M A R Barker - [Tekumel- The Empire of the Petal Throne 01]

by Flamesong (v0. 9) (epub)

  The Lady Jai emerged from the Kasi's gray canvas tent in the company of the priestess Mashyan. The two women picked their way along behind the mangonels where the artillerymen strained at their winches. They paused before the wooden cage in which the Tsolyani who had brought them from Mihallu were imprisoned. Ridek was too far away to see, but he thought that the Lady Jai spoke to the man—the Hereksa.

  The fate of those four was even less appetizing than Ridek’s. General Qutmu’s staff had swiftly condemned them as deserters, after which General Vrishtara’s sappers erected a cage and four stakes in the square before the headquarters tent. The impalements were delayed, however, to await the arrival of professional executioners from Kankara. One of Ridek’s fellow captives, Kai Vrishn Tlarik, who had lived in Tsolyani before the war, said that there was some special clan, devoted to Lord Vimuhla’s ferocious Cohort, Lord Chiteng, which performed this function for all felons in the Empire. It was a matter of religion as well as of the state: the executioners worked always in parties of four because of some obscure doctrinal reason, and no one else was permitted to impale a criminal. General Qutmu had fumed, rumor had it, and demanded swifter justice, but the Kasi of artillery—whose Legion’s prisoners they technically were—held out for the strict observance of legal protocol. The wretched Hereksa and his three soldiers thus had perhaps two more days to live.

  Ridek had not seen either Tse’e or Thu’n after the Kasi had ordered them arrested. The old man was Tsolyani but neither soldier nor slave; there was no charge against him, therefore, and he had probably wandered away into the desert or found acceptance among the artisans and camp-followers who hovered about the army like Chri-flies. The Nininyal, on the other hand, had been taken somewhere else.

  Where Aluja—poor Aluja—and the Lady Deq Dimani were he had no idea at all.

  The afternoon passed in a blaze of early spring heat. A volley of fire, followed by shouts and jests as the city’s defenses crumbled, then silence. Then another volley. The crenellations were gone, and plumes of dust drifted up from the wall below. Even from this range Ridek could see cracks and fissures spread across the masonry like a network of tree roots. A thump, a crash, and the Tsolyani artillerymen whooped and cheered. The tents off to Ridek’s right remained silent; somewhere over there the undead waited, as patient as the Worm Lord Himself, for the clarion that would summon them forth.

  The work-party returned to the stockade at sundown, passing the second shift on its way to carry on their task by torchlight. The pen stank of sweat and excrement. Ridek knew better than to fight for the chunks of Dna-bread the Tsolyani cook threw over the palisade into the enclosure. He waited, and at last a pale Saa Aliaqiyani youth tossed him a thick red-brown crust. The fellow had favored him before, and Ridek suspected that eventually payment would be demanded in a coin he had no intention of giving. He responded with a curt shrug of thanks and was relieved when Shekka Va Kriyor camei over to sit beside him.

  “Tomorrow, boy,” the Ghitaa said. “Then we sit back and watch ’em go over the walls and fight like Ghar-lizards mating in a riverbed.” He showed chipped, yellow teeth in an uneven grin. Shekka Va Kriyor was as homely as a clay idol, a tenant farmer from Tleku Miriya in eastern Yan Kor. He had been wounded in the face at the first Battle of Mar, and the scar where his left ear and part of his cheek had been gave him an appearance not unlike one of the undead themselves.

  “Afterward?”

  The older man let out a long breath. “They take me back to Tsolyanu, I guess. A field-slave—not pretty enough to be a house servant. Maybe somebody’ll buy me for sacrifice. Then I’ll see how well I’ve learned our ‘Way of Nchel.’ I’ve thought a lot about it. . . .”

  Ridek did not want to think about it. He asked, “The rest of us?”

  Shekka Va Kriyor rubbed his stubbled chin. “You must

  have clan. I saw from the first that you’re no poor farm bumpkin. Tell the Tsolyani that your people will ransom you. The greedy bastards’ll ship you home in the next exchange.” “Why? When you and so many others are enslaved or slain! Why should I be otherwise? Should I not seek the ‘Way of Nchel’ too?”

  “Cha! You’re too young. A long life. Home. Your clan-mothers’ll find you a wife or two.” The Ghitaa stirred restlessly, a shadowy hulk in the gathering dusk. “Now Besa there, the little girl from my Gurek, she’d want you.”

  Ridek was grateful for the reassurance of the man’s jibe. “She’ll have to wait in line.” He smiled back. “I’ve my own plans.”

  “Then live ’em, boy. No ‘Way of Nchel’ for you!”

  They sat together in silence for a time. Then the Ghitaa said, “Escape. That’s another Skein.”

  “I’d chance it.”

  “Look, you. The desert is as much death for us as it is for the Tsolyani. The sand-worms’ll gladly slay us both. Still. . . “When? How?”

  Shekka Va Kriyor seized Ridek’s face in one callused vise of a hand and pulled him around to peer into his eyes. The stink of his breath—or of the still festering wound in his jaw—was sickening. “Hoi, hoi! A word to the Tsolyani and we’re meat on the Sarku lads’ platters! One whisper, and you’re spitted first!” He relaxed his grip. “Your clothes, your hands, your fine speech all say you’re somebody’s son. Somebody important. Now that doesn’t move me the length of a Shqa-beetle’s tiny twig, but I’ve five brats at home your size, and it’s them I remember whenever I look at you, boy. Why your Chlen-brained parents let you join the army makes me wonder! —And may the gods give the Baron Aid Ahoggya piss to drink for starting this buggering war!”

  Ridek almost laughed. “He’d probably like that. As for me, I can take care—”

  “Of what? Your pretty arse? The target of that plummy

  Saa Allaqiyani dildo over there! Him and a dozen others, were it not for me and my troopers!”

  “I—1 thank you—”

  “Cha! Thank the gods instead. Just be nearby when I shout.”

  They curled up on the dry sand to sleep. The Saa Allaqiyani importuned Ridek with delicate gestures and whispered something sibilant in his singing language, reminding Ridek of the Tka Mihalli of Ninue. Shekka Va Kriyor gave the youth a look that would have withered a Sro-dragon, and he went away. '

  Lanterns flared amber to dazzle his eyes. He awoke to find three of Vrishtara’s barrel-chested guards opening the crude wooden gate. A fourth man stood there, an officer, possibly a Kasi, in gleaming brown-lacquered armor. The visored, flanged helmet bore a skull-crest of bleached Chlen-hide.

  He burrowed down behind the Ghitaa's massive torso.

  “Why no>v of all times?” he heard one guard complain. Ridek’s Tsolyani had improved enough to follow the simple exchange.

  “Here is my—” the officer used an unknown word. Copper-trimmed vambraces flashed yellow-orange in the buttery glow.

  The other held out a hand, received a document, and pretended to read. He was probably no more literate than a sand-worm! “Over there, 1 think.”

  The guards picked their way across the compound, halberd butts at the ready.

  “Here. Behind that man.” The officer’s bony finger pointed straight at Ridek.

  “No! Damn it,” the turnkey protested. “The boy? There’s a lot of work left in that one—Sire.”

  “Read.”

  Shekka Va Kriyor loomed up before them. “Take me instead,” he stammered in broken Tsolyani. “Me, I go. Bigger. Better! Tasty!”

  The skull-painted face beneath the helmet rim only grinned. “The boy.”

  Shekka Va Kriyor moved, and the halberds jabbed at him. “Not the boy! No boy!” he roared. And charged.

  It was no contest. The sapper guards yelled for reinforcements, the big Yan Koryani fell like a Tiu-tree beneath their clubbed weapons, and the rest of the prisoners shuffled back out of danger. A soldier pulled Ridek to his feet, kicked him efficiently, and jerked his hands up behind him. He felt the bite of thongs about his wrists.

  Then he was dragged out into the
tent-lined square.

  Torches, lanterns, passwords, a whirl of shadows around leaping watchfires, dust, and the stink of fear. His own fear. Someone' rose up before him, another death’s-head, and he heard an exchange of salutes.

  They bore him past the bivouac of the Battalions of the Seal of the Worm, past General Qutmu’s elegant tent with its lanterns of copper and sepia-hued glass, past the areas between the tent-rows where dun-armored troopers squatted to sharpen their weapons, past the Chlen-carts and the jumbled, tarpaulin-shrouded supply dumps.

  Into a place that was silent: tents in which nothing moved, watchfires that lacked the throngs of raucous soldiers and whores about them, empty camp streets that were unlittered and unlighted.

  And dead.

  Dim shapes sat around those fires, to be sure. He saw helmets that had been old when the Second Imperium was young, upcurved pauldrons of rusting steel, capes and mantles streaked with grave-hoar, spears and glaives and pikes and other weapons of designs so antique that they no longer had names, and shields embossed with dread Lord Sarku’s wriggling, serpentine worm. He smelled rot and decay, not strong, but omnipresent, the sweet-sick stench of things long entombed. There were faces, too: most were skeletal and fleshless, but some still showed bloated and gray, stamped with the rictus of death—and of unnatural life.

  Ridek screamed.

  “Enough,” his captor snarled. “I take him from here.” He halted at one of the watchfires, its light spilling from his mailed shoulders like rich, red blood.

  He heard mutters of willing, uneasy assent and the tramp of retreating boots.

  Then he was alone, with the undead all around him.

  His captor spun him about, and he felt a knife nibbling at his bonds. Over his shoulder he saw the man lift off his copper-chaised skull-helmet with his other hand. The face beneath it was very similar to that of the young Tsolyani Hereksa, Trinesh hiKetkolel.

  Ridek gaped. Then the nose lengthened, the eyes spread apart, the jaw grew longer, the skin darker. Fangs emerged to project like downward-curving scimitars over blackish lips.

  It was Aluja.

  One of the dark-shrouded undead arose from the motionless group seated about the fire and limped toward him.

  “Here’s the Lady,” Aluja said. “She’s wounded. We must get her to—”

  Ridek did not hear the rest; his cries made even General Qutmu’s staff officers look up from their dinners.

  Aluja shook his beast-head in frustration. “I never know how much you humans can bear! We Mihalli have no fear of dead bodies, not even when animated by power from the Planes Beyond. Such entities are naught but multi-planar foci within the continuum. ”

  “Jargon!” the Lady Deq Dimani snapped. “You could have used some gentler method of getting him out of the Tsolyani slave pen!” She kept one arm about Ridek but favored the other beneath the tattered blue-black cloak she wore. Aluja had taken the garment from one of the uncomplaining undead; it stank, and there were dark-crusted stains upon its folds.

  “How? I can fool humans in a marketplace, a crowd, or wherever there are foreigners and strangers. But an army? 1 don’t know their passwords or salutes or—or anything. I had no time to master the background. Nor is my Tsolyani native enough: more than a barked command, and somebody’d want a look. The next thing would be one more Yan Koryani spy wriggling on a stake!”

  “Where—how—?” Ridek managed. He was growing calmer.

  The Lady murmured something soothing, but Aluja intervened. “He’s ready to talk—stronger than you think: less than I had guessed but more than you credit him.”

  “He’s only a child!”

  The Mihalli spared her a critical glance. “How little you know the capacities of your own species, Madam. Now if you had children of your own. ...”

  He was not prepared for the furious glare she flung at him. “We Mihalli are hermaphrodites,” Aluja protested mildly. “I have myself given birth to two children—and fathered others. 1 do not understand!”

  She clenched her teeth. “There are other matters to discuss. As soon as Ridek is able.”

  The boy hugged himself tightly to keep his hands from trembling. He said, “I’m all right now. How do we get out of this camp?”

  “See? I—” Aluja thought better of his comment just in time.

  She faced the boy. “Leaving’s easy. Some garments from— from these poor creatures, Aluja as a Tsolyani officer, a password overheard, and we’re out.”

  Ridek arose to peer anxiously at the silent warriors seated about the watchfire behind her. “They—they do not see us? They do not object if we—you—take their clothing?”

  “No. They are the lowest form of the unread: Mrur. A few are Shedra, who are a trifle more aware. They respond to commands from their officers, the Jajqi, Lord Sarku’s elite.”

  “I—I know. Someone else told me.”

  “So. We must avoid the Jajqi, for they are as clever as they were in life.” She hugged her wounded arm to her breast and rocked to and fro.

  Ridek noticed her injury for the first time. “How badly are you hurt?”

  “Not much. A crossbow quarrel through my pauldron and into the shoulder-muscle.”

  “She must have help,” Aluja contradicted her. “I thought we might obtain it within Pu’er. Last night 1 crept past the Tsolyani siege lines into the city, but the garrison has neither food nor medical supplies. Their sorcerers save their healing magic for the battle to come.”

  “They refused? They won’t help us?”

  “They would—gladly. But they urged us not to enter Pu’er. If the Tsolyani mount an assault, we might not get out again.”

  “Find a Nexus Point,” Ridek suggested earnestly. “Use your powers! Return us to Ke’er!”

  The Mihalli shook his alien head. “I no longer can. I have never seen the like of that weapon the Tsolyani employed there in Ninue. I can change my shape, but the rest of my energies are drained as empty as a drunkard’s flagon! I am like a child—a human. I do feel my strength seeping back, but very, very slowly.”

  “The ‘Eye’ you took back from me? Your globe-thing? My staff—it did not deflect the crossbowman’s bolt after the Hereksa fired his device at me.”

  “All are depleted, useless. My ‘Ball of Immediate Eventu-ation’ is a dead cinder somewhere on the floor of the Hall of the Elliptical Veil.”

  “The—Nexus doorway through Which we came?”

  “Gone. They do not remain long. Now I can only sense Nexus Points, not summon them—not until I am more recovered. ’ ’

  “We must try for my brother’s encampment,” the Lady

  Deq Dimani interrupted. “He and his Gurek are somewhere north of the Sakbe road, in the mountains behind Kankara.” “But you are wounded. Can you travel?”

  “She thinks she can,” Aluja said curtly. “She is determined.” “Of course. I am a soldier, after all. I have endured wounds before!”

  The Mihalli cocked his head. “The Tsolyani supply carts come and go. It’s about sixty Tsan from here to Kankara: four days’ journey. An injured soldier woman—a foreign mercenary, mayhap? —a captive slave-boy, and perhaps a merchant from neutral Mu’ugalavya or Salarvya. Some of these sad undead still wear the ornaments of the tomb: armlets of gold, collars, necklaces, amulets. We can easily glean enough to pay some carter or suttler.”

  “It is Kankara or surrender, Ridek,” the Lady Deq Dimani said. “You know what that means.”

  He did, in all its dreadful reality. “Can we find your brother and his GurekT’

  “We must. Aluja tells me that there may also be other Mihalli at Kankara. We have agents in the Tsolyani camp there.”

  “If I can find them, we are gone,” the Mihalli said. “Home, Ridek!”

  “There’s someone I must rescue first,” he declared. “From the Tsolyani prison stockade—a Ghitaa named Shekka Va Kriyor. Wait—why him alone? We can help them all escape!” Aluja only looked at him.

  “We cannot,”
the Lady said regretfully. “You are no Hrugga of the epics, Ridek. You are more important than a Gurek of good troops. No, do not gainsay me! Think, and you’ll realize why.”

  It was true.

  “Then we depart.” Aluja stood up to readjust his disguise. “There is something I must do, however,” the Lady added casually. “The rumor you heard in the camp market—about the gift the priestess Mashyan makes to her superior in Kankara?

  If the Yan Koryani gir! is really the Lady Jai, then I cannot abandon her.”

  “You mean that you will not. I think I can guess your purpose.”

  The Lady Deq Dimani wrinkled her nose at the redolence of death that clung to her cloak. “It will take but a little time—long enough to give an instruction.”

  “We cannot stop to play dangerous games!”

  “I plan no such. Only a word or two with the harvester when the crop is ripe.”

  The Mihalli shook his head so violently that his masquerade slipped, leaving his face an unpleasant mixture of human eyes and nose but an elongated Mihalli fanged jaw. “No, I say! A quick look for another Mihalli at Kankara. That is all! If we find no one, then we seek your brother’s troops.” He turned away to repair his features.

  Ridek considered; then he said, “I agree with Aluja. Neither Shekka Va Kriyor nor any missions at Kankara. Not now. First you must be healed, Lady, and I—I would return to Ke’er. I am a Prince of Yan Kor and my father’s son. This is my command.”

  Aluja smiled at the Lady Deq Dimani over the boy’s black head, a look that held more of respect than amusement.

  In answer she only bared her teeth and wound the grave-stained cloak the tighter about her wounded arm.