CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

An Ominous Silence

Tess liked the exhausting pace forced on her by the messenger bells. It meant she was too tired to think. She didn't mind the pain either, the scraped and sore ribs, the aching muscles, the constant rasp of her breathing as the chill air of autumn pulled the warmth out of her lungs. She had earned that pain.

Like a badge, it reminded her every instant of what she had done to get herself here: She had killed her husband because she was afraid to tell him the truth.

Kirill said, once, "Tess, there might have been survivors. Two of the monks said that they saw a handful of prisoners the next day."

"Said it because they were about to be killed and they probably thought it would save their lives!"

Kirill only shrugged. It seemed perfectly logical to him that every inhabitant of the monastery had been killed after a brief and no doubt brutal interrogation. Tess found it appalling. No doubt the poor heretic who had been taken from Parkilnous and hauled off to face trial at the monastery had been killed as indiscriminately as the rest, meeting an ironic and cruel fate as the unwitting bait that had drawn Ilya to his doom. She had absorbed the full report, but she felt so detached from it that it seemed to trail in her wake, not quite connected to her. It had been thorough, in its way, information gleaned from four dozen interrogations listed efficiently, easily memorizable, so that the messenger's verbal report had tallied exactly with the written scroll.

The gods had struck down the chief holy man when he was brought before the jaran captain who had led the expedition to Urosh Monastery in search of Bakhtiian. By this, Tess supposed that the presbyter had died of fright, probably a stroke or a heart attack. Unfortunately, that also meant they had gotten nothing from him.

For the rest, they knew only that Andrei Sakhalin had been there, not whether his troops had gotten caught and killed with the others. Fifteen monks had claimed no knowledge of the attacker, two said it was the hand of God at work, and seven had recognized the colors of the prince of Dushan known as Janos the Disgraced due to some recent upheaval at court. His troops had done their job well: The slaughter had been complete, according to all but two of the monks, the two who claimed to have seen prisoners.

Tess tried to let herself hope, but it hurt too much.

They rode. The passage of ground jarred hope out of her; the rising sun each morning leached it away, and the setting sun dragged her down into a heavy sleep bereft of dreams. She thought of Vasha and Katya, of Niko's grandson Stefan, children who had become dear to her, killed before they could reach their full growth as adults. Because she was Charles's sister, she thought of Princess Rusudani and wondered sardonically, angry at herself for her calculating mind, how great a prize they had lost thereby.

Ten days and perhaps a thousand kilometers south of Sarai, she stared at Kirill as they swung onto their horses at the posting station, their escort of Gennady Berezin and fifty riders mounting up behind them, and she swore.

"What an idiot I've been! There's no obvious reason for a khaja prince to attack the guard, even knowing whose it was, especially knowing...." She could not bring herself to say his name. "It's irrational. It doesn't make sense. Unless he thought he was getting something. What if that something was Princess Rusudani?"

"Of course," said Kirill mildly, as if he had long since assimilated this information and stored it away for future use. "She is the key. Why else would the jaran traitor in our midst have sent a message to the Mircassian king?"

Kirill's bland demeanor irritated Tess so thoroughly that she did not speak to him for the rest of the day, but then, she rarely spoke on the long, hard ride each day. It took too much effort. It was effort enough to ride for hours at a stretch, changing horses at each posting station, forcing dried meat and sour yoghurt down her throat, drinking komis until she was giddy from it.

Nineteen days after they left Sarai they came up before Parkilnous, and two days after that, they found an outrider; by afternoon they had fallen in with the waiting army, the host with which Ilya had ridden south weeks and weeks ago, now camped somewhat off the main road south.

She held court under an awning. Every captain in that host—and there were over a hundred of them—came forward and offered her his saber, giving it up to her because of the dishonor they had each and every one of them brought on themselves by letting their dyan fall prey to a khaja ambush.

She said, each time, so that it became a mantra: "Keep your saber. You are not done with it."

After all of them had knelt before her and, with her refusal, retreated to leave room for the next one, she rose. The captains knelt in a semicircle before her and beyond them, the host of riders, gathered as close as they could. The five hundred riders from Bakhtiian's personal guard ranged around her awning, equally silent. They sent Gennady Berezin forward and he knelt before her, unsheathed his saber, and laid it at her feet, his head bowed in shame.

She picked it up and gave it back to him. "I don't want to take your sabers from you," she said, loudly, pitching her voice to carry, knowing that this man more than all the others represented the whole army, a man who had ridden faithfully with Bakhtiian from the beginning. Without realizing she meant to say it, she did anyway.

" I want revenge."

They responded with silence, ominous because it shouted approval, and a moment later with the rustling of thousands of soldiers rising to their feet, preparing to ride. After that, it was too late to call the words back. She felt, at that moment, that her assimilation to the jaran, a cleaner, more honest, more brutal life than the one she had known on Earth, was complete.

She swayed, overcome by emotion. "We'll have to ride in the morning. I'm falling asleep on my feet."

Several of the young women, archers with the army, came forward and led her to a tent. She slept like one dead.

Kirill woke her before dawn. "Come. There's news."

Catching his excitement, she jerked on her boots and belted her saber on. "What is it?"

"The rider sent out thirty days ago has returned from the court of Dushan, where he has a report from Andrei Sakhalin, who is whole and safe. Sakhalin says that he left Bakhtiian at the monastery and rode on to the court, and that the last he saw of them Bakhtiian and his guard were alive. So the attack must have happened after Sakhalin left. Perhaps the khaja prince saw Sakhalin leaving and thought he could easily defeat the group remaining."

"Perhaps."

"Sakhalin also sends word that this Prince Janos is out of favor at court, and was once betrothed to Princess Rusudani."

"Is that so? Interesting that the princess never mentioned that she had ever been betrothed. I wonder how her parents came to break off the arrangement and put her in a convent instead."

Tess's escort consisted of Kirill and two of the young women, bright, hardened girls who had the swagger of experienced soldiers and the solicitous nature of jaran women.

But Kirill did not lead her to the awning where she would have expected to have an audience with the messenger who had come from the Dushanite court. He led her to the surgery tents. A host of lanterns gleamed around the central tent belonging to the chief healer riding with the army. An apprentice healer held the flap aside for her to enter. Inside, lanterns illuminated the body of a young man lying on furs in the center of the tent. She recognized him, even through the filth. Dirt and the rust stain of old blood matted his clothing. His hair ran gray with dust. Grime streaked his hands and face, as if he had attempted, intermittently, to clean them. He had only recently been admitted to Bakhtiian's jahar, a signal honor, one sought after by every young man who had aspirations.

"Stanislav Vershinin," she said aloud, she was so surprised. "What has happened to him?" And, she wondered to herself, why have I been called in to see to him? He looked ill, battered, and possibly as if he might yet die.

The healer, a hardy woman in her fifties, looked up from the paste she was pounding in a shallow bowl. "He was with the guard that went to Urosh Monastery, Sister," she said, speaking to Tess in the formal style.

It took Tess a long time to assimilate this information. An old man cut away the trouser leg from Vershinin's left leg, revealing the festering wound, scabbed over but still infected. The apprentice brought an iron pot and set it on a tripod next to the Vershinin lad. Truly, Tess thought, gazing down at the young man's pale face, his closed eyes, he could not have been more than two years older than Vasha. The old man began to clean the wound with the hot water, and that brought the young man awake. He yelped. A second apprentice handed him a strip of leather and he bit down on it, his eyes tearing while the old healer dabbed the pus and dirt off the wound and probed delicately at it with a tiny spatula, cleaning out the infected cut. Vershinin passed out. When the old healer was done, the woman sealed the wound with paste and then bound it with cloth.

"That may save it," she said aloud, "but it's badly infected."

Vershinin's eyes fluttered open. He searched the tent, found Tess, and focused on her, blinking madly. "Alive," he said hoarsely. He licked his lips and tried again. "Bakhtiian was alive, but very bad.

Badly wounded. He was a prisoner."

At once, Tess knelt beside him. Her heart pounded wildly in her chest, so erratically that she felt dizzy. "What khaja did this?"

"His name ... Prince Janos. He married the khaja princess." He licked his lips again, and the healer gave him some of the boiled water to drink. "But it was not him. Not the khaja prince. Sakhalin betrayed us."

"Sakhalin!" That came from Kirill, who turned at once and left the tent, running.

"What of the others? You escaped. Did anyone else? What of Bakhtiian?"

Vershinin seemed to have found his strength, what there was of it. "Konstans Barshai was killed in his place."

"In his place?"

"The khaja prince thought Barshai was Bakhtiian. He killed him. A few of us were spared by the princess's hand. Katerina Orzhekov. Vladimir the orphan. The Kolenin cousins. The two boys." He blinked, eyes rolling, trying to remember something.

"Let him rest," said the healer.

"No," he said. "I must tell the rest. Bakhtiian lived, but he was badly wounded. We were all taken prisoner and we traveled, west. West. A little south. We made a plan, the other guardsmen and I. I fell behind, and the khaja soldiers grew tired of my slowness and sold me as a slave to farmers. From there I escaped."

"Good God," exclaimed Tess. "And made your way here."

"How else to get the word out? He betrayed us, the bastard. The khaja prince did his bidding and took the others. He would have killed us all except for the intercession of the woman."

"But Bakhtiian was still alive, when you left them?"

Vershinin shook his head. "Still alive, but dying, or close enough. He could not even walk. I don't know what happened to him. He was with the boy."

"With Vasha?" What difference did it make who he was with if he was dying, but she grasped for each scrap of information as if enough scraps might together form a real and solid body of Ilya, surviving.

Vershinin took some more water but did not reply.

"Where did Prince Janos take them? Do you know where they were headed?"

"To his stronghold, I think. I don't know."

"Let him rest," said the healer. "Or he will not have the strength to fight off the infection. He has done enough."

"You have done enough," said Tess to the young man, patting him on the hand. And his look, when she said it, burned her to the heart: That awful loyalty that they all gave to Bakhtiian, of their own free will. That terrible desire to prove their worth, to be part of his glorious enterprise, to win fame and to blaze in their own right, a true rider of the jaran.

She left them. She felt numb. Crossing the camp to her awning, she felt each step like the hammer of death, beating down to sound Ilya's fate: dying, dying, dying. Not even able to walk.

At the awning, they waited, the ten chief captains and ten guardsmen.

"We find a khaja guide and we ride for the stronghold of Prince Janos," she said, hearing her voice from a distance, as if someone else was speaking. "I want Andrei Sakhalin. Kirill, you will bring me Andrei Sakhalin."

"I will bring him to you," he agreed. "I will need a thousand troops."

"Take two thousand. As for the rest, we ride west southwest. As soon as camp is broken, we ride.

Leave an honor guard of five hundred men to protect Vershinin until he is able to move again."

They moved, scattering to obey her commands. She just stood there, toting up numbers in her head: two thousand with Kirill, five hundred with Vershinin ... that still left her seventeen thousand riders and archers. That ought to be enough to crush this khaja prince and get the prisoners back.

"Tess," said Kirill softly. He had remained behind. The sun rose behind him, glinting in her eyes so that she could not really see his face. It was blurred by tears, but that was only the glare of the sun.

She blinked them back ruthlessly. "I told you. Ilya is too damned tough for any khaja to kill."

"Go," said she brusquely.

He went.

But the truth was, it was worse, knowing that he had been alive. But not even able to walk.

"Ah, gods," she breathed, the words torn from her by a wrenching agony so strong that she staggered.

"Aunt, are you ill?" asked one of the young archers, her hovering escort, steadying her.

Dying, Vershinin had said. It would have been easier just to know that he was dead. It was worse not knowing. It hurt too much to hope.