Sworn in Steel

by Douglas Hulick

  I took one of the oto—a lightly roasted, dryer-looking seed—and slipped it into my mouth and then beneath my tongue. I felt my heart quicken in anticipation, and had a hard time preventing myself from simply biting down on the seed immediately.

  Heron, I decided, was all right.

  “Tell me,” I said as the clerk slipped the case back into his pocket, my eyes tracking its every movement. “How bad do you have to be to get your entire group thrown out of the Old City?”

  Heron stared down at the floor, looking thoughtful. “It’s a fine edge,” he said. “Especially for Imperials. What might get a Djanese poet censure could get an Imperial cast out—or cast into prison. Social norms and customs, not to mention affairs of honor, can get confusing fast. Caste rivalries get ugly, too.” He looked back up at me. “If I were you, I’d stick to what you know. Imperial—foreign—matters, if you understand what I mean. Better for everyone that way.”

  “All right,” I said. “And what if it was discovered that some members of a troupe were involved with, say, the Zakur? Or other criminals?”

  “Such as Imperial Kin, perhaps?” said Heron.

  “Sure, why not?”

  Fowler knitted her brow. I shifted my chin slightly, signally her to bide.

  Heron gave me an appraising look. “I’d say,” he said slowly, “that while it wasn’t enough to get that troupe’s audition canceled, I’d certainly feel better if they weren’t in contact with any of the padishah’s other dependents, if only for moral reasons. After all, we can’t have them trafficking with undesirables—at least, not openly.”

  “In that case,” I said, a smile tugging at my lips, “I’m afraid I have some terrible news to relay to you. . . .”

  Chapter Sixteen

  “You mean he didn’t give you any explanation at all?” said Tobin as he trudged beside me on the street.

  “Nothing,” I said. I threw my hands wide. “All the wazir’s secretary told me was that, now that I was well enough to walk, we needed to get off the padishah’s grounds and into the Imperial Quarter.”

  Tobin shook his head. “It doesn’t make sense. There are other prospects waiting to audition still living on the grounds. Why would they single us out?”

  I placed a hand on the troupe leader’s shoulder and leaned in a bit. “Just a guess, but were any of those other acts Imperial?”

  Tobin’s eyes shifted to me. “No.”

  “Well, then,” I said, and let the point hang between us.

  Tobin cast his eyes about—at the street and the traffic and the troop of guards escorting us through both—and made a thoughtful sound. Less than two hours ago, he and his troupe had been basking in the glory that was the padishah’s grounds: groomed lawns, stocked lakes, trees heavy with fruit and foliage, not to mention the paved courtyards and shade-rich verandas of the artists’ sanctuary. Then I’d turned up with a troop of hard-faced guards at my back and news that we had to leave. To say it hadn’t gone over well would be an understatement. Still, after the initial outburst, Tobin and the rest had been smart enough to read the guards’ expressions and gather their things without any undue complaints. I’d managed to avoid the troupe leader as we’d been quick-marched away from the sanctum and across the grounds, but now that we were through the royal gates and in to the city the pace had slackened enough for him to catch both his breath and me.

  “And you’re sure he said nothing about why?” said Tobin.

  “Not a word,” I lied.

  “And you? Could you have . . . ?”

  “Me?” I snorted. “I’ve been out and on my back for two days. When would I have had the chance?”

  “Yes, well. You’re our patron, so I thought I should at least ask.” Tobin ran a hand across his cheek and down his neck, leaving a wet sheen of sweat in its wake. “Thank you for your . . . insights. Good day, Master Drothe.”

  I chose to ignore the tone behind his words as he lengthened his stride and stepped away.

  “Thieves,” muttered Muiress as she trundled along on the other side of me, sweat rolling freely down her face in the late-morning heat.

  I looked up at the broad, unbroken expanse of sky that spread out above us. Not even the hint of a cloud in sight. No relief until we got where we were going, then.

  I glanced over at Muiress again, then let my knife slip into the palm of my left hand. I wandered over to one of our escorts.

  “How much farther?” I asked in Djanese as I sidled up next to him, matching his pace.

  He gave me a glare and shoved at me with his elbow. I stumbled into him, apologized, and faded back into the troupe.

  “Here,” I said, handing the matron the swatch of linen I’d cut from the guard’s layered fighting skirt. “You looked like you could use a handkerchief.”

  “Thieves,” she muttered again, but this time with less vitriol. Muiress wiped her face with the fabric and then secreted it among the folds of her gown.

  I gave her a wink and let myself drift back a bit toward the rear of our procession, behind the rest of the actors, but ahead of the final rank of guards. Fowler, who was walking and laughing and chatting with the female contingent of the troupe, glanced back and raised an eyebrow. She’d managed to gain a gauzy green shawl somewhere, and the fabric, along with her expression, made her look winsome. I shook my head in response to her query: I wanted to be alone just now.

  Thanks to the neyajin’s poison, I’d missed our entry into the Old City, not to mention the last two days overall: I wanted to eye the place and take its measure. And while our current route might not have been leading us through the districts and neighborhoods I expected to be frequenting, the main thoroughfares of a city can still tell you a lot.

  Despite what the storytellers in the Raffa Na’Ir cordon back home liked to say, the streets and gutters of el-Qaddice didn’t look to be lined with gold and silver. Then again, I’ve never found the jeweled roofs and silk-clad beggars Ildrecca was supposedly famous for, either, so I wasn’t exactly disappointed by the reality.

  What I did see were buildings rising four and five stories on either side of us. Some towered over the gardens and orchards and courtyards that lay before them, while others stood shoulder to shoulder along the street, their whitewashed and tiled facades gleaming in the sunlight. Every now and then the line was broken, the buildings being replaced by the elaborately carved walls that set off one of the private compounds of the nobles and merchant sheikhs. Palm fronds and tree branches peeked over these walls, hinting at the lush gardens that lay beyond the solid wood and iron gates.

  Farther back, along the western horizon, I could make out the domes of the greater temples, their bulbous sides shining from the silver-gilt prayers that covered their surfaces. I wondered whether the local thieves were ever tempted to pry the precious man-high letters off the temple roofs, and if not, what the Despotate had done to discourage them from lifting the gleaming words.

  Down closer to the street, color was everywhere. Caravans brought dyes to el-Qaddice from the south and west, silks from the east, resulting in the people here draping themselves with the brilliant reds and yellows and greens that would normally be reserved for only the richest in Ildrecca. Gleaming tiles covered the roofs and walls of buildings, their deep blues and greens providing at least the cooling illusion of water. And everywhere were flowers and trees and bushes, from simple planters set at the entry to a courtyard, to the sweeping irrigated public gardens we passed with surprising frequency. El-Qaddice relied on both springs that bubbled up along the escarpment and wells that extended deep below, but even with this, I was surprised at how many more public gardens this city had compared to Ildrecca, which sat on the sea.

  Djanese predominated on the street, of course, both in language and numbers, but there were enough skin tones and clothing styles, enough foreign syllables and throaty clicks in the air, to speak to the cosmopolitan nature of el-Qaddice, even in the guarded Old City. Silk-robed and -capped Ulaan’ng bureaucrats, their elab
orate queues draped over their shoulders and looped in their belts, shuffled past brocade-wrapped Parvans, the latter’s heavy beards split and plaited, rings thick in their hair and ears. A group of midnight-skinned Rathin passed us in gray wayfarers’ robes—the only color allowed their people outside their own borders—their laughter a sharp contrast to their dour clothes. Farther along, a Betten mercenary, his linen shirt open to his waist to show off his scars of merit, barely gave our procession a passing glance, although I noticed his hands kept close to the half dozen daggers he wore at his waist.

  And on every corner, it seemed, stood street magicians: juggling balls of light, drawing down dragons made of vapor and dust, casting fortunes with carved ivory rods, or simply chanting out their services to passersby. Where magicians and Mouths in Ildrecca kept their magics close and their spells soft, here the casters all but shouted their power from the rooftops. I’d seen my fair share of petty glimmer hawkers and con men in the Lower City when we’d arrived, but here, seeing dust dance and steam pull itself from the dry air at a mere gesture or word, made me wonder if the old tales about the origins of the Djanese were true; made me wonder whether the men and women around me had just a hint of the same blood as the djinn that wandered the desert.

  We passed through a great arched gate, fanked on either side by stone elephants extending out from the walls, and entered the third ring of the city. Whereas before we’d been passing through the realm of the nobility and the well connected, now we walked the streets of the more established common classes. The main thoroughfare still ran straight and the trash was mostly cleared away, but paint had replaced tiles as decorations on many of the buildings around us, and the domes of the temple we passed were decorated with beaten copper and glazed ceramic instead of polished silver.

  We were nearly at the wall that separated the third ring from the fourth when the guard captain turned down a curving lane. A short distance later, we passed through what looked to have once been a fortified gate, but was now merely an archway between two tall tenement buildings. Beyond, the streets narrowed considerably, with weathered buildings made from beaten earth and clay bricks crowding in on either side. The paving beneath our feet changed from shaped cobbles to well-worn stone, laid ages ago and worn smooth by centuries of traffic. Roofs were lower, the windows narrower and higher, and most doors—all brightly painted—stood a step or more below street level.

  We had clearly gone from the Old City to the “Ancient City,” and it was here, among the twisting, crowded streets of what was clearly the foreign district, that the Imperial Quarter had grown up.

  Long ago, the Quarter had been a simple trading district, with all of the important diplomatic functionaries taking residence in the second ring of the city. Most of them were still there, but as the relationship between the Empire and the Despotate had evolved over the centuries, so had the quarter. Now it stood as the main symbol of all things imperial within el-Qaddice, housing not only merchants, but craftsmen, lesser diplomats, artists, bankers, trading houses, laborers, expatriates—as well as half a cohort of legionnaires.

  Heron met us in the shadow of the Quarter’s gate, dressed in white and gray like some great crane. A pair of lesser clerks stood behind him. Both were Djanese. Just like back in the room where I’d woken up, he had a book open in his hands, reading. This time, though, it was a thin quarto.

  He lowered the book as I approached up and indicated the walls with a nod. “They’re the third set, you know.”

  I followed his gesture. They were high, solid things covered with bas-relief figures. Most of those figures were Imperials, and most were in the process of dying, either via sickness or at spear point. Considering the reason the walls had been torn down and rebuilt, that made sense.

  “I know,” I said. “The last ones were torn down during the Siege of the Paragons.”

  Heron raised an appreciative eyebrow. “You know of that? Most of our people have tried to forget it.”

  “Most have,” I said, keeping my eyes on the wall. “I just got lucky and came across a copy of Petrosius’s Regimes.”

  He turned to face me full-on. “You have a copy of Petrosius? That book was banned and burned in the empire almost a century ago. How—?”

  “Who said I had a copy?” I said. “I know someone with an extensive collection, is all.” Someone who happened to be both a master scribe and a forger, as well as in my debt.

  Heron cleared his throat. I watched as his fingers played over the cover of the quarto, hungry for that which he’d never thought to even taste. “Do you think he might be willing to . . . perhaps . . . ?”

  “Loan it out?” Loaning out rare books, even across countries, wasn’t an unknown thing, especially among bibliophiles. The opportunity to exchange tomes could often outweigh the risk of loss or damage represented by transit in many minds—one of which seemed to be Heron’s.

  “That, or allow me to pay for a copy to be made,” said Heron. “If, that is, he can find someone he trusts to copy it.”

  I laughed despite myself. Asking Baldezar to copy something like Regimes, especially if there was a chance to show off his scholarly and scribal skills, let alone make a profit, was like asking a bee to make honey. “I think he can probably find someone,” I said. “I’ll even make sure he doesn’t cheat you too badly.”

  “For a copy of that book?” said Heron. “Don’t concern yourself about the price.”

  I turned my attention back to the wall. I could understand Heron’s interest, being in the middle of Djan, even as I could understand why the empire had decided long ago to sweep the incident under the rug. It had been an ignominious action on the part of the emperor at the time, and any acknowledgment by the empire, even through a banned historian, would likely play well at the despotic court.

  A little over one and a quarter centuries ago, Theodoi, in his fifth incarnation as emperor, had decided that it was time to go to war with the Despotate again. This time, though, he wanted to strike at the head first, rather than work his way in from the edges, as had been the tradition for ages. To that end, he ordered almost four hundred legionnaires to be smuggled into el-Qaddice over the course of six months, the troops disguised variously as traders, servants, teamsters, and whatever else would raise the least suspicion. Alone, that was bad enough, but Theodoi had sent along three Imperial Paragons as well.

  Traditionally, the emperor’s private mages had been held in reserve for the defense of the empire, or, on rare occasions, sent to accompany a full Dorminikan army on the march. Paragons were simply too valuable—and too dangerous, if you thought about what one could spill if he was captured—to risk on their own. To send three into el-Qaddice with only half a cohort for protection spoke to just how seriously Theodoi had taken this war, and how badly he’d wanted to strike a crippling blow to the Djanese.

  And he did. The plague started a full two weeks before war was declared. Disease swept through el-Qaddice, starting in the lower city and running all the way up to the gates of the despot’s inner ring. According to Petrosius, prayers, magic, and physicians filled the streets, barely stemming the tide. When the bodies of the corpses began bursting into flames three days later, though, it quickly became obvious that this was more than a simple plague. The exodus from the city was almost immediate.

  Theodoi’s declaration of war had arrived four days after that, accompanied by an ultimatum that all but took direct responsibility for the plague. The despot at the time—one Mehmer Ajan III—hadn’t hesitated. Marshaling his personal forces and summoning the power not only of the Fifteen High Magi, but also the magi of the disparate tribes and clans under his control, the despot had returned to el-Qaddice and laid siege to the Imperial Quarter.

  Petrosius numbers the dead in the thousands outside the walls of the Imperial enclave. Once the magi learned how to turn the plague back on the Imperials, though, he speaks of tens of thousands—all within the Quarter. The walls of the Quarter were torn down, and the heads of the three
Paragons were sent back to Theodoi, along with the despot’s own ultimatum.

  The Dorminikan Empire surrendered two provinces to the Despotate of Djan that autumn, and has only ever recovered half of one in the intervening one hundred and thirty-four years. For the Djanese, that time is referred to as the Burning Days, and they’ve carved depictions of them into the Quarter’s walls, lest they, or we, forget.

  As if reading my mood, Heron cleared his throat beside me. “Dark days, long passed,” he said. He shuddered for a moment in sympathy with the past, then gestured for Tobin and Ezak to join us.

  “What I have to say concerns all of you,” said Heron as the mismatched pair of cousins walked up. “Accommodations have been arranged for you. Even though you aren’t allowed to stay in the Sanctuary of the Muse, the wazir and, through him, the padishah are still responsible for your well-being and sustenance.”

  “Meaning you’re covering out expenses?” said Tobin, smiling for the first time since we’d left the padishah’s enclave.

  “Meaning you have an allowance,” said Heron. “A strict allowance.” He turned his eyes to me. “That you, as the imperial patron, must come to me to receive every other day.”

  “In person?” I said. Having to walk back and forth across the Old City every other day could put a crimp in my other work.

  “In person,” said Heron. “At which point you will report on your troupe’s progress in their preparations, as well as answer for any complaints lodged against you—of which I expect to hear none, of course.”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “When do we appear before His Eminence, the padishah?” said Ezak.

  “Whenever you are ready to perform,” said Heron. “Which,” he added as the two men began to grin, anticipating weeks, or more, of living on the padishah’s coin, “the wazir has decided will be on the twenty-fourth day of Fallwah.”