha glanced at a mirror that showed the kennels as she had first entered them. A second looking glass displayed the scene later, after the smoke had cleared. Not only had the far door opened, but also the lid of an urn had shifted. Its glazed pattern of yellow lines now aligned with those on the rest of the urn, the clay vessel large enough to hold a man.

The reflection squealed. “He's still in the room with us?”

A tightness spread over Hiresha's back, and her skin prickled. “Given the pattern of disrupted sand around the urn, it seems likely.”

“Don't leave.” The reflection pleaded. “He could kill us if we wake.”

“If I allow him to escape, the vizier will execute Chandur.” Hiresha outstretched her arms. Glowing jewels swirled around her, and the red diamond in her chest pulsed with replenished power.

She blinked awake.

The urn's lid had tipped onto the sand. The second priest lay gaping at her, his slobbering mouth half filled with sand. Now five men sprawled in the room.

“Confound it!” Hiresha noticed the thief's knife was gone from where it had fallen in the sand.

A peep into the urn revealed the blue of discarded priest robes. The thief was nowhere in sight.

“Some assistance.”

Her voice sounded muffled and weak. Strands of black hair thrashed about as she whirled. She saw only a mass of pilgrims outside in front of the temple. She saw no one. Hiresha felt as if she had swallowed two fistfuls of obsidian shards, her stomach a quivering knot of pain and her insides lacerated.

“Help!”