“Who might have done such a wicked thing?” Malik asked.
“An enemy of peace.” Nathaliey stared hard. “There are many, aren’t there?”
“Indeed,” the pasha said, with no hint of irony. “They are everywhere.”
“Your men will die in the mountains without the master’s protection. Griffins will kill your horses, and griffin riders will plunder your caravans.”
“Our archers will drive the beasts from the sky.”
“Then there are bandits, giants. Tall, pale-skinned warriors from over the mountains. Who will negotiate with the barbarian kingdoms?”
Malik waved his hand dismissively. “The new fortifications will be more than sufficient.”
Nathaliey avoided looking at her father and instead addressed the khalif directly. “There are no Veyrian troops billeted in the city. Our yearly levy has been paid. Why is this man here?” Her eyes narrowed as she remembered something Omar had said. “What do you mean, general of the western armies? I didn’t know there was a western army.”
Omar gave a casual shrug, but he wouldn’t meet her gaze. He snapped his fingers at the monkey and pointed to a silver bowl of dates that lay just out of reach. The monkey scrambled down the pole, chattering excitedly. He handed the bowl to the khalif and received a date as recompense.
“Well?” Nathaliey demanded.
The ministers were buzzing, and now Nathaliey’s father spoke up. “You forget yourself, apprentice. You will speak to your lord with proper deference.”
“He is not my lord, Vizier. I answer to Memnet the Great.”
Omar looked up from the dates. “The old wizard is dead.”
“But the order is not. My loyalty is to the Crimson Path, not to you, nor to any other worldly power. You are not my king or master.”
Omar’s face reddened. “You will speak to me properly. If I tell you to bow, you will bow.”
“Don’t be absurd. I don’t bow.”
“This is outrageous. I’ll have you in the dungeon.”
Nathaliey blinked. She’d known Omar since they’d played together as children in the palace gardens. She was two years older and had found the boy amusing and foolish in turns. Yet he’d been far more pleasant than his obnoxious sisters, the princesses. Until she found out Omar was destined to be her king some day and she to serve as his vizier—then she’d soured on the friendship. How could she take him seriously as her ruler? She had literally seen him put sticks up his nose. Once, he’d licked a bright orange frog on a dare and thrown up on his tunic when it made him sick.
Apprenticeship in the gardens had offered Nathaliey a different path, and she’d sensed Omar’s resentment ever since. Not only of her, but of her master and the privileges of the wizard and his gardens. Members of the order came and went as they pleased. Where they lived, no one knew. They were answerable to no one but their own order.
Could it have been the khalif who sent the gray-faced assassin? No, impossible. Omar needed Memnet’s power, the strength of the gardens and apprentices. It was the master who had kept Aristonia from the grasp of stronger powers to the east and north. Resent the order or not, losing their support would be disastrous.
Aristonia was the smallest of the khalifates, a mere fifty miles wide and a hundred long. The Great Census five years earlier had numbered her people at a hundred and ten thousand souls, with more than half living in the capital of Syrmarria. While drought in surrounding lands had surely swelled those numbers with refugees, the khalifate was still too small to defend herself. Even a large enough tribe of Kratians might be tempted to ride in from the desert and sack Syrmarria, seeing it as rich and vulnerable.
Vulnerable except for the Order of the Crimson Path and the powerful wizard at its head.
Nathaliey bowed her head and forced the anger from her face. When she looked up, Omar had settled down and looked almost ashamed at his outburst.
“My lord,” she said, forcing the words out, “may I speak with you in private on an unrelated matter?”
“The khalif does not take counsel without the presence of his ministers,” one of the viziers said.
“Whatever it is can wait until later,” her father added.
There was a warning in his tone, and Nathaliey glanced at him, surprised and confused. His brows knit together and he gave a barely perceptible shake of the head. What did that mean?
“Not counsel, vizier,” she told her father. “I have questions. As I indicated, it has nothing to do with the visitors.”
“No,” he said. “Impossible.”
She had been merely irritated by the presence of the engineer and pasha, but now studied them more closely. “What is happening here? What do these Veyrians want?”
Pasha Malik had remained standing throughout all of this, and now he took a step toward her. He was several inches taller than she was, and at one time would have left her intimidated as he approached so closely. Now she felt only annoyed, and refused to take a step back.
“We are changing the course of the road,” Malik said.
“Through Aristonia?” She directed this question at the khalif, not the high king’s pasha.
“There is no reason why it should not pass through,” Omar said.
“Memnet forbade it. That is reason enough.”
“A foolish, shortsighted move,” Omar said. “Increased trade will enrich our land, strengthen Syrmarria, and make us invulnerable to attack.”
“What fool told you that? This one?” Nathaliey hooked her thumb at Pasha Malik. “You know what it will do—it will flood our lands with travelers. Merchants will move to our cities, and bring their families, their servants, their slaves. It is already occurring—what happens when the trickle turns to a flood?”
“The world turns,” Pasha Malik said. “If you stand in its way, you will be crushed.”
Nathaliey turned back to him. “What course would you have the road take?”
“Instead of cutting north and adding fifty miles of unnecessary travel, the highway will pass through the gates of Syrmarria, then directly west toward the mountains.”
That was even worse than she’d thought. “Your course would take it near the Sacred Forest. That, we will never allow.”
“Directly through it, in fact, unless I am mistaken,” the pasha said.
He glanced at his engineer with a question in his eyes, though surely this was something he would know without confirmation. The engineer nodded.
“Yes,” the older man said. “Through the forest.”
“Impossible,” Nathaliey said.
Malik gave a dismissive wave of the hand. “There is nothing sacred about those woods. They are only trees—if they ever served a religious purpose, those days are over. Anyway, it is a small thing, a ribbon of road through a vast woodland. What is the harm of it?”
Nathaliey made her way to the khalif and squatted in front of him. “Omar, listen to me. The king’s highway is twenty-five feet wide, with guard posts every three miles. Fortifications, barracks, castles. The high king’s troops will be stationed right in the heart of Aristonia, with powerful fortresses held by the king’s own army. Syrmarria will fill with Veyrians and other Easterners.”
“Aristonia will remain,” Omar said. “It won’t disappear.”
“As a name, as a smudge on a map. As a nation, no. What is a nation but the people who live in it? You know what this means, you have to know. Why would you agree to such a thing?”
The khalif’s smile looked strained. “What choice do you think I have?”
“Of course you have a choice. You can tell him no. The order survives. Our power remains. The master—”
Nathaliey stopped herself. She’d been on the verge of admitting their greatest hopes, that Memnet was not yet dead, that he would be restored by the miraculous soil of the gardens. But considering who had benefited by the master’s death, she harbored strong suspicions that the assassin had been sent by someone in this room.
“Your khalif is
right,” Pasha Malik said. “There is no choice. The griffin riders grow more bold as their flocks migrate south. They swarm the mountains by the hundreds. And the barbarians are growing stronger with every passing season. We must build the road first, or one day we will wake to find an army of white-skinned devils roaring down from the passes.”
“If the barbarians are our enemies,” she said, “why build a road to them? If the griffins are a threat, why antagonize them by building castles and fortifications among their mountain aeries?”
“They must be driven off, of course.”
“Use the griffins as a buffer to protect us from the barbarians,” she said. “If you approach the griffin riders, they may even agree to an alliance.”
“There is a drought,” Pasha Malik said, as if that were answer enough. “The cities of the plains must be fed. Why should the barbarians hoard the bounty of their fields?”
“This is ridiculous!”
The heaven birds stopped their bell-like singing at Nathaliey’s raised voice. The monkey screeched and pulled on his perch until it swayed. It bared its teeth at her.
The khalif looked up at the monkey with an annoyed expression, then back at Nathaliey with a deepening scowl. “Someone get this girl out of my presence. Pasha, forgive me, I did not know she was in the palace, or I would have warned you.”
“I understand,” Malik said. “You have a dangerous element in your midst.”
“We can both agree on that much,” Nathaliey said. “Why don’t you leave this city before you are thrown out?”
“Nathaliey, please,” her father said. He stepped away from the other ministers and reached for her wrist, but she shrugged him away.
“So now it is open treason?” Pasha Malik said.
“Treason?” she scoffed. “You are the foreigner here, not I.”
Malik nodded grimly. “I was prepared for this. Men!”
Three Veyrians with black capes burst into the room, scimitars already in hand. Blood of the Path! Veyrian soldiers? Where the devil was the palace guard?
Malik pointed at Nathaliey. “Take her at once.”
Nathaliey pulled back her sleeves as the three soldiers turned on her. She placed her hands palm down. The three hesitated, even as the words came to her tongue. Blood rose from the pores on her arms.
“Labi et cadere. Lapidem te percussit.”
An illusion, but a powerful one. The three soldiers flailed as if the entire room had been tilted to one side. They lost their scimitars, which clattered to the floor as the men tried to keep their balance and failed. One man struck his head on the flagstones, but the other two landed less awkwardly and were already grabbing for their weapons as Nathaliey picked up the hem of her robe and fled for the open doorway. The khalif’s monkey shrieked at her as she ran.
All she had to do was reach the arcades outside, then she had another trick that would get her across the courtyard. Once on the other side, she’d disappear into the shadows and they’d never find her before she escaped the palace into the streets of Syrmarria. From there, she would flee the city, get to the gardens, and warn her friends.
Pasha Malik’s hand shot out and seized her wrist before she could get past. He twisted it around, and her arm wrenched painfully in its socket. But Nathaliey had the presence of mind to call up her other spell. It was a simple one, but it would confuse him long enough to let her get free.
It was on her lips when Malik struck her hard on the face with his free hand. Her head rocked back, and the words died as she fell. He kept hold of her wrist, and something popped in her shoulder, but she felt nothing yet over the blow to her face.
Other men grabbed her legs and arms. Someone stuffed a rag in her mouth that tasted of stale sweat, while another bound her hands behind her. Her head was still ringing in any event, and she was incapable of defending herself. A man kicked her in the ribs, cursing. Another man pummeled her head.
“Don’t hurt her!” a voice cried. Her father? The khalif?
The commotion had set the monkey shrieking in earnest, and it was the last thing she heard before the lurking blackness reached up and dragged her down.
Chapter Six
Nathaliey was already semiconscious by the time they threw her into the dungeon, but it took time for her head to clear. The throbbing in her temples didn’t help, and neither did the ache in her ribs. Her shoulder hurt, too, but the way her arms were twisted behind her, she couldn’t tell if it was merely wrenched about or if her right arm was dislocated.
Blood filled her nose and ran down her throat, and it was all she could do to breathe through the gag they’d bound around her mouth. For several minutes she fought the sensation of suffocating until she forced calm on herself by using meditation techniques learned in the garden. That helped, and once her breathing slowed, she found she could get enough air.
It then took about an hour to chew through the gag and get her mouth free. She maneuvered herself into a sitting position and slid across the damp flagstones until she found the wall in the darkness. She leaned against it, trying not to groan from the pain.
It was quiet down here, the only sounds being her own breathing and a drip of water that fell from the ceiling into a puddle a few feet away. Every eight or ten seconds another plop. It must be draining through the floor at roughly the same rate, because the puddle hadn’t spread to where she sat, thankfully, although the stone was damp and the air moist and unhealthy.
Nathaliey turned over ways to free herself. She didn’t know the dungeon, but had heard the door slam shut with a definitive clang, so she had to assume it was secure enough. If she could get her hands free, she might be able to concentrate against the pain long enough to use one more spell before she drained out too much blood. But what?
There was magic strong enough to splinter doors like this one to kindling. For that matter, Memnet could shake the whole castle down were he determined enough. But Nathaliey was only an apprentice, and possessed a limited arsenal of tricks and flashy surprises.
A message to her father? Could she put a thought in his mind to send word to the gardens?
“That’s the sort of thing he should think of himself,” she said. Her voice echoed hollowly in the darkness. “For that matter, he could get a key and let me out.”
Otherwise, what was the benefit of being a vizier in the khalif’s court if you couldn’t even get your own daughter out of the dungeon? She’d committed no crime, unless you counted arguing with an arrogant Veyrian general an act of treason. What did her father think of her behavior? Did he assign her any guilt in this matter? Kandibar Liltige hadn’t precisely disowned his daughter, nor she him, but when Memnet selected her as his apprentice, she’d been divided from all other loyalties as surely as a lamb separated from a flock of mindless sheep.
Spells began to suggest themselves to her mind, including one or two whose incantations she might be able to remember without Markal’s help. Nathaliey edged around the room, feeling for a rough bit of stone on which to work at the ropes binding her hands behind her back. The stone was smooth all the way around, but she found an iron ring in the wall, presumably for chaining prisoners, and here she rubbed the cord back and forth. She kept at it for some time, until her injured shoulder forced her to stop. So far as she could tell, there had been no real effect on the rope.
Instead, she worked at the one binding her feet, and here found more success. The knots weren’t as tight as those around her wrists, and once she got the hem of her robe out she was able to twist and work at the extra space until she’d extracted one foot, and then the other. Now at least she could stand, thank the Brothers, but nothing was to be done for the cord around her wrists. The infernal thing was so tight it seemed a part of her skin.
Nathaliey slumped to the ground and meditated until she slipped into an exhausted sleep. Thirst and pain brought her awake again. Hours seemed to have passed.
“Is there anyone out there? Jailer? Will you at least remove these cords? By the Brother
s, have mercy.”
There was no answer, and she was dozing off again when a noise caught her ear. It was the sort of sound that only the ears of a beast or a wizard could have heard, distant footsteps that were so soft that Nathaliey immediately identified them as belonging to a child, and a barefoot one at that. Someone was descending the stairs into the hallway outside her cell.
Had she heard a guard’s boots or the slap of sandals, she’d have cried out, but she was curious now. There seemed to be no other prisoners in this dungeon, which meant that the child could only have been looking for her. But Nathaliey was at a loss. She had no younger siblings and knew none of the children who lived in the palace.
The footsteps continued until they reached her door. Then a curious noise, what sounded like someone scratching or climbing the door. A rattle of a key in the lock, followed by a click. The door was unlocked.
“Hello?” Nathaliey whispered. “Who is it? Speak to me, child.”
No answer.
She struggled to her feet, ears straining, eyes staring into the blackness. There was no torch or candlelight coming through the keyhole. She backed into the door and felt with her bound hands for a handle, but of course there wasn’t one on the inside surface, and the child hadn’t pushed the door open. She found where the door met the stone, and her fingers dug in in an attempt to ease the door open.
When that failed, she felt along the bottom of the door with her bare feet, and here she found success; there was a small slit in the center through which food and water might be passed to a prisoner. Hooking it with her foot, she pulled the heavy door toward her. It swung into the room with a groan of old timbers.
It was just as black in the corridor. She saw nothing.
“Hello?” she called. “Who is it?”
Again, the padding of bare feet on the stone, this time moving away from her. Afraid of stumbling through the dark, but even more afraid of staying behind, Nathaliey had no choice but to follow. She struck her shoulder on one wall, nearly got turned around, and then found her way again. How the devil did the child know where to go?
The Red Sword (The Red Sword Trilogy Book 1) Page 6
