Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy)

by Bell, Hilari

  “I told you, he’s a traitor,” said Garren.

  “Not without a trial, he’s not. In the future, Strategus, you will remain within the law, or we’ll arrest you, and your cursed bargain can go into the nearest privy! Do you understand that?”

  “You’re very clear, sir,” said Garren. Why did he suddenly sound triumphant? Kavi made an effort and opened his eyes again.

  “I will complete my conquest, within the allotted time and within the law,” Garren went on. “Farsalan law! I’ll use this pathetic boy as bait—it doesn’t matter if he’s a traitor or not! I can declare him hostage for his master and challenge this Sorahb to single combat. If he doesn’t answer, according to Farsalan law I can kill my hostage.”

  Deghans, deghan law, reaching out from the grave. They probably owed him an ill turn, at that. Kavi sighed and let his eyes fall closed.

  “Is that really their law? How barbarous,” said one of the senators.

  “It is barbarous,” said Garren. “But unless it directly contradicts imperial law, the law itself decrees that local customs prevail!”

  “Executing prisoners is forbidden by imperial law,” said a senator.

  “But executing a hostage isn’t,” said Garren. “Not if the agreement that binds the hostage is broken.”

  “But there was no agree—”

  “Be quiet!” a senator snapped. “All of you. This is a legal quibble, and I’m not a lawyer. The committee will allow you to issue your challenge, Strategus, but if Sorahb doesn’t show up, you won’t be allowed to kill this man. You’re not governor yet.”

  “You have no say in the matter,” said Garren. “Local laws rule this. But if you allow me to issue the challenge, the question won’t arise. I’ve fought Sorahb long enough to know that he holds to the old deghans’ code. If I challenge him, with his follower’s life for the stake, he’ll come. And when he dies, Farsalan resistance will die with him. My spies tell me that their loyalty, their trust in Sorahb, is the only thing that gives these people the will to fight.”

  Which was probably true, but there was no Sorahb. The confidence in Garren’s voice told Kavi he was plotting something, but what was it? A nonexistent man wouldn’t be answering any challenges, so … did he mean Jiaan? Did Garren think that Jiaan would accept his challenge? To save Kavi?

  Kavi began to laugh. He laughed while the senators and Garren departed, while the guards dragged his pallet and blankets back into the cell and then left, locking the door behind them.

  He was still snickering as he crawled toward his bed, though his laughter now verged on tears, and he had forgotten what was so funny.

  The thin straw pallet, with its rough blanket and battered pillow, looked like paradise.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  SORAYA

  AHRIMAN CURSE HIM,” Jiaan grumbled, gazing out over the old flags-and-lances field. Garren had set up a platform in the center, where the senate committee sat, overlooking the circle marked on the ground below. “If he’d held the challenge in the city square, like he said he was going to, I could have had an archer on every rooftop and in every window! Why change the location at the last minute?”

  “Presumably,” said Soraya, “to avoid having to deal with archers at every rooftop and window.”

  The view from the packed stands was excellent. She and Jiaan perched about halfway up, right beside the railing that kept the audience from falling from the raised seats into the entrance that cut between them. And the stands were packed, despite the wind whipping the banners and the low clouds that promised a storm. Judging by the thunder’s distant rumble, this might be the first of the wild spring thunderstorms, instead of the last of the slow winter rains. Either way they were going to get wet, but that hadn’t stopped most of the population of Setesafon from coming here.

  It was clear that Garren wanted lots of witnesses for whatever it was he had planned, but Soraya wasn’t sure that gathering this huge mob was wise. Sorahb had become not only the symbol but the soul of Farsalan resistance. Here in Setesafon, where Garren’s power was greatest, the growing disaffection was less obvious than it was in the rest of Farsala—but it was there.

  At least the mammoth crowd gave Jiaan plenty of cover for his archers. Unfortunately, they were too far from the center of the field to do any good. Past the stands, past the guards who manned the barrier at the foot of the stands to keep people from coming any closer, there was no cover at all.

  The last time Soraya had sat in these stands, she’d been seated in the gahn’s partitioned section, watching her father compete. It wasn’t the last time she had seen him, by a number of days, but he had been magnificent then, mounted on Rakesh and wreaking havoc among his opponents, even with a wooden practice sword and blunted lance. He’d been happy … Tears rose in her eyes, but they felt better than the others she’d shed—as if they held more love than bitterness. Was she finally beginning to heal? This seemed an odd place for it, dressed as a shopgirl, crammed in among craftsmen and townsfolk.

  At least the noisy conversations around them assured their privacy. A handful of people looked at Fasal as he rode through the entrance and stopped beside Jiaan, but as far as Soraya could tell no one even tried to listen.

  “The archers are scattered through the crowd, all around the field, just as you ordered,” Fasal told his commander, in a tone that seemed, to Soraya’s ears, to lack the proper respect. “For all the good they’ll do.”

  Definitely lacking respect—but the authority in Jiaan’s voice made up for it. “They probably won’t be needed—that’s what I’m counting on. But even if Garren goes through with it, I’m not letting you accept the challenge. We’ve been over this before.”

  In fact, they’d been arguing about it ever since Fasal brought in the archers late yesterday afternoon. Garren had given Sorahb seven days to arrive for the challenge, which seemed almost reasonable until you realized that word of the challenge had to reach Sorahb first. As Nadi had put it, “If the champion’s much further off than Mazad, Garren doesn’t have a thing to worry about.”

  It was mostly her concern, Soraya thought, that had induced Jiaan to send for his archers. He made no secret of his own belief that Garren was bluffing about killing his prisoner. Soraya had to admit that it was against Hrum law, it would alienate the population he hoped to rule, and it would gain him nothing at all. It would be stupid, and Garren had never been stupid. Still, Jiaan had managed to get word to his forces in time. And Fasal, against Jiaan’s express order, had come with them, hoping to take up the challenge.

  “But if I win,” he said, as he had so often since yesterday, “it will end this war—right here, right now. No final battle for Mazad. The Hrum gone, the young gahn returned. Farsala would be as it was before!”

  Privately, Soraya doubted that Farsala could ever be the same—but perhaps that was because she could never go back to being the girl she’d been. Did she regret that?

  “What makes you think he won’t cheat?” Jiaan asked, as he’d already asked a dozen times. “Just as he cheated the last time. Look at the guards around that circle.”

  He had a point. The circle where the combat would take place was surrounded by Hrum soldiers, half of them carrying bows and quivers. She remembered the Farsalan soldier describing her father’s death, cut down by Hrum archers after he had challenged Garren to single combat.

  … shot full of arrows like—um, it was quick, girl. Lady. As quick as death in battle ever can be …

  Part of her still flinched at the memory, and that same part of her understood Fasal. She wanted to see a champion take up Farsala’s cause, to see Garren fall, as he should have fallen almost a year ago under her father’s blade!

  So spoke her heart, but her brain said otherwise.

  “Jiaan’s right,” she said, interrupting Fasal’s protest. “If you showed any sign of winning, Garren would order your death. He’s not a deghan. And I think … I think he has more at stake here than his own life.”

 
“Then we should bargain instead,” said Fasal. “Tell him that if he kills our man we’ll kill our Hrum prisoners. We’re out of food for them anyway, and the Suud have already shared more than they can afford.”

  “I’ve told you before,” said Jiaan, “we have to be better than they are! To kill more than five hundred prisoners because he killed one would—”

  “I’m not saying we kill them,” Fasal interrupted in turn. “Just tell Garren we’re going to.”

  “The problem with that,” Soraya intervened hastily as Jiaan’s face darkened, “is what do you do if Garren doesn’t believe you? What if he refuses to bargain, demands combat, and kills Kavi when ‘Sorahb’ doesn’t show up?”

  “He might do that,” Fasal admitted. “But would the committee allow it? I thought they were supposed to keep him from doing things like that.”

  Soraya fell silent. In truth she didn’t know how this strange committee would react. They’d certainly responded quickly to the “anonymous” note Jiaan had sent Tactimian Patrius.

  It was Hama who’d heard rumors that the governor was torturing a Farsalan prisoner, and that even the Hrum who guarded him were angry and upset about it. She hadn’t been able to confirm it, or learn any details, but she’d still come home in tears, full of rash, vague plans for a jailbreak.

  It was Jiaan who came up with the idea of sending a letter to Patrius, detailing the rumors, which he might not have heard, since he, along with most of Garren’s opponents within his own forces, had been exiled to the old camp.

  Exiled or not, they still had some power. Garren’s proclamation of challenge had been read in the markets the next morning, and other rumors began circulating soon after that. Some were as wild as Garren threatening to imprison the whole committee and rebel against the emperor, or the committee threatening to have Garren imprisoned, or executed, or … But all the rumors claimed that senators had broken into one of the cells beneath the armory and found … the rumors of what they’d found had started at appalling, and soon grew so improbable that even Hama and Sim stopped listening to them. They promptly became a lot more cheerful, for if those rumors were false, then the previous ones had probably been false as well.

  Jiaan had doubted the whole thing. As he told Soraya privately, “If they’d put any pressure on that bastard, we’d have had Hrum soldiers breaking down the door days ago. And we haven’t, so you can be pretty sure they aren’t torturing anyone. On the other hand, that doesn’t guarantee they won’t start … or worse yet, come up with a decent bribe.”

  Shortly after that conversation, he had arranged for the gold to be moved out of Nadi’s house and into the keeping of a member of the resistance the peddler didn’t know. Soraya considered that a sensible precaution. She didn’t share Jiaan’s estimation of the peddler’s cowardice, but her father had once told her that given enough time anyone could be broken.

  For the first time in her life, Soraya wondered how her father knew that. She shivered, and thunder rumbled in the distance. Was she influencing that storm? She closed down her shilshadu sensing, firmly, as Maok had taught her. Rain wouldn’t stop Garren, not today. And neither …

  “I don’t think the committee will stop him,” said Soraya slowly. “At least, I don’t think we can count on it. Garren was prepared to leave Hrum prisoners in our hands in order to get the Kadeshi troops he needed to win, and the committee didn’t stop him. I think there’s more at stake for the committee than we know about too.”

  “Then you should let me answer the challenge,” Fasal argued. His voice was calm, but his mare snorted as his hand tightened on the reins. “If I win, the committee has to honor the terms Garren offered. They’ve endorsed them in the emperor’s name!”

  That was true. In fact, all ten members of the committee were seated on the dais, with all the officers of the Hrum army who were posted to Setesafon sitting behind them. Even Garren’s enemies were there. Soraya saw Patrius, his face stiff with worry, sitting behind Substrategus Barmael, whose red-bearded face showed nothing at all. But Soraya had served in the Hrum camp with the substrategus, with many of the officers seated on the dais, and she knew that Barmael’s controlled expression concealed a generous heart.

  The committee’s faces were harder to read, since she didn’t know them at all, but she thought they looked grim. Almost as if … no, surely they wouldn’t permit Garren to kill a helpless prisoner, even if “Sorahb” failed to show up. It was against their law, just as Jiaan had said, and Soraya knew even better than he did that the Hrum were a people of law. The odds in Setesafon’s marketplace had been running about even on whether the committee would allow the execution if Sorahb didn’t arrive, but Soraya had lived among the Hrum and she knew better.

  The odds on whether Sorahb would take up the challenge had fluctuated wildly, almost as if the townsfolk were as divided between heart and mind as she was. They knew he might not come. He could be too far from the city to hear Garren’s message before it was over, for as everyone knew, he ranged over the entire country. A few people were even bold enough to doubt Sorahb’s existence, pointing out that no one they knew had ever seen him, but they were universally shouted down. In their hearts, Soraya knew, everyone wanted the champion to come—just as she did, and she knew “Sorahb Storm-bringer” was a myth.

  Some of the people in the chattering crowd might have come in the low hope of seeing bloodshed, but most of them had come here hoping to set eyes on the legend himself. With any luck both expectations would be thwarted, Soraya thought firmly If Garren really meant to kill his prisoner, and the committee allowed it, there was no—

  Garren appeared abruptly, riding through a gate at the other side of the field. Over a soldier’s tunic and armor he wore the deep scarlet robe of a Hrum governor, and the guards around him wore the same color—a color to which, according to marketplace gossip, Garren was not entitled until his conquest was complete.

  A mutter of dissent, like distant thunder, greeted his appearance.

  A clap of not-so-distant thunder echoed it. The wind was picking up, and Soraya wondered how long Garren intended to wait for the champion to appear. If he waited very long, they were going to get drenched. Then the governor’s guards led out their prisoner, and the crowd fell silent.

  He was on foot, his ankles linked with a short rope, his hands bound in front of him. Two guards held his arms, but even in the clumsy hobbles he walked without their support. That was probably good, Soraya thought numbly, but nothing could belie the dark, almost black bruises that marred his face, or his swollen lips and eyelids. Even across the width of the field, Soraya could see that four fingers on his right hand were also dark with bruising and swollen like sausages.

  She shut her eyes, fighting down a surge of nausea. She hadn’t been as certain as Jiaan, but she hadn’t expected this.

  The crowd erupted in a storm of threats, hisses, and jeers. If Garren had ever had any hope that Setesafon might accept his rule, it was now gone. But if the committee had allowed this …

  “Garren’s going to kill him,” Jiaan whispered. His face was white. “I thought … I didn’t think … Fasal, get word to the archers—everyone is to make their way upwind of the dais. If this breeze gets stronger as the storm moves in, with enough loft maybe we can make the range.”

  “You can’t,” said Fasal.

  “We might.”

  Garren dismounted and climbed the steps to the dais. Kavi, on foot, was still crossing the field. He scanned the crowd intently, as if searching for someone—for rescue? But Fasal was right. There would be no rescue.

  “You can’t make that range, and you know it,” the young deghan said now.

  Kavi had reached the ground before the dais.

  “I am here today to challenge the rebel Sorahb for this man’s life, though by our law he is a traitor to the Iron Empire—” The guards who held Kavi tore his right sleeve down from his arm, revealing the tattoo that almost everyone now knew marked a Hrum spy. The stitches of his sleeve,
Soraya realized, must have been weakened so Garren could make his gesture. She saw a flash of cynical amusement cross the peddler’s battered face, and knew that he had just realized the same thing. Her heart wept for him.

  “A traitor to the empire,” Garren repeated, “and thus, by our laws, condemned to death.”

  “That’s his excuse,” said Jiaan grimly. “That’s how he’s getting it past the committee. Fasal, go now! Tell the archers to move!”

  “It’s too late,” said Fasal. “Garren’s not waiting.”

  Thunder cracked, but Soraya no longer cared whether she was influencing the storm.

  “But in my mercy, I will give this man’s master a chance to save him,” Garren shouted over the rising wind. The guards dragged Kavi up onto the platform—if he was to die, everyone would get the clearest possible view. “A chance to fight for Farsala, as he claims to do—while in reality he hides in the shadows and lets others take his risks.”

  “Have you got any better ideas?” Jiaan snapped.

  “So, if he cares for this country as he claims, let Sorahb come forth!” Garren roared. “If he wins, he wins your independence—by the sworn word of the senate and the emperor. If he is willing to fight for you, let him come forth now!”

  “Yes,” said Fasal, “I have an idea. If nothing else, it will give you time to get the archers into position.” And he kicked his mare into motion, onto the field.

  Jiaan dived half way out of the stands reaching for his reins, and missed. “Kanarang take the idiot. Now Garren’s got two of my people for hostages!” He squirmed though the railing, half leaping, half falling to the ground, and rushed off to find his archers.

  Soraya thought of following, but even though her heart pounded with the need for action, there was nothing she could do. Nothing but stand and watch as Fasal cantered his mare across the field and pulled her to a snorting stop before the circle. She shouldn’t have been able to hear Fasal, but the crowd had fallen silent as they too strained to hear. The only sound was the banners snapping in the breeze, not loud enough to drown Fasal’s clear voice.