“Explain this well, sorcerer,” Artakhshathra said. “If it was worth sending a warrior away to find before a battle…”

“An ambush, in fairness,” Eigou said mildly. The old man perched on his mule with an air of contentment, while Ilati rode behind. “The well was a place of knowledge. Once, it was filled with cool, clear waters that provided insight and foresight alike, depending upon what one drew their focus to.”

“Yet it was dry.”

A hint of grimace spread across Eigou’s features, lips twisting as if he had bitten into a wild almond, all bitterness and poison. “Someone who knew of it, who knew of its properties, ensured they would be the last to draw water from it.”

The great chieftain leaned forward to pat Babak’s neck. Everyone was tired, and they had many leagues yet to go. “It surprises me. If this was a thing of such power, surely it would be harder to destroy. Or guarded.”

Eigou sighed. “Such things, the gods intend for all. A rare generosity on their part, given their predilection for demanding offerings. Such things are fragile and gods easily angered, however. No doubt the One with a Thousand Faces withdrew their blessing.”

Shir Del rode up alongside, a frown etched into her features. “I do not know this god.”

“Fate.” Eigou cleared his throat slightly. “In the tradition of the land between the rivers, that force is called so because one may meet that god on the road wearing any number of such faces. You never know if the stranger you meet may be that one. That is why it pays to be polite, I find.”

“You did not say who ruined the well, old man,” Menes pointed out. He rode on the opposite side, Roshanak’s protective shadow.

Silence stretched on for what felt like leagues before Eigou finally spoke. “There were only two who knew of the well likely to have done such an evil.” His face hardened and lost its bitter expression, taking on again the blankness of desert sands. “Either Amar-Sin or perhaps even the great Ilishu himself.”

Roshanak wiggled on her saddle to get more comfortable, hand still near her little bow even if she had no intention of using it. Everyone still had their weapons ready, whether as a strung bow or Menes’s hand on his sword. “Why would they do such a thing?”

“Selfishness.” Eigou reached over, patting Roshanak on the back. “Something you will unfortunately understand better when you are older.”

“Wouldn’t they want Ilati to have it? It would help her. She is avenging them,” the girl said, brow furrowed in confusion.

“They would have wished it for the sons of Amar-Sin more. I wonder if the princes ever visited it, or if their fates claimed them before.” Eigou’s musing still had that bitter edge to it. He tried to twist in the saddle. “Ilati, did they ever speak of it?”

Ilati tried to clear her thoughts through the pain. Her leg seemed to throb worse and worse with every passing hour. “A mystical well? No, but ‌I was seldom with them and even less with them and the great king both.”

Roshanak eyed her owlishly and Shir Del furrowed her brow as well. “I do not know how the great tents are so large that anyone could not know what everyone was scheming,” the girl said.

The priestess smiled faintly. “They have many rooms.”

“How many?”

Menes chuckled at that. “In a palace? Some have a thousand rooms, Roshanak.”

“How many is that?”

Ilati smiled despite herself. “How many fletchings can you make from an entire flock of geese flying south for summer?”

Roshanak’s eyes went wide. “Was your house that big?”

Eigou snorted, his bitterness disrupted by the earnest shock of their youngest friend. “I take it you have not seen many houses, Roshanak.”

“I have seen many hands of them since we came to the land between rivers,” Roshanak said defensively. She narrowed her eyes slightly at Ilati and Menes. “Are you teasing?”

“No,” Menes promised with a smile. “In Magan, the Sun Palace in Araka is a city within a city. New servants could get lost within its walls until they were practically faint with hunger. I imagine that the seat of Kullan power was no different, given it was once home to the King of Kings himself.”

Ilati smiled slightly, an edge of humor to it. “My mother used to note that the palace in Shadi was larger and more extensive than the temple grounds. She said it spoke volumes about the builder of both buildings. She would always say that at least, in his kindness, Ilishu gave Zu the better view. Admittedly, it was mostly a better view of his palace.”

Shir Del laughed. “Prideful. No wonder his empire collapsed.”

“The sin of Kullah has always been its pride, even before it was an empire. Every squabbling village was home to some halfwit braggart calling himself a king at least, in the old days.” Eigou took a swig from his skin of beer. With the horses at a walk, it was much easier for them to talk. “To think they went from quarreling infants to masters of the four corners of the world in a single lifespan.”

“And lost it even more quickly,” Ilati murmured. It was hard to feel anything for the glory of the empire that had crumbled with Ilishu’s death, not when it had so little attracted her while it was around. In her life before, she had trained scribes who came from as far away as Hatti, across an entire sea, to learn the secret of writing from those who birthed it. She had seen the lords and masters of the other Kullan cities put their faces to the floor before her father and grandfather.

She knew in the abstract that even in its diminished state, her parents had ruled a kingdom beyond any compare to others in its wealth and power, so great that the city’s people decorated their great fortifying walls with silver and lapis lazuli, that the gardens held trees born of seeds from across the far western desert of Magan and the coast of Hatti, that her parents wore silks from beyond the Desert of Kings borne by traders up the Ab-Larssan coast meant just for the riches of Shadi.

All this and so much more greatness she had seen, touched, smelled, tasted, and heard in the place of her birth, the City Without Equal, the navel of the world.

Where was it now? Dead, with all those joys and loves and pains she had once known.

The finality and hollow ache to that thought brought Ilati to the verge of tears in a way that no other pain could, yet they refused to fall. I shed my last tears into the River Esharra. That was what she had told Eigou and the desert alike. Even her senseless flesh, normally so weak, seemed as resolved as stone in honesty to that truth.

“I have never seen a temple,” Roshanak admitted, looking over at Ilati with those wide blue eyes. “Skyfather and Earthmother don’t ask the People for big houses. Just offerings.”

“A ziggurat is just a stone offering, Roshanak. It is a magnificent house for a god, where they live in a city that they have chosen.”

“What was Zu’s house like?”

This story is posted elsewhere by the author. Help them out by reading the authentic version.

“Roshanak!” Shir Del snapped. She seemed well aware that they were into sensitive territory, a rare consideration for a woman used to thinking like a fist. Clearly, the priestess was not hiding her pain as well as she thought.

“No, it’s alright,” Ilati said, offering them a wan smile. The ache in her chest distracted her from the throbbing in her leg. “If she has never seen a temple, maybe I can tell her. That way when she sees one, she will know what it is. Besides, it will be better to think of it in the good days.”

The Sut Resi woman nodded slowly. “If you are certain.”

Ilati shifted slightly to relieve some of the pain in her leg. “Do you remember the three stone steps at the door to the place of beer in Aham-Nishi?”

Roshanak nodded meekly, clearly still cautious after her mother’s correction.

“Imagine a mountain of bricks with three great roads made of stairs like that, that comes to a top that is square instead of pointed. It is so great that looking up at it from the River Gate, it blocks the sun until almost midday.” The priestess smiled as Roshanak immediately closed her eyes, expression tight with concentration. “It takes an hour to walk from the Esharra to the doors to the holy house on a quiet day, longer if the markets are at their normal frenzied energy. Closer to the bottom of the ziggurat is the main temple, surrounding an open square where offerings are burned constantly every day for the goddess, in front of her likeness in stone, draped with the finest purple cloth.” Ilati had to use her own word for the color, since Sut Resi didn’t seem to have a word for it.

“What color is purple?”

“Do you remember the shells of the little snails they crushed on the shores of the sea very north and east of here, Roshanak? The…not-red?” Shir Del interjected when Ilati froze on how to answer that question.

“Yes!” Roshanak said immediately. “It was very sad. They were pretty shells.”

“That is…purple,” Shir Del said, parroting the word with terrible pronunciation. Ilati couldn’t blame her. It was a word the warrior had no practice with no reason to practice with. The Sut Resi warrior seemed as fascinated as her daughter, but was hiding it much better.

“The lower part has living places for priestesses, comfortable chambers for worship, ritual baths in pools with mosaics of beautiful flowers at the bottom and petals floating on the mirror-like surfaces of fresh water. It is busy in the front where people come to be healed or to seek the arms of Zu’s chosen or to ask the goddess for any number of things: rich harvests, many children, good luck, protection. It is quieter the closer one gets to the inner stairs. There you see a great door of red cedarwood inlaid with brilliant gold in writing. The doors lead to more stairs stretching the rest of the way up, guarded by the temple guards who wear bronze from the bottom of their feet to the crown of their head, like living statues.”

“Writing. Those are the word pictures?”

Ilati smiled. “Yes.”

“What words do they show?”

“They are invocations, calling to the goddess Zu, welcoming her into her home,” Ilati said lightly. “The highest part of the temple is hers alone, where only her high priestess can go in with offerings and to clean.”

“What is it like up there?”

It would shatter a vow of secrecy to speak of what was at the highest peak of the ziggurat, a shrine where only the initiated and chosen of Zu could go. Lower priestesses knew in theory, but even then it was mostly gossip. Ilati couldn’t count the number of times she’d heard wilder rumors from girls in training than from the young men they were making eyes at. However, given everything that had happened, Ilati was very ready to violate that secrecy. “It is a shrine more than a temple, smaller, but even grander. The floors are lapis lazuli ornamented with sapphires. The walls are paneled in cedar inlaid with gold as thick as a man’s thumb. There is a statue of Zu where the goddess dwells, high above everything else, where earth and sky can join.”

Artakhshathra’s voice cut through the story like a sword. “You were her high priestess?”

Ilati almost jumped out of her seat on Ankhu’s back, just as Roshanak almost leaped out of her own saddle. She hadn’t realized that the chieftain was still listening. He had to have drifted closer back when she began her description of the temple. For a moment, the pounding of her heart distracted her from her throbbing leg. There was no sense in lying now that it was guessed. The chieftain had not lived to his present age by being easy to fool. “I was.”

“Is that bad?” Roshanak whispered, glancing at the adults around her.

“No,” Shir Del said as soothingly as she could while glaring at Artakhshathra for spooking her daughter.

“You left your goddess?” The question lingered in the air, but this felt less like a bared blade and more like Artakhshathra trying to make sense of her. He eyed her like an asp with its hood up. “Are there not vows?”

The harshness in Ilati’s voice was even more forceful than that he had spoken with. “There are: those that Zu broke when she fled her own people at the points of Nadaren spears. If she wanted her priestesses, she would not have let them burn like offerings or bleed at the butchery of their tormentors.” The venom that welled up almost surprised even Ilati: everyone around her flinched. She supposed the sting was twice as bad for being unexpected, like a bite from a beloved hound.

Artakhshathra cocked his head slightly. “You survived this.”

“As long as Nysra is alive, I will live and have my revenge. After that, I do not care.” Ilati hated Nysra for the destruction of her city and the deaths of her family, but she despised Zu. Knowing that she had been given over to a goddess whose shrine she had cleaned and tended so diligently, whose prayers she had sung so perfectly, who she had given everything to only to receive nothing in that hour of most desperate need…it inspired something that cut deeper than any knife could go.

“And what of your goddess?”

Ilati looked unflinchingly into his eyes, no longer able to perceive any pain past her anger. “My goddess is the Mother of Demons, Lady of Tempests, Howler in the Desert. I have no other and will have no other.”

Artakhshathra considered that for a long moment before speaking, clearly weighing his words. “I see how you survived,” he said finally. “And the why. This is good.” He whistled to Babak and the stallion immediately paced away more quickly, straight towards Tahmasp.

Eigou let out his held breath in a hiss. “That was a risk, Ilati, to say so much.” It was impossible to tell from his tone if it was approving, not that Ilati cared at the moment. She was in incredible pain, a chill swept through her whole body now, and incandescent rage burned at her core like a smelter’s furnace.

“What would you have had me do, o wise one?” she demanded, words barbed. “Search out an absent well?”

“I think you spoke to Artakhshathra what was wisest in that moment,” Eigou said mildly. Ilati wondered if he was being so reasonable only because he could tell how angry she was. “The Sut Resi value truth highly.”

Ilati pulled in a sharp breath and then let it out slowly, reminding herself that she had just dug thorns into a man who had helped pull her out of the same sacred river she had nearly died in. “I am sorry, Eigou. My anger is not with you. It is not right that I put it on you.”

He patted her good leg. “I am old enough to know what is my fault and what is not, Ilati. The well I take full credit for. The destruction of Shadi, not so much.”

“Nysra can have that.” Ilati shook her head, trying to pull together her thoughts. It was growing harder and harder. Every time the wind picked up, the chills seemed to worsen. “I am tired of talking.”

Menes’s brow furrowed. “We should take a look at your wounds again, Ilati. You seem pale.”

Ilati almost said something heated, a barb at the person who deserved it not even in the slightest, and bit her tongue for a moment. “It is fine, Menes. It just hurts.”

“You are shivering.”

“That wind is cold,” Ilati muttered. Coming across the surface of a small lake, the breeze was noticeably chilling the air. She could hear the relief in their tired mule’s grateful puffs.

“Leave her be while you still have all your fingers, Menes. Too close and she may bite them off,” Shir Del said. She nudged Roshanak a little. “See if you can bring down dinner, Roshanak. There are plenty of fowl alongside the lake. I will follow close.”

It was only after Shir Del and Roshanak had left that Eigou said quietly, “This may cause more trouble, Ilati, if Artakhshathra and Tahmasp put the pieces together in a way where the whole tribe hears of who you are.”

“Would they know?” Ilati asked. “The customs of my people are strange to them.”

“We should assume they will know that you are at least highborn and that will spread,” Eigou said. He sighed. “Artakhshathra and Tahmasp will need to know the full truth before we reach Sa Dul. I had hoped to delay things.”

Ilati wished she had the mental fortitude to fully comprehend what the fallout of her little slip was going to be. “Why?”

“Rumor to the wrong ears could ruin us,” Eigou said quietly. “Another ambush like the last…”

She didn’t have it in her to answer, not as the anger ebbed and the pain took over again. Her molars felt like they would crack, but gradually she could feel the heat in her leg spreading to chase out the chills, even though it made no impact on her shivering. Through everything, she turned one last thought to Zu. I am not finished with this thing you have done to me, she promised.

Ilati spit in the dirt and turned an evil eye towards the northern sky.