The Inheritance Trilogy Omnibus(332)
Ahad laughed, but a feeling that had been in the air—an extra measure of heaviness and danger that had been thickening around us—eased. “I’ll take care, then. I do like being neat.”
There was a flicker. I felt myself disassembled and pushed out of the world. Despite Ahad’s threats, he was actually quite gentle about it. Then a new setting melted together around me.
Arrebaia, the largest city amid the collection of squabbling tribes that had grown together and decided to fight others instead of each other. I could remember when they had not been Darre, just Somem and Lapri and Ztoric, and even further back when they had been families, and before that when they had been wandering bands lacking names of any kind. No more, however. I stood atop a wall near the city’s heart and privately marveled at how much they’d grown. The immense, tangled jungle that dominated this part of High North shone on the distant horizon, as green as the dragons that flew through other realms and the color of my mother’s eyes when she was angry. I could smell its humidity and violent, fragile life on the wind. Around me spread a maze of streets and temples and statues and gardens, all rising in stony tiers toward the city’s center, all carpeted in the paler green of the ornamental grass that the Darre cultivated. It made their city glow like an emerald in the slanting afternoon light.
Before me, in the near distance, loomed the hulking, squared-off pyramid of Sar-enna-nem. My destination, I guessed, since Ahad did not strike me as the subtle type.
My arrival had not gone unnoticed, however. I glanced down from the wall on which I stood to find an old woman and a boychild of four or five years staring up at me. Amid the crowded street, they alone had stopped; between them was a rickety-looking cart bearing a few tired-looking vegetables and fruits. Ah, yes, the end of the market day. I sat down on the wall, dangling my feet over it and wondering how the hell I was supposed to get down, since it was a good ten feet high and I now had to worry about breaking bones. Damn Ahad.
“Hey, there,” I said in Senmite. “You know whether this wall runs all the way to Sar-enna-nem?”
The boy frowned, but the old woman merely looked thoughtful. “All things in Arrebaia lead to Sar-enna-nem,” she said. “But you may have trouble getting in. Foreigners are more welcome in the city than they used to be, but they are barred from the temple by declaration of our ennu.”
“Temple?”
“Sar-enna-nem,” said the boy, his expression suddenly scornful. “You don’t know anything, do you?”
He spoke with the thickest accent I’d heard in centuries, his Senmite inflected by the gulping river flow of the Darren tongue. The woman’s Senmite bore only a trace of this. She had learned Senmite early, probably before she’d learned Darre. The boy had done it the other way around. I glanced up as a pack of children near the boy’s age ran past, shrieking as children always seem to. They were shrieking in Darre.
“I know a lot of things,” I said to the boy, “but not everything. I know Sar-enna-nem used to be a temple, long ago, back before the Arameri made the world over. So it’s a temple again?” I grinned, delighted. “Whose?”
“All the gods’, of course!” The boy put his hands on his hips, having clearly decided I was an idiot. “If you don’t like that, you can leave!”
The old woman sighed. “Hush, boy. I didn’t raise you to be rude to guests.”
“He’s a Teman, Beba! Wigyi from school says you can’t trust those eyes of theirs.”
Before I could retort, the old woman’s hand shot out and cuffed the boy. I winced in sympathy at his yelp, but really, a smart child would’ve known better.
“We will discuss proper comportment for a young man when we get home,” she added, and the boy looked chastened at last. Then she focused on me again. “If you didn’t know the temple is a temple again, then I doubt you’ve come looking to pray. What is it that you really want here, stranger?”
“Well, I was looking for your ennu—or his daughter Usein, rather.” I had vague memories of someone mentioning a Baron Darr. “Where might she be found?”
The old woman narrowed her eyes at me for a long moment before answering. There was an attentiveness in her posture, and I noted the way she shifted her stance back, just a little. She moved her right hand to her hip, too, for easy access to the knife that was almost surely sheathed at the small of her back. Not all of Darr’s women were warriors, but this one had been, no doubt about it.
I flashed her my broadest, most innocent smile, hoping she would dismiss me as harmless. She didn’t relax—my smile didn’t work as well as it had when I’d been a boy—but her lips did twitch in an almost-smile.