receded into the distance, their entourage behind, could have sent that note.
Hakiem rubbed his face, bleary-eyed and weary: this final indignity heaped upon luckless Sanctuary was almost too much for him to bear. Daily, the rubble piles grew greater and the body count mounted. Orphans now outnumbered parented children, and child gangs as deadly as the Nisibisi-sponsored death squads roamed the town at night when (everywhere but in the Maze, which was impossible to police) the Beysib curfew was in force.
Once, the town of Sanctuary had been sneered at as the anus of Empire-but at least then it had been part of something comprehensible: the Rankan Empire, venal and vicious, was a creation of men and manpower, not of women and sorcery. The Harka Bey and their sorceresses imposed a rule of supernatural terror upon Sanctuary that all priests-Ilsig and Rankan alike-agreed would soon bring down the wrath of the elder gods.
An Ilsigi priest, in his fiery sermons (held surreptitously north of town in the Old Ruins), had warned that the gods might send Sanctuary to the bottom of the sea if the populace did not unite and oust the Bey.
Some had hoped Kadakithis might show his face there last night; but no one in the city had seen the poor Prince/Governor up close since the takeover: sometimes a personage who looked very like Kadakithis appeared at the high window in the Hall of Justice, but the whispers were that this was only a simulacrum of Kadakithis, that the Prince/ Governor languished, all but dead, under the Beysa Shupansea's spell. And the rumors were not so far from the truth, though Kadakithis was held in thrall by love, not magic. Things were so much worse now than they'd been when the Nisibisi witches had come down from the north preaching Ilsig liberation and prophesying a great upheaval to come that, had the most terrible Nisibisi witch-Roxane, Death's Queen-appeared now before Hakiem and demanded his soul in payment for the opportunity to tell a tale of Sane-f tuary's freedom, Hakiem would gladly have given it.
Things were so damned depressing, sometimes he wanted to cry. When he wiped his eyes and took his old, gnarled hands away, a woman stood there before him.
He drew in a shocked breath and almost cowered: was it a witch? Was it dreaded Roxane, come back from the northern war? Roxane, who had all but destroyed the Stepsons and made undead slaves of her conquests? Had he just pacted with a witch? By the mechanism of a thought, just an errant thought? Surely, no one could lose their soul so easily, so offhandedly....
The woman was tall and broad-shouldered, with a turn chin and clear narrow eyes; her hair was as black as a wizard's, her clothes nondescript but cut to facilitate easy movement-her tunic vented, her Ilsig leggings bloused at the knees and disappearing into calf-high, laced boots.
"Hakiem, are you? I'm Kama. Shall we walk?"
"Walk? I'm... waiting for someone-my apprentice," he lied lamely. Was this a Bey mercenary? He didn't know they covered their breasts or wore pants. Was he to be arrested? That would be a story-"Inside a Beysib Interrogation Cell"-if only he might live to tell it....
"Walk." The woman's voice was throaty as she chuckled. "It's safer, for this kind of meet. And the someone you're waiting for, I hope, is me." She smiled, and there was something familiar about her eyes, as if an old acquaintance looked out of them. She extended her hand to him as if he were infirm, some old woman to be helped to her feet. Women were getting altogether out of hand in Sanctuary this season.
He brushed her hand aside and got up stiffly, hoping she wouldn't notice. She was saying, "-your apprentice? That idea's not half-bad. I'd probably qualify, having won first prize at the last Festival of Man, wouldn't you think?"
"First prize? Festival of Man?" Hakiem repeated dumbly. "What did you say your name was?" The Festival of Man was held once every four years, far to the north. It was a festival for