by Kate Elliott
“Behind me,” said Elit.
The other knife-man fanned out to come at them from the side and thus split Elit’s guard. Sarai backed into the wall, hands shaking so hard she almost dropped the mirror.
Above her, the shuttered window was flung open. An old man in soldier’s gear appeared, poised on the sill and holding a small crossbow. With a thunk it released. A bolt slammed into the swordsman’s gut. Elit sprang out to whack the other knife-man over the head; the blow didn’t fell him but he grunted and swayed.
“Out of the way,” said the old man.
Elit ducked back beside Sarai. A bolt thudded into the knife-man’s shoulder, and more quickly than Sarai thought possible a third, a fourth, and a fifth, until all three men were down, groaning and thrashing as they tried to crawl away.
“Kill them,” said the old man in the same tone he might have said Here’s your tea.
Sarai’s mouth opened and closed and opened and closed, yet no sound came out as Elit knelt, rolling the first one half over and bracing her weight so he couldn’t struggle, then slit his throat with the same brisk efficiency as she had slaughtered sheep back in Elsharat. But this was not a sheep, and the blood that gushed not that of an animal but of a person.
Her gaze hazed, and her lips prickled as if she had eaten raw nettles.
A rope ladder unrolled down the wall and hit Sarai on the head. She flinched and got caught in the rungs. Footsteps pounded up out of the darkness, and panic made her thrash harder and get further tangled as a man raced into view.
Elit said, “Ani! I could have used your help sooner.”
“Had to save that ass Vedar when he tripped.”
“Ha! How like him. Here, you do the other two.”
Elit trotted over to Sarai and roughly yanked her out of the entangling rungs.
“Climb, Sarai! Hurry!”
Sarai’s hands had gone so numb she could barely feel the rope as she climbed. When she paused to catch her breath again, Elit shoved at her backside. Clambering across the sill she found herself in a storage room filled with chests. Elit swung easily up after her, followed by Ani, who had blood on his face and hands. Sarai braced herself on the wall; she was finding it hard to breathe, each inhalation more of a hoarse, whistling wheeze.
Once he had shuttered and barred the window, the old man indicated a corridor. “This way.”
“Yes, Captain.” Ani went out at once.
Sarai did not budge. The jumbling confusion of her thoughts, the dreadful image carved into her mind by blood pumping out of dying men, the tightness in her chest: All made words hard. “You killed them.”
“Had we left them alive, they could later have identified you as coming here.” The old man had a stare that cut words right off her tongue and left her speechless. He again indicated the corridor. “Wash off your disguises and change your clothes.”
Elit stepped closer and caught Sarai’s face between her hands. They had been apart for so long that Sarai had forgotten everything about Elit. The shape and heat of her lover poured over her with an immediacy that was almost painful.
Elit was taller than Sarai now, having been a little shorter for all of their childhood. A scar cut a stark white line across the back of her left hand where she had cut herself with pruning shears when they were both fourteen. Her shoulders were even broader than they had been before, sculpted with muscle from training, but the nape of her neck and the curve of her throat were exactly as Sarai recalled them: skin so sensitive to kisses.
She broke away. “What have you become, Elit?”
“I’m one of Hasibal’s players,” said Elit with a serious stare and a flutter of hands, as if she wanted to grasp Sarai’s fingers and press them to her lips in the old familiar way. “We are soldiers now, Black Wolves fighting for the Hundred.”
Sarai’s pulse thundered in her ears. To hear her beloved name herself with that hated name pinned her to silence.
“We don’t have time for this,” said the captain.
A young woman of quite startling beauty poked her head in with a questioning look. “How much trouble?” she asked.
The captain spoke with brisk command. “Three dead men in the alley. Have them thrown into the river. Come along, you two!”
Sarai found herself moving even though she’d had no intention of following him. He led them down a corridor past small cubicles that reminded her of the palace’s sleeping closets; the sounds of lovemaking drifted from behind closed doors. Stairs took them into a small courtyard, landscaped with herbs and flowers, that accommodated an outdoor washing area elevated on planks and amply supplied with water through bamboo pipes. A trellis heavily grown with muzz and proudhorn sheltered a heated bath for soaking. Four lanterns illuminated Ani standing on the planks and scrubbing dirt and blood from his body with a brush. As Elit stripped he merely handed her the brush. It meant nothing to them to stand out in plain view naked. He had scars on his left hip and powerfully muscled legs and arms with the girth of a very big man; Gil’s shorter, slender frame was more to her taste. The tattoos down Ani’s right arm marked him as a child of the Water Mother because they were the same as the inks Elit had on her right arm and left leg. Sarai stared at Elit’s lean body, her firm ass and small breasts and the triangle of dark hair, but when she opened her mouth to speak all voice and emotion had fled.
Elit paused. “I forget you’re not accustomed to this. I haven’t bathed in private for three years.” She showed Sarai a basin, where she washed the paint and pencil off her face. The captain had already gone inside. In an antechamber overlooking the courtyard they changed into cotton taloos.
“The captain is waiting for you.” Elit indicated an adjoining room. “I’ll stand as sentry outside so no one interrupts.”
“Have you killed before that you can be so calm? You cut that man’s throat like you were killing a sheep.”
“It’s not meant to be something you get used to. We pray, and give offerings, and chant to ask for forgiveness, to find a measure of peace. And we have nightmares, too.”
“Is this what a merciful god asks you to do?”
Elit touched a finger to Sarai’s lips, as she used to do when they were whispering secrets. “It is the path I’ve been called to. We fight for the Hundred. Talk to Captain Kellas.”
Sarai walked stiffly to join the captain in a small audience room fitted with cushions and an altar set into an alcove in one wall. Illuminated by a tiny oil lamp, the alcove displayed a painting depicting the compassionate face of the Merciful One in her guise as a beautiful woman sitting in a shower of plum blossoms. The holy one did not resemble any of the women of the Hundred whom Sarai had ever seen, as if she were a foreigner who had wandered far before she found a home. Her dark eyes seemed to follow Sarai’s hesitant tread with a kind, solicitous gaze.
Sarai let out a held breath and seated herself on a cushion, pushing the tea tray so it rested between her and the captain. His presence had such clarity and formality that it was easy for the mind to wipe away the shocking violence and just wait as she studied him. He had a pleasing face and the posture of a man still healthy and vigorous for all his years.
First he poured tea with efficient neatness and offered her the first cup, which she did not take. Then for an uncomfortable interlude he studied her face. Only by gripping the cloth of her taloos did she manage not to lift a hand to touch her scar.
“We live in a complicated time, Lady Sarai,” he said.
“Elit cannot be a Black Wolf.”
“Why not?”
“Because they are murderers!” She wanted to dash the contents of the cup into his face. “Anyway, they are all gone. They were disbanded after the death of King Atani.”
“They lost their honor,” he said softly.
To her surprise he reached across the tray with a hand seamed, callused, weathered, and worn with experience. His fingers traced her scar as with a feather’s brush. With a faint sigh he withdrew his hand. “But they are not all go
ne.”
“They should all have died! They killed my mother!”
“No, they did not,” he said. “Only one man was responsible for your mother’s death.”
In his aged face she saw so many shadows she could not count them. She felt herself at the brink of a precipice yawning open at her unsuspecting feet. Almost she jumped up and ran. But she saw the truth in his expression, a cold burden that drenched all her hot anger.
Her voice cracked as she forced out words. “How did it happen? Why was she there?”
49
He knew who she was the moment he saw her, although he had begun to suspect the truth when he had seen Lord Gilaras with his veiled Ri Amarah wife, a girl of the right age from that specific clan, one whom the family was willing to marry out. The scar sealed it, but that wasn’t all he had seen. Moments of great emotion sear into the mind. He could still recall her mother’s face when she had approached them in the forest with her delicate and stubborn beauty. Sarai resembled her mother, although it was immediately obvious why her mother had fled a jealous husband with a baby who clearly had not been fathered by a Ri Amarah man.
“His name was Isar,” he said.
“Isar?”
“The man your mother was with, the man she was defending. Possibly he was the man who sired you.”
“We have a word for that in our language. A woman stained by lust who plants a false seed in her husband’s garden.”
He raised an eyebrow. “I confess I am old-fashioned enough to believe a baby matters more to a clan than which man fathered it.”
She pressed a hand to her cheek as if the scar whispered a message to her. Her eyes were brilliant. He leaned back a little to give some distance from their intensity.
After several unsteady breaths she lowered the hand and spoke in a quavering voice. “Please do not spare me the details. I would rather know than remain ignorant as I have all these years.”
He admired the way she did not waver, so he told her pieces of the truth: a rumored plot, his race after the king, the woman they’d met in the forest and how she had come after him with a staff on the ridgetop. Such altered retellings covered the worst wounds of the past.
“She stabbed me. I defended myself. I am trained to kill, Lady Sarai, and she had placed herself between me and the king.”
“But when you realized I was strapped to her chest you tried not to kill me.”
“I do not kill children.”
“Don’t you? If the adults who nurture them are dead, is that not a form of death for the children they cared for? As it was for me?” Her stare actually made him feel self-conscious, a feeling he had long thought scraped off by the rigors of his life. “Do you regret it, Captain?”
“I regret not saving King Atani. That before anything. As for her life, I think she was not my enemy but rather in that place at an ill time, for reasons of her own that had nothing to do with the king.”
“That is a glib way to justify killing her.”
“In times of crisis if you wait to act to be assured no one will suffer, then you will never act.”
She set on her lap a bronze mirror whose incised back she stroked pensively as her eyes sought memories he could not see. Over the years he had learned to temper his impulsive, restless nature with patience. He sipped at his tea, enjoying its bitter aftertaste.
“Isar.” She spoke the name precisely, as if committing it to memory. “Did he die, too?”
“Whether he died in the end I cannot say. When I fell unconscious he may have still been alive. I never saw or heard of him after that. I do remember he called out her name, Nadit.”
“Her name was Nadai, but I suppose Nadit would have been the easiest way to make it sound like a Hundred name.”
His gaze drifted to the altar with its painted image that people called the Merciful One but whom he called beloved.
He remarked, “When I was a boy, the god Hasibal was not called the Merciful One. Hasibal was known as the Formless One and could walk the world in any shape.”
“Why do we change, Captain?” she asked in that slightly hoarse voice that made her utterances pleasing and warm and a little mysterious despite her thick hill country accent. “What causes a young woman to abandon wealth, status, and her own young son to die an outlaw in the wilderness?”
“Love?”
“Surely love rarely alters the trajectory of our motion to such an extreme.”
“Does it not?”
“Ambition and a desire to learn to recite the old tales caused Elit to dedicate herself to Hasibal, and yet now I discover she has become a soldier. It was greed that got Gil arrested, but if I recall rightly, you then used the opportunity to recruit him as a spy. King Jehosh first wished to flirt with me no doubt because as a Ri Amarah woman I seemed forbidden and thus alluring. But as soon as the queen’s plot was revealed to him he was willing to see me turned over to Prince Tavahosh because he wanted to know what I could find out from his son about her plans. Since you serve Jehosh, why not leave me where I was?”
“Do you want to go back?”
“No, I emphatically do not. What I want is Gil pardoned and released.”
“His work gang is out of my hands.”
“Then what use are you, Captain?”
Her cool and rather sardonic interrogation delighted him. “A fair question, Lady Sarai, but one that is not mine to answer. I am merely a soldier under orders.”
“Let me ask a different question then. What campaign are you waging?”
“I am a traditionalist. I remember what the Hundred looked like when I was a boy and I reflect on how many things have changed.”
“We cannot recover what is past, Captain. My mother stays dead despite what I wish. The Hundred cannot return to the days of righteous rule under King Anjihosh the Glorious Unifier.”
“No, indeed, it cannot.”
“As you people set in motion your schemes and plots do you think at all about those who will be caught in the conflict? What will happen to the Ri Amarah, who are already being attacked? What about me? I don’t believe you rescued me out of sympathy for my desperate situation. I think I am nothing more than a piece in a game to all of you. So is Gil. So is Elit, even if she believes otherwise. You shouldn’t play games with people’s lives!”
“Do not be naive, Lady Sarai. It does not suit you.”
“Am I naive to think you use people as tools and weapons in a greater war? Regardless of the cost to them?”
“Many of the Ri Amarah have already left the city to take shelter at country estates. I am not unsympathetic to the difficult situation they find themselves in.”
“My thanks,” she said sardonically. “But you are right. It seems there is widespread unrest throughout the Hundred. Have I been roping the wrong horse? Is it demons you fear?”
Now he did chuckle. She had exactly the kind of incisive mind fitting for a Wolf. Those who only looked for martial prowess sorely mistook the matter. The more you narrowed your idea of who could be useful, the more rigid your blade and the easier it could snap.
“Why would you say so?” he temporized.
A mischievous smile softened her expression. He thought she would speak but instead the smile faded as she tucked the mirror into a cloth sleeve and placed it on top of the leather case she carried.
“Something King Jehosh said.”
Fifty years as a soldier had honed his instinct for danger. A jolt of energy passed through his old frame, like the whisper of death breathing down his back. He leaned forward.
She said, “He told me that demons threaten the Hundred because they want to rule here again, as they did in the old days. He said they had poisoned his father, King Atani, with their false promises and seductive words.”
The moment Sarai said the words, she saw how Captain Kellas went rigid, his eyes on her but no longer looking at her. She had lost him as thoroughly as if he had gotten up and left the room. If she had slammed Elit’s sticks into the side of his
head he couldn’t have looked more stunned.
“Poisoned,” he murmured. His gaze focused on her with a cold intensity that made her scoot away from him. “You are sure that is what he said. False promises and seductive words.”
“Yes. I have an excellent memory. Anyway I wrote it down afterward.”
From elsewhere in the building a loud hammering started. Voices raised in argument.
Elit slipped inside. “Supreme Captain Ulyar is here demanding to see you, Captain.”
“Into the closet, Lady Sarai,” he said without a pause. “Elit, you’ll sit.”
Sarai protested, “But—”
“Don’t argue.” Elit whisked her into a screened alcove lined with shelves on which were piled cushions and bedding. With the door shut a whisker’s length from her knees, Sarai listened to the rustling of cloth as Elit arranged herself on a cushion.
A man who has just been told news he does not want to believe might look the way Captain Kellas had just looked. Yet he had cleared the expression so smoothly off his face, responding to the new crisis, that she might have been mistaken.
A person stomped into the chamber. “So, Captain Kellas, you are taking your ease at the House of the Dagger while the city burns.”
“Is there a problem, Supreme Captain Ulyar? I came here to speak to one of my informants.”
“A euphemism, I presume. She’s young enough to be your granddaughter. I did not know you went in for that sort of thing.”
“Why do you bore me with this manner of predictable insult? What do you want?”
“Prince Tavahosh’s bride is missing. At first it was thought she had been taken ill but after all of the latrines and bathing rooms were searched, the queen realized the girl had been kidnapped. The queen sent me to track down the Habisal players who were in the palace earlier.”
“Of course I am sorry to hear it but I have more pressing concerns, Ulyar. Perhaps you hadn’t heard but there has been another fire at a Ri Amarah compound.”
Sarai bit down on her lip but in her mind she spoke a prayer for mercy.
