Page 1 of The Offering of Four

THE OFFERING OF FOUR

The temple bells rang the call to prayer, the high and soft morning song of first light. In the darkness of his chamber, Amenzu scrubbed his hands and face. Today was his turn to lead the star-chant, and he murmured the words to himself as he dressed. He would forget nothing and wouldn’t stumble or summarize, either, and Tiziri would choose him again for his golden-tongued performance.

He was brought up short outside his chamber, his hand still on the door. Two men waited for him in the dim pre-dawn light. The startled pounding of his heart faded as his eyes made sense of these unexpected figures. Their robes looked gray in the fading night, but he could make out the circles of hammered metal sewn onto their shoulders that marked them as priests of the first house.

There were many doors along this side of the cloister. Most likely they had come to the wrong one.

“Light fare you well, my brothers,” Amenzu said, and folded his hands together to await their explanation.

One of them stepped forward. “Amenzu of Imlil, you’re called to serve the crown prince.”

“I see,” Amenzu said, although he didn’t at all. He was a junior priest of the third house, a scholar and a scribe, and although he was very happy with his place in life, he had no special skills and had done nothing to draw any notice to himself—certainly nothing that would attract the attention of the royal house. Yet here they were, somber men twice his age, accomplished dreamers who had descended from the citadel to wait outside his door before dawn.

“You’ll come with us,” the same man said. “No need to pack your belongings. Anything you need will be provided in the citadel.”

“The star-chant,” Amenzu began. “I’m to recite it this morning, so?—”

“We already spoke with your priestess. There’s no need to linger. We’ll go now.”

The other man shifted his weight. He had, Amenzu could see, a sword at his waist, with a brass hilt that gleamed in the faint gray light.

The implied threat struck him as perversely comical. Where did they think he would flee? In what manner did they think he would resist them? He would beat them to death with his writing calluses, hard as steel. If Tiziri had told these men where to find him, then he would honor her and his king and do as he was told.

He closed the door behind him. “I’ll follow your lead.”

The citadel’sred earth walls crouched at the center of the city. The roads were a hopeless jumble of dead ends, blind turns, and gates that led nowhere; even after three years in Tinmel, Amenzu got lost more often than not when he left the temple grounds. But his guides—or guards—made one unerring turnafter another and led him through the dawn-quiet streets to the citadel’s only gate.

The priest with the sword drew his weapon from his sash and used the hilt to beat a strong rhythm on the carved wooden door. With a great creaking sound, the door split down the middle and peeled open, and Amenzu followed his escorts through the gate.

He had never been inside the citadel before. A broad courtyard paved in stone lay before the inner palace, and through an open archway Amenzu could see fountains and lemon trees in a sheltered garden.

The priests spoke with the guard who had opened the gate. Amenzu caught the woman’s gaze slide over him skeptically, and he couldn’t blame her; he was skeptical, too. Someone like him didn’t have any business standing inside these walls.

“Come now,” said the priest without the sword, gesturing toward the archway. Through it lay the garden Amenzu had glimpsed, which he had no time to admire before the priests turned left to enter the palace complex, a series of interconnected rooms and courtyards open to the sky. The walls were plastered and decorated with mosaics finer even than those in the temple. The priests deposited him at last in an empty room with screened windows overlooking the main courtyard and the city beyond, and left him there without explanation.

He sat on a cushion beside the window, watching Tinmel wake up as the sun rose. Some dream had summoned him here, he was sure: a dream from beyond death, sent by the dead. But whose dream, and for what purpose, he couldn’t guess.

After what seemed to him an inordinately long wait, an elderly priestess came shuffling into the room. Despite her hunched posture and her lank white hair, her eyes were sharp in her dark face, and her voice was clear and firm as she said, “Amenzu of Imlil, I’m the one who summoned you here.”

When she didn’t sit, Amenzu rose and folded his hands. “I await your direction.”

“Obedient boy. So.” She gazed through the window, where guards and horses were moving around in the courtyard. “It’s time for Prince Mendas to marry. Do you know how an omega makes his selection?”

“A highborn omega,” Amenzu said, stalling for time, and then the answer came to him from his long-ago schoolboy lessons. “Yes: the offering of four. Nobleman, tradesman, farmer, priest.”

As he saidpriest, he understood, with an awful sensation as if his stomach were dropping like a stone into a dry well, why he had been brought here.

“Yes, you see now, don’t you,” the priestess said, watching his face. “I lay in the tomb of Great Aghilas and asked for a dream, and he told me to seek a junior scribe of the third house in the Temple of the Morning Star.”

“That’s me,” Amenzu said, the words of a fool. “But—my vows, my vocation?—”

“My dear, it’s only a formality.” The priestess rolled her eyes. “He’ll choose the nobleman, as they always do, and you’ll be back to the temple before the prince is even out of heat. You’ll have a few days away from your duties with the palace servants to wait on your every whim. That’s not such a hardship, in my estimation.”

“I suppose not.” Amenzu looked down at his clasped hands. He switched the order of his thumbs, moving the right one on top of the left. He didn’t particularly want to be coddled by servants. He liked the temple, and his friends there, and his absorbing, useful work. He didn’t want to marry a prince or to stay in the palace for even one night.

But a dream from the dead couldn’t be ignored. Great Aghilas had been sealed in his tomb for four hundred years, and that waspowerful magic. If he had chosen Amenzu, then Amenzu would stay as long as the royal house desired him to. And marry a prince, too, if he was called to that.

His stomach hit the bottom of the well and lay there, heavy and inert as clay.