LITMIR.BIZ

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danger behind these walls, and we suffer with others if Cartada’s hand—or any other hand—falls too heavily on this city. What happened here today does matter to us.”

      “We will suffer no matter what they do to each other, Jehane.” He was as stubborn as she was and, after years with Ishak, as versed in argument. His normally mild blue eyes were intense. “This is Asharite killing Asharite. Why let it throw our own lives into chaos. Think what you are doing to those who love you. Think—”

      Again she had to interrupt. He sounded too much like her mother for comfort now. “Don’t exaggerate,” she said, though he wasn’t, actually. “I am a physician. I am going to look for work outside the city. To expand my knowledge. To make a name. My father did that for years and years, riding with the khalif’s armies some seasons, signing contracts at different courts after Silvenes fell. That’s how he ended up in Cartada. You know that. You were with him.”

      “And I know what happened there,” Velaz shot back.

      Jehane stopped dead in the street. Someone running behind them almost crashed into her. It was a woman, Jehane saw, her face blank, a mask, as at the spring Processional. But this was a real face, and what lay behind the appearance of a mask was horror.

      Velaz was forced to stop as well. He looked at her, his expression angry and afraid. A small man, and not young; nearly sixty years of age now, Jehane knew. He had been with her parents for a long time before her own birth. A Waleskan slave, bought as a young man in the market at Lonza; freed after ten years, which was the Kindath practice.

      He could have gone anywhere then. Fluent in five languages after the years abroad with Ishak in Batiara and Ferrieres, and at the khalifs’ courts in Silvenes itself, trained flawlessly as a physician’s aide, more knowledgeable than most doctors were. Discreet, fiercely intelligent, Velaz would have had opportunities all over the peninsula or beyond the mountains east. The Al-Fontina of the khalifs, in those days, had been largely staffed and run by former slaves from the north, few of them as clever or versed in nuances of diplomacy as Velaz had been after ten years with Ishak ben Yonannon.

      Such a course seemed never even to have been contemplated. Perhaps he lacked ambition, perhaps he was simply happy. He had converted to the Kindath faith immediately after being freed. Had willingly shouldered the difficult weight of their history. He prayed after that to the white and blue moons—the two sisters of the god—rather than invoking the images of Jad from his boyhood in Waleska or the stars of Ashar painted on the domed temple ceilings of Al-Rassan.

      He had stayed with Ishak and Eliane and their small child from that day until this one, and if anyone in the world besides her parents truly loved her, Jehane knew it was this man.

      Which made it harder to look at the apprehension in his eyes and realize that she really couldn’t clearly explain why the path of her life seemed to have forked so sharply with the news of this massacre. Why it seemed so obvious what she now had to do. Obvious, but inexplicable. She could imagine what Ser Rezzoni of Sorenica would have said in response to such a conjunction. She could almost hear her father’s words, as well. “An obvious failure to think clearly enough,” Ishak would have murmured. “Start at the beginning, Jehane. Take all the time you need.”

      She didn’t have that much time. She had to get Husari ibn Musa into the Kindath Quarter tonight, and do something even harder before that.

      She said, “Velaz, I know what happened to my father in Cartada. This isn’t a debate. I can’t explain fully. I would do so if I could. You know that. I can only say that past a certain point accepting the things Almalik has done feels like sharing in them. Being responsible for them. If I stay here and simply open the treatment rooms in the morning and then the next day and the next, as if nothing has happened, that’s how I’ll feel.”

      There was a certain quality to Velaz, one of the measures of the man: he knew when what he heard was final.

      They walked the rest of the way in silence.

      AT THE HEAVY, unadorned iron gates that marked the enclosed Kindath Quarter of Fezana, Jehane breathed a sigh of relief. She knew both of the men posted there. One had been a lover, one a friend for much of her life.

      She was as direct as she could afford to be. There was very little time. “Shimon, Bakir, I need your help,” she said to them, even before they had finished unlocking the gates.

      “You have it,” Shimon grunted, “but hurry up and get inside. Do you know what is happening out there?”

      “I know what has happened, yes, which is why I need you.”

      Bakir groaned as he swung the gate open. “Jehane, what have you done now?”

      He was a big, broad-shouldered man, undeniably handsome. They had begun to bore each other within weeks of their liaison’s beginning. Fortunately they had parted soon enough for affection to linger. He was married now, with two children. Jehane had delivered both of them.

      “Nothing I could avoid, given my doctor’s Oath of Galinus.”

      “Burn Galinus!” Shimon said bluntly. “They are killing people out there.”

      “That’s why you have to help me,” Jehane said quickly. “I have a patient in the city to whom I must attend tonight. I don’t think I’m safe outside the Quarter—”

      “You most certainly aren’t!” Bakir interrupted.

      “Fine. I want you to let me bring him in here in a little while. I’ll put him to bed in our house and treat him there.”

      They looked at each other.

      Bakir shrugged. “That’s all?”

      Shimon still looked suspicious. “He’s an Asharite?”

      “No, he’s a horse. Of course he’s an Asharite, you idiot. Why else would I be asking permission of the stupidest men in the Quarter?” The insult, she hoped, would distract them enough to end the questioning. Velaz was blessedly silent behind her.

      “When will you bring him?”

      “I’ll go fetch him immediately. I have to ask my mother’s permission first. Which is why I came ahead.”

      Bakir’s dark eyes narrowed further. “You are being awfully proper about this, aren’t you. That isn’t like you, Jehane.”

      “Don’t be more of a fool than you have to be, Bakir. You think I’m going to play games after what’s happened this afternoon?”

      Again they looked at each other.

      “I suppose not,” Shimon said grudgingly. “Very well, your patient can come in. But you aren’t leaving the Quarter again. Velaz can bring him, although I certainly won’t be the one to order him to do it.”

      “No, that’s fine,” said Velaz quickly. “I’ll go.”

      Jehane had thought that might happen. It was all right. She turned to Velaz. “Go now, then,” she murmured. “If my mother makes a fuss—I’m certain she won’t—we’ll put him in one of the travellers’ inns. Go quickly.”

      She turned back to the two guards and offered her best smile. “Thank you, both of you. I won’t forget this.”

      “I’d rather you did,” said Shimon virtuously. “You know how irregular this is.”

      He was being pompous. It was irregular, but not greatly so. Asharites often came quietly into the Quarter, on business or in pursuit of pleasure. The only trick—and not a hard one—was to make sure the wadjis didn’t know about it outside, or the Kindath high priests inside the gates. Jehane didn’t think it was an appropriate time to get into a dispute with Shimon, however.

      Among other things, the longer they talked the more it was possible that he might inquire as to the identity of her patient. And if he asked and she had to tell, he might know that Husari ibn Musa was one of those who was to have been in the castle that day. If Shimon and Bakir discovered this

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