Pale Queen's Courtyard

by Marcin Wrona

  Chapter 6: Letters

  Shimurg had already flown over the Serpent’s Bones when Kamvar shaped a final tablet from the clay in his water-bowl. He had written several letters already, first by the dappled afternoon light shining through Lugal Zagezi’s gardens, then, as the sky darkened, by the oil lamp in his own chambers.

  It was slow going. He was used to ink on vellum, or papyrus woven from mulched bulrushes, but these were not commonly used in Ekka. Pressing a stylus into clay felt clumsy. His hand was messy and uneven, something a barely-lettered child might write in the tablet house.

  The first of his several letters had been compelled by duty – a report even now speeding its way to Sinmalik, carried by a messenger with two fresh horses galloping alongside his own, and two guards besides. Barsam would have to know what had happened here. Kamvar wondered how the Hound would react to their losses. Three men dead – No, four; do not forget the Lugal’s guardsman – and Yazan badly burned. Even if they had come away with the girl, it would hardly be considered a success.

  The next of his letters were compelled by compassion. Three of his brothers had died, and he had taken it on himself to send letters of condolence to their families: the usual rote recitations of piety and honour, of men dying bravely and for a greater cause, of Shinvat and Vashedin. He hated writing them, but who else could? Yazan was his elder, but he’d spent the evening among poultices and prayers. Tahmin… Tahmin had not taken the day’s events well and had gone off on his own. He dealt poorly with death.

  Finally, his duty discharged, Kamvar turned his attention to a letter compelled by love, addressed to that simple farm holding in the shadow of Mesav Peak.

  Sahar, my light, this letter that I write to you is a difficult one. I do not wish to cause you grief, or to make you ill with fear for me, but neither will I lie and tell you all is well.

  We left Sarvagadis in high spirits, hunting an unfortunate young girl cursed with a talent for sorcery. We thought we had caught her trail in a manor in the very west of this country, but instead it was the trail of a different sorcerer, this one a murderer and thief who fled to Inatum, a nearby city. Majid believed we would be able to catch the man without abandoning our duty, and I was happy for it. Who would not be, when the alternative is to go after a child?

  Kamvar wrote slowly at first, considering his words carefully. He soon lost himself in the letter, words spilling forth like beer over a mug’s rim.

  We were brash, overconfident. It made him angry. Seven armed men had gone in pursuit of a thief with less than a half-day’s lead, and had found his trail in Inatum within a day’s time. It should have been an easy Hunt, and yet…

  We found the thief, but he was not surprised. He killed Shadmehr in the street where we tried to apprehend him, and ran into the sewers. We followed after but lost his trail, and found instead the girl we had been sent after. It had seemed a masterstroke of luck at the time – even had they lost the thief, the girl was their true quarry. Had she been captured, this stay in Ekka would have been cut mercifully short; he could have been on his way downriver within days, and from the delta to Sarvagadis and home.

  But again, they had taken the situation too lightly.

  Angramash has a wicked sense of humour. Her power was horrific, Sahar. Manoush tried to dispel her fear of us, but she screamed, and I do not know exactly what happened after. I saw Manoush fall, and then I was panicked, terrified. Images flitted before my eyes that I will not describe, and I ran – and so did the rest of us, scattering like mice. I had no choice, no control. I just ran, as fast and far as my legs could take me.

  He stopped there, laying the tablet aside, and let out a deep breath. It had been some time since he had thought of his father. When the girl had shrieked, it was his father that he saw, first smiling through a black beard and telling his son that he would return before the rains came, then lying raven-pecked on snow stained red, his head shattered by the blow of an axe.

  The image had repeated a second time, but the son wore the face of Ashuz, the father his own, and the Dolnayans walked from the battlefield and struck south, raping and pillaging as they went, moving inexorably towards a farmstead where a widowed wife comforted a weeping son.

  The thought had incited in Kamvar a blind terror, and he had hurtled headlong into the sewers, trying desperately to reach his home and spirit away his family before the barbarians descended upon them.

  He had never felt such a thing before. Kamvar had been the target of sorcery twice in the course of carrying out his duty – being a Huntsman carried that risk, and they all knew it – but never this way. What the girl had done to him was not deadly, and yet more invasive by far than anything he had suffered before. He felt tainted by the doubts and fears that had assailed his mind, insidious sorceries that he did not have the strength to resist. The thought of a Daiva having access to his mind terrified him.

  The most dangerous sorcery he had faced prior to this accursed trip to Ekka was that of a wood witch, a young girl that possessed the animals of the mountains in which she lived. They had lost Vasha and Hasan that day. Vasha’s ribs were smashed to splinters by the great paw of a mountain bear, and Hasan had fallen to his death after a herd of rams knocked him from a narrow mountain path, half of them blindly following after. Yet even that terrible day seemed pale before this one.

  When I came to, I found myself stumbling blindly through the dark of Inatum’s sewers. Ahamash be praised, I had the foresight to put a torch in my belt earlier, in case the one we carried went out. I tried to follow a path I did not remember running, calling out the names of my brothers in the hope that they would hear me. But when I found them…

  He remembered his return to that corridor. He had come across Yazan first, unconscious, and when he tried to wake him he saw the ruin that only fire could have made of his face, the skin already white and blistered in places. What awaited him in the sewer tunnels was worse, much worse: Majid lying in a pool of blood, his throat ripped to pieces, and Manoush – poor, young Manoush, who joined them in Hasan’s place – dead, his back arched and face frozen into a screaming mask of terror.

  Kamvar felt tears gather, and he clenched his jaw, his head swimming with an angry litany of curses. Three men dead, and Majid among them, the first and only Hound he had ever followed.

  I don’t know how I’m going to sleep tonight, he thought. He would train a bit, he decided, and hopefully weary himself enough that he would collapse without dreaming. First, though, he had to finish his letter. Sighing, he returned to the tablet.

  When Manoush fell, it was to his death. I do not know why he died when the rest of us only ran in terror, but now he is gone. Majid lay dead as well, his throat cut. I found Yazan nearby, unconscious, his face horribly burned. He told me later that the thief had found them, and that the girl was in his custody.

  That was bad. That they had failed to bring in the girl was unfortunate, but could be forgiven. Such things happened. But if their efforts had only led one sorcerer to another, and allowed the two to join forces… well, that would look very ill on Majid’s command. Not that it really mattered any more, Kamvar supposed. Majid was dead.

  The city’s Lugal – that is how the Ekkadi call their kings – has sealed every exit from the city, but the thief has not turned up.

  No doubt he had followed the sewers to the Shalumes. Tahmin had asked the Lugal’s men to post guards along the river, some men at each place where the sewers ran into the water, but they had not yet heard any news. The murderer must have left the city well before the guards arrived at their posts. It had taken some time – and shouting himself hoarse – to find Akosh and Tahmin. He and Akosh had carried Yazan while Tahmin ran ahead to warn the Lugal’s men of what had happened. They had already been mobilized, but even still, he doubted his request was typical. It took too long to find the sewer map from the public works office, and longer still to follow it to each sluice. It was a failed effort from the start.

  We brought our fa
llen brothers to the surface, allowed them to lie in honour in the eyes of the Shimurg…

  The funerals had taken place shortly after noon. The Lugal had given them a carriage, so that their fallen brothers could ride in dignity to their final sacrament. The survivors followed it through streets crowded with citizens. Men and women whispered to each other, and their curious children pulled at sleeves and tunics asking what had happened.

  They chose as the funereal site a grassy plain north of the Shalumes, and they let their brothers lie there, in view of the Shimurg. While the Huntsmen followed their own custom – each man standing relating a tale of a man fallen – Akosh and their Ekkadi escort buried Hanasib, the guard who had been killed, and sang a prayer to one of their many gods in an Ekkadi dialect of which he had understood only a few words.

  “I was a member of Majid’s Hunt for three years,” Kamvar had said of their leader, “and in that time I came to learn what a singular man he was. A Hound, certainly, but also a man – a man who laughed and drank and diced with us. When my son Ashuz was born, I was still a student at the seminary, having just been assigned to his unit, and our Ekkadi language exams were fast approaching. To my great surprise, Majid allowed me to put off the exam. To my even greater surprise, he roused our entire unit and galloped to my farmstead, so that I could name my child and feast his birth in the company of my brothers.”

  Tahmin spoke of Manoush next, and the tale he told was one that always made Kamvar smile. “When Manoush and Shadmehr first came among us in the Seminary, after Hasan and Vasha crossed the bridge, I was worried they were too green. Manoush in particular looked so… dainty. Like he had never lifted a hand to the plow, much less the spear. Being an idiot, I decided I would test him – and hopefully bruise that pretty face a little – by challenging him to a fistfight. We attracted quite a crowd, he and I, brothers cheering in a ring around us, and money changing hands. So I closed in, showing off a little, and then he came at me. Ahamash, I’d never faced a man so quick with his fists before in my life. Before I knew it, I was stumbling around dazed, nose smashed open, and then I was on the ground.” Tahmin chuckled sadly. “And Kamvar has never let me forget that he bet against me and made enough money to buy a new ox.”

  Yazan, naturally, spoke of Shadmehr. Kamvar wanted him to stay behind, with the healers, that they could keep his face clean and free of infection, but he could hardly ask a man to forgo his closest friend’s funeral. So he came, a gauzy strip of cloth hanging across his face like a woman’s veil, and mumbled through lips cracked and bubbling.

  “Shad was my dearest friend,” he had said, speaking slowly and deliberately through the pain it must have caused him. “We had not known each other long, but in that time we forged first a friendship, then a love. In his love of learning, he reminded me, old man that I am, of what it was to be young, of my own sons and daughter, and their endless questions. I asked Shad once why he had joined the Hunt. He shrugged, and said simply, ‘To see the world.’ That was Shad – everything he did, he did out of curiosity.”

  They stood together in silence a moment, and when the Ekkadi heaped the last shovel of earth on Hanasib’s grave, they left. The Ekkadi probably thought them barbarians for leaving their men to the jackals and birds, but Kamvar did not care. The longer Shimurg had to gaze upon them, the more He would come to love the fine men they had been. They had returned and built pyres this morning.

  He etched another symbol into the tablet, a horizontal line scored by a number of smaller vertical cuts. One day, long ago, it might have looked like the dog it was intended to represent.

  …and I have sent a letter to Hound Barsam – a thoroughly unpleasant man – informing him of these events. I am sure this will occasion some censure from the Temple, but these deaths are on their heads. Perhaps it is heresy to say so, I do not know, but they could have warned us about the danger this girl posed, or sent more Hounds, or… I don’t know. Something.

  Was that unfair? Perhaps it was – who was Kamvar to question the Prophet’s orders? – but still. They had not been prepared, not seriously, and they had lost men. It was true that regular men rarely had reason to know the secrets Hounds kept to themselves, but the Huntsmen were not city guards. They were the finest warriors of the Kingpriest and the Empire of Merezad that bore his name. To lose their lives in battle was one thing, but to be told nothing of the danger that awaited them?

  Tam is well, praise Ahamash, and I am well also – if greatly shaken.

  I do not know what will happen next. Were the decision mine, I would return immediately to Sarvash, but I expect we will continue the Hunt. I will write to you soon.

  Tell Ashuz that his father thinks of him constantly.

  I hate to make of you a harbinger, but please read this letter to my mother as well. I know you do not always get along, but she too has a right to know what has happened here. I will not ask you not to worry; know simply that I love you and that I will do whatever it takes to return safely home.

  The letter complete, Kamvar sighed and leaned back on his stool. They had been left to their own devices that night, which was fine. The Lugal had probably thought the Huntsmen too shaken to sit at royal banquet, pestered by inquisitive nobles. He was right. Unworthy though it was, Kamvar simmered with an anger he struggled to contain, and he did not particularly want to build a reputation for punching out Ekkadi noblemen.

  He placed the tablet beside the oil lamp, with the others. In the morning, they would be dry enough that the writing would not smudge. Lugal Zagezi had graciously offered the use of his own messengers to carry the letters to Sarvash. He was an honourable man.

  Kamvar stood up and left the room he and Tahmin shared, bending nimbly to snatch his spear from the floor where it lay.

  The palace corridors were mostly empty at this hour, even the servants and slaves having retired for a well-earned sleep. He nodded to a guard as he passed through the doors that led outside, and got a perfunctory nod in return. The night was cool, as it could so often be at the tail end of the Rain Days, even when the afternoons were hot and dry. Akosh had told them during their ride to Inatum that dry Rain Days were common, and that the Shalumes often swelled and flooded when strong rains did fall, carrying away entire villages in its wake.

  Rivers did not do that sort of thing in Sarvash.

  It had taken him some time to get used to the weather here. His homeland was a country of winds, of mountains and plateaus. Snow was known to fall in winter – he had seen such, even in the foothills where he tended his farmstead – and the Rain Days were worthy of the name.

  Ekka was a strange country, he decided, picking out a spot atop the palace’s step where he would not be disturbed. He stretched out his arms and waist, then squatted several times to get blood flowing to his legs. He was bemused to note that they still ached with the morning’s exertions. He’d been lax in his training.

  Kamvar took up his spear, and began the Snake Dance, dashing around in triangle patterns and arcs, and weaving his body about to avoid imaginary thrusts. Sometimes, he returned one, or punched out with the shaft of his spear to knock out the teeth of an imaginary adversary who drew too close. In time, he began to strike more often, now a high thrust, now a low, and now a whirling strike that could cut with the elongated spearhead of the Hunt’s chosen weapon, or shatter bones with its haft.

  “Pretty,” said someone behind him, the voice that of an old man. Kamvar had not heard anyone approach. He turned to see Akosh stroking his beard and appraising him as a man might a horse.

  “More than pretty,” he said, breathing a little too quickly for his taste. “The Snake Dance teaches a man to attack with every inch of a spear, instead of hiding behind a shield and poking with the tip like an infantryman.”

  Akosh snorted. “You know, boy, I was an infantryman, and I wasn’t a half-bad duelist either.”

  “Oh?” Unsurprising. Akosh had, for all his bulk, kept up with them during the sewer chase without complaint – with ease, e
ven. He was certainly more than a simple hired guard.

  “Yes. Come with me,” the old man said, turning around and beckoning to him. Kamvar shrugged and followed.

  Akosh led him to another end of the palace, where a set of circles had been chalked into the ground. A number of racks stood by the wall, stacked with padded wooden poles of all shapes and sizes.

  “Training yard, for the guards,” said Akosh. “I was working with them a bit earlier. Come, show me just how deadly that Snake Dance of yours is.”

  Kamvar grinned, and selected a wooden pole as long as he was tall, both ends swaddled in cloth padding. Akosh took up two sticks that curved sharply at their ends.

  Kamvar bowed his head to his opponent, saw him return the gesture, and started to dance, weaving about the yard to keep his distance from the old man, who advanced cautiously.

  He threw two quick thrusts to test the man’s reflexes. They were good. The first thrust was easily batted aside, the second… Akosh slipped under the second, letting the padded head of Kamvar’s stick pass harmlessly over his shoulder, and careened toward him, right axe held high. His left slid along Kamvar’s pole, keeping it in check.

  Kamvar leapt back and spun, delivered a whirling strike with his spear that Akosh turned to block, both sticks held out in front of him. The impact was jarring, the strike hard enough to shatter an arm or a skull. Kamvar was not fighting to kill, but sometimes, in the heat of training, such details were forgotten.

  The old man did not seem to mind, if indeed he noticed. A savage grin lit up his face as he lashed out with his left axe, aiming for Kamvar’s ribs. The younger man leapt back, and Akosh followed. Before he could get his bearings, the old man was already uncomfortably close, his axes whirling one over the other, blurring together. Kamvar heard the impact of stick on stick as he twisted and parried in a desperate defense. He realized, when the opportunity came to push Akosh back with a foot planted square in his broad chest, that he had somehow weathered the old man’s barrage.

  He had to attack, to end this quickly. Akosh had already regained his balance. He was breathing heavily, wheezing like a bellows, but the look in his face was not one of exhaustion. Kamvar feinted a thrust at his face, then redirected it, attacking his opponent’s legs. Akosh danced back, as he expected, then blocked the follow-up thrust and rushed in once more, as expected.

  Kamvar pulled his spear back, sliding his hands closer to the head, as though intending to fight in close. He made as if to strike with the head, then leaned forward, swinging the butt of the spear across from his back, in a tight arc that ended at the old man’s head.

  Or would have.

  He heard the loud clack of wood striking wood, and then the impact of Akosh’s bull charge dashed the wind from his lungs. He found himself wrapped in a bear hug, his spear trapped uselessly, a padded pretend-blade at his throat.

  “S-scorpion Tail, eh?” Akosh huffed, letting Kamvar out of his grasp. “Seen th-that one before.”

  Kamvar laughed, and bowed his head in respect. “I underestimated you gravely, old man.”

  “Old just means I’ve learned more tricks,” Akosh replied. “I was a soldier too, once. Fought with axes, clubs, spears… even stood at the wall and pulled a bow.”

  “What did I do wrong?”

  “Wrong? Bah, you were good. I was just better. When I was a young man, maybe a few years younger than you, my people – I am from Karhan – warred with the Artalum. They liked spears, so we trained to defeat spears.”

  There was a momentary silence, and Akosh added, “There is one thing. When a man’s good at closing with you, every heartbeat – every fraction of a heartbeat – counts. The Scorpion Tail may defeat a man who does not expect it, and I’ll wager most don’t, but it is risky. Takes too long, for one thing. You should just punch out with the shaft, or kick your man away, like you did me earlier. That was prettily done. Won’t score a kill, but it won’t kill you as readily.”

  Kamvar nodded. They had been taught as much by their trainers, but he had found too many times that fights favoured the bold. Still, Akosh had defeated him soundly. It was something to consider.

  “Thank you, Akosh,” he said, “for the training. We will have to do this again.”

  Akosh clapped him on the shoulder, and grunted assent. For a moment, neither man spoke. Kamvar turned and watched twinkling points of light falling to the earth, a black sky their backdrop.

  “The Ekkadi believe the night-fires to be warriors, Ashuras, I think they call them. Men who served the gods bravely in life, and who continue to do so in death,” Kamvar said. He’d learned as much in the seminary.

  Akosh nodded, looking at him curiously.

  “My people believe them to be the Shimurg’s feathers, floating down to earth, where they become the birds.”

  “And?”

  “They look like neither.”

  Akosh laughed at that. “The Karhani once believed the night-fires to be literally that, the cook-fires of our ancestors in the other world. The desert men to the south believe them to be the souls of their fathers, hung by their gods in the sky that they might keep an eye on their descendants. The fire-eyes even further believe them to be droplets of blood spilling from the body of a dying god.”

  “Have you ever wondered why it is that we are so certain of our beliefs when men the world over hold different gods to their breast as lovingly as we do ours?” Kamvar asked. He had asked Sahar that once, and Tahmin – though Tam had only rolled his eyes. He never dared ask a Hound, or a priest, for fear of the boring lecture that would undoubtedly follow.

  “I thought about these things when I was younger, like you.”

  “And what answers did you come up with?”

  Akosh shrugged. “My answer is that you should believe what you believe, without worrying so much about who’s priests are correct. Does it matter what the night-fires are, so long as they give us light to see by?”

  Kamvar had asked Sahar a question of that sort once as well. Smiling, she had chided him for spending so much time locked away in his own head, struggling with questions meant for priests. But she had no opinion on the difference between feathers and warriors.

  “I don’t know,” Kamvar answered quietly, and he meant it.

  Later that night, Kamvar woke to the sound of a door opening.

  “Tam?” he asked. “Where have you been?”

  “Praying,” said Tahmin.

  Kamvar rolled over on his cot. The weak light of the night-lamp sent shadows dancing across Tahmin’s face as he undressed. He looked tired.

  “You spent the entire evening in prayer?” he asked.

  The look in Tahmin’s eyes was baleful. “You know, Kam,” he replied, his voice venomous, “some of us holy warriors do turn to Ahamash for guidance.”

  “Oh, come off it,” Kamvar said, a little more angrily than he had intended. Faith had been the source of so many arguments between them, and while most were good-natured, there were times when one man or the other was not at his best, and they could grow heated. “I know I’m no Jazd, but don’t start with all this. I mourn our brothers in my way, you mourn them in yours.”

  He rolled over, turning his face back to the wall. “Good night, Tam,” he said.

  For a moment, the room was silent.

  “Good night, Kam,” Tahmin said finally. “I’m sorry, I’m just… just on edge.”

  Kamvar grunted dismissively, and closed his eyes. Some time later, when weariness finally threatened to pull him back into what he hoped would be a dreamless sleep, Tahmin cleared his throat.

  “Kamvar?” he said.

  “Yes?”

  “What did… what did you see? When the girl cast her spell.”

  He had expected Tahmin would ask him that eventually, if not so soon. They had few secrets from each other.

  “My father. I saw him leave home, and then die in Dolnaya. And then I saw the same thing again, but his face was my face, and then the savages swept down on our f
arms. I… I saw Sahar and Ashuz, huddling together while our home burned, and … and that’s enough. They’re not thoughts I want to revisit.”

  Tahmin’s voice turned wistful. “I have not thought about father in so long. Another sin, I suppose.”

  “Hm?”

  “I saw the cultists of Angramash, from two years ago, when we uncovered their mockery of a Temple,” Tahmin said. Kamvar remembered that day well. Majid’s company had found a ring of stones in the wild after the Hound caught the scent of sorcery wafting from the Hashaveh woods, on their way back to the capital after yet another of the interminable training exercises their company underwent. Tahmin had been injured that day, a spear tearing through his side.

  “This time… when I was injured, I died. And… and I came to Shinvat, believing myself worthy, but with each step I took, the bridge shook. It crumbled under me, Kamvar. It crumbled, and I didn’t know why.” There was anguish in Tahmin’s voice.

  “It wasn’t real, Tam. No more real than me dying in my father’s place. She just showed us our fears, like Jazd Shezad in the Chronicle of Paar.”

  Tahmin was quiet a moment, then he laughed. “I didn’t think you paid anywhere near that much attention to the priests.”

  “Yes, well. It’s been known to happen. But it’s true – what we saw, in those sewers, was nothing more than our own … insecurities, made manifest.”

  “I know. I’m not always an idiot. I’m well aware that I didn’t die in the Hashaveh. But it still made me think. Why would a man living a worthy life fear damnation? I’m not living up to God’s word.”

  “Tahmin, my friend, what in hell has gotten into you? Of course you’re not living up to the God’s word, no more than I, or Majid, or Barsam or any of us. Does the scripture not say that men are imperfect, and that as long as they strive after goodness they will find it?”

  “This is rich, Kamvar. You’re quoting scripture?” Tahmin’s voice was disbelieving, but the edge of humour had returned to it.

  “I have more. Does the scripture not also say that sorcery will cloud your mind, and cause you to doubt Ahamash and yourself? How many times did Majid tell us that?”

  Tahmin sighed. “You’re right, of course. I don’t know, it just seems different, somehow. Than the priests had made it out to be. I didn’t expect to feel as though… as though there was truth in it, somewhere.”

  “A lie built on truth is stronger.”

  “I suppose,” Tahmin replied.

  “Good. Now go to sleep.”

  Tahmin chuckled. “Good night, Kam.”

  Kamvar slept late, much later than intended, waking only when Yazan burst into their room and shook him and Tahmin awake.

  “Late,” he said simply. Yazan’s eulogy for Shadmehr had probably been more painful – physically as well as otherwise – than he had let on. Since the funeral he spoke rarely, and then only in clipped sentences. “Guards have news.”

  Kamvar perked up at that, and leapt from his bed. He and Tahmin dressed quickly, then followed their brother to the Lugal’s dining hall where the guard master Et-Halum waited with a group of his men. A man lay at their feet, his face bloodied. One of the guardsmen had him pinned to the ground with a sandaled foot.

  Et-Halum greeted them respectfully, if not effusively, and pointed to the man.

  “This is the house slave Wardum Nazimarut, of the household of Awilum Shudagan, merchant of Inatum. We have reason to suspect that his master was the fence or employer of the thief Leonine. He…” Et-Halum spat the word distastefully, prodding the slave with his boot, “…has neither confirmed nor denied. Mostly, he has just bleated his ignorance.”

  “But it’s true, master, I didn’t –” Et-Halum kicked the man, hard, in the ribs. He groaned in pain and fell silent. Kamvar, watching Nazimarut’s face, thought he saw loathing in his features, replaced quickly – too quickly to be anything but artifice – by an expression of weepy fear.

  “Why do you suspect this man’s master?” asked Tahmin before Kamvar could voice the same question.

  “Witnesses of good character swear they saw the thief Leonine walking into his home the day before yesterday. One said he was carrying a sack. We went to Shudagan’s home earlier today, and all we found was this man here. Who claims, conveniently enough, that his master’s gone to Sinmalik on a merchant’s errand. Never mind that there are no records of his passing at the Windward Gate.”

  That seemed damning enough.

  “Scourge him. Still lies? Kill him,” suggested Yazan.

  “What? Wait a moment!” said Tahmin. “Since when do Ekkadi noblemen confide in their slaves? I don’t find it at all hard to believe that a menial would be kept ignorant of his master’s intentions.”

  Et-Halum cleared his throat. “Master Tahmin, is it? You do not know of this man. Shudagan, like his father before him, has long been suspected of having ties to criminality. This man, Nazimarut, has himself been accused of murder, but his accuser was unable to prove the case and was put to death.”

  Ekkadi law was famously harsh. In Sarvash, a false accusation merited a fine, at worst, and there was no penalty if the judge believed the accuser mistaken rather than malicious. In Ekka, it was said, men feared to bring others to justice, for a single bought judge could spell their own death.

  “If you have all these suspicions,” Kamvar asked, “why did you not simply keep them under watch?” No sooner had he asked the question than he knew the answer.

  “Master Kamvar, in a city with as many proven criminals as Inatum, it is difficult to spare men to watch someone simply out of suspicion.” Kamvar could not help but detect a note of disdain in Et-Halum’s voice. He probably resents being ordered about by foreign soldiers. “We throw a few scraps of meat to the beggars when we need such answers, but they are not always speedy, and certainly not always reliable.”

  “So scourge,” Yazan said again. “Ahamash, I’ll do it.”

  “That would not be proper. He has not yet been sent before a judge. We do have laws here in Ekka.” Disdain and smugness, that time.

  Yazan laughed, an ugly, grating noise. Kamvar realized, with a shock, that he did not recognize him. Yazan had always been a dangerous man when his temper rose, but he had not been cruel, not like this.

  “Lied to you. And me. Lying to Hunt is death. The whip is mercy enough.”

  Et-Halum looked helplessly to Kamvar. Kamvar looked away. Yazan was his elder brother. Majid’s death had made him their leader.

  “Very well,” Et-Halum said with a grimace. “But know that I will discuss this with the Lugal.” If it was a threat, politics made it an empty one. As much as the Merezad respected the laws of its vassal states, there would be no argument where sorcerers were concerned.

  Kamvar cleared his throat. “Master Et-Halum, if you would be so kind as to spare us one of your men? Tahmin and I will search this Awilum Shudagan’s home.”

  Tahmin shot him a look of gratitude. Kamvar knew that his friend had no desire to stay and watch Yazan scourge the slave.

  Et-Halum nodded. “Certainly. Anzatesh will go with you. He knows the way.”

  Kamvar was glad for that. Anzatesh had been a knowledgeable guide, and a familiar face would be welcome.

  “Oh, and another thing,” Kamvar added. “Has anyone seen Akosh? I would like him to come with us.”

  Shudagan’s home, its back to the Mound of Lumshazzar as though leaning against it, was smaller than Kamvar had imagined it would be. In Sarvash they had heard tales of the fabulously wealthy merchants and nobles of the Awilum class, tales of manors that competed even with palaces and temples in their excesses. He had seen such in Ab-Ewarad and Sarvagadis, although the Sarvashi had converted the more extravagant buildings of the latter city to public use.

  Still, if Shudagan’s home was small and unassuming, it was nonetheless tastefully appointed and watched over by expensive statuary. Nobody had answered the door when Tahmin hammered at it with the butt of his spear, and so they kicked it in.
The house, it seemed, was empty.

  Kamvar rifled through what appeared to be an office, examining tablet after tablet, ledger after ledger, by the wan light of an oil lamp that was close to expiring. He found no mention of Akrosian vases, or indeed of any prior business within Sinmalik, but that was to be expected. Wise men did not catalogue their misdeeds. Instead, the ledgers bore mute witness to the trade of jewelry and textiles, and a surprising number of slaves.

  “Anzatesh!” Kamvar called. The guardsman had been searching Shudagan’s bedchamber a room away, while Akosh and Tahmin searched the upper floors.

  “Yes, Kamvar?” When Kamvar looked up, he found the guardsman standing in the office doorway, his head cocked quizzically to the right.

  “Master Et-Halum mentioned earlier that Shudagan and his father have been under suspicion for some time. What were they suspected of, exactly? I should have asked him.”

  Anzatesh scratched his head. “I don’t know all the details, but we had apparently found evidence some fifteen years ago that Awilum Shudagan’s father, Awilum Hadames, was buying up slaves in great number only to free them afterwards.”

  Strange.

  “That’s not illegal, of course. A free man has a right to buy and sell slaves as he wishes, but… well, it created some problems at the time, as there was no place in Inatum for the freed slaves to live. Many of them ended up living below, in Lumshazzar, and of those, most turned to crime. A man who frees a slave that turns to crime is considered partly culpable, and the crimes were so many and so serious that Hadames was put to death.”

  Anzatesh looked distinctly uncomfortable to be discussing this. Kamvar felt a little guilt at prodding further, but not much. There was too much that he did not yet understand.

  “So what happened?” he asked.

  “There was a riot. Hadames was an old man already, could not have been far from death, but when we hanged him, the city erupted. Men came from sewers and inns and docks, Mushkenum and Wardum alike, armed with clubs, knives, broomsticks and anything else they could find. I was new to the Lugal’s guard then… it was the first time I saw real combat. We lost many men in the streets, and too many more when we swept through Lumshazzar to eliminate the rest of them.”

  A riot of such fury should certainly have been recorded in the history scrolls, yet Kamvar had never heard mention of the event in the seminary. Perhaps the Merezad’s historians had discounted the slave revolt as insignificant.

  They probably want to keep Ekka’s slave trade as quiet as possible, Kamvar realized. Slavery was forbidden in Sarvash. Many of his countrymen considered it an abhorrent practice, but the Merezad had allowed the Ekkadi to keep to their customs. If such tales were to spread, and too many important Sarvashi cried out for change, who could know how the Ekkadi would react?

  Politics.

  “What does this have to do with Shudagan?” Kamvar asked.

  “Well, that riot wasn’t the end of it,” the guardsman replied. “Since that day, there have been a number of attacks on slavers’ barges, or Awilum that were reputed to treat their slaves poorly. All by a group that calls itself the Shattered Manacle. Pretentious, I know, but they have caused us no end of grief.”

  “And you believe Shudagan is involved with them because of his father’s history?” That was by no means a long leap.

  “Yes, Kamvar. That’s exactly what I believe. Moreover, we know Awilum Shudagan himself is very active in the slave trade, and yet he has never suffered an attack. I believe he buys slave warriors for the Manacle.”

  “Let me guess: there is no solid proof of any of this, and so men fear to bring him to court.”

  “I am only a guard, not a judge. But yes, that is what I believe.”

  How is the Daiva implicated in this? And what use would a man with so much money to spend on slaves have for the petty theft of a vase?

  Shudagan’s ledgers seemed profitable enough, but if what Anzatesh suspected was true, it was entirely possible that the slave sales recorded within them had never taken place. If that was the case, perhaps Shudagan needed to arrange thefts from time to time to pay for his purchases, if jewelry and textiles did not suffice. Kamvar found himself wondering how, if at all, these events related.

  “Kamvar!”

  Kamvar looked up at the sound of Tahmin’s voice. His friend stood behind Anzatesh in the doorway, a strange look on his face.

  “Come upstairs. Akosh has found something.”

  He followed Tahmin up the narrow staircase, its landing guarded by a splendidly sculpted lion, and through a maze of small rooms. Akosh waited for them in a bathroom, a great copper tub in its center. Behind him was a dressing closet of heavy mahogany. Akosh pointed to it as Kamvar entered.

  “Have a look at that,” the old man said.

  The clothes had been pulled to one side, and behind them, where he would have expected to see more wood, or at least a wall, an earthen tunnel spiraled downward into blackness.

  When Akosh next spoke, his tone was wry. “Where do you suppose it leads?”