Servant of the Empire

by Raymond E. Feist

  Suddenly the servant standing nearest reeled aside with a knife in his back.

  He fell without a cry. Even as the assassin's shadow sliced across the sunlight, the second servant toppled with a cut throat.

  Nacoya felt the thud as the corpse struck the wooden floor. Instinctively attuned to danger, she reached down and caught the Acoma heir, who still howled, and flung him headlong into the corner. He landed rolling amid bed mat and cushions still in morning disarray.

  The First Adviser called for the guards, but her voice was aged and weak. Her warning went unheard. Ayaki screamed now in blind rage, intent on disentangling himself from his bedclothes. Only Nacoya saw his peril, and the servants bleeding out their lives on the nursery floor.

  'Demon!' she said again, but this time to the black-clothed figure of the tong assassin. He had pulled another knife from his belt, and a cord looped the fingers of his left hand. His face was hidden behind a black gauze caul; his fists were gloved. Nothing showed but his eyes as he stalked to take his victim, the boy who was Mara's heir. Only Nacoya stood in his way. Already the knife rose for a throw to cut her down.

  'No!' Nacoya flung forward as the knife left his hand. She made a dive for his left wrist and the cord held ready for Ayaki's throat. The blade flashed over the First Adviser's head and thunked in the plaster wall.

  The assassin cursed and side-stepped. But Nacoya caught his garrotte. Her nails tore through thin leather, raked his knuckles like claws, and twisted in a deathgrip on the cord. 'You won't.' She again called for guards, but her thin voice was not equal to the task.

  The assassin wasted no time in wrestling. His eyes narrowed in contempt, and his right hand closed on a wooden handle and drew the next knife in line on his belt. He seemed perversely delighted as he drove the point deep between the old woman's ribs.

  Nacoya's lips curled back from her teeth with the pain. She hung on.

  'Die, old woman!' The assassin gave the knife a vicious twist.

  Nacoya shuddered. An agonized cry escaped her, but her hands tightened harder on the cord. 'He will not be killed in dishonour,' she wrung out.

  Behind her, Ayaki's cries died. He saw the knife in the wall above his head, and then the blood that snaked across the floorboards. One of the fallen servants still quivered in his death throes. Paralysed with terror, an orange shell button still clenched in one fist, Ayaki bit back a whimper. The assassin, he decided, must be Tasaio. With that realization, the courage that was his father's reasserted itself in force.

  'Attack!' he shouted. 'Attack!' And with his head filled with visions of warriors, he scrambled from his pillows and beat upon the intruder's thigh.

  The tong took no notice. He shoved the knife deeper into Nacoya. Blood ran hot over his hand, soaking his glove as he jerked his garrotte from her grip. She crumpled quickly, fell over into Ayaki, and pinned the boy under her dying weight.

  'The Good God's curse upon you,' she croaked hoarsely at the tong. Her strength inexorably ebbed. Ayaki wriggled free.

  The assassin grabbed at the boy and tripped. Nacoya had caught his ankle, but her life was fading fast. The assassin recovered instantly, stamped on her wrist, and yanked free.

  Across the chamber, through failing vision, the old woman saw the guards had finally reacted. They charged through the nursery doorway, their armour shining unbearably in bright sunlight. With drawn swords they ran, bellowing battle cries, across the chamber toward the tong.

  Behind her, the assassin pounced. Little Ayaki howled wrathfully. Nacoya struggled to raise her cheek from a puddle of pooling blood. She could not see but only hear the scuffle of Ayaki's bare feet drumming on the floorboards. Her vision went dark, and her dying thought was recognition: the cord was still tangled in her fingers. She had done nothing more than force the assassin to use his knives . . . A boy who died honourably by the blade would still be dead.

  'Ayaki,' she murmured, and then, heartbrokenly, 'Mara . . .' as darkness took her.

  Kevin lunged, thrust, and cleared his sword. An enemy fell screaming at his feet. He leaped over the thrashing, gut-wounded man, and met another. Somewhere in the fray he had picked up a foe's shield, and it had saved his life. He had taken another cut in his left shoulder, and a glancing slash across the ribs. His movements were hampered by the sting. Blood flowed over his bare skin and soaked soggily into his loincloth. Every movement hurt. The enemy swordsman exchanged three strokes with him before realizing he fought a slave. He snarled an oath and dodged past. Kevin stabbed him unceremoniously from behind.

  'Die for Tsurani honour,' the barbarian cried savagely. 'Gods, please, let the runts keep being stupid.'

  Let them keep underestimating his war skills, that Mara might stay alive.

  But there were too many. Enemies kept sallying from the trees. As Kevin whirled to stave off another attacker, he realized the Acoma were more than just surrounded. Their circle was breached. Foes charged through and started hacking at the bodies that lay across the litter which sheltered Mara.

  The Midkemian screamed like a banshee and ran a man through. He abandoned his blade in the corpse, snatched up another from the ground. In the same unbroken movement he kicked over the fallen litter. The wooden frame hammered down, driving enemy soldiers into a scattered rush back; then the litter thumped to a rest, with Mara and her shield of dying bodyguard fenced underneath.

  Kevin charged over the barrier. 'Back, you pig-licking dogs!' He added obscenities in Tsurani and hurtled over the wreckage.

  His blood-streaked, near-naked body and berserker's howl startled the lead ranks into hesitation. He landed on an arrow, felt the sting of its four-bladed head cut his heel, and cursed again in Yabon dialect. 'May Turakamu eat your heart for breakfast,' he ended, and then the swords came at him.

  He could not parry so many. Nor could he wonder if his use of the litter for a ram had injured Mara. He only understood he would die here and was not pleased with the prospect.

  A sword sliced his shin. He stumbled, fell, rolled. The air above his head became bisected by weapons driving to impale him. They narrowly bit earth; he felt the disturbed dirt strike his shoulders. He unlimbered his shield and rolled hard over again, bringing it upward in a vicious blow to the groin of a man who moved too slowly. Kevin's body wedged at last under the canted litter. His searching fingers encountered a fallen shield. He twisted, scraping against wood, and came up with the shield in front. His palms stung as enemy blows rained down, momentarily thwarted.

  'Gods, this can't last.' His curses now sounded suspiciously like crying. And the swords hammered his shield, incessantly. They split toughened needra hide and wood, and left him clutching splinters. Very far off, perhaps in the wood, he heard shouting and the clatter of more fighting. 'Damn them, damn them.' He loosed a bitter laugh. 'We're defeated, and still they want to butcher us.'

  The sword sliced air with a whine and bit flesh. A black-haired head tumbled in a bouncing roll among the bedclothes.

  Still the Acoma guard kept yelling, and before the assassin fell, he had slashed the body three times. The corpse collapsed in a ruck of sodden fabric, and shuddered convulsively amid the cushions.

  Spattered with the blood of the tong, and crying in wild-eyed terror, Ayaki wormed out from under the corpse. A gash on his young neck bled freely, and he threw himself mindlessly against the wall in an attempt to escape from stark terror.

  'Fetch Keyoke,' cried the warrior with the dripping sword to the other who bent over the body of Nacoya. 'There may be other assassins!'

  The slap of running sandals sounded outside the screen as armed warriors rushed through the courtyard garden. Drawn by the disturbance, they saw the puddled blood and corpses through the screen, and almost instantly a second Strike Leader arrived, giving fast orders for a grounds search, while detailing six men to surround the Acoma heir.

  A moment later, Jican appeared, his composure vanishing as he saw the carnage on the nursery floor. He shoved his load of slates into the hands of th
e stupefied slave who followed him and, in atypical haste, threaded a path through a room suddenly filled with armed men. Beyond a wall of sticky cushions crouched the Acoma heir, pounding the wall with bruised fists and screaming, 'Minwanabi, Minwanabi, Minwanabi!'

  The warriors who gathered to help seemed unwilling to touch him.

  'Ayaki, come here, it's over,' Jican said firmly.

  The little one appeared not to hear. Mara's hadonra reached out anyway. He ignored the child's flinch from his touch, extracted the traumatized boy from the mess, and bundled him against robes that smelled like chalk instead of slaughter.

  'Let's get him out of here,' he instructed the nearest warrior. 'Get the healer. He's injured.' Looking at the motionless forms of Nacoya and the two nurses, he said, 'And somebody find out if he has a nurse left alive.'

  The blows on the shield redoubled. Kevin yanked one hand away from the rim, an instant before losing a finger. He was dimly aware of a heave of movement in the bodies behind his hip, as one of the mortally injured warriors he leaned on thrust a dagger handle into his palm.

  'Defend our Lady,' croaked a voice. 'She's alive.'

  Kevin rejected the defeated realization that she could not remain so much longer. Naked and bleeding and half-crazed with battle fury, he accepted the blade, reached under the rim of the shield, and stabbed an enemy foot. The knife was promptly lost as the skewered enemy jerked with a scream of rage.

  'Happy dancing,' wished the barbarian, turned drunken with blood loss and adrenaline. He took a moment to notice that the blows on the shield had stopped.

  Hands in green-lacquered gauntlets caught the rim a moment later and strongly lifted the battered wreckage away. Kevin peered up, blinking against the sun. Through vision that danced with dizziness he made out an officer's plume and the face of the Acoma Force Commander.

  Relief overturned his sense of humour. 'Thank the gods you're here,' he said. 'We found ourselves in a sticky situation.'

  Lujan regarded Kevin's bloodied hands and the dripping gash on his forearm. 'Happy dancing?' he quoted, puzzled.

  'Later,' Kevin muttered. 'I'll explain everything later.'

  He turned awkwardly against the pain of his bleeding side, and cursed bilingually. He felt sick, and the sun was too bright.

  'Where is our Lady?' Lujan demanded, sharply now, and taut with worry.

  Kevin blinked bemusedly at the overturned litter. Acoma dead lay crushed like so many impaled beetles underneath.

  'Light of Heaven, not under there!' Lujan called another order that to Kevin's ears sounded like noise. Then many hands were reaching down and dragging his battered body out from under the splinters.

  'Don't,' Kevin protested weakly. 'I want to know if Mara . . .' Words were hard; the air burned his lungs.

  Still protesting, he was pushed supine on the ground, and darkness closed over his ears just before the shouts of amazed discovery from the warriors who righted the litter; they sorted the tangle of dead and injured and found a bloodstained, crumpled figure who was not conscious but had no wound beyond a purple bruise on her head.

  Mara was laid on the soft, dry moss by the spring. Surrounded by a hundred soldiers, her head pillowed in Lujan's lap, she roused as a rag that dripped icy water bathed the lump on her brow. 'Keyoke?' she murmured as her eyes first flickered open.

  'No,' her Force Commander answered gently. 'Lujan, mistress. But Keyoke was the one who sent me here. He thought you might run into trouble.'

  Mara stirred, faintly reproving. 'He's not your commander, but my Adviser for War.'

  Lujan stroked the hair from his mistress's face and gave her his most insolent smile. 'Old habits die hard. When my old commander says jump, I jump.'

  Mara shifted painfully. She seemed battered and sore in a hundred places. 'I should have listened.' Her eyes clouded. 'Kevin,' she said. 'Where is he?'

  Lujan inclined his head toward his field healer, who crouched over a second figure lying on the moss. 'He survived. In a loincloth, without armour, and with a hero's complement of wounds. Ayee, what a warrior that man is.'

  'Wounds!' Mara shoved up in distress, and Lujan required a surprising amount of strength to keep her quiet.

  'Lady, be still. He will live, though he'll have a pretty set of scars. He might limp, and he will be a long time regaining full use of his left hand. The muscles were badly slashed.'

  'Brave Kevin.' Mara's voice shook. 'He saved me. My foolishness almost killed him.'

  Her Force Commander touched her again, almost tenderly. 'It is a pity the man is a slave,' he commiserated. 'Such courage deserves only the highest honour.'

  The air suddenly hurt to breathe; Mara turned her face into Lujan's shoulder and shivered. Perhaps she wept, soundless in misery; if she did, the officer who comforted her would never expose her shame. Somehow he understood that her agony did not stem from her narrow escape in the glen alone. And his abiding love and devotion would never permit him to acknowledge his Lady had betrayed herself in a moment of public weakness. The surrounding soldiers quickly found tasks to occupy themselves, allowing Mara her moment of release.

  The Lady of the Acoma wept for Kevin, whose bold spirit had captured hers, and whose actions had finally made her understand beyond denial that he was not, and never would be, a slave.

  She would have to set him free, and that could not be done within the borders of the Empire of Tsuranuanni. To give him his due, to acknowlege him as a man, she was going to lose him forever. Following through that realization was going to be the hardest thing she had ever undertaken.

  Regrouping from the ambush in the forest took the better part of the day. The bodies of the slain warriors had to be gathered up onto makeshift litters for rites and cremation at home; the enemy dead were left as food for jagunas and other carrion eaters. Lujan sent out scouts, who returned from the appointed place of rendezvous with reports that the Hanqu were nowhere in evidence.

  Mara took this news badly: that her proposed meeting with Lord Xaltepo was unequivocally fiction and more probably a Minwanabi plot. She fretted, too tired to keep still even in the heat, and worried now for more than Kevin's hurts.

  'Tasaio does not strike just once,' she complained to Lujan, as the gloom of twilight fell around the firelit encampment of warriors. 'Though our wounded will suffer for being moved, we must return home tonight.'

  Her Force Commander did not argue the necessity, but strode off and mustered his warriors and efficiently made arrangements to depart. Battle-weary and bandaged, the three survivors from Mara's original guard were given places of honour at the head of the march. Kevin and two litter-borne wounded were carried next, and after them, the honourably slain. Mara insisted on staying afoot. Her bearers lived, but with their trained ability to manage burdens without jostling, they were assigned to carry the injured. The Lady of the Acoma walked beside her unconscious body slave. Kevin had been given a draught for his pain that left him deeply asleep. She held his unbandaged hand and alternated between aching sorrow and fury.

  She had not heeded warnings that Tasaio might have compromised Arakasi's network. She had seen only her growing power, had been lured into thinking that because she was now Clan Warchief, it was her natural due that lesser families should clamour for her favour. Nacoya had cautioned her; Keyoke had most pointedly avoided a confrontation with her, precisely that he could be free to forestall the disaster of the trap she had foolishly conceded to Tasaio.

  Twenty-seven good warriors from her honour guard were dead. Lujan had lost another twelve in the course of her rescue, and Kevin might never walk again without a limp.

  The price was far too high.

  Mara clenched her hand, then belatedly relaxed her grip; she squeezed only Kevin, who had stood as staunchly as any of her warriors. She did not feel the stones under her feet, or notice the occasional hand on her elbow as Lujan steadied her over the gullies. She barely noticed the coming and going of the scout patrols, as they repeatedly swept the surrounding woods for e
nemies; she thought only upon the shame of her own false pride; and she wondered, over and over, what she would say to Arakasi.

  The moon set. The darkness under the trees matched the darkness in Mara's heart as she marched numbly, dwelling long and hard on recriminations until she reached the borders of her estate.

  Another patrol of soldiers awaited her there, armed and carrying torches. Mara was weary enough that it took her a moment to realize the anomaly of this added company's presence. Lujan was speaking with the Patrol Leader, and as she heard Ayaki's name, a chill washed over her, fright jolting her alert.

  She pushed away from Kevin's litter and hurried to her Force Commander's side. 'What has happened to my son?'

  Lujan caught her shoulders firmly. 'He is alive, my Lady.'

  That reassurance did not blunt the edge of Mara's urgency. Even in the wind-caught flicker of the torch light, the reporting Patrol Leader's face showed strain. Terrified that the disaster that had overtaken her might not have been confined to the glen, Mara demanded, 'Has there been an attack upon my house?'

  'My Lady, an assassin was sent.' The Patrol Leader tersely bowed. Trained by Keyoke to be concise, he delivered the news like a battle report. 'Ayaki suffered a minor cut, but is otherwise unharmed. Two nurses died, and Nacoya, First Adviser, was killed in the child's defence. The estate grounds have been searched, with no sign of other enemies found. The assassin apparently stole in alone. Keyoke reinforced all border patrols and sent us to bolster your escort.'

  But Mara heard none of the details, past knowledge that Ayaki had suffered hurt and that Nacoya, who had been a mother to her since childhood, was dead. Her knees felt weak, and her mind was shocked past thinking. She did not feel the arm that Lujan slipped under her elbow to steady her. She heard but did not comprehend the words her Force Commander said to the Patrol Leader, dispatching a runner to fetch a replacement litter.

  Nacoya was dead, and Ayaki injured. She needed Kevin's arms around her, and the comfort of his love through this nightmare; but he lay bandaged in a litter, unconscious from a healing draught.