Arad dropped into Posture of the Lion, then turned on the ball of his foot and extended the sika into Willow’s Whip. The blade was beautifully balanced, but his movements were clumsy. He clucked at himself in chastisement, and wondered why he hadn’t taken the sword with him for practice.
Because your father is a beast, he reminded himself. He murdered your sister. His teeth gritted involuntarily at the thought, and he threw the sika down on the stone floor, generating a blaze of sparks. His father had commissioned that sword for him—it could lie on the floor and rust; he wouldn’t look at it again.
He stepped out into the corridor and was reminded of what was different about his room this time; the two soldiers outside his door. They glanced at him, and one turned to address him.
“Would you like to go somewhere, exec?” the man asked.
Arad stared at him, slowly shaking his head. It’s not his fault; he’s just following his orders. “No,” he replied with a soft smile. “I was just . . . remembering.” Giving the man a nod he turned back into his room.
There would be no wandering about the barracks without an escort, and he wouldn’t be leaving any time soon. Arad may not have been charged with a crime, but he was certainly a prisoner. Sitting on his cot, he wondered for how long.
・
“Follow me, exec,” the soldier said. He was young; Arad didn’t recognize him. But no doubt a lot of men had come through the garrison since his departure. He wondered if they had heard of him—probably not, since his father had no reason to mention.
Arad had not been warned of the escort’s arrival, but he had been expecting to be summoned every morning of the two tendays he had been imprisoned in his room. His father was an early riser, so every dawn he had awoken and dressed himself—at first he had considered donning his uniform, which was taken away and returned perfectly pressed every evening, but he concluded that it might please his father, and so had chosen his traveling clothes instead.
The escort had, as expected, arrived at dawn. He waited patiently outside the door, but there was no doubt that it was an order, not a request.
Arad had a moment of irritation as he stepped into the hall, seeing only the one soldier; the two guards were gone. He let it pass, though; his father was not so petty as to intend such a slight. From the center of the barracks, he wouldn’t get far if he decided to go left anyway.
You’re not military anymore, he reminded himself. If he escaped, he was doing just that—escaping. Going left, or abandoning a post, only applied to men on duty. If I did run, he probably would treat me like a deserter. For some reason the thought made him angry. He forced it down, and emptied himself of emotion. He would never leave this place—or see Sayri again—if he allowed his feelings to dominate him. He only hoped she could find her way to Win Wal and Ooji.
The training ground was exactly as Arad remembered it, with the weapons racks and targets, soldiers practicing formations, the smiths heating up the forges . . . he guessed that if he went to the weapons rack and picked up a practice sword, he would recognize its wear marks. He had probably used every piece of gear in the ground a hundred times, excepting a few replacement items. For a moment, watching the soldiers lined up, he felt a flash of nostalgia; his time with the army had been a bright period of his life, despite serving under his father, and he had many friends among these men. Without thinking he ran his eyes across the soldiers, looking for a friendly face, then shook his head and turned away. Any men he knew would be long past this drill. He would have been more likely to know his escort, or the drill sergeant.
The soldier leading him glanced over occasionally to make sure Arad was with him, as if expecting him to wander off. Arad walked perfectly on the man’s right flank, turning the corners and climbing the steps with him in unison. If the soldier noticed, he didn’t show it.
A short time later they entered the garrison headquarters, and the soldier stopped at the two metal doors that closed off the Commander-General’s war room. He drew his baton and rapped twice on the doors. A single rap sounded on the opposite side, and as the latch came open and the doors slowly swung out, the soldier stepped aside and took up a guard position alongside the doors.
An officer was opening the doors; Arad didn’t recognize him, but he was greying over the ears, and a Precept. Arad imagined he was a personal aide of some sort, but made a point of not saluting. The Precept narrowed his eyes slightly, whether at Arad’s lack of a salute or lack of a uniform he could not know, then stepped to the side and motioned Arad into the room.
The spartan office was all-too-familiar to Arad, who felt rage threatening to well up inside him once more; his father was standing as he always did, in front of the table he used to for strategic planning and study. This day it was covered in maps; Arad imagined why.
There had been blood on the stone floor in the guest apartments when they removed him from the Overlord’s citadel. No bodies, but no Lordsguard either; he knew what that meant. His father had killed them and seized Lord Perrile, for only one purpose that Arad could imagine—to start a war.
The heavy doors closed behind him as his father turned from the maps. Arad advanced precisely halfway into the room, as would be proper before a superior, but he didn’t stop at attention, instead simply standing with his hands at his sides. Not at attention, not at ease, he told himself with an ounce of relish.
Not surprisingly, his father ignored Arad’s informal posture. He examined Arad with no expression for a few dozen heartbeats, as thought he were reading a book. Arad knew what he was doing; intimidating. Knowing helped, but not much; he couldn’t help feeling uncomfortable. He focused on keeping his mind empty of the rage that he knew sought to escape.
“Explain to me how you are not a traitor,” his father finally said.
“Explain—” Arad began, then caught himself. Explain to me how you are not a murderer. No benefit from voicing that, and he knew where it led.
He started over. “Lord Perrile sought peace. He asked me to advise him to better understand your point of view. I thought myself capable of the task, and presumed that helping to maintain the peace between the Lords’ Lands and Somria would beneficial to both.” Unfortunately, I underestimated your ambition and sadistic nature, he added to himself, if only to give voice to the thought.
“Did I raise so foolish a son?” his father asked. Arad did not respond.
The Commander-General considered his son; then, without taking his eyes off him, commanded, “Precept, bring me the south sea scouting reports.”
The Precept nodded and, without a word, walked over to the table and dug through the maps. After a moment, he extracted a cluster of pages and brought them to Arad’s father, who took them without looking.
He studied them for a moment, flipping past several pages, then nodded his head as he found what he wanted and looked back at up Arad. “In the last five summers naval activity in the southern islands has doubled,” he said finally.
“I wasn’t aware of that,” Arad replied. His father’s eyes narrowed at the lack of the honorific exec, but he didn’t comment.
“No doubt. None of that activity has been Somrian,” his father continued. “Care to guess from where those ships hailed?”
Arad frowned for a moment, then reestablished his focus. Is he trying to bait me? “They were founding a settlement,” he said. “It would be expected to have naval support for protection against pirates and savages.”
“A convenient pretext for gathering forces on our side of the sea.”
“If their intent was to attack,” Arad agreed.
“Since I had no way of knowing, eradication of the base was the only option,” his father elucidated.
Arad froze, his mouth open. Eradication . . ? “You destroyed the colony? You killed the colonists?”
“Invaders,” the Commander-General corrected, straightening. “Lord Perrile obviously came here to distract me from his true intent. While you were fraternizing with the lord and his office
r and indulging with that yellow-haired wench, they had dispatched another fleet of ships to the island. Fortunately,” he finished, filling his chest slightly with pride, “I foresaw his move, and sent another fleet to intercept. I win; they lose. The base is destroyed; Somria is safe.”
Arad was aghast . . . he could not have imagined the depth of his father’s madness. Or . . . was it simply ambition? Was it all an illusion, a cover for for his true intent, to kill and conquer?
If so, why lie to him?
“Why are you telling me this?” he asked quietly.
His father turned slowly and paced around the table until he stood opposite his son, then lowered his hands to the table and rested his upper body weight on them. The table, a single piece cut from heavy hardwood, did not protest. His eyes, deeply circled, held Arad firmly. “So that you might comprehend the depth of your betrayal,” he said.
Madness. “Nothing I did had any effect on the outcome,” Arad said slowly. He wasn’t actually defending himself, but rather grieving at his inability to stop such a horrific act from having taking place. “You call me a traitor for your convenience. So be it. What do you want of me?”
At the question, Arad witnessed something that he could never recall having seen before, something so dreadful that he couldn’t look away.
His father smiled.
19 SAYRI
What impressed her first was how quickly the terrain changed. Sayri had taken for granted that the coach would follow a coastal route from Yalcinae to the Northern Province, then inland to the garrison (it was a lot further north than west, so from her perspective this was a reasonable assumption). No sooner had it left the city limits, however—defined only by a sudden lack of crowds, at least in Sayri’s mind—the coach turned west. She was struck by panic then, and asked other passengers sitting near her several times—to make certain she understood their accents—whether the coach was, in fact, traveling to the North Province. She found herself only slightly reassured by their confirmations.
The rolling rocky hills of the coast gradually flattened out into a wide lowland, sparsely decorated with house-sized boulders that seemed deposited upon the dry, flat land by the hand of a titan. In the distance Sayri could see a low line of mountains, or hills perhaps, but otherwise the terrain was nearly flat, punctuated only by the occasional sudden plateau, as if the land thereafter had simply decided to raise itself without conferring with the adjacent ground. They encountered several great washouts of dried mud spread so wide it took half a day to cross; Sayri imagined the spectacular flood that must have occurred to deposit it.
It was on the afternoon of the third day that the coach came upon a house.
At first Sayri had thought she was imagining it. Since the previous morning she had seen nothing but a flat, dried up, mud plain extending into the distance; then, at midday, there was a house abruptly in her view.
It was two stories in height, and several dozen paces in length and width; the home of a family possessing great wealth, to be certain. It was not protected by any sort of fence, but there was not, she imagined, much need for security in the middle of nowhere. Curious, she craned her neck to look out of the coach in all directions; there were no other structures in sight.
She was quite surprised when the coach rolled directly to the house and pulled up in front. The driver dismounted and opened the door of the coach; he remained near the door and offered Sayri a hand when she eventually stepped down, which she accepted politely. Before doing so, she watched the other ladies in the coach being assisted by their male companions, who stepped down first; she was the only woman traveling alone.
“What is this place?” she asked the driver once her feet were on solid ground. She doubted she would understand his reply, but it was worth a try.
“A halfway house,” he replied; to her surprise, his accent was now no more incomprehensible than Arad’s. “A stopover for travelers making from or to the western highlands. The owner offers foods and beds, but we will stop only for midal.”
“Midal?” Sayri asked, frowning.
“Ah . . . luncheon,” he corrected.
Sayri nodded. When she said nothing further and turned to examine the structure, he moved away.
The house was primarily constructed from the yellow mud bricks that were so common in Yalcinae, but of considerably larger size, each being at least two hands across. The walls were featureless, and the only windows were on the upper floor, and quite large. The roof was tiled with triangular pieces of what appeared to be fired clay, and ornamented with a large spine of heavier tiles running its length, arching up on the ends. There was an intricately carved wooden panel covering the front facing upper floor; she couldn’t make out what it portrayed from where she stood.
The other passengers had made their way to the entrance, which was directly beneath the ornamental wood panel, and consisted of a large pair of doors with curved and pointed tops, standing open. From within she could hear many voices and the rattling of eating wares, and she could smell roasting meat, which made her mouth water.
For some reason her thoughts drifted back to roasting a lapizar over a campfire, and her stomach voiced its interest. In those first few days before she had learned the art of catching them, the scent of roasting meat, together with the sizzle of the fats dripping on the fire, would have her blood surging as she anticipated the joy of a filled belly.
She walked across the dried mud that covered the ground around the halfway house—did that mean it had been in the middle of a flood recently?—and entered through the doors.
The inside of the establishment was filled with smoke. It was all one massive room, with carved wood panels separating the area into smaller, semi-private areas. Four huge pillars, painted blood red, stood in the center of the building, supporting a massive roof. There was an upper floor, a balcony that encircled the four pillars, leaving a large space in the middle.
The space between the pillars on the main floor was occupied by a fire pit, large enough to roast a whole cow. There was an unidentifiable animal spit over it; smoke rose smoothly up through the space in the upper floor and out the roof, which Sayri now noticed had a cap raised to allow the smoke out.
The floor was hardened dirt, no doubt pounded flat by many feet as much as by mallets. The second floor, of course, was wood.
There was a fair crowd of patrons in the house, at least half upstairs. She hadn’t seen any other coaches outside, so the rest must have come here by other means. Though easily half the passengers in her coach had been women, the rest of the clientele were men, and a tough lot by the look of them. Many eyes were upon her as she moved through the doorway, and Sayri suddenly realized that she had no one to sit with, no group to join. Standing there, she looked around the room for an innocuous place to occupy, and found it in the form of a small table with two benches to the right of the entrance. She walked to it and sat down pointedly.
Eyes were still upon her; she gathered her cloak about her—she had grabbed it as an afterthought when she left their apartments in Yalcinae, and was glad for it, as the temperature seemed cooler here. Many of the men who were staring at her had on layers of what looked like cold-weather clothing, and she even saw fur-lined boots, which made her frown, since it was barely autumn.
A man stood up from a table across the room and started in her direction; without thinking, Sayri pulled out her knife and stabbed it into the table in front of her, where she began intently digging a gouge in the wood. She wasn’t the first to do so, as the table was covered in such marks. A glance back after a few moments showed the man moving back toward his companions; only then did Sayri realize the ferocity with which she had attacked the wood. Blinking away the flash of anger that had welled up, she put her knife away.
A woman approached her table then with a wood cup and platter, and placed both on the table before her. The cup was filled with what might have been hot tea, with curls of steam rising from it. The woman, who was not much older or taller t
han Sayri but at least double her weight, offered a brief, toothless smile as she placed an enormous two-pronged fork on the platter; it looked a better weapon than eating utensil. Sayri stared at it in disbelief, which prompted the young woman to make a motion towards the roast over the fire. Apparently she was to serve herself. Sayri smiled thanks at her, and the woman moved off. Only then did Sayri realize that the woman had not said a word to her; she wondered if it was a reflection on the number of foreign language speakers that frequented the place, or if the woman was mute.
As she watched, several patrons walked to the fire pit and sliced portions of meat from the animal roasting there. The huge forks seemed well suited to the purpose, at least if one intended to take a large hunk of meat. No knife had been provided; did everyone around here carry their own knife? It seemed so, or at least every patron in the place seemed to have one.
Sayri wasn’t particularly hungry. Sitting in a coach all morning didn’t work up much of an appetite, and though she had experimented with tasting a variety of creatures whilst living in the wild, she remained suspicious of unfamiliar meat. She did sip at the cup provided her, and was pleasantly surprised with a variety of tea she had never encountered; it had a roasted flowery scent, and a slight sweetness. She suspected something had been added to make it sweet, and chose carefully not to speculate what. She took a longer draw and discovered it also had a kick—either it was fermented, producing alcohol, or something had been added to it. Quickly the drink induced a pleasant warmth throughout her body, and she began to relax.
After a time of peaceful distraction, wherein she pondered her approach to the problem of locating Win Wal and Ooji (Arad had only said they could be found at the North Province garrison, which she hoped was easy to find), she was drawn from her introspection by the sound of raised voices. She quickly located them on the second level, across the fire pit from where she sat. From her upward viewing angle, with the presence of several wooden dividers, she only had a partial view of a man from the back; he seemed to be animated in conversation. She couldn’t make out his words, partly due to the background noise but more to his accent. It didn’t appear to be one of the passengers, but after a moment she heard a reply from an unseen man, and recognized her driver’s voice. He, too, was using the colloquial dialect, and she couldn’t understand any of it, but he sounded irate.
Sayri's Whisper: The Great Link Book 1 Page 20