FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Ah, so you know the child,” the old man said with a grin.

  “My sister,” Darik said fighting down his tears. “I was afraid I’d never see her again.”

  “Fortune smiles on you today, boy. Come. Whelan is always in a rush.” He grinned at the taller man, who ignored him, scanning the thickening crowds ahead of him for a way out of the square.

  The tall man, Whelan, kept quiet after they left the Grand Bazaar, but the other man kept up a steady stream of conversation as they made their way to the Bakers Corner, a quarter square mile held by the tiny bakers guild near the center of Balsalom. The two men were also slaves of this Graiyan, who owned twelve ovens, two servants and eight slaves before he bought Darik and Kaya and had carved a moderate prosperity from the quality of his baked goods.

  The older man—he said his name was Markal—proudly declared that Graiyan’s kitchen made the best bread in the Grand Bazaar, and Darik had to bite his tongue to keep from shouting, “What is that to me, old man? I’m a slave.”

  Over the next few weeks, Darik avoided making trouble until he could come up with a plan for escape. Graiyan was a stern master, but not cruel. When his slaves finished selling Graiyan’s goods in the Grand Bazaar, they could sell their own loaves made from sweepings. Guild law didn’t allow a slave to buy his freedom, but he could prosper in his own right, even buying his own ovens and slaves and enriching himself and his master in the process. Darik got up early every morning with Whelan and Markal, the two slaves who’d rescued him from the salt mines. The two men baked their own loaves before the others rose. Darik quickly formed a friendship with them.

  He settled into a familiar pattern, so comfortable that he knew he could live it for the rest of his life if forced to do so. Rise early to bake the extra loaves, then pass the morning kneading dough and blistering himself in front of the ovens. Spend the afternoon in the Grand Bazaar or the bakers souk, haggling to sell Graiyan’s wares. Return in the evening for dinner and a couple of precious hours before bed when the slaves gathered to talk, drink wine, and smoke hookahs.

  But then Darik discovered that Graiyan had different designs for the brother and sister. Darik slept with the slaves and sold bread. Kaya slept in the nursery next to Graiyan and his wife’s room. Elethra couldn’t have children, Whelan told him, and had fallen in love with the young girl. Kaya would be raised as their own child.

  The thought burned him alive with rage.

  “If you make trouble,” Whelan warned while leavening the dough one morning, “Graiyan will sell you to the mines. He harbors no dissent from his slaves.”

  “I won’t let it happen. She’s the blood of my parents.” He groaned. “But what can I do?”

  Old Markal looked up from soaking his hands in a bucket of water. Darik still thought him something of a fool. He’d burned them again. Markal grinned in that gap-toothed way of his. “There is something.”

  Whelan stayed quiet, looking down at his loaf of bread. Darik turned back to Markal for an explanation.

  The old slave glanced at Whelan then nodded solemnly. “Sanctuary.”

  Sanctuary! The idea consumed every spare thought from that moment on.

  Sanctuary meant reaching the Citadel, that great tower rising from the midst of the barbarian’s greatest city, Arvada, a hundred and fifty miles to the west in the Eriscoban Free Kingdoms. A fanatical sect of warriors jealously guarded its right to grant Sanctuary, just as a second sect of wizards guarded the magical secrets of the Citadel. Their rules were strict: arrive at the Citadel of your own power, not carried by man or beast; come without worldly possessions; be purged in a ritual that might kill or maim.

  But if you survived, the Brotherhood of the Thorne would buy your freedom, pay your debts, and pardon your crimes. And a young man like himself would also earn the right to join the Brotherhood and train to become a Knight Temperate, if he so desired. The practice infuriated the khalifs, but the barbarians had grown so strong that it would take war to overthrow Sanctuary.

  Whelan told him the plan while they baked bread one morning before the other slaves awoke. “Markal and I earned forty dinarii in the last nine months. Yesterday I bought enough provisions to last us a hundred and fifty miles on foot. I hid it outside the city.”

  Darik nodded. “What did you buy?”

  Whelan shrugged. “Food, extra boots, cloaks to keep us warm through the mountains. Enough. We’ll discard everything when we stand in front of the Citadel.”

  A hard edge played at the corner of the tall man’s eyes. His father was a barbarian from the Eriscoban Free Kingdoms, but Whelan said he’d grown up in Mascadas fifty miles east along the Tothian Way, rising to the rank of captain in the khalif’s guard. But one night after drinking too much, he’d argued with the khalif’s pasha and struck him across the brow with the pommel of his sword. The pasha was merciful. He could have ordered Whelan beheaded. Instead, he’d stripped Whelan’s rank and sold him to a caravan traveling west. After Whelan exchanged angry words with the merchant who owned the caravan, the man sold him to Graiyan. Whelan maintained that he had since learned to control his temper.

  Darik looked at Markal, who grinned and nodded his agreement. “And me?”

  “We got a good price in the market. We have enough food and supplies for a third,” Markal said, a little too eagerly. “We wouldn’t leave you behind.”

  Darik frowned, struggling to understand the look that passed between the two men. He worried that they were setting him up. “I have no money. No knowledge of the Way or any other roads. Why tell me this?”

  Whelan hesitated. He said, “We like you well enough, Darik, but the truth is, Markal shouldn’t have told you our plans. It was a mistake. I considered my options. I talked to a man yesterday who was to rob you on the way back from the market and slit your throat while I watched. I couldn’t risk having you tell Graiyan.”

  Darik’s heart pounded that he’d come so close to death. It all made sense, now. He didn’t trust Markal to keep his mouth shut, either. When Darik spoke, his voice was shrill. “Why didn’t you?”

  Whelan shrugged. “I told you, we like you. And it’s not your fault that the old fool couldn’t keep his mouth shut.” Markal looked at his feet, but Whelan ignored him. “So it’s your decision, Darik. Will you come with us?”

  Only one thing didn’t fit. He was old enough to carry his own weight along the Way and through the mountains. But it would be a difficult journey on foot. Even without a two-year-old child.

  “And Kaya? What of her?”

  Whelan shifted on his heels, looking at his hands. He opened the oven and pulled out some loaves of bread one by one with a bread paddle. A blast of heat roiled from the oven and made beads of sweat stand on their skin.

  “We leave the city and here’s what we do,” Whelan said at last. “We divide up the provisions equally. Every man carries his own burden. What you do with them after that is your business. You’ll have to forage for food alongside the road or go hungry some meals, and you’ll have to carry your share and the child. Can you do it?”

  Darik imagined such a journey. Sore feet, Kaya whining for more food, and begging to be carried. Hunger gnawing at his belly for a hundred and fifty miles.

  But what of their plan? Leaving Balsalom would free him of slavery. Head south to Darnad, or west to the Free Kingdoms and nobody would think him a slave. He didn’t need Sanctuary for that. But Sanctuary could provide something that escape wouldn’t.

  Honor. Join the Brotherhood of the Thorne and become a Knight Temperate. Repair the tatters of his family’s honor. He owed as much to Kaya, if not to himself.

  “Yes, I’ll care for her myself,” he said. “Thank you.” He couldn’t help but notice that Whelan had called him a man. Darik passed a look to Markal. “And I’ll keep the secret.”

  Whelan said, “You’ll owe us each fourteen dinarii plus usury when we reach Eriscoba. You’ll have to find some way to pay off your debt.”

  “Of course.”<
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  Whelan didn’t wait long to spring their escape. The next day, he pulled Darik aside for a moment while Markal haggled with a customer in the market. The customer had light skin like a barbarian, but that wasn’t unusual in Balsalom, since Eriscoba lay just over the mountains to the west. Witness Whelan.

  The customer wanted to sample the ginger cakes, the sesame bread, the sweet meats, but couldn’t decide what to buy. All the while, he held out the promise of a major purchase, perhaps enough that they could sell the rest of Graiyan’s goods by early afternoon and their own wares until the Grand Bazaar closed at seven bells.

  The man weighed a heavy purse in his hand and sighed. “I need enough to feed my wife’s sister and her seven starving whelps for three days, but if it doesn’t taste right she’ll complain to my wife, and my wife, in turn, will make me wish I was lying in the road, gnawed by wild dogs.”

  Markal blinked nervously. This time of year, with the fall festivals coming, they’d sell their goods anyway, but he took his haggling seriously. “Take the cakes and I’ll give you a loaf of soured millet. Two dinarii, six crana.”

  The man shook his head and weighed his purse again. Darik could see him struggling against spending that much money, although Darik had no idea if the man’s story was true, or just a story. There was no question that Graiyan’s goods were more expensive than most coming out of the baker’s corner, but from the way the man’s eyes widened when he tasted the ginger cakes, he’d also appreciated their quality.

  “I don’t know. Two and six?” He let out a low whistle. “A lot of money. How about two?”

  Markal groaned and threw up his hands. “Go somewhere else then, and stop eating my food before I call the watchman!”

  Laughing at the old slave’s haggling techniques, Darik let Whelan pull him aside. They stepped toward a troupe of brightly colored musicians playing for coins in the squat shadow cast by a tan mudstone building that encroached on the edge of the square. A placard hanging from the door was painted with the coin-laden scales of the moneylenders guild.

  Darik glanced through the slats on the window, instinctive dislike rising like bile when he saw the moneylender himself. Moneylenders had ruined his father with their usury, charging higher and higher rates as Father’s situation grew more desperate. Darik couldn’t hear the conversation, but gestures told him enough. The moneylender sat on a velvet cushion haggling with a man squatting across from him on the carpet; the borrower trembled in anticipation at the huge pile of gold coins stacked between them. The moneylender gnawed on a joint of meat, occasionally gesturing at the money and shrugging as if to say the money itself was a trifling thing.

  The midday chimes of the bakers tower turned Darik’s attention. The master baker had commissioned the white stone minaret at the edge of the Grand Bazaar two years ago to match the bell towers of the other guilds, draining the small guild’s coffers dry in the process.

  Other towers joined in. The troupe of barbarians struggled to be heard against the bells. The musicians scrambled together a grating mix of lutes and barbarian gut pipes that didn’t harmonize well with the guild towers.

  Darik looked back at Markal haggling harder than ever, regretting that the music and the shouts of a slave auction further into the square drowned out the show.

  “Did you see what just happened?” Whelan asked.

  Darik shook his head. “With Markal and the man trying to buy the bread? No. What do you mean?”

  Whelan smiled. “Good. Then hopefully nobody else did either.” He explained. “We feared that the man might be followed so he pretended to be a customer. If the man told Markal that Hasdini’s man wanted three dinarii for worse bread, that meant he’d hidden our supplies where the north aqueduct meets the Nye River. If he offered two, which he did, that means that we’ll find them in the Tombs of the Kings, just beyond the west wall of the city.”

  Darik was surprised. “I had no idea that Markal could put on such an act.”

  “Oh, he wasn’t. The two dinarii offering price was solely for my benefit. I imagine our friend from the smugglers guild will haggle for a few more minutes, make a couple of small purchases, then leave Markal grumbling.”

  Darik smiled at the thought. He understood Whelan’s caution. Slaves were too costly, and Eriscoba too close. The watchmans guild closely watched the city gates for escaping slaves.

  They made their way back to Graiyan’s canopy, where the customer moved on with his bag of bread. Grinning, Markal marked notches in the stick with his knife to count the number of loaves sold. Whelan had been wrong about that much, anyway. It appeared that Markal’s haggling had convinced the smuggler of the quality of their wares, despite other motives.

  In the center of the square, the giant bells atop the merchants minaret chimed, drowning out the smaller bell towers of the other guilds. The merchants purposely started their song late to remind the other guilds how much wealthier and more powerful they were. Indeed, their tower stood taller and broader than any other in the city, save Toth’s View near the Great Gates, and the stone carvings and gold leaf offsetting the white stone made it more elegant than any but the artists tower.

  The bells, the barbarian pipers, and the shouts of merchants hawking their wares blended into a noisy cacophony. Darik’s stomach churned with just as much vigor. Tonight, they would run. Whelan didn’t need to remind him what happened to runaway slaves after capture. Public castration, followed by a short, unhappy life in the salt mines.

  That night, Whelan and Darik told Markal about the transaction in the bazaar as they made their final preparations. The old man was annoyed that he’d been duped by his co-conspirators, but Whelan convinced him it had been necessary.

  Whelan turned to Darik. “I’ll knock on your door one hour after Graiyan takes his evening wine.”

  Every night after his wife went to sleep, the baker crept down to the kitchen and unlocked the wine chest and drank two glasses. Darik could hear his heavy steps past his door shortly thereafter.

  “And then what? We just walk out the front door?”

  “The watchman keeps a close eye on the bakery. We can’t just walk out the door. No, you look out the window and I’ll go down to the street and toss you a rope. We’ll slip out the back alley.”

  One problem with that plan, Darik noted. No mention of Kaya. He opened his mouth to ask, but stopped himself. No doubt Whelan’s omission was intentional. How else could the man omit the reasoning behind Darik’s escape in the first place? With all of his earlier talk, he had no intention of making a dangerous trek through the mountains with a two-year-old child in tow.

  Darik lay in bed a few hours later, formulating his true plan. Outside the window, the bell towers chimed curfew. Slaves chanted as they marched home from the mines and whips cracked against their backs to speed them along. Crickets chirped, hanging in tiny cages at the threshold of every house, their songs frightening away the spirits of the dead. A cool breeze blew in through the window, carrying spiced desert air.

  The success of his plan depended upon two unknowns. First, could he keep Kaya quiet? And second, did he have the nerve to move fast enough?

  The floorboards creaked overhead and Darik lay quiet, listening. Graiyan, going down to the kitchen for his wine. As predictable as the chiming of the merchants tower. Graiyan would pause at the top of the stairs to see if Elethra woke and called out to him, but she never did. In fact, if Darik threw open his door, he’d hear her snoring. Two months ago she’d slept through a thunderstorm that blew down the thorn tree growing in front of the bakery.

  Graiyan, however, tossed and turned all night, sometimes pacing the hallways when he couldn’t sleep. Hence the wine to soothe his nerves. Darik didn’t dare creep into the room while the man slept. While he drank his wine, however, his wife slept alone, and Darik’s sister in the room beyond. Darik would creep into the baker’s unlocked room, take Kaya and return to wait for Whelan’s knock on the door.

  Graiyan’s heavy feet creake
d on the stairs. He walked slowly down the hall, stepping lightly past each door. He tried to keep his night drinking a secret, but all of the slaves and servants knew. No doubt Elethra did as well when she saw the extra wine purchases on the ledger. Graiyan stepped into the kitchen farther down the hall and pulled the door shut behind him.

  Darik dropped from bed, his feet bare against the cool stone floor. He would move much more quietly up the stairs than the heavy baker; he had plenty of practice stealing out of his father’s house at night to play in the children’s garden. But as he turned toward his bedroom door, he heard a sound that turned his careful plans into disarray.

  “Boy!” a voice cried softly outside the window.

  Darik froze at the door, horrified. He hurried back to the window and threw open the curtains. Whelan stood in the street below, face pinched and nervous. He held a small olive-oil lamp in his right hand. No, Darik thought. Please, not yet. Whelan was supposed to wait until after Graiyan returned from his wine, then knock on the door first.

  Darik looked down the alley for Markal but saw no sign of the older slave. “What happened?”

  “No time to explain. Here, catch this rope.” He threw a rope up to the window. Darik caught it and tied it to the curtain post.

  He looked down to Whelan. “Wait a moment.” He held up his hand at the expression on Whelan’s face. “Please, just a minute. I’ll be right back. My sister.”

  “No! Darik.”

  Darik turned from the window, opened the door and ran down the hall, then up the stairs toward Graiyan’s bedroom, all caution fled.

  The stairs creaked their alarm to any listeners, but Darik didn’t dare stop. He had to get Kaya out and back to his room before Whelan gave up and left. If Graiyan found him with Kaya . . . well, he’d been down that unhappy road in his mind more often than he cared to admit.