hushed vista.
The storm was completely exhausted now. People should have been appearing in their doorsteps to brush off the sand and peer at their roofs to see they were still secure. But there was nobody. The elegant streets, laid with such precision, were deserted from end to end.
“Maybe they’ve all gathered in-one place,” Gentle suggested. “Is there some kind of assembly place? A church or
a senate?”
“The chianculi’s the nearest thing,” Pie said, pointing towards a quartet of pale yellow domes set amid trees shaped like cypresses but bearing Prussian blue foliage. Birds were rising from them into the clearing sky, their shadows the only motion on the streets below.
“What happens at the chianculi?” Gentle said as they started towards the domes.
“Ah! In my youth,” the mystif said, attempting a lightness of tone it clearly didn’t feel, “in my youth it was where we had the circuses.”
“I didn’t know you came from circus stock.” “They weren’t like any Fifth Dominion circus,” Pie replied. “They were ways we remembered the Dominion we’d been exiled from.”
“No clowns and ponies?” Gentle said. “No clowns and ponies,” Pie replied, and would not be drawn on the subject any further.
Now that they were close to the chianculi, its scale—and that of the trees surrounding it—became apparent. It was fully five stories high from the ground to the apex of its largest dome. The birds, having made one celebratory circuit of the Kesparate, were now settling in the trees again, chattering like myna birds that had been taught Japanese.
Gentle’s attention was briefly claimed by the spectacle, only to be grounded again when he heard Pie say, “They’re not all dead.”
Emerging from between the Prussian blue trees were four of the mystif s tribe, negroes wrapped in undyed robes like desert nomads, some folds of which they held between their teeth, covering their lower faces. Nothing about their gait or garments offered any clue to their sex, but they were evidently prepared to oust trespassers, for they came armed with fine silver rods, three feet or so in length and held across their hips.
“On no account move or even speak,” the mystif said to Gentle as the quartet came within ten yards of where they stood.
“Why not?”
“This isn’t a welcoming party.”
“What is it then?”
“An execution squad.”
So saying, the mystif raised its hands in front of its chest, palms out, then—breaking its own edict—it stepped forward, addressing the squad as it did so. The language it spoke was not English but had about it the same oriental lilt Gentle had heard from the beaks of the settling birds. Perhaps they’d indeed been speaking in their owners’ tongue.
One of the quartet now let the bitten veil drop, revealing a woman in early middle age, her expression more puzzled than aggressive. Having listened to Pie for a time, she murmured something to the individual at her right, winning only a shaken head by way of response. The squad had continued to approach Pie as it talked, their stride steady; but now, as Gentle heard the syllables Pie ‘oh’ pah appear in the mystif s monologue, the woman called a halt. Two more of the veils were dropped, revealing men as finely boned as their leader. One was lightly mustached, but the seeds of sexual ambiguity that blossomed so exquisitely in Pie were visible here. Without further word from the woman, her companion went on to reveal a second ambiguity, altogether less attractive. He let one hand drop from the silver rod he carried and the wind caught it, a ripple passing through its length as though it were made not of steel but of silk. He lifted it to his mouth and draped it over his tongue. It fell in soft loops from his lips and fingers, still glinting like a blade even though it folded and fluttered.
Whether this gesture was a threat or not Gentle couldn’t know, but in response to it the mystif dropped to its knees and indicated with a wave of its hand that Gentle and Huz-zah should do the same. The child cast a rueful glance in Gentle’s direction, looking to him for endorsement. He shrugged and nodded, and they both knelt, though to Gentle’s way of thinking this was the last position to adopt in front of an execution squad.