Sword and Sorceress XXVII

by Unknown

  Azure had heard the tales of how rich the salt trade had made the pirates. She readily understood why they would hold tightly to their prize. What astounded her was that any person had ever been insane enough to explore this basin in the first place.

  #

  The first thing Coil did when he woke that evening was drink an entire flagon of water. Even that was not enough to rinse away the taste of dust. He opened one of the kegs, refilled the flagon to the brim, and set the flagon beside Azure’s pallet. Returning to his own pallet, he began working on what remained in the keg.

  Moonlight shone brightly through the grillwork of the window of the coop the innkeeper had rented them. As he sipped, Coil contemplated the stack of kegs in the corner—their entire supply, transferred from their camels as the last thing they accomplished before collapsing for the day. How inadequate it seemed.

  Azure murmured and sat up. She, too, went straight for the flagon, taking huge, unladylike gulps.

  Coil considered lighting the oil lamp, but Azure was as wilted as she had ever been aside from that time they’d been poisoned in Murk Hollow. He decided she would prefer to have whatever illusion of grace the dimness preserved.

  “Will it ever get cooler?” she whined.

  “It has to,” he said. “But once that happens, patrons will start wandering in downstairs. If we’re going to look around before our shift, we need to head out soon.”

  They put on street clothes, broke their fast on raisins and roasted locusts, and tried to stretch out the stiffness from their roadsore muscles. Then they headed out the back door of the inn and began threading through the lanes of Salt Town.

  Whenever they met someone going the other way, they were forced to squeeze by. The gaps between the buildings were narrow, the better to preserve shade during the day. Given the canopies on most windows, a rat would be able to travel from one end of Salt Town to the other and never touch the ground.

  They stumbled across the pens without meaning to. Coil suspected they would have found more of the same no matter which quarter of the outpost they explored. Camel drovers, mercenary guards, and slave overseers lined up at the entrance. They handed over their whore chits to the doorkeep, who let them in one by one whenever a man already inside exited a stall.

  In any other town, except perhaps the desperate ports along the Kraken Sea or the hovels of Lotus City, a building such as this would be a stable for livestock. But then, in any other city one might see weavers at their looms, children running after stray chickens, maidens helping their old grandfathers to the meditation house.

  They continued on to their goal. They found it at the very center of Salt Town, surrounded by a circular plaza of stone pavement, standing tall as no human-made building had a right to stand, straining for the moon like the phallus of a buried god.

  Whatever lookout might be stationed at the uppermost platform had lit no lamp—the better for his night vision, Coil surmised. He and Azure made sure not to step out into the plaza where he might spot them.

  Lamplight did flicker through some of the windows. The lowest of those was five times as high as Coil could reach if he stood on his toes, and none were big enough to squeeze through. The only ways in were the grand entrance and two service portals around back. Burly guards stood at each opening, and in the absence of anyone going in and out, the grates had been lowered.

  “No going in the hard way,” Coil said. “The soft way it is.”

  “It seems so,” Azure sighed.

  That was unfortunate. The soft way would take time. And luck.

  They made one complete circuit of the outpost so that they would have their bearings. They soon found themselves back at the inn. The window of their little room looked down on them. The first patrons were ambling into the ground-floor tavern, parting the strings of beads that hung halfway down the arched entrance.

  Coil paused outside. He studied the building.

  “You’re thinking of home,” Azure said.

  “I am,” he replied. “I was thinking how this could never be like Mama’s.” His foster mother’s establishment had catered to a neverending series of overnight guests, but its kitchen and back rooms had nevertheless been a sanctuary—as good a family space as any boy could ask for. Or it had been until that one awful night.

  This inn was no home. No place in Salt Town was home to any person. People came here to Salt Town to work. They came to die. No one came here to live.

  #

  Coil showed off his rope tricks and his knife juggling. Azure sang ribald songs of the barge wenches of Reedy River. But for most of the evening, Coil played his sevenflute while Azure danced. Around them guards and drovers and off-duty cooks drank and gambled among themselves for scrip or whore chits. Finally the right prospect turned up: A guard sat down alone at a table. By his third ale he was gazing up and down Azure’s curves in a way that said he had sought his release in the pens so many times in a row he wanted to prove to himself a woman would be with him of her own accord.

  Coil drew the accompaniment to a close. Azure slowed her movements to finish her last pose just as the last languid note of the flute faded below human hearing.

  Coil put away his instrument and found a seat along the wall. The innkeeper brought him an ale. He and Azure did not make eye contact.

  “You and your fellow having a lover’s spat?” the guard asked.

  Azure glided casually across the dais toward the guard’s table. “He’s not my lover. He’s my milk brother.”

  “Ah. So, are you saying he won’t be jealous if you spend time with me?”

  “Something like that,” she responded. “But I don’t show favor to just any man.”

  He moved to a bench near the edge of the dance dais. “I expect I’m up to your standards.”

  Azure tilted an eyebrow at him. “And what makes you special?”

  “I’m a tower guard. You won’t find me sweatin’ out there in the salt fields, whippin’ slaves all night.”

  “Mildly impressive.” She propped his knees together and sat sideways across his lower thighs.

  He raised his hand toward her chest. His grin faded when she stuck her talon thimble into his questing palm.

  “Ow!”

  “Anyone can be a tower guard,” she chided. “Tell me something interesting.”

  “I can nick a bluefly off a camel’s ass with my scimitar, and the camel wouldn’t even feel it.”

  “I’ll keep that in mind next time my camel needs that.”

  “I can out-drink any man here.”

  She yawned.

  “I’ve seen the prince’s new plaything. The daughter of the stormwitch.”

  Azure shrugged. “I don’t believe she’s actually in there. If she were, how would you see her? I’m sure the only guards with access to her are eunuchs. Oh!” She eyed his crotch. “Are you a eunuch?”

  “I didn’t say I guard her, now did I? I saw her in the cage when she was brought in. Lovely little thing, she was. Fresh into her womanhood. He’s one lucky man, that admiral prince. He’s having her trained in the arts of the harem. Sends her to the baths every afternoon so she’s fresh for him when evening comes. Sends her to the baths again when he’s done what he likes.”

  “There are baths in Salt Town? You make me laugh.”

  “There are in the tower. The master of Salt Town can have anything he wants. He has water brought in fresh every day. Sends the dregs off to the camel troughs and slave cisterns. If you’re a pirate lord, even Salt Town has its luxuries.”

  She scooted a bit further up his thighs. Leaned in a little. “You really saw her?”

  “With my own eyes.” He put his hand on one of her knees. She let it stay there.

  “The Salt Pirates are taking a risk, taunting the witch that way.”

  The guard snorted. “She’s toothless.”

  “That’s not what I heard.”

  “You know what the prince is going to do? When he’s tired of the sweetling, he’ll send h
er to the pens. Even I might have a chance at her when that happens. He’ll send her to the pens like he sent the witch herself there when she was the same age. She couldn’t stop him then. She won’t be able to stop him this time.”

  Over at his table, Coil had been reading the man’s lips. His eyes widened.

  Azure disguised her own shock by tilting forward until her mouth was only the span of a finger away from the guard’s ear. “Now that’s story to stir me,” she cooed. “Find me when my shift is done.”

  She rose. Coil began to play his sevenflute. She resumed her dancing. The guard leaned back against the table, grinning like a fool.

  #

  By the time their workshift ended, the fool was snoring on the floor, a little beyond drunk thanks to the dose of slumberlock Azure had slipped into his tankard.

  Coil and Azure cleared out of their room. By the time dawn came and the populace went to ground to wait out the onslaught of heat, the milk siblings were tucked into a hiding place in the warehouse caves near the plaza, where the pirate prince’s barrels of water were stored.

  No more inn. No more flute playing and dancing. They had found the soft way in. All they had to do was wait until late afternoon. They slept in shifts while the hours passed.

  The sentries at the tower service portal were wilted and sluggish of attention in the late afternoon when Coil and Azure rolled the water cart up to the grate wearing the livery of tower servants, cowls shading their faces. The men raised the grate and waved them through. Even a brief check would have revealed the pair were not the same tandem that had left a short while earlier to fetch the load from the caves.

  They were likewise ignored as they turned down a passageway, guided by the scrape marks of thousands of such deliveries, and came to the hoist. No one noticed that Coil and Azure neglected to transfer their cargo. They stepped onto the platform bringing only a backpack and the short staff Coil had hidden between the barrels.

  They tugged hard on the pulley ropes. Meant for raising much heavier loads than the two of them, the elevator raced upward—faster even than they could have run up the stairs.

  At the first landing, they saw larder supplies and heard the banging of pots and clatter of knives on chopping boards. An appetizing odor wafted toward them. They did not pause in their ascent.

  Thirty heartbeats later the hoist reached the uppermost landing. A guard was lounging on the floor beside his bench, sucking on a pipe as long as curved as a cobra contemplating a strike. The stench of fivefold leaf, sweet as new manure, pervaded the chamber.

  The guard opened his eyes. Coil burst from the lift. He got to the man before he could rise. The pipe had barely fallen out of the way when Coil plunged his dagger beneath the man’s chin and twisted the blade.

  Azure rushed past, her own knife held ready. She stopped at the threshold of the next room, glance darting right and left.

  “Clear,” she whispered.

  Coil grabbed his short staff from the lift platform. He took the lead again.

  As expected, they found these upper reaches of the tower, the intimate domain of the pirate lord, were mostly empty. They ran into no further delays on their way to the baths.

  Their destination was not hard to locate. The passageways virtually sang out that somewhere nearby, water was caressing air. All they had to do was trust that feeling. Two floors down Coil turned a corner and spotted an ornate double door. In front of it, a eunuch guard and a harem matron were conversing.

  The guard chose the wrong move. He pulled out his scimitar. That gave Coil the chance to charge forward and plunge the end of his staff into the man’s sternum. The eunuch’s lungs emptied, ended his chance to shout.

  Unfortunately, the matron had the sense to scream. The noise lasted only a moment before Azure body-slammed into her midsection, but it was loud. As was the sound of her skull hitting the door behind her.

  Coil didn’t even take the time to curse. Speed was the only cure. Coil knocked aside the scimitar. The eunuch, though breathless, parried Coil’s first swipe at his head, but not the second. An instant later the fellow slumped over the matron’s limp form.

  Coil and Azure flung the doors open and burst into a gloriously appointed chamber. Sunken, tile-lined pools took up both of the far corners. Light through stained-glass windows illuminated the chamber’s only occupant. She was standing thigh deep in the larger pool.

  The girl had less nomad blood in her, but no one who had ever seen Lady Sirocco would doubt that this was her daughter. The difference was Lady Sirocco wore a mantle that said Step Back. This gracile beauty wore one that said Join Me.

  She did not seem startled to see them.

  “I’m Coil,” said Coil. He almost stammered. “This is Azure. We’re here to rescue you. We have to move quickly.”

  He tossed her the washcloth from the pool’s edge. It was the only item in the whole chamber other than the girl herself. There were no towels in Salt Town.

  The girl waded up the ledges of the pool, shook the excess moisture from her feet, and gestured for them to lead on.

  #

  Almost all of the tower sentries were stationed at the bottom. So Coil headed up, sprinting. The girl was right at his heels. Azure was slow only in the sense that she spared occasional glances behind to check for pursuers.

  None yet.

  She heard Coil shout as he reached the lookout platform. She leaped up the last few steps two at a time and found her milk brother squared off against a single sentry.

  The defender ignored Azure, naturally assuming that Coil was the threat. He did not expect Azure’s knife throw. Her blade sank deep into the side of his neck.

  Reflex made the man pull the knife out. Wrong move. Blood poured from the wound. His eyes glazed over. He fell back.

  The twitching was soon done. Azure retrieved her knife from the dead man’s loose grip.

  “Let me.”

  To Azure’s surprise, the girl wiped the blood off Azure’s blade with the washcloth. After making sure she had rubbed away every trace of crimson, she handed the weapon back to Azure and tossed the washcloth onto the corpse.

  “I’m Zephyr,” she said.

  Azure blinked. “Puh-pleased to meet you,” she stammered, composure ruined precisely because she was striving so hard to retain it.

  “Please tell me you have my mother’s flying carpet.”

  Coil pulled off his backpack. He and Azure pulled out the requested item and spread it out on the bricks, careful not to let the edge slip into the spreading blood.

  The carpet was silk. Thin. It was clearly not meant as something to tread upon. Its lightness and lack of bulk meant it could be—and indeed had been—folded many times and made compact. Unfurled, it was twice as long as Coil was tall, and nearly as great in width. Its designs were lavish and intricate.

  “Your mother said you would know how to make it work,” Coil said.

  Zephyr knelt near the center. “Sit beside me,” she instructed.

  No sooner had she uttered the words that the sound of heavy footfalls began reverberating ever more loudly up the stairs. Coil and Azure took their places.

  Zephyr caressed the fabric just in front of her knees, her fingers tracing the outline of a roc flying over a wasteland of high dunes. “To my mother, wherever she is. Go!”

  The carpet lifted them as if it were as solid as a ship deck. They glided smoothly out from beneath the cap of the toadstool, heading northeast.

  No sooner had they emerged into sunlight than guards poured onto the tower platform. They shouted as they spotted the carpet and its passengers.

  Two of them were carrying bows.

  “Make it go faster!” Coil said.

  Zephyr winced. “It always starts slow.”

  Coil grabbed the girl and flung her sideways with him. An arrow sped through the place where they had been, opening a slice in one of his sleeves. Azure pulled them the other way just in time to avoid the second shot.

  The archers nocke
d again and fired. This time the arrows fell short. A pair of antlermen with their longbows would have had a chance, but the guards of Salt Town had only the short bows of the deserts, meant for firing from the backs of horses or camels.

  In the streets below, other guards spotted them. One or two rushed to find bows of their own, but by the time they reached their armories, Azure and Coil and the stormwitch’s waif were well past the edges of the outpost.

  “You’re safe now,” Coil told the girl.

  For the first time, the youngster trembled. She curled up against Coil. He instinctively wrapped his arms around her. It worked. Azure saw the girl’s breathing ease.

  Slow though the acceleration was, the carpet’s speed increased at a steady rate until they were hurtling over the landscape at a rate that would humble any migratory bird. The wind of their passage whipped at their clothes—that is to say, at Coil’s and Azure’s clothes—mitigating the sun’s fierce kiss. Azure lay down to keep her hair from whipping around her face. She studied the way her milk brother was nestling Zephyr. She studied Zephyr being nestled.

  It was the strangest thing. She didn’t know which one she envied more.

  #

  The sun had been low in the sky when they made their escape. But so fast did they travel, the orb had barely dropped below the horizon when they passed over the eastern rim of the great basin. Below sprawled the convoluted heart of the Desert of Fumes.

  That landscape, fully visible in the glow of early twilight, was changing.

  A rumble grew. It was a sound deeper than any Coil had ever heard. His ears were not sufficient to perceive it. It smote like a thundercrack but lasted far longer. It grabbed him by the skull and spine and shook him.

  Suddenly the carpet shot straight up, pummeled by a blast of air. Its magic kept it stable and none of the riders fell off, but it felt as though a Titan had swatted them. The girl screamed and pressed even harder against Coil.

  “Can this be happening?” Azure squeaked.

  Belatedly Coil saw what she had, and no, it did not seem possible—the plateau was tearing asunder right along the route the caravan had taken. The northern side of the canyon heaved upward, then downward, then both sides separated.