by Kate Elliott
“Eliar.” Kesh rose.
“You’re here!” said Eliar, with a flash of surprise before he looked away. He placed a bundle of accounts books on O’eki’s writing desk. “I’ve brought today’s accounting early. We’ve a festival tonight, and the women closed up the books early.”
“Why are you surprised to see me?” asked Kesh. “I’m a hostage, you must have known I’d be dragged back here in time. In a way, I’m like your sister—”
Eliar turned his back on Kesh. “My sister is dead.”
“Of course she’s not dead—!”
“I’ll thank you not to speak of her.”
“You’re the one who loses in that bargain. I see you have more bracelets, eh? Were you rewarded for your part in our southern expedition?”
Eliar tensed as he clenched a fist. “I’m getting married. The engagement’s been sealed. My bride arrives any day now.”
“How can she do that?”
“A female reeve will bring her. It’s all been arranged.”
“Just as your sister would have been hauled off to Nessumara—Wait! Which bride? The one they arranged for before? The one from Nessumara? The one they meant to trade Miravia for?”
Eliar lunged, fist cocked, but O’eki interposed his bulk between them. “I’ll thank both of you pups not to bark. My thanks, Eliar. As always. Here’s our book. I’ll see you tomorrow.”
There he stood with the immensity of a mountain, implacable and immovable, as Eliar grabbed the accounts book and left.
“So,” muttered Kesh, “the Ri Amarah settle their problems by pretending they don’t exist.”
“I still hear barking,” said O’eki. “I’m no longer a slave, Master Keshad. I’m factor here, with certain privileges. One of them is that I want you to shut up about this. It’s a waste of my time, and I value the Ri Amarah, even if you do not.”
Kesh bit back a retort.
O’eki smiled. “That’s better.”
“You’re a cursed sight cleverer than anyone has ever thought you were, aren’t you?” said Kesh.
“I’m a patient man. Now that I’m here, Master Keshad, I don’t intend to lose what I’ve so unexpectedly gained, nor do I intend to suffer through two young men wrangling out of hurt pride and unmet lust. Do you understand me?”
But Kesh smiled. Lust was nothing. Lust passed. What he felt was not lust.
“I realize I am a hostage in this household,” he said, “but with your permission I’d like the evening free to run a few errands.”
“You’re free to go. I’ll be sending you back to Astafero in the morning by reeve to arrange for another consignment of oil of naya.”
“Won’t that clean out their stores?”
“The naya seeps will keep producing, won’t they?”
“So they will. Why don’t they lift it all out by eagle?”
“The eagles can only take two vessels at a time. There’s still stock in Argent Hall to move, so why waste the reeves’ time by making them lose two days flying to Astafero and back when we can ship in new supplies for them to carry once they’ve lifted the old?”
“You’d think the enemy might remember what was done to them at Olossi. Not that I was there, but I’ve heard the story a hundred times.”
“Even if they know, what can they do?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m not a military man. I’ll be ready to go at dawn.”
In the hirelings’ courtyard he washed, and dressed in a rumpled jacket and trousers. He didn’t need to impress with his clothing and his looks. He wasn’t a rich merchant. The gold from Anji’s mother was like poison that he had to shed from his system.
He set out in the heat haze, keeping to the shady side of the streets. He stopped first at one of the Lantern’s temples, and afterward made his way to Mistress Bettia’s compound. The elderly doorman, a slave bought out of the south years ago, recognized Keshad and admitted him to the reception hall, a cozy chamber fitted with pillows, a decorative screen depicting famous actors from recent festivals, and doors slid open to display an inner courtyard ornamented with a fishpond and flower pots.
He sat cross-legged on a pillow, watching the courtyard shadows consume the handsome pond and plants as the sun set. The inner door slapped open, and a slave entered, a young attractive woman carrying a tray with a pot and two tiny ceramic cups. A debt mark branded her face by her left eye; she was wearing a taloos so thinly woven that her body was half visible beneath, the kind of thing unpleasant masters made their massage girls wear when helping bored customers. She did not look at him, her face flushed with shame.
Mistress Bettia knew he and Nasia had been slaves together in Master Feden’s household and it was almost certain she knew they had once been lovers. It was possible Nasia had even confessed to her mistress, or to one of the other household slaves, that she had cherished the hope that Keshad meant to buy her free, but of course he had ruthlessly abandoned her when he had a chance to free his sister from Ushara’s temple.
Mistress Bettia entered the room, called for tea to be poured, and dimissed the slave.
“Whew! Such heat!” she said by way of opening the conversation, fanning her sweaty face. “You were gone a long time, Master Keshad. People thought you were dead.”
“I’m not dead. I see you still have the slave you received from Master Feden.”
“Nasia?” Her smile oozed a false surprise. “Not much use to me, I tell you. The Sirniakan couch I traded for her was of more use to me.”
“How much?” he asked.
“How much?” Her trembling hand, lifting the cup, betrayed her greed. She licked her lips before she sipped. “Ten cheyt.”
“That’s the price for a good riding horse.”
She laughed unkindly, setting down the cup. “You’ve not been in Olossi for some months, have you? A good riding horse costs five times that now that the army has requisitioned so many. I daresay you cannot purchase a riding horse in this city for any price.”
Abruptly he was bored with haggling. “Ten cheyt it is. Sapanasu’s clerks inform me that the going rate for Sirniakan dinns is four per cheyt. Here’s your price.”
He counted out forty gold dinns onto the tray and rose. “I’ll wait outside. Send her and the bill of sale to me.”
He walked out before she could find her voice. Out on the street, the doorman examined him with an odd expression, more frown than smile. Folk passed, making haste to get home as the light dwindled. Spiced meat was being roasted, and he licked his lips rather as Bettia had done, thinking she had caught the flavor of his weakness.
It was full dark before Nasia cautiously stepped onto the street. She handed him a hastily written bill of sale and moved out of the aura of the lamplight, hiding herself.
“I’m sorry about the pregnancy you carried and lost,” he said in a low voice. He handed her ten dinns.
“I don’t want your coin!”
“Shut up and just take it! This is your seed coin. You can start your own business, make a new life.”
He could not see her expression in the darkness, but her voice was bitter. “I don’t know how. I’ve been a slave since I was eight.”
“Get yourself a Qin husband, then. After riding and training all day, they’d probably like a good strong pair of hands to massage their sore buttocks.”
“An outlander?”
“They’re all right. They’re decent, honest men.”
“That’s more than I can say for you!”
“Say what you want about me, Nasia. I can’t make amends for what can’t be changed. Come at dawn to the Qin compound and you’ll get your manumission, sealed and clear. You’re free. What you make of it is up to you.”
He tucked the bill of sale into his sleeve and walked off, not looking back. He walked to the night market and ate at a slip-fry stand, savoring the familiar spices and the inconsequential chatter. Then he made his way to Master Calon’s compound, a new place rather higher on the hill in deference to Calon
’s newly elevated status in the city.
Master Calon received him not in his reception hall but in his private audience chamber, floridly decorated with layers of screens and paintings as if he felt obliged to display every ornament he owned. The effect made Kesh blink, even as lamplight softened the mismatched colors. Two expensive Sirniakan couches graced the chamber. Kesh sat on a pillow as Calon chuckled.
“Had enough of the empire, have you?”
“I have. Did you ever get a full accounting of my travels?”
“I wouldn’t know. Together with Olossi’s council and the Hieros, I met with Captain Anji before he left. I hear a rumor that a woman of exalted status resides in Astafero now, presumed to be his mother.”
“It’s true. A Qin princess, and formerly wife to the Sirniakan emperor, now deceased, the one who fathered Captain Anji.”
Calon nodded thoughtfully. His grandfather had left the Sirniakan Empire as a young man and settled in Olossi, marrying into a local clan, but Calon’s ancestry was still apparent in his prominent nose and the texture of his hair. He had the handsome coloring of the Hundred folk but his features weren’t truly local. You could never look at him and not know he had ancestors who came from somewhere else.
“I’ll make you a trade,” said Kesh. “Sell back to me those two sisters I sold you, and I’ll give you the same report I gave to Captain Anji, not a word left out. Name a fair price. I won’t bargain.”
“You’re already bargaining,” said Calon. “And it’s a cursed hard bargain you’re driving, too. I’d give a lot to have that information. But I sold away the younger sister to pay for the elder’s training.”
“Who bought her?”
Calon rang his bell, and a factor hurried in, a hireling by the look of him, eager to show he was doing a good job. “Bring my red book.”
The book was brought. As he scanned the accounts, he spoke. “The older sister was coming along very well, with a pretty voice and a quick tongue. But her manner isn’t fetching. She frowns and cries—”
“Did it ever occur to you she might miss her sister?”
Calon glanced up at him, mouth twisting as if he did not know whether to laugh or scold, then touched a line on the ledger. “Mountain Azalea clan. They run a lumber business.”
Kesh rose. “I know where they are. Wait up for me, if you will, Master Calon. I’ll return.”
It was more difficult to get into Mountain Azalea’s clan compound after dark, but in the end he shamelessly traded on Mai’s name and wedged a foot between doors. An irritated older woman was sent out to interview him in the entrance courtyard, although he could see onto the porch of the reception hall that a lamp burned within, behind rice-paper screens.
“What do you want? Master Keshad, is it?”
“Yes. I’m recently returned from a trading expedition to the south, where I discovered some unexpected—Aui!—never mind that. I’ve just been to see Master Calon about the slave girls I sold him last year, and I understand he sold you the younger sister. How is the girl working out?”
She watched him as if he were a snake about to strike. “Why do you want to know?”
“It’s nothing, I am sure. The trouble in Mariha . . . for sure it’s most likely because of the tremendous heat down in those lands. That the problem happened with her sister doesn’t mean it will be a problem for you.”
Her eyes widened. “What problem?”
“Neh, nothing to concern yourself with. I was just asking if there had been any incidents, but if there haven’t been—”
“What cursed manner of incidents?” she demanded, with a glance toward the shuttered reception hall.
“If there have been none, I see no reason to alarm you.”
“We just bought her because she’s young and likely to grow into something useful later. Right now she’s mostly just an extra mouth to feed.”
“I’m relieved to hear nothing is amiss and that none of the rest of you have suffered. I’ll be going now. My pardon for disturbing you so late—”
“Neh, come inside, Master Keshad. Perhaps you’ll take khaif and cakes and we can discuss the girl further. Really, these outlanders are a lot of trouble, aren’t they?”
By one means and another he left the house with the girl, whose wan face turned several unpleasant shades as she recognized him, the man who had hauled her and her sister far from their distant homes and into the household of a master who had callously separated them. As he had once been separated from Zubaidit.
The hells.
But she went obediently enough. Young slaves learned to be obedient if they learned nothing else. She trotted beside him, for he practically ran all the way back to Master Calon’s compound, impatient to be finished with the cursed business and hating her lifeless expression.
Calon had waited up, expectantly, with a tray of food and drink to greet their return. He chuckled as they entered.
“What demon has gotten into you, Keshad?” he asked.
The girl’s color brightened; she looked around the room, straining as at an invisible leash. Calon rang the bell, and the door opened, and there stood her sister. The two girls wept and embraced until Calon told the factor to take them out and let them weep elsewhere, out of earshot.
“What do you want?” Calon said, when tranquillity had been restored and all they could hear was the clip-clap of a dray beast being led down the street just beyond the wall.
Kesh cleared the dishes off the tray and dumped the rest of the dinns on the lacquered surface. He hadn’t counted them; he didn’t want to know. Calon grunted, then put a hand to his chest as though he’d been struck.
“You always dealt fairly with me, Calon, so I’ll trust you now. Here is the coin for their upkeep, and a stake for the elder sister toward her manumission. The rest she will have to earn herself. Here’s the bill of sale for the younger. It will need to be sealed and signed off.”
“Why are you doing this? You’re the one who brought them over the mountains and sold them to me in the first place.”
“I’ve had a change of heart.” As he felt his burden lightened of all the tarnished gold gifted him by the Qin princess, of the females left behind in slavery so Bai could walk free, he knew it was true.
43
DRY SEASON IT might be, but Arras’s cohort, given the right flank on the downstream end of the line, was able to move forward no more than about two mey during the night’s advance. Despite torches blazing and no cursed reeves to plague them, they bogged down time and again in sludge-sucking hollows and spongy ankle-deep pools. One poor man had his leg bitten off by a kroke, which then slithered away into the darkness. The man died screaming. Shortly after, arrows flying out of the gloom drove the forward cadre into the protection of a hedge of thorny brush whose intertwined branches caught the missiles.
Arras came forward and waited a short space, tested an advance; no arrows flew. He personally led the reluctant cadre forward past the hollow where the beast had sheltered and the dead man sprawled. Marsh worms had already risen from the mire to sup on fresh blood.
“Where are my gods-rotted pioneers?” he shouted. “If you’d been out in front as you were supposed to be, testing the ground with spears and beating the brush, you wouldn’t have been taken by surprise.”
“What about the arrows, Captain?”
“Keep your shields up. Now, move out.”
He took a stint at the front, searching for traps, hacking at tangles of thorny brush, shifting a rotting log into a ditch to fill in for better footing. That shamed the soldiers, and the men assigned to track forged out in front of him.
Soon after dawn, the first reeves passed overhead. None dropped rocks. Nor, in the mire, did he see any sign of skirmishers, not that it was easy to see within the tangle of growth. This was flat ground but dreadfully overgrown. The thorns were the worst, but there were also thick stands of pipe-brush and sprawling tangles of a shrub the locals called poison-kiss. Mosks followed them in clouds. Flies buzzed
in ecstasy, drunk on sweat.
Five months ago this entire expanse of ground had been underwater, impassable. They moved forward step by cautious step, slow, hot, stinging, and nasty work, and the men were hard-pulled and short-tempered. So when one cadre cornered a kroke, not a very big one, he allowed them to delay the march to hack it into pieces. They took positions at midday on solid ground and rested under their shields. The sky was as blue as a demon’s icy gaze and the heat was unrelenting. A few men fainted, but the rest held strong.
How the other cohorts were faring on the upstream side of the mire he did not know, but he found a knobby hillock and from that vantage thought he could see the causeway shimmering in the heat haze. Or perhaps he was just fooling himself, thinking he saw companies from what could be Eighth Cohort moving along the stone berm. Likely it was too far away to see, unless you were a cursed reeve harnessed up with your cursed eagle.
“Captain?” Giyara’s face was red, but she moved easily in her boiled leather coat and quilted leggings. “The sun’s easing. Best we move forward because at day’s end we’ll be staring straight into the sun for a bit, not able to see anything in front of us.”
He signaled. The horns blatted, and the men began the next stage. They’d come about halfway. No doubt the commanders hadn’t taken in account how slowly they would advance under these conditions. The commanders were accustomed to roads and paths, and never seemed to take into account that things might not go as they wished.
“You’re thoughtful, Captain,” Giyara said as they trudged behind the front line.
“I’d’ve been happier if we’d been allowed Eighth Cohort’s position in the center. Captain Deri will do all right, though.”