“Very well.” He waved his hand to dismiss the tattooist. The man gathered his needles and inks and left the room.
Chantmer doused the coals in the brazier with a ladle of water from the bucket, which sent steam hissing into the air. He drew back the curtains and let in a breeze that flushed the worst of the stifling heat and the smell of burning incense. Chantmer’s chamber sat on the second story above the Courtyard of Contemplation, around which sat other meditation chambers.
Chantmer stretched his muscles slowly by the window before turning his attention back to the eunuch. Faalam shivered again and frowned at the open window. He couldn’t possibly be cold in this heat.
“This business of yours, it must be urgent to pull you from bed when you are so ill.”
“Urgent enough if we don’t deal with the situation.”
Chantmer raised an eyebrow. “We? Are we allies now?”
Faalam coughed into his hand before continuing. “This woman. She deftly turns aside the sultan’s attentions of weightier matters. He forgets his purposes, which purposes, I remind you, are yours and mine as well.”
This news surprised Chantmer. He hadn’t been paying attention to the machinations in the palace since Sofiana disappeared three days earlier. Instead, he had been playing a cat and mouse game with Narud, quite literally. Once Chantmer recognized his old rival’s magical scent—subtle and very nearly missed entirely—and discovered that the other wizard was slinking around as a big gray cat, he’d amused himself by casting minor spells on mice, rats, and other palace vermin and sending them out for Narud to hunt.
“You mean the princess?”
“Yes, Marialla Saffa,” Faalam said irritably. He glared up at Chantmer from where he’d sunk to the pillows. “Who else would I be talking about?”
“She is a nobody, only the pawn of the khalifa. The princess commands no armies and masters no guilds. And she is not so delicate in age as the child, so how could she possibly turn the attentions of the sultan?”
“Mufashe’s tastes are large and wide-ranging. He is a man of appetites, and this woman appeals to them. This is the sultan’s undoing. He is distracted from his purpose.”
“Which is?”
Faalam frowned and turned away.
“The sultan sent messengers across the desert to ask for her hand, did he not?” Chantmer prodded. “So that a political alliance would be formed between Balsalom and Marrabat. Or was that Balsalom’s idea?”
“What was offered was a political alliance. Perhaps another outlet for his lust, at most. But nothing more.”
This grew interesting. “Is Mufashe smitten with the woman, is that your claim?”
Again, the eunuch didn’t answer.
“Very well,” Chantmer said. “Keep your own counsel. But if the sultan’s appetites turned so easily from the girl to the princess, then if you were to remove the princess, he would simply find some other pretty thing to occupy his attention. Does it matter who?”
“Of course it matters. For all of the girl’s spirit, she was still a child. Her goals were single-minded and transparent.”
Not so transparent, my friend. You never suspected the poison until it was too late.
Faalam paused to catch his breath. A fleck of bloody spittle hung on his lip. Chantmer hoped he had the decency to wait until the conversation ended before vomiting up his innards and dying.
After a moment, the eunuch regained his composure. “Who knows what game Marialla plays? It is a game, of that I am certain.”
“Is she stirring up trouble?”
“She’s playing the sultan’s sons against each other. They are as grasping and treacherous as their father. We may have civil war on our hands if we don’t do something. Indeed, it may already be too late. The eldest has withdrawn to his lands outside the city and begun raising men.”
“All of this in a few days?” Chantmer said, alarmed.
He had heard whisperings of factions among Mufashe’s sons from Roghan and the other mages, but had no idea that Marialla could cause such trouble, and in so little time. She must be dealt with. But he certainly didn’t want to suggest poisoning the woman in front of the sultan’s chief adviser, and it occurred to him that this might be a good thing, if he could figure out how to turn it to his advantage.
“What then?” he asked. “Do you have a plan to diffuse this situation?”
“First, consider one other problem.” Faalam coughed wetly into his hand before continuing. “We may suddenly find a Balsalomian army marching south on the Spice Road, or a host of Knights Temperate riding through the mountain passes. Pasha Boroah still commands several thousand men.”
“Because of the girl.”
“Yes. She will have tales to tell.”
“Fah!” Chantmer laughed. The silver bite had indeed damaged the eunuch’s mind. “I know the girl is resourceful, but you surely cannot believe that she can cross hundreds of miles of desert by herself. And there are garrisons of men and tax collectors who have received word of the missing girl. They will find her and return her. Anyway, what could she possibly tell Balsalom?”
“That you are vying for control of Marrabat.”
“Nonsense. Who told you that?”
“Whispers, gossip.”
“Don’t believe everything you hear.”
Faalam rose to his feet and turned toward the arched doorway. “What I do believe, Chantmer the Betrayer, is that you are a wicked and treacherous man who will stop at nothing in his pursuit of personal glory.”
Rage swept over him. “I am not Chantmer the Betrayer!” he cried as the man bowed and ducked out of the room. He raised his hand to punish the man, then thought better of it and let the eunuch go. Faalam was dying already; he was not worth Chantmer’s precious magic and the risk of a scimitar at his neck if he killed the sultan’s adviser.
Only after he settled back onto the bed of nails did he begin to wonder. Why had Faalam told him all of this? He hadn’t asked Chantmer’s advice at any time, but had given information without cost, and in Chantmer’s experience, Marrabatti rarely committed such follies, let alone the eunuch. He shuffled the pieces of the conversation in his mind and then settled on one interesting detail.
If the sultan’s sons all vied for the throne, perhaps Chantmer could turn one of them to his own advantage. Or better still, he could turn the princess. Roghan concerned himself too much with his order of mages, the sultan with his various sexual interests, and whatever Faalam schemed would die when the man did. That left Chantmer to control the throne. Control the throne, and he could take Balsalom as well, and then he would have the power to unify Mithyl to fight against the dark wizard in Veyre.
And yet, it occurred to him that perhaps Faalam wanted him to turn his attention to the throne. Perhaps he had led Chantmer to that very conclusion. He considered for a moment, but couldn’t think of why the eunuch would wish such a thing. Indeed, it didn’t matter anyway. The man would soon be dead.
Chapter Seventeen
Sofiana never had any intention of traveling up the Spice Road with Darik. She remembered when she’d passed through the Desolation of Toth last summer with Whelan, Markal, and Darik, and the boy had proved worthless at best. He was a naive city boy, and though he’d been enslaved when her father and the wizard rescued him, he’d proved himself a slow learner. Yes, he had been training and fighting since the beginning of the war, but how much could one person learn in so short a time?
So when the two cats slipped out of Marrabat through the sewers and entered the desert, she was already thinking about how she could lose him. Darik led her up the road a couple of miles and into a village of mud and straw houses. She could smell wild animals creeping by in the darkness, and some of them would be able to smell her too. Darik found a farmer’s shed, the walls crumbling and gaps eroded in the foundation. He squirmed in and meowed for her to follow. Once inside, his glowing eyes gave her a significant look, and then he cast his gaze toward the corner, where a collection o
f broken tools would provide refuge until they transformed back into humans.
Sofiana obeyed everything he told her, but as soon as he was curled up and asleep, his breath emerging in a low rumble, she sprang silently to her paws and made for the gap in the wall. Once outside, she ran down the empty street and toward the highway. Along toward morning, she found herself a girl once again. Her dagger remained beneath her robe, together with the coin purse King Daniel had given her.
When the sun climbed into the sky, she found herself on foot trudging up an empty road, surrounded by the vast, sandy desert. There was no sign of Darik.
#
Late on the first morning after escaping Darik’s watchful eye, she entered a village where she passed off a few Balsalomian dinarii for waterskins and supplies. A few miles up the road, she came upon one of the fortress-like caravanserai that lodged and protected travelers on the Spice Road, and here she stole a camel from some Kratians. After that she thought it wise to stay off the highway and travel the desert alone.
That night when she slept in the open air, she woke to hear a desert owl hooting softly to the south. A moment later, another owl hooted to her east. Another hoot from the first owl, followed by a third owl. Sofiana reached into her robes to pull out her dagger and remained perfectly still while silently begging her camel to remain asleep. The hoots came too regularly for owls and sounded to her ears like a systematic search. Mufashe’s men, or the Kratians looking for the stolen camel? She remained in place until the owl hooted again further to the north.
The next morning she was more cautious, watching constantly and taking the camel along the windward sides of dunes. The blowing sand irritated the camel and worked its way underneath the edge of the turban wrapped around her mouth, but it would sweep away her tracks. Those precautions eventually faded to be replaced by boredom, hunger, and thirst.
Two days later, she was hungry and discouraged. She had seen no one since the caravanserai and had eaten nothing in the last two days but a monitor lizard she’d dug from its burrow, meat dried across her saddle. Her waterskins dangled limp and nearly empty from her camel’s pack. She resisted the urge to guzzle the last few mouthfuls. Her stolen camel plodded across the sand about two miles west of the Spice Road, with the mountains to her left and more than a hundred miles of desert and scrub ahead of her before she reached the safety of Balsalomian lands.
Sofiana glanced over her shoulder when the camel crested a sandy dune. Grass and a few thorny bushes pinned the dune in place, and the camel lowered its head to snuffle for something edible to munch on. Sofiana let it rest while she looked. Nothing behind her or ahead that she could see. No, just an endless, depressing waste that stretched in all directions. At least it wasn’t as hot as it had been.
After a heavy sigh, Sofiana pulled the reins and nudged the camel into action. The beast bellowed its irritation and turned its head to grab one last mouthful before moving. She frowned and jerked harder on the reins, and the camel bellowed again.
The sun sank slowly behind the mountains far to the west, and the day’s warmth bled from the air. Soon, she was cold for the first time in weeks. She had no riding cloak, but had been wise enough to buy an extra robe in the village, and she pulled it on over the other one. It stopped the shivers, but left her well short of warm. Sofiana began to watch for a place to spend the night. The first stars glimmered overhead, but their light was washed out by the comet that now spread nearly two hands wide across the sky.
A smaller hump of dry hills and mountains stretched to her east, the tan stone of a vast escarpment ending in field of boulders and rubble. Sofiana had heard hyenas last night and knew that desert lions lived here where the sandy waste began to give way to desert scrub. The boulders might make a good refuge from the cold and the wild beasts.
Sofiana was turning her camel toward them when she saw a fire.
It flickered between two dunes that had initially blocked her view. Four men squatted around the fire, while some forty or fifty camels milled about or sat on their knees a short distance from the camp. An animal of some kind roasted over the flames, and a delicious aroma wafted over the dunes.
Sofiana hesitated for a long moment, torn between her fear and her hunger and loneliness. In the end, it was the camels that decided it for her. Only traders would have so many camels and so few riders. They could not possibly be Marrabatti soldiers out looking for her, and the men she’d stolen the camel from had been traveling south. They wouldn’t have gone this far simply to search for one missing animal. She dismounted and picked her way across the sand toward the fire. She called out her arrival as she drew into view.
Men sprang to their feet and drew scimitars. They positioned themselves in a crescent moon shape in front of the fire. One man, older than the others, with a beard that dipped halfway down his chest, shouted instructions to the others in a language that sounded like Kratian. Then, when Sofiana drew within the light cast by the fire, the man laughed and resheathed his weapon. The others did likewise.
“Boy,” the man called to her. “Are you alone? This is a dangerous land.”
“I’m not a boy,” she said, feeling peevish.
The man laughed again. “Girl, then. But my question remains. There are lions and bearded snakes, and you would make a nice mouthful for any of them. Even a dragon, some say.”
“Who says that I’m alone?” She climbed down from the camel.
Two of the men turned their attentions to the meat over the fire while the others sat back on their haunches. The animal was a wild oryx, dressed and skewered.
The first man grinned at her, revealing a smile missing several teeth, the others stained red from khat chewing. “You are alone, but whether lost or simply foolhardy, I’m not sure. Care to share a meal?”
“Perhaps.”
“I can hear your stomach rumbling from here, friend. And your waterskins hang empty. Come, join us.” He gestured to one of the other men and jabbered a few words to him in Kratian.
This second man hurried forward to take the reins of her camel, but Sofiana didn’t let go. She was suddenly sure that she had made a mistake in approaching. She recognized the men now from their dark skin and desert-roughened features, as much as their language. These were no merchants, they were camel riders of the kind who had fought for King Toth at Arvada. They were notorious thieves and liars. What if they were slavers?
“It’s all right,” the bearded man said. “We won’t hurt your mount. Listen, we found the watering hole. Your camel needs it—he is weak and staggering.”
Reluctantly, she removed her hand from the reins, and the second man took her camel. As he passed the fire, the older man with the beard rubbed his hand over the camel’s head, and nodded for the other man to take him to the others. He said a few more words to the other man, then turned back to Sofiana. “You ride a fine Kratian beast. Does it carry you well?”
Sofiana shrugged. “He’s a fine enough mount. Somewhat foul-tempered and willful. But he’s not a Kratian camel, so far as I know. I bought him in Darnad,” she lied. “I don’t think the Kratians trade so far north.”
“Ah, we do trade in Darnad,” he said. “If indeed you purchased the camel in the khalifates.”
The man drew a dagger, and Sofiana staggered backwards, reaching for her own blade. But before she could draw it, he sliced a hunk of meat from the oryx and held it out to her on the tip of his blade. “You are our guest, so I would be honored if you would test it and tell me if it is done.”
She took the meat. It was so hot that it burned her fingers and her mouth, but she was hungry and didn’t care. She nodded between chews. “It’s delicious.”
The man broke into a smile. He shouted, “It is done! We eat.” He shouted again in Kratian.
Two more men appeared and came scrambling down the dune, and shortly the man who’d taken her camel reappeared as well. The six of them immediately set into the beast, cutting off huge slabs of meat and laying them in polished cedar bowls.
Someone produced a jug of fermented camel milk and passed it around. Sofiana dared not refuse when offered the jug. It was sharp and bitter, yet had a cloying aftertaste at the same time.
“Tell me your name, girl,” the man said.
She hesitated. If they’d heard her name, Sofiana might find herself trussed up and thrown over the back of a camel to return to the sultan’s palace in Marrabat. But she was too proud to take on a false name, either.
“My name is Ninny.”
“Ninny.” The man rolled the word on his tongue like it was a strange and inedible berry. “My name is Abuda-Mallfallah-Bar-Julab. But they call me Abudallah.”
They sat and ate for a few minutes, the silence punctuated by grunts and belches. When they finished, one of the men passed out leaves of khat, which the men tucked into their cheeks. Sofiana took a leaf, sniffed it, and followed their lead. She wrinkled her face at the bitter flavor.
“A curious thing happened to my brother a few days ago outside of Marrabat,” Abudallah said. “He woke one morning to find his best camel missing.”
Sofiana’s heart jumped. “Oh?” The others watched her, no longer eating.
“Yes, most strange. ‘A djinn,’ I told him, ‘came in the night and worked his mischief.’ But now I am not so sure. I only asked you about your camel because it has three notches in its right ear, which is how my tribe marks its beasts.” He shrugged. “But if you say the camel came from Darnad . . . ”
Sofiana kicked herself for not being more observant. Had she noticed the notches, she could have added an extra. “That is strange. Maybe it was resold.”
Abudallah took another swig from the jug of fermented milk. “I told my brother not to worry about his loss. Whoever took it must have needed the camel badly to cross the desert. Perhaps the thief was running from the sultan of Marrabat, who has many enemies. I even hear that he is looking for a young Eriscoban girl.”
The Warrior King (Book 4) Page 13
