The Thousand Names Read Free Page A

skilled.”
    Jaffa closed his eyes for a moment, running through the words of a prayer. Once, such a thing would have sickened him. Once, he had even sought to bring the prince’s justice to Mother and all who served her, to break the secret temples and bring their obscenities to light. Now, having seen the men who had risen in her place, he had bound himself to her service. Now he was able to look on the death of an urchin girl without much more than a tremor. There had been so many deaths, after all. And one lesson the Redeemers had taught to Ashe-Katarion at painful length was that there were worse things in life than a quick ending.
    Mother crooked a bony finger. “Now, Akataer.”
    The boy nodded. Onvidaer gathered the girl’s other arm above her shoulders, so she hung with her knees just brushing the flagstones. Akataer put one hand under her lolling head and lifted it, looking solemnly into her blind, staring eyes and brushing back her hair. Then he leaned in, with the quiet concentration of a craftsman at work, and gently kissed her. His tongue pushed past her slack lips. There was a long, silent moment.
    When he was finished, he put one hand on the side of her face and pulled open the lid of one rapidly filming eye until it gaped in ludicrous surprise. Again the boy leaned close, this time extending his tongue through his teeth, and ever so carefully he touched the tip of it to the corpse’s eye. He repeated the procedure with the other eye, then stepped back and muttered a few words under his breath.
    In the depths of the girl’s pupils, something took shape. Her body swayed, as though Onvidaer had shaken it gently. Her eyes closed of their own accord, slowly, then flickered open. In place of white, irises, and pupils, they were now filled from edge to edge with green fire. Her lips shifted, and a wisp of smoke curled upward from the corner of her mouth.
    The old woman grunted, satisfied. She gestured Akataer to her side and patted him proprietarily on the head with a white-wrapped claw. Then she directed her attention to the thing that had been the urchin girl.
    “Now,” she said, “we shall have some answers.”
    “This is Mother,” said Akataer, in a high, clear voice. “I charge you to answer her questions, and speak truthfully.”
    The corpse shifted again, drooling another skein of smoke. The glowing green eyes were unblinking.
    “You followed Jaffa here,” the old woman said, gesturing at him. “This man.”
    There was a long pause. When the corpse spoke, more smoke escaped, as though it had been holding in a draw from a pipe. It curled through the girl’s hair and hung oddly still in the air above her. Her voice was a drawn-out hiss, like a hot coal plunged in a water bucket.
    “Yesssssss . . .”
    Jaffa swallowed hard. He’d been half hoping Mother was wrong, though that meant the girl would have died for nothing. Small chance there, though. Mother was never wrong.
    “And who bade you follow him? Who are your masters?”
    Another pause, as though the dead thing were considering.
    “. . . Orlanko . . . ,” she said eventually, reluctantly. “. . . Concordaaaaaat . . .”
    “The foreigners,” the old woman said. She made a hawking sound, as though she would spit but didn’t have the juice. “And what were the
raschem
looking for?”
    “. . . Names . . .” The corpse groaned. “. . . Must . . . have . . . the Names . . .”
    She wriggled in Onvidaer’s grasp, and the green flared brighter. Akataer glanced anxiously at the old woman, who waved one hand as though bored by the proceedings.
    “Dismiss her,” she said.
    The boy nodded gratefully and muttered another few words. All at once, the corpse slumped, green fires dying away. The girl’s eye sockets were a charred ruin, and the stench of burned flesh wafted across the yard.
    “You have done well, Akataer,” the old woman said. “Return to your chambers. Onvidaer, dispose of that.”
    Jaffa frowned.