Court of Fives (Page 56)

Only when the wagon passes out of my sight do I exhale.

The oracle’s vehicle is followed by twenty tomb attendants walking in ranks of five. These women from Lord Ottonor’s clan have been granted the honor of sitting vigil overnight as the borrowed spark drains from the body of the deceased. Mourning shrouds cover their bodies from neck to ankle and they have all done up their hair in a tower of braids wrapped around a conical funeral hat. I see Amaya’s friend Denya among them, looking pale and sad.

Behind them walk the five servants who will be walled into the tomb at dawn to serve the living oracle. They are faceless and nameless. Shrouds cover their heads and drag on the ground so even their feet cannot be glimpsed.

The shrouded attendant who walks at the center staggers like a wounded creature with a swollen belly. I blink.

Suddenly I am absolutely sure it is my mother.

My heart pounds so hard I think it is going to leap out of my throat. A headache spikes between my eyes, my vision growing blurred. Another of the attendants is tall like Bettany, and one has a slight lurch to her walk as Maraya would. One is short and delicate like Amaya, and the fourth could be me if I wasn’t standing here, torn away from them.

“Mother,” I gasp.

Gira grasps my wrist. “Shhh.”

The bricklayers’ wagon trundles past, followed by a file of royal cavalry and a squadron of six spider scouts. The clanking of their metal feet on stone shakes me back to earth.

It cannot be them. Tomb attendants are raised in the temple just as oracles are. My thoughts are just a wandering madness because I don’t know where my mother and sisters are.

The princely and lordly retinues follow the funeral procession through the city and past the harbors to the temple and Eternity Gate. I walk as if dazed by shadow-smoke, my hands clammy and my face hot.

Just past the temple wall rise the mudbrick tombs where ordinary Patrons inter their dead, one hundred to a small chamber, packed in like bricks. Richer Patrons can afford family tombs where, for generation after generation, their dead are wrapped in shrouds and stacked onto granite shelves. The tombs of the lords and the palaces stand on the hill, with the royal tombs at the crown. Only highborn Patrons are served by oracles, as it is said, “Let the king and his sons heed the word of the gods even in the shadow of the afterlife.”

All the households wait in the heat as the dead man is led into his tomb. The sun hurts my eyes but every time I close them I see a nightmare vision of my mother wrapped in a shroud.

The palace households ahead of us start filing in to pay their last respects. We creep up the hill. At length a porch and low door appear before us. Bricklayers wait under an awning, bricks and mortar and tools ready for tomorrow’s dawn.

My hands clench as I climb the five steps onto the porch. A simplified version of a three-horned bull is carved into the lintel, a few lines incised to identify this as the tomb of Clan Tonor. The opening into the tomb is so narrow we have to turn sideways to go in. I shuffle behind Gira through an outer chamber with an offering trough to the right and a latrine trough to the left. People have already urinated into it, and the smell makes me wince. The tomb also stinks of the sweat of so many hot, anxious people trudging through. How horrible to be trapped inside here for the rest of your life.

We pass under an arch into the central chamber with its stone bier. Offering cups and bowls filled with flowers, beads, coins, and magical amulets surround it.

Dead but breathing, Lord Ottonor lies on top of the coffin. The spark that gives him breath will fade over the course of the day and night. Just before dawn the priests will place him inside his coffin and seal the lid. His corpse and coffin will rest on the bier until his oracle dies.

How do the priests fix that spark into him? Did it come from an animal or a person? All I know is that it must come from a similar place as the magic the king’s magicians use to animate the spider scouts, whose metal bodies are given life by sparks taken, so Father once told us, from desert spiders.

The twenty vigil-sitters face the walls, their backs to the mourners who file past. The five shrouded attendants kneel in the archway that opens into the third chamber, where the oracle resides. From behind they look like sacks.

The quiet in the tomb presses like weight. The world outside, the sough of the ocean, the cry of gulls, the speech of people: these have vanished. All I hear is the scuff of feet and the occasional sucked-in breath as people enter the tomb behind us and get a lungful of the fetid air.

We pace up the length of the middle chamber. The moment I reach the head of the bier, the line halts. I look down on Lord Ottonor’s waxy forehead. His eyes are horribly open, staring sightlessly at the ceiling, which is painted black with white specks for stars. His chest rises and falls. I am caught between the bier and the veiled attendants who block the doorway into the third room.