Kwasin shuddered. Had Awineth truly seen the Goddess, or had she merely made up the vision to frighten the camp guards? The guards certainly did seem subdued that evening, and he didn’t think it a coincidence when the following morning he overheard the guards whispering among themselves that three of their fellows had deserted. Awineth seemed pleased with the development.

  “Kho has rightly put fear into their hearts,” she said. “She has sent the men running back to their families to spread the word of my vision.”

  That morning Awineth began eating once again the foul, ritually forbidden cuisine offered her, saying that she must remain strong for the moment when her followers would come to free her. But over the weeks that followed—weeks filled with humiliation and suffering as the two endured the cold, whipping rains and were paraded through the streets of various villages—no further attempts were made to emancipate Kho’s high vicar.

  At last the day came when mighty Khowot’s smoldering volcanic summit rose up slowly upon the eastern horizon and the procession marched out of the rolling hills surrounding Khokarsa and past the fields and huts that marked the city’s agricultural suburbs. Kwasin, but even more so Awineth, was shocked at the state of the capital since they had been there last, now almost a year and a half ago. At that time, when Kwasin had been imprisoned in a cell beneath the palace citadel and Awineth locked away by her father, the city lay devastated in the aftermath of Minruth’s revolt. Thirty thousand died in the uprisings that followed, and much of the capital and its suburbs burned to the ground. Then Khowot had erupted again just as Kwasin—along with Hadon, Awineth, and their companions—managed to escape from Minruth’s prisons. Once more the lava had descended on the city and set much of it afire. But now the charred rubble had been razed and the stinking piles of corpses disposed with, and in place of the wreckage, new stately buildings proudly lined the paved streets of Khokarsa. How Minruth had managed the city’s renovation during the costly civil war baffled Kwasin, and he could only surmise the military had enforced a brutal policy of civil service, or perhaps enacted total slavery over a great portion of the population.

  And by Kho, the Great Tower! When last they had seen it, the massive ziggurat stood only two-thirds completed, rising just short of five hundred feet into the heavens. But now, by some miracle of miracles, at least another fifty feet had been added to its height. Perhaps less than a quarter of the tower remained to be constructed.

  Seeing the surprised looks on the captives’ faces, a guard marching beside them said, “The tides have turned—Kho subsides, and Resu provides! King Minruth says the tower will be completed by the Year of Wenqath the Hero!” As the Year of the Horned Fish was now coming to a close, that meant Minruth planned to have his tower finished in only two years! Kwasin gaped at the impressive structure that loomed over the city, its base nearly a half-mile in diameter, its slanting stepped walls surrounded by massive earthen ramparts and enveloped by great billows of orange dust hanging ominously in the air—the latter raised by the travails of the thousands of men and oxen, looking ant-sized in the distance, working to haul cyclopean stone blocks up the ramparts. Up, down, and across the broad face of the tower, teams of workers labored to install elaborate friezes on the stonework. The carved figures rivaled in craftsmanship the work of Awodon, that bygone master of sculpture, and were in the form of many varied animals, men, heroes, gods, goddesses, and demons. The cost of commissioning the impressive sculptures must have been exceedingly vast, though it would have paled in comparison to the expenditure required to make such rapid progress on the entire structure.

  “It wouldn’t have been possible,” the talkative guard continued, “without the emperor’s new architect, Wenekaru. The man carries a genius to rival Awines, they say! I do not understand the high talk of mathematics, which is wearisome to me, but it is said Wenekaru is actually building a completely new type of structure on top of the old one. And he has at last found a light-weight type of brick, long sought by King Minruth, which will ensure that the tower will not collapse from its own heaviness.”

  They continued on, passing into the city through the outer eastern gate and crossing a stone bridge spanning one of the many canals of the great metropolis. Scores of residents and market-goers thronged about the procession to see their king returning from his great victory, and to gawk at the misery of his two famous captives. But Kwasin noted that only a portion of the onlookers cheered the king of kings, and that Minruth was careful to surround his royal wagon with an intimidating number of armed soldiers, who with the points of their spears sought to hold back both the overeager and the potentially dangerous.

  When they passed through another gated wall and were carted past the tower workers’ residences, Kwasin understood that his guess about Minruth’s totalitarian tactics had been correct. Expansive stone-walled pens, marked at intervals by well-manned sentry towers, enclosed a vast district set aside for the workers. While slave labor had always been used for the construction of the ziggurat, it was clear now that Minruth had indentured a tremendous portion of the city’s population to finish his dream once and for all.

  “Get a good look,” the guard who had spoken before said to Kwasin. “Because after the trial, which is likely to be quite a show, the slave pens are sure to be your new home. Oh, no, our beloved king wouldn’t waste an elephant like you by executing you or letting you rot in the pits beneath the citadel—not when he can use you to set the blocks on his road to immortality.”

  Then the soldier looked up at Awineth and grinned. “And as for you, my former queen, I’m told your father has other plans.”

  23

  The procession stopped on the edge of the Inner City and the soldiers, JL thrusting their spears inside the cage, forced Awineth to manacle Kwasin in heavy iron chains. When satisfied their giant prisoner was properly restrained, the soldiers swung open the iron doors of the cage and with additional chains secured Kwasin’s arms, crossing them so tightly behind his back he could not move them at all. Then, to the sound of trumpets blaring, drums beating, and brass gongs clanging, Kwasin and Awineth climbed down from their cart and were led forward through the clamorous throngs of spectators.

  Continuing on, the procession crossed over the arching stone bridge that rose above the moat, then climbed the wide, steep steps of the acropolis before passing through the huge bronze doors into the citadel. As they marched past the many temples and government buildings, Kwasin noted that all of the statues of Kho had been removed where possible and replaced with effigies of Resu, while those figures too large to move had been defaced by Minruth’s vandals. The sight both outraged and disgusted Kwasin, and beside him Awineth’s eyes burned with fury.

  They approached the great domed, nine-sided palace, and Kwasin thought they would be led inside when suddenly the guards yanked hard on the chain around his neck and pulled him out of the procession. Kwasin roared and drove a massive shoulder into the group of soldiers who tried to restrain him, landing a number of them on their rears. Many in the thronging street cheered and hooted their approval, but more soldiers quickly overwhelmed Kwasin and forced him to his knees, nearly jumping over one another to assail the prisoner with the butts of their spears.

  Kwasin caught one last glimpse of Awineth as she was led up the broad and steep steps of the palace. She looked back at him over a shoulder, but she was already too far away for him to discern whether her large, dark eyes were pleading or remained proudly defiant.

  The soldiers drove Kwasin ahead of them with their spears, while at the same time retaining a firm grip on the chain about his neck. They prodded him around the palace to a rear entrance, and after passing up the steps of the building into a spacious hall, his captors unlocked an iron-grilled door and brought their prisoner down a series of winding stone staircases and narrow corridors. Kwasin already knew their destination, for Minruth had imprisoned him beneath the palace once before.

  “What of the trial?” Kwasin asked one of the soldiers. “When will I be summoned to testify?”

  “Trial?” The man laughed. “It’s going on as we speak, but you won’t be testifying. Our orders are to hold you here until you’re sentenced. I don’t think Minruth would have bothered with the trial at all, but he wants to give the appearance of fairness. Now get moving, you great oaf!”

  The soldier jabbed his spear at Kwasin, forcing him inside a dark cell near the end of a long corridor. The iron door slammed shut, echoing against the hallway’s stone walls like a sentence of doom. The turnkey bolted the door’s heavy lock, removed his key, and left Kwasin to brood in the darkness of his cell.

  Kwasin had just stood up to examine his prison when the turnkey returned with the guards and opened the cell door.

  “What now?” Kwasin asked, scowling.

  “Trial’s over!” one of the guards exclaimed. “You’ve been convicted on seventeen counts of high treason and sentenced to death. But King Minruth will allow you to ruminate on your multitude of transgressions while you slave on the Great Tower.”

  “And what of the queen?”

  “You mean the former queen,” the guard said. “The criers have just announced to the city that she has denounced the College of Priestesses as corrupt. Because of her contrition and her father’s great mercy, she will be allowed to retain her office as high priestess of Kho and will immediately begin initiating reforms among the priestesses. But there will no longer be an Empress of Khokarsa. King Minruth says that Resu has decreed it.”

  Disgusted by the sham trial, the lies about Awineth, and the blatant sacrilege, Kwasin said nothing. If Minruth was fool enough to let him live a little longer, then so be it. Meanwhile, he would try to find a means of escape. And after that, revenge.

  But when the guards escorted him to the tower workers’ district, he saw what a truly daunting feat escape would be. Not only were the workers’ pens double-walled and kept under the ever vigilant watch of the sentries in the towers, but he was brought to a special heavily fortified pen which had been designed and created just for him. The pen was in reality more of a pit, fully thirty-feet deep, and a hundred feet in both length and width. The only way in or out of the pit was to be lowered or hoisted up by rope. A special wooden crane, from the sheave of which dangled a wooden platform, had been set up for the purpose of ferrying passengers from the base of the pit to ground level. When the crane elevator was not in use, it could be swung back away from the pit to prevent a person below from somehow lassoing the crane and thereby escaping. To further complicate matters for the would-be escapee, a tall stone wall had been erected from the base of the pit and rose thirty feet above the pit’s rim, and a barrier of thorns wrapped along the top and sides of the encircling wall to discourage potential climbing. Not that there would be any climbing, a soldier told Kwasin, for at all times he was to be fettered in chains of bronze inside a stone prison that had been constructed in the center of the pit. And even should Kwasin escape his shackles, break through the door of the prison, and attempt to scale the walls or burrow beneath them, he would be spotted immediately by the soldiers in the overlooking towers, as the pit was lit by torches throughout the night.

  Five soldiers accompanied Kwasin to the floor of the pit on the swaying platform that hung down from the crane. He would have tried knocking the men from the platform, but a noose had been slipped over his neck. A man stationed on top of the wall released the slack of Kwasin’s noose from a winch as the platform was lowered. The captain in charge warned Kwasin that if he caused any trouble, the man above would draw up the noose. Then Kwasin wouldn’t be creating any more trouble for anyone, the man had said with a smile.

  When they reached the bottom, Kwasin eyed a number of small stone-lined holes spaced at regular intervals along the pit’s perimeter. This would be a drainage system put in place to prevent the massive slave pit from filling up with rainwater, although it would not stop it from suddenly becoming a muddy hellhole once one of the violent seasonal storms struck the region. Because of this latter fact, a raised, stone walkway ran from where the crane dropped off its passengers to the stone prison where Kwasin was to remain chained to a granite wall when he wasn’t working on the tower.

  The soldiers escorted Kwasin down the walkway to the prison, unlocked and swung open the great bronze door, and brought him inside where he was secured with massive bronze chains to a wall. One of the soldiers took off the chains that trussed up Kwasin’s arms behind his back, although he did not remove the manacles. A bowl of cold and watery millet gruel was set on the floor before Kwasin. Then torches in the wall sconces were extinguished and the door to the long, narrow cell was shut and locked behind the departing soldiers.

  Kwasin leaned forward to lap up the contents of the bowl in front of him when a voice arose in the darkness, carrying from what must have been a cell behind his own.

  “Strange is the road of fate laid down by the deities,” the melodious voice rang out, “but stranger is the road from Dythbeth to Khokarsa! Indeed, it is as if Kho has inextricably tied us together, my king!”

  Kwasin groaned upon hearing the singsong voice. Would he never be rid of the loudmouthed bard?

  24

  It turned out that Minruth, not fate or the Goddess, had paired up Bhako with his former king. The romantic bard, however, saw things differently.

  “It is true,” Bhako explained, shouting through a ventilation shaft in the ceiling that connected both of their cells, “that Minruth has placed me in your pit because he wishes me to punctuate my epic verse, the Pwamwotkwasin, with a record of your final and humiliating days as a slave. But it was really Kho, acting through Her high priestess, Who orchestrated the events that led me to be once more at your side. For on the very night shining Dythbeth fell, Queen Awineth ordered me to the walls to entertain with song the war-weary soldiers serving night duty. Had she not done so, I would surely have joined the pile of the dead upon the great plain. Because on the night before that great battle of battles had yet begun, I was plucking my lyre and reciting a minor cycle in your heroic epic when suddenly, drunk on song, I stumbled and hit my head. I must have done this and lost consciousness just as the invaders attacked, for when I awoke I found it was morning and that I had fallen behind the wooden supply crate on which I had been standing as I performed. I say it must have been at the moment the Khokarsans struck, for if I had fallen earlier, why wouldn’t the soldiers to whom I was singing have pulled me up from behind the crate and brought me to a priestess of medicine?”

  “Perhaps they’d had enough of your tuneless singing!” Kwasin growled.

  Bhako ignored the jibe and continued. “Only because I was hidden behind the crate had I escaped the enemy’s notice. When I got up and peered from the wall, I saw my once proud and fair city smoldering in ruins and the Klemqaba busied with their looting and raping. I even saw you, O King, trussed up before Minruth’s tower of dead. Oh, how I agonized that I could do nothing to help you!”

  “I am sure saving my hide was your highest priority,” Kwasin murmured skeptically.

  “It was, O King,” Bhako replied, who must have been as keen of hearing as the fabled long-eared hare in the verse of the priestess-bard Hala. Certainly the bard was as annoying as that mischievous, although widely renowned leporid. “But by the time I had donned the trappings of a fallen Khokarsan soldier,” Bhako continued, “and made it outside the walls, it was too late. Minruth had already begun to transfer you to the cage in which, to my horror, Queen Awineth was also imprisoned. And yet I did not give up. I infiltrated the army and joined Minruth’s great triumphal procession. Yes, my king, although you did not know it, I remained faithfully at your side all the way to the capital! Unfortunately, only a few weeks into our journey, I was found out when I attempted to filch the key to your cage from a guard. Despite my status as a sacred bard, Minruth threw me in irons. At first I thought—and hoped, so I might soothe your suffering and woe with song— that he would put me with you in your cage. But Minruth the Mad said the sharp wit of a bard’s tongue revealed his devious nature and feared I would somehow help you escape.

  “Yes, the Emperor of Khokarsa is quite interested in you, O King! Almost to the point of obsession, for he has heard of your many feats of bravery and knows too well the great losses you have caused him. He even had me recite to him my great epic of your adventures, saying he has in store for it a most fitting conclusion.”

  Kwasin had no comeback to the bard’s last comment. He was sure Minruth had long contemplated how best to dispose of Dythbeth’s great hero.

  Feeling even more sullen after hearing Bahko’s story, Kwasin pushed aside the bowl of gruel left by the guards and, leaning against the cold granite wall, fell into a restless sleep filled with nightmares that upon awakening he could not remember.

  The days, weeks, and months that followed stretched on wearily for Kwasin. The Year of the Horned Fish came to a close, and the Year of the Honey Bee progressed as the once defiant King of Dythbeth slaved away on the Great Tower, waiting anxiously for word from the outside that the forces of the Goddess had at last rallied against Minruth. But no such news ever arrived, and what little information Kwasin did garner from eavesdropping on his guards, or from rumors spread among the tower workers, was not good.

  His guards’ whispers confirmed that Minruth had kept true to his word and given his daughter her life but not her freedom, permitting Awineth to live out her days in a heavily barred apartment within the palace. Probably he feared the public outcry, and quite possibly all-out revolt, that would be sure to follow if he killed Kho’s high vicar. But while Awineth was more or less comfortably imprisoned and otherwise well treated, rumor had it that Minruth took great pleasure in periodically entering her chambers and raping her, despite the fact that she was said to be pregnant with Kwasin’s child. Kwasin could not dismiss the disturbing stories as fiction. He had seen for himself Minruth’s unhealthy infatuation with his daughter.