“What are they doing?”
“There was a—disagreement, Lord.” The signo’s voice was tight. “I think it is b-because some of them were against ransoming you.”
“These were against it?”
“Yes, Lord.”
“Where are they taking us?”
“I don’t know, Lord. They’re taking you so the others can’t ransom you to the fort.”
“Taking both of us, wherever we’re going.”
The horses were moving now. They rode in silence. His head throbbed with each hoof beat, and after a while he could think of nothing but the pain. He passed out and came awake much later in darkness with thirst crawling up his throat and the pain at rest in an uneasy truce. Through the hood, he could see the moon risen over his right shoulder, the Wolf over his left. They were riding south and west, and it was perhaps two hours until midnight.
He lifted his head. “Signo,” he said.
The signo did not answer, and Torien did not speak again. He rested his head against the horse’s neck and turned his hands this way and that on the saddle-horns, folding his fingers together, flattening his knuckles, trying to loosen the ropes at his wrists enough that he could slip his hands free. He chafed his wrists raw working at the ropes. He got his right hand free, finally, and reached over, without moving his head, to untie the rope at his left.
He lay still against the horse’s neck with his hands free. He knew, from their voices and the hoof beats of their horses, that there were five Mayasi—three riding ahead, two behind. The ones behind would see it if he reached up to take off the hood. Also, it was no good with the horse on a lead. He would have to lean over the saddle-horns and unbuckle the bridle, and they would certainly see that. The only thing to do was to wait until they stopped and take both horses when the Mayaso with his lead had dismounted.
It would be a poor chance even then, and it would mean leaving the signo.
He had not thought about that all the while he was working his wrists free. Now he made himself think about it. If the signo were his soldier, there would be no question about it, by virtue of his officers’ oath: they would both go, or they would both stay. But the signo was not a soldier. The signo was a murderer from Puoli sent here to Tasso so the Empire might profit from his death. Regardless of his guilt where Espere was concerned, the signo was a murderer from Puoli. That was the hard truth of it, and he must think in terms of hard truth now.
On the other hand, they were at least a full night’s ride from where he knew the Road to be, and the signo knew the lay of the land better than he did. There was no point to his running if he could not make it to the Road. If he rode straight east, he would come sooner or later to the sea, and if he could find the sea then he could find the Road—but to ride straight east he needed a clear sky, and that could not be presumed upon. For sheer practicality’s sake, it would be better to have the signo along.
They did not stop until daybreak. He lay still between the saddle-horns while the Mayaso ahead of him dismounted and picketed his horse. The Mayaso finished with the horse and came over with his knife, reaching for Torien’s hands. Torien threw himself from the saddle. He carried the Mayaso down with him to the sand, ripping off the hood as he fell. He rammed a knee into the Mayaso’s stomach and covered the Mayaso’s mouth with his left hand, pinning the Mayaso’s knife hand against the sand with his right. He dug his knee under the Mayaso’s ribs and tore the knife from the Mayaso’s fingers. Swiftly, he slit the Mayaso’s throat and pulled himself to his feet against the horse, knife in hand.
A voice shouted in Mayaso. Hoof beats pounded toward him in the sand. He ducked beneath the horse’s neck and came up face-to-face with the Mayaso who had been cutting the signo’s hands free. The Mayaso held up his left hand reflexively, swinging his knife wildly with his right. Torien sidestepped the blade. He caught the Mayaso’s wrist and shoved him away and lunged for the Mayaso’s horse, which was tethered to the signo’s horse by a short lead. He dropped the knife, yanked the picket up, and dragged himself into the saddle. He kicked the horse up to a run, the signo’s horse behind him.
The horse stumbled violently beneath him. He slid from the saddle. He hit the sand with his weight on his right arm and his breath gone out of him as though it had been ground out under a boot heel. The horse was dead, prone on the sand with a spear through its flank. The signo’s horse was on its feet behind, tossing its head and shying; the signo looked very small and still in the saddle. Torien sat up slowly on his knees. He had not thought they might spear the horse. A Mayaso reined up before him and dismounted in a shower of sand and swung a spear butt into his face.
He lay curled unmoving on the cool sand while they tied his hands and feet. Dawn was a long red blade cutting across the sky. They dragged him by the arms back over the sand to the horses. He lay on his stomach and watched, spitting blood intermittently, while they dug two shallow graves: one for the man he had killed, one for the horse. The signo sat beside him. His hood was off, his hands unbound. The signo hugged his knees and watched the grave-digging, not looking at Torien. The skin was thin and smooth and silvery where it had started to heal and scar over his cheekbone.
The signo said, suddenly, “I’d have slowed my lord down.”
Torien turned his head against the sand and tried to look up into the signo’s face. The signo kept his eyes fixed on the grave diggers. His shoulders were drawn up. Once more, Torien had the impression he was holding his breath.
“Pragmatism,” Torien said. It was effort to push it out through his teeth. The words were thick and tasted of blood. “I’d have left you if I didn’t have use for you. You know the Road. I don’t.”
“My lord had the command.”
It was curious logic for a man who had murdered nobility: my lord had the command, therefore he must know the Road. It betrayed a perplexingly naïve faith in the merits of hierarchy. Perhaps it was mockery. He could not tell from the signo’s tone, and he could not see it in the signo’s face. “Your lord had the command because Espere needed him dead at Mayaso hands, no other reason.”
The signo turned his head and looked at him, finally—a long, searching look. The Mayasi had filled the graves. Two of them were unrolling bundled tent-hides over the sand. The other two came over to Torien and the signo. The taller of the two was carrying a spear and a length of rope. Wordlessly, he pulled Torien up to his knees and stretched Torien’s legs straight and drove the spear into the sand at Torien’s back, between his arms. He settled the signo against the spear and tied the signo’s hands to Torien’s hands. The other Mayaso had crouched to watch and spoke now while the first one finished with the signo’s hands. The voice was low and hard but unmistakably a woman’s.
At his back, the signo said, “She says if they didn’t need you alive, they would do to you as they did to the Lieutenant. But they need you alive, so this is how you will pay for trying to run.”
“I thought you said they were against a ransom.”
The signo was silent, for a moment. “Against a ransom to the fort, Lord.”
Torien looked at the woman. Like the others, she was veiled so there was nothing visible of her face but her eyes—and her eyes, which met his unblinking, told him nothing. “Tell her it was my doing,” he said to the signo. “They needn’t punish you for it.”
The woman stood up, suddenly. She spoke in a burst of perfect Vareno. “It is astonishing to me—the Vareno compulsion to control. It is astonishing to me how you consider yourself in a position to dictate what I need and need not do.”
He swallowed his surprise. He shook his head. “I ask it of you: spare the innocent, punish the guilty. I didn’t think it was an idea peculiar to Vareni.”
“It is an idea peculiarly foreign to Vareni.”
“The signo had no say in what I did. I ask that you spare—”
“He is innocent neither by the standards of your people nor by the standards of mine. But if you care
for him, you will think twice before you try again to run.”
She was gone before he could reply—away across the sand to the tent. The other Mayaso followed her. They were alone on the open sand, he and the signo. He could feel the signo’s shoulders braced very tightly against his. He said, “I’m sorry.”
When the signo said nothing, he said, “Tell me why they want me alive, signo.”
The signo said, dully, “I don’t know, Lord.”
“Tell me what you think.”
“They have spoken of the mines, Lord.”
He laughed. “They’re going to sell me into the mines? They could ask a better price on a block in Tasso. I can read and write and recite poetry.”
“They will sell you to the Asani in exchange for some of their own. There are many Mayasi in the mines.”
“The fort’s work?”
“My work. All those fit for mine labor. The rest I was ordered to kill.”
Torien said, at length and quietly, “Did he give you a reason?”
“He made it very plain to me why I should do what he asked of me, Lord.”
“You didn’t learn the lesson as well as he hoped.”
“Not as soon as he hoped, Lord, though I’ve learned it fairly well since.” The signo’s voice was faintly dry.
“Who was the Asano?”
The signo shifted at his back. “I swore safe passage to some Mayasi at a watering hole. They had come with their goats. They were not looking to fight. I swore them safe passage. The Asano disregarded it. He said it was not binding, coming from a signo. Maybe he was right, Lord. But I had given my word.”
“It was the right thing to do.” He was thinking of the girl in Modigne, and the scar across his palm.
The signo said, “I wish I knew that it was, Lord.”
“Why shouldn’t it be?”
“Maybe if the punishment had been mine alone, Lord. I thought it would be. It was my word—my word. Otherwise I—don’t know what I’d have done. I don’t know what was the right thing.”
“Espere punished your men?”
The signo was silent, for a long moment. “Decimation,” he said, finally, “by my own hand. He said—said if I refused it would be the whole troop.”
He could feel the signo’s shoulders shaking. He could feel the signo’s hands clenched to trembling fists on either side of the spear. He slid his fingers around the signo’s thin wrists. “It was his wrong,” he said, “not yours.”
“I wish I could believe that, Lord. But I killed them.”
“You saved the rest. You did all you could do.”
The signo said, “Is it a comfort to you, Lord—to tell yourself you did all you could do for the Lieutenant?”
It hit him like a blow to the teeth. He closed his eyes. “Yes,” he said, “a comfort.” He knew the signo could tell it was a lie.
The sun crawled slowly across the empty sky. He slept the first few hours after dawn, head bowed under the heat which hung like a physical weight on his neck and shoulders and eyelids. He woke near mid-morning with pain bursting through his skull and the heat alive now and powerful, pushing him down against the sand, pressing smothering hands over his mouth and nose, closing his throat. His head spun with the taste of blood and the sharp realization of hunger and thirst: he had not drunk since yesterday noon, and he had not eaten since supper at the fort the night before. It was not yet two days ago, but in the heat and sand and across the gaping, jagged chasm that was Alluin’s death, it seemed an eternity.
Without much enthusiasm, and to no purpose, he tested the rope at his wrists. He felt the signo come awake with a start behind him, arms jerking, and he wished he had not done it. There was no question of sleeping now in the heat. The signo sat up very still against him. “I didn’t mean to wake you,” Torien said. His tongue was thick.
“Better not to talk, Lord,” the signo said.
They sat in silence. He watched the shadows at his feet turn slowly over the sand with the angle of the sun. He could feel the heat of the sand through his tunic and the soles of his boots. The sand grew painfully hot against his bare calves, and he sat with his knees drawn up to his chest. His head was swimming, his throat tight. He drew quick, gulping breaths, fighting the stranglehold until his lungs were screaming and his heart beating a panicked tattoo against his ribs. He dropped into blackness. Hands on his hands pulled him sharply back up. There was a voice in his ears, quiet but insistent: “Lord Risto.”
He opened his aching eyes. He saw nothing but sand and sky. He opened his mouth to gulp a breath. The hands tightened on his hands. The signo said, “Slowly, Lord, and through your nose.”
He tried to speak. His mouth and throat were as dry as dust. Nothing came out but a creaking moan.
The signo said, “Breathe, Lord, don’t speak.”
He breathed through his nose, long and unsteadily. Sand and sky were tumbling together at the corners of his eyes. He thought he might be sick. He shut his eyes and bent forward from the spear and rested his head on his knees. He spent the next little while working up saliva enough to swallow. The signo held his hands and said nothing. Torien swallowed and sat back up with the spear between his shoulder-blades. “How did you know my name?” he said, thickly.
“I heard it of Nerix,” the signo said, “the night before last. Don’t speak, Lord.”
“You never told me yours.”
The signo said, “I don’t remember it.” His voice was empty. “Please, Lord. Save your strength and do not speak.”
He was bent over his knees again, half in the blackness and half out, when they cut the ropes from his wrists and ankles. They got him to his feet before he went face-down on the sand. There were two of them, one on either side of him, and they dragged him by the arms across the sand and into the tent. They let him go on the tent floor. He went first to his knees, then to his face. He lay numbly still, feeling the cool sand against his face and between his fingers.
Someone put a water-skin to his cracked lips and raised his head while he drank, easing him back to the sand when he was done and pouring water over his face. He blinked up from the floor, eyes streaming. The woman sat back on her heels with the water-skin on her lap. She was unveiled. On her forehead and cheekbones were the same red markings he had seen first on the face of the dead horsewoman, two nights ago. “If you try again to run,” she said, “I will kill him.”
Torien turned his cheek on the sand. The signo was watching from the tent-side. The woman tied up the water-skin and stood. The thin gold loops around her ankles fell together clinking. “Rest,” she said.
He tried to push himself up on his hands. Failing that, he pulled himself across the sand to the signo’s side. He lay face-down, holding the sand tightly in his fists to stop the tent spinning. “They gave you to drink?” he said.
“Yes, Lord,” the signo said.
He slept. He drifted awake to voices and the smell of lamp oil and the flickering light of lamp flame on the tent walls. He turned onto his shoulder. The four Mayasi were sitting in a circle to eat. The woman was sitting nearest, her back to him. Her hair was twisted in a thick braid over her right shoulder, and it left the curve of her neck bare to him. At the nape, he could just see the edge of a slave brand, poorly healed, crusted black on the smooth brown skin. It was a Vareno brand. He tried to read it in the half-light. She turned her head in response to something said, and the braid swung down her back and swept the brand from his sight.
There were almonds and dried dates and soft cheese on a cloth spread over the sand beside him, and milk in a leather cup. He sat up, slowly. He brushed dry sand from his face and leaned his head on his palms. “You’ve already eaten?”
“I did not want to wake you, Lord,” the signo said.
“Did you sleep?”
“A little, Lord.”
Torien dropped his hands. He took the cup of milk and drank. The milk was warm, clotted, sour. It coated his mouth a
nd throat like thick honey. He very nearly spit it out on the sand. He swallowed it quickly and licked it from his teeth and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Mare’s milk?”
“Camel’s milk,” the signo said.
“You care for it?”
“It will do my lord good to drink.”
He held the cup in his hands. “Signo.”
“Lord.”
“I know you said you’ve tried to forget. I don’t mean to cause you pain—further than I’ve caused you already. But I wish to know what happened in Puoli.”
The signo did not look at him. His voice was as empty as it had been earlier, but his shoulders were drawn up very tightly. “My lord will have friends in the capital who can tell him what happened in Puoli, if he survives to the capital. If he does not survive, then it will not matter to him.”
“I wish to know it of you.”
“My lord has no more reason to believe what I tell him of Puoli than he has to believe what I told him of the watering hole.”
“And you’ve no reason to lie to me, given the improbability of my survival.”
Footsteps approached in the sand. The woman brought Torien’s cuirass over and set it down on the sand at Torien’s feet. He watched her lay out his kit, piece by piece: helmet, jerkin, cloak, sword belt, gloves, wrist-guards, braid. She nudged the cuirass toward him with one foot. “Put it on.”
“You’ll kill the signo if I refuse?”
She jerked her chin over her shoulder. “These are for the criminal.”
Another kit had gone onto the sand beside the signo. He recognized Alluin’s kit. He recognized the fist-sized dent on the breastplate of the cuirass where the point of a blunted training spear had broken Alluin’s shoulder last year: three inches to the right, two inches up, and it would have snapped his neck. Out of stupid, boyish pride Alluin had not wanted the dent hammered out.
Something went very cold and hard and tight and then shattered inside him. He flung the cup away and took the sword belt and had his sword from its sheath and was on his feet with his knees bent, sword hand drawn back in preparation for the killing stroke, all of it by reflex and thoughtlessly—and in that moment of breathless stillness before the lunge, he saw the palm-blade spearhead leveled at the lower edge of the signo’s collarbone.
Blood Road Page 9