Court of Fives

Did Lord Ottonor’s shadow try to crawl into my body? Was my brother merely caught in a deep sleep that we mistook for death or did a spark give life to his dead flesh?

What lies buried beneath the City of the Dead? Is this the corpse of old Efea, the secret at the heart of the land?

You know the lies they tell you but you don’t know the truth, so Coriander said to me.

I rest my right hand on the right-hand wall of the right-hand passageway. I am the tomb spider, anchored to the stone, spinning a way out of this maze. “Kal, you have the chalk.”

“I’ll mark the junctions, Jes,” he calls forward. We both know how to unravel a maze.

I pace with slow sweeps, checking for pitfalls and traps. The ragged rock scrapes at my fingers but my gloves protect my palms. Our light reveals the mark of tools scoring the walls, places where long-dead workmen smoothed a sharp edge or erased the mark another maze traveler carved in the rock to show their path. Suddenly an unseen creature crawls over my hand and I shriek.

“Nothing,” I say, although my heart pounds twice as fast as before. “It was just a bug.”

“I’d have smacked it with my slipper,” says Amaya. Her words give me the courage to go on.

Twice we pass a cleft that leads to an air shaft. In the first the shaft is partially collapsed. In the second we smell a fetid aroma, and the mark on the shaft indicates it is the tomb of a lord who passed, Maraya says, eighteen years earlier. Perhaps his oracle and her attendants have died.

We reach a circular space like a distended gourd. There are three possible exits. Ro-emnu sets Mother down with meticulous gentleness. She is unconscious and does not wake even when the babies fuss hungrily. Cook and Maraya let them suck broth off their little fingers. Coriander rests against a wall. The oracle stares so blankly I wonder what she sees.

Amaya sinks to the ground with head on knees, next to the opening that is the first to the right. According to my own plan we have to keep going to the right, yet the opening isn’t even tall enough to walk upright. Its sloped confines hook away into the rock. What if the tunnel closes and we are stuck and can’t turn around? How can Mother crawl if she can’t even wake up?

I sit with her hand in mine. Her pulse is a fragile thread.

Kalliarkos crouches beside me and clasps my other hand. “The leftmost opening is another air shaft,” he says. “It’s clear of debris, and it doesn’t stink. I’ll climb it. There’s a chance we can get out more quickly that way. Everyone needs a rest anyway.”

He vanishes up the shaft, taking no light, climbing blind. Doubt digs its teeth into my heart. If I am mistaken in thinking this complex to have anything in common with a Fives court, then I may have doomed us to dying of thirst, lost in a maze.

Coming up beside me, Ro-emnu smiles the way a tomcat prowls. “What is your next command, Captain Jessamy? How is your campaign strategy proceeding?”

“I would like to see you do better! Since you seem to believe you know so much!”

Coriander’s eyes pop open. “Ro knows more than any Archives!” she says stoutly.

“Kori, hold your tongue.” His is the tone of an exasperated older sibling, one I recognize.

“I won’t! Ro is trained as a poet in the Efean way, to speak only the truth. That’s why the king’s agents arrested him.”

“For murder!” The instant the words leave my mouth I’m sorry I said them in front of everyone else.

Naturally he laughs. Cook shifts away from him. Maraya measures him anxiously. He seems so big and threatening here in this closed space where we can’t run.

Coriander makes a rude gesture with her hand, right at me. “He was arrested for the play he wrote. The one the king’s agents closed the night it opened.”

“The Poet’s Curse? The one that murdered the king’s reputation? What is it about?”

With a chuckle he rubs the stubble of his hair. He has a laborer’s callused hands, nothing like the soft skin I associate with a daydreaming poet sitting at a window gazing over a reed-choked lakeshore where egrets hunt in the misty distance. “The story may shock you, Doma.”

“I’m not afraid of the truth, if that is what you mean,” I retort.

“You don’t have the sense to be afraid.”

“Either tell me or stop boasting, I beg you.”

By the way he stares at me I can tell he is about to refuse, just to spite me.

But it is Maraya who speaks. “I would like to know if the Archives are wrong. Isn’t it better to chase the truth and catch it if you can?”