by Kate Elliott
The wind turned. He licked his lips, feeling the greasy taste of scorched oil on the air. What was he thinking, to put the apprentices and envoys at risk? How could this self-confessed “assassin” possibly get him back to the temple with the city under curfew?
Screams burst as fire blazed up in the upper story of the closed emporium on the opposite side of the square. He stared in awe and horror as the people in the square cried out, as soldiers grabbed buckets stored in the fire station. Stone Quarter could burn down! Everyone was running, most for the fire station, setting up lines at the wells, while others dashed away into the darkness of back streets, escaping while they had the chance. The fire bell atop Law Rock clanged in the distance.
Obviously this was a diversion! Time to go.
He scraped palms as he scrabbled for purchase on the tiles, jamming his right leg as he barely caught the gutter instead of tumbling over the drop. Pain stabbed through his left ankle, blinding him. Then he breathed out of it and found the strength to heave himself onto the lower roof and roll to lie precariously along the edge.
“Holy One?” Her voice drifted up from the alley below him.
His anger blazed. “It could burn down the entire quarter. What of the poor folk who own that shop, whose entire livelihood is going up in flames?”
“Their goods had already been looted.” The assassin’s voice was staggering in its calm intensity. “Anyway, that fire is nothing to what I’ve seen this army do, and what worse things they’ll do if they’re not stopped. Now is the time to go, if you mean to come with me, Holy One.”
She was right.
When he threw his legs over and eased himself down, bruised arms and shoulders screaming at the effort, she caught him. He showed her the way, and she supported him through the empty night streets as the fire drew the attention of the army. Past Lele Square, they reached the temple gate, locked and barred, but the dogs whined to alert the night guard and the small gate was cracked open to allow him in.
She waved him on.
“You’re not coming in?”
“Neh. I must retrieve my comrade. We’ll return tomorrow night or the next. Watch for us, Holy One.”
Then she was gone into the night, and the gate was closed and barred behind him. As he limped into the dark courtyard, all the envoys and every apprentice flooded out of the sleeping house, crowding him, touching him, weeping with relief, until he thought he would faint for needing to sit down. He was bereft of speech. The fire bell had ceased ringing. Smoke scented the air. One of the night guards called down from the sentry post: “Looks like it’s stopped spreading!”
Vassa pushed her way through the acolytes with sharper words than he had ever heard from one who was always gentle. When she shone lamplight in his face, everyone gasped.
“Gather a few things and sit out here in the courtyard until we know the danger is passed,” she said to the envoys and apprentices. “Kellas, haul out the litter in case we must carry the ostiary.”
“I can walk—” Nekkar croaked, and put his weight on his twisted ankle. The light hazed. The world spun. Many arms took hold of him and lifted him.
“You’ll take a wash and some poultices for your injuries, some food and tea, and then you’ll lie down.”
“I must talk to you—”
“Yes,” Vassa agreed, and he realized in a distant way that she was trying not to cry. “Here, you lads, carry him.”
He was too weary and too much in pain to struggle. Tomorrow or the next night, the assassin had said. Tomorrow would be soon enough to see what trouble he had called down on the temple. They had to be ready for anything.
5
DON’T OPEN THE GATE.
That was the last thing Zubaidit had said to Shai before leaving on her spying expedition yesterday. Now it was dawn, Bai hadn’t returned, and someone was rapping hard on the nailed-together planks set against a gap in the abandoned storeroom in which he had slept.
“Open up!”
“The whole compound looks abandoned to me.”
“The dog thinks otherwise.”
A dog snuffled along the exterior of the planks. Shai tucked his sword along his torso and slid a hiltless knife into a sheath cut into the leather of his boots just as the soldiers kicked down the planks. Shards splintered.
He pretended he was just waking up. He’d successfully played stupid before. “Eh, ver. Eh. You frightened me.”
Burly soldiers prodded spears in his direction. “Heya, Sergeant! Got an outlander here. Whew! He stinks.”
“That’s because we’re in an old tanning yard, you imbecile,” came the reply. “Bring him out.”
“Out!” They treated him as they might a dog whose temperament was chancy.
“Eh, ver, Mistress told me to wait here for her. She’ll whip me if I leave.”
“Our orders are to kill anyone who disobeys.”
“Maybe he can’t understand you,” said the second man.
Shai had already cut a hiding place for his sword into the foundation. He rolled over the sword, shoved it into the gap, and covered it as he kept talking. “Please don’t hurt me, ver. My mistress, she said she would whip me. Please don’t.”
He crawled on hands and knees, feeling the points of the spears like stinging scorpions along his back, but once he got outside into the colorless dawn, the soldiers drew a step back and let him stand. He shook out his loose trousers, flicked dust from the sleeveless leather vest that covered his chest, and wiped a smear of dust from his lips. This tannery compound hadn’t been used for some time, and lay far enough away from Toskala that Bai had thought it safe to use as a hiding place. But every structure in this entire area where the camp followers had set up days ago was being searched and their occupants driven outside and rounded up. Women were arguing, children crying, old men fumbling as they tried to keep their bundled possessions slung over thin shoulders.
As they came into the disrupted camp, a sergeant trotted over to look him up and down. “An outlander, all right! Look at those arms!”
“Mistress said to wait for her here, ver.”
“And where is she, your mistress, eh?” demanded the sergeant.
“Out in the camp, ver. She always goes out at night.”
“A whore, eh?” cackled one of the soldiers. “I wonder what she wants a slave for, if she can get men to pay for it?”
The other soldier poked Shai with the haft of his spear. “He’s got no slave mark. What if he’s concealing a weapon beneath that vest or trousers.”
“Fancy a look, do you, Milas?” said the first soldier.
“Shut it,” barked the sergeant. “Milas is right. Get that vest off.”
In the Hundred, folk walked about with a great deal of skin uncovered, while Shai still felt awkward about his bare arms. So his embarrassment made him slow, and the soldiers got more threatening, others circling in, attracted by the commotion. The light rose from gray to a pearly pink. Overhead, clouds chased the wind north.
Shai was strong from years of carpentry, and lean from the recent weeks of privation. He kept his head bent, knowing he was blushing as he stripped off the vest.
“Sheh! Reason enough, neh?” Milas laughed once Shai stood with with vest hanging from his right hand. “Cursed if those camp women aren’t staring and licking their lips. You want us to strip him all the way, Sergeant? A nice show for the lasses and such lads as are fashioned that way, neh?”
The sergeant had already turned away. “This is taking too long. A cloak will sort this out. Bring him.” He raised his voice. “Let’s get this camp cleared.”
Shai pulled on the vest as he shuffled over to join the rest of the detainees. He kept his head deferentially lowered as he scanned the encampment: canvas tents and lean-tos, tiny huts precariously assembled out of scraps of wood. A few abandoned structures like the old tannery in which he had slept gave the temporary camp a look of ruined permanence, and the clotheslines where rags flapped and the stink of the crudely dug refuse p
its reminded him of certain neighborhoods in faraway Kartu Town where the outcast and the poor had barely scraped by living in their own filth. The Qin conquerors had forced gangs of townspeople to raze such compounds and build blocks of more sanitary housing, easy to police and control.
But he had left Kartu Town. He no longer lived under the suzerainty of the Qin. He had come to the Hundred together with a troop of exiled Qin soldiers only to find himself in the middle of a chaotic internal war. He and Zubaidit had been sent north with five others to spy out the enemy, and now, of course, he’d gotten himself captured.
Again.
The soldiers herded the group along a barrier of wagons that marked off the edge of the army’s main camp. An early wind teased trampled ground where draft beasts and horses grazed. In the days since Toskala had fallen, much of the army had taken up stations within the city, leaving the camp followers to starve because the soldiers could get food and miscellaneous goods as well as repair work done elsewhere. Some had drifted away into the countryside. Now, it seemed, the commanders of the army meant to sweep up and dispose of the rest.
“Heya! I walked all the way from Walshow, feeding the army. What am I to do?” called a man hauling a cart laden with the pans and tripods of a movable kitchen. Beside him, a boy bent double under the weight of a bundle of goods, his left eye scarred with the mark of a debt slave.
A young woman, red-eyed from weeping, kept trying to get the attention of a pair of soldiers who resolutely refused to look her way. She held an infant wrapped in a decent piece of cloth that matched the green scarf she had wrapped around her hair. “Where’s Joran? Why hasn’t he come back for me and the baby, like he promised?”
Shai hung back until he was at the tail of the crowd, the dust kicked up by their feet smearing his tongue. After months of regular rain, it had not rained in three days, and the churned-up ground had dried. Off to the left sprawled the city, too big to comprehend in one glance. It was marked most obviously by a huge rock outcropping thrust up where the River Istri and the Lesser Istri had their confluence. There, during the day, the giant eagles ridden by reeves landed and took off. A pillar of smoke drifted above one quarter of the city, losing coherence as the wind tore at it.
“Keep moving!” A soldier prodded Shai while speaking to his own comrade. “Milas says this one’s got muscles like you wouldn’t believe. A real woodchopper!” They both laughed, as if the word meant something different.
“Where’s the outlander?” Shai recognized the sergeant’s voice. “Move him out separate.”
“What are we doing with the rest of them, Sergeant? That poor lass. Joran did promise to take care of her and the baby, but I hear he got assigned guard duty at the lord commander’s headquarters.”
“Not our problem. Our orders is to clear the camp and cleanse those who give us trouble. Anyway, the girl was stupid for leaving her village to follow him. She can walk home. If Joran cares about her, he’ll fetch her when the campaign is over.”
By now the detained camp followers numbered in the hundreds, and those at the front began wailing as they neared the road. Poles lined the road up to the city gates, bodies strung up by their arms on at least a third of them. Living people, some still struggling as they tried to relieve the pressure on their arms, some with broken legs unable to carry any weight. Flies swarmed on the faces of hanging folk helpless to swipe them away.
Hu! Not even the Qin conquerors were that cruel. They had executed criminals and traitors and, indeed, anyone they deemed a threat for whatever reason they cared to name, but they killed them first and hung their bodies out as a warning after.
A captain rode his horse along the road, surveying the poles, both the unadorned and those ornamented with the dying and the dead. Shai could not help but criticize his uneasy seat in the saddle, a man come late to riding to whom the gelding was merely a badge of authority. He lacked the Qin grace on horseback. He preened, relishing his power, as he looked over the frightened faces gazing up at him.
“Orders have come down from the commanders,” he shouted, his voice raspy. No doubt a captain of an army that is imposing its control over a hostile city had good reason to go hoarse from shouting. Shai held his position at the back of the crowd, but the sergeant kept staring right at him. “You lot are to return to your homes. The army has no more need of you.”
A chorus of protests rose: “You can’t dump us—!” “We walked all that way with you—” “How are we to live—?”
The captain rode to the front of the crowd, drew his sword as folk shrieked and pressed back, and cut down the lass with the infant. She died without a sound, collapsing into a heap with the baby in her arms. Her ghost emerged with startling swiftness as a mist exhaled from her nostrils. Her ghostly fingers plucked at the squalling baby as she cried in a voice only Shai could hear.
“Help my baby, please! I beg you!”
Ghosts may be warned by senses other than sight and hearing. With a terrible shriek she flung her essence uselessly at the captain as he casually leaned down and stabbed the infant, like piercing a haunch of uncooked meat once, twice, and a third time.
Folk scattered away, screaming, but the soldiers drove them back together like so many stampeding sheep rounded up and confined before slaughter. The cursed sergeant grabbed Shai’s arm, his smile that of a man who has seen his dinner waiting and knows it’ll be tasty.
“Don’t try to run, ver.”
“Silence!” shouted the captain. Soldiers plied the flats of their swords like clubs until the crowd huddled in submissive fear. Many had dropped their goods, leavings scattered: a ladle here and a sieve there, a tangle of leather cords crushed into the dirt, and a forlorn dog cowering. In the turmoil, the ghosts had vanished.
“You were allowed to follow the army from Walshow on sufferance. Now you are no longer needed. Go home. Any found by day’s end within sight of the city will be cleansed, I promise you.”
He reined aside as the soldiers formed a barrier between the city and the crowd and waited sullenly for the camp followers to accept the inevitable and start moving off.
The sergeant hailed the captain. “Captain Dessheyi, we found an outlander.”
The captain rode over, the horse skittish with the crowd seething so close by. “So I see, Sergeant. Good work. I’ll take him.”
“There’s a reward for outlanders, Captain. If I might say so. I found him.”
“Did you? Or did some of your men roust him out, and now you take credit for it? Very well. There’s a cloak at the city gates. Take him there.”
He should have run at the first sign of trouble. Now it was too late. Some called the cloaks “Guardians,” saying they were holy guardians of justice sent to the Hundred by the gods long ago. But Shai figured they were demons. Of the four he had encountered, one was a horrible pervert. Another had taken on the form and face of a dead slave girl Shai had once owned, and she had easily killed an entire cadre of the enemy before allowing Shai and the children he was caring for to walk free. The third had seemed harmless enough, a middle-aged man dressed in a blue cloak who talked too much. The fourth had been his dead brother Hari’s ghost.
The commander of this army, Lord Radas, was one of these demons, the very man Zubaidit had been sent north to assassinate. So this was Shai’s chance to be more than the least and last of seven brothers, the least and last of the Qin tailmen. This was his chance to prove himself.
“Glad it’s not me has to face a cloak,” muttered Milas as the cadre marched Shai up onto the road toward Toskala. Outside the city walls, houses rose in village blocks linked by paths to the city, although the folk who lived there had fled. Every patch of ground was cultivated, rice fields, vineyards, vegetable gardens, wheat. Mulberry trees lined the irrigation ditches that crossed the area. Farther out along the Lesser Istri spread compounds like the abandoned tannery he had hidden in, anything that stank too much to be allowed within the environs of the city.
Gangs of workers tended the fi
elds under guard by cadres from the army. Ten heavily laden wagons rolled past. A steady stream of people trudged out of the city on footpaths, more refugees to join the banished camp followers. It was a pleasant morning for walking, as long as you didn’t think about the dead and dying people hanging from posts.
When their cadre reached the gate, they found a line of detainees waiting beyond the gate house under the supervision of bored soldiers.
“Heya!” called the sergeant, seeking out the captain in charge. “I’ve got an outlander. Can I take him forward?”
This captain had a lean, watchful face and enough arrogance to make you blink. “Get in line with the rest.”
“These lot aren’t outlanders!”
“I’m pleased you can tell the difference. Everyone here has to be judged for one reason or another, so get in line. You’re not the only one who’s brought in an outlander. I’ll call you forward in due time.”
They waited the rest of the morning. Shai measured the height of the walls, the speed and frequency of traffic—all as Tohon had taught him—but after a while he began to think his efforts pointless. The soldiers stood, or sat, or went to relieve themselves; two mounted an expedition for food and returned some time later with a heaping bowl of noodles that they shared out between them. Shai got nothing. His stomach rumbled with hunger, but he’d endured worse and, even so, he had never suffered the abuses forced on the children he’d been held captive with for many weeks. Had Eridit and the others found Tohon? Had their party reached Nessumara safely? He murmured a prayer to the Merciful One: Shower mercy over them; protect them; grant them refuge. But he had no offering gift except the pain and fear and grief in his heart.
Clouds gave intermittent protection from the sun. It was not as steamy as it had been earlier in the year. The season was changing. Having grown up in a distant land where the round of the year was utterly predictable, he could not hope to know what this new season would bring. He considered the knife concealed within his boot and offered a brief prayer to the Merciful One: Let them not search me.