small dark eyes, a stubbled lantern jaw and a squashed nose. His black hair was bound into ropes and tied through with coloured cord, swept back from his low forehead to hang down to his nape. Though he was nearing his fiftieth harvest, his bearish physique made him more than a match for most men half his age. In his voice and his eyes were a weary authority, a soldier who had seen it all many times before and had resigned himself to seeing it again.
It was through Bakkara that Mishani learned how they had known who she was, and why his men’s reaction to their impending fate was so optimistic.
‘It’s not my habit to rescue noble ladies,’ he had said with a rough grin, in response to her question. They had been riding through the early hours of the night, and the atmosphere had a surreal and disjointed quality, as if their group were alone in an empty world.
‘Then what prompted you to break with tradition and kidnap me?’ she asked.
‘Hardly kidnapping, Mistress,’ he said. He used the correct title, though the mode he spoke in was anything but subservient. ‘Unless you want your man back there to ride the rest of the way to your destination in that state.’
Mishani angled her head, and the faint starlight caught the sharp, thin planes of her cheek. ‘We both know that you would not let me ride away now,’ she said. ‘As for Chien, I care little for him. And he is certainly not my man.’
Bakkara chuckled. ‘I’ll be straight with you,’ he said. ‘Anyone else, we’d have let them go on their way. But not you. On the one hand, Ocha forbid harm should come to you; and I wouldn’t like to let you go riding on your own any further south. Things are getting worse down there.’ His face creased in a twinge of regret. ‘On the other, you’re an asset too valuable to pass up, and Xejen would kill me if I did. We may need you at Zila. So I’m afraid that’s where you’re going.’
Mishani had already worked out what her situation was before he mentioned Xejen’s name and confirmed it.
‘You’re Ais Maraxa,’ she said.
He grunted an affirmative. ‘Aren’t you lucky?’ he said sarcastically.
Mishani laughed.
‘You’re something of a legend in the Ais Maraxa, Mistress, as I’m sure you know,’ Bakkara continued with a wry tone. ‘You were one of those who saved our little messiah from the jaws of death.’
‘Forgive me, but you do not sound like the foaming zealot I would have expected of a man in your position,’ Mishani said, provoking a bellow of mirth from the soldier.
‘Wait till you meet Xejen,’ he returned. ‘He should match up to your standards much better than I.’ His laughter diminished a little, and he gave Mishani a strange look. ‘I believe in Lucia,’ he said eventually. ‘Just because I don’t spout the dogma doesn’t make my strength of conviction any the less.’
‘But you understand it is rather harder for me to see the point of view your organisation espouses,’ Mishani explained. ‘For you, she may represent an ideal, and objects of worship I find are more effective when worshipped from a distance; but for me, she is like a younger sister.’
‘Worship is a strong word,’ said Bakkara uncomfortably. ‘She is not a goddess.’
‘That much I am certain of,’ said Mishani. She found Bakkara curious. He did not seem entirely at ease with his professed allegiance, and that puzzled her.
‘But she’s something more than human,’ the soldier continued. ‘That much I am certain of.’
Mishani brought herself back to the present, and back to the frowning walls of Zila that rose above them as they climbed the steps, helping the wounded merchant. She was recalling all that she knew of the Ais Maraxa, remembering old conversations with Zaelis and Cailin, mining titbits of information from the past like diamonds from coal. It had been too long since she had paid attention to the Ais Maraxa; she had never given them as much credit as she should have. Now she had been away and out of contact for over two months, and in her absence the Ais Maraxa seemed to have showed themselves at last to the world at large. She would never have thought them capable. It was what everyone close to Lucia had feared.
They had begun as nothing more than a particularly radical and enthusiastic part of the fledgling Libera Dramach. Stories among the peasantry concerning a saviour