by Bell, Hilari
The slaves’ message relay had already told him that Hama was finished and ready to run. Kavi opened the last lock, drawing a breath to shout as he turned back for a final check on the guards. The breath left his lungs in an unwary squawk as his eyes met the lady Soraya’s. She was practically lying on his boots, her expression calm and withdrawn. But at least she was up against the wagon’s side, and had evidently managed to get there without alerting the soldiers.
“What are you doing here?” he breathed. “You’re supposed to give the signal to the archers!”
“Don’t worry about that.” Her voice was as soft as his. “I was wondering … your peasant informants told us about the towers, even when they were arriving. Why didn’t they warn us about the slaves?” She gestured to several of the slaves in question. They were looking out, or at each other, but Kavi knew they were listening.
“How should I know?” She hadn’t come down here to ask that question—though now that he thought about it, Kavi wondered himself. She had come because she didn’t trust him. And now … “How can you signal the archers without getting us caught? You’ve jeopardized everything! You—”
“All right, all right.” She rolled onto her side to pull a piece of flint and a steel striker from her belt pouch, but even as she moved her expression changed—as if some decision had been reached.
“Did you know that you were working magic? On those locks just now?”
“What do you mean? I was picking them. You can’t set these towers alight with just a spark. It would take you several tries even to set tinder burning, and the Hrum will hear the striker!”
“You were Speaking to the metal,” she said, with an emphasis that made it clear that the word “speaking” meant more than simple speech. “Like the Suud do. Speaking to its spirit.”
“That’s ridiculous,” whispered Kavi, wondering how he could get the striker out of her hands without alerting the Hrum. “The Suud are strange enough that I might—might!—believe they could work magic, but no Farsalan can. Even the church is faking its miracles.”
“Really?” A smile eased the tension in her expression. Her dark eyes glinted. She raised the striker.
“Lady, don’t—”
She hit the flint once, at an expert angle, sending half a dozen sparks to lie on the thick beam. Kavi knew they would promptly go out, accelerant or no.
As the sparks struck the surface, she whispered, “Burn!” Fire sprang to life, and blazed, and grew, eating along the beam so fast Kavi had to pull away.
“What in the …” But whatever had caused it, the fire was well started, and growing faster than he’d dreamed it could.
“Run!” Kavi shouted. He scrambled to the other side of the wagon and leaped out, feeling the heat on his flesh.
The Hrum were shouting too: orders about water, about shovels and sand. The slaves were shouting as they fled in all directions, though Kavi saw that Hama was leading a group up through the thick brush of the hillside toward the archers.
The archers were no longer waiting. Arrows wreathed in fire arced through the air and hissed down toward the siege towers. The heavy, rag-wrapped tips threw them off course, and many of them thudded into the dusty road—and, alarmingly, into the dry brown bushes, which promptly began to smoke.
Time to be going. Kavi plunged into the bushes. He had climbed halfway up the hill before he realized that the lady Soraya wasn’t behind him. He turned and looked back.
She stood in the midst of a blazing timber cage, for the fire she had started was spreading far more swiftly than those in the other towers. Kavi pulled in breath to scream at the terrible sight, but she wasn’t screaming. She inspected the burning wood with the critical expression of a craftswoman examining her work. She nodded once and then climbed out through the tangle of beams, placing her hands and feet squarely on the wood, as if there were no fire. Her feet, Kavi noticed, were bare.
Free of the wagon, she took a moment to pat out a few sparks in her clothing and then pull on her stockings and boots. In truth she had nothing to fear from the Hrum, who were frantically trying to protect the surviving towers from the fire arrows that still rained down.
She climbed calmly up the hillside to where Kavi stood. “Is that a sufficient signal, do you think?”
Kavi gaped at her. There were scorched places on her clothes—he could smell the acrid scent of burned wool—but her hands weren’t burned. Nor her feet, if the way she was walking was any indication.
“I … you … the fire …” He swallowed, feeling the beginning of fear—which was absurd, for he’d traveled with her for weeks, and she was no different now from the girl she’d been then. No, she was different.
She smiled again. She was enjoying his fear, the brat, and somehow that lessened it. But wonder remained, and she saw that too, and the malice drained out of her smile.
“I Spoke to the fire’s shilshadu,” she said. “I persuaded it not to burn me. Just as you Spoke to the shilshadu of the metal, persuading those locks to open. Interested?”
CHAPTER TWO
JIAAN
JIAAN RAISED HIS ARM and signaled his troop to rein in. They’d gained a good lead on the Hrum infantry, but all the horses except his own Rakesh were winded—and even Rakesh was blowing, ready to walk for a while. As the horses slowed, Jiaan twisted in the saddle and looked back at the Hrum’s mounted scout, who still followed behind them.
The Hrum soldier had already slowed his own horse to a walk—clearly he had no intention of coming within arrow range.
“We could turn, make a quick charge, and take him,” said Fasal. “Keep them from following us.”
Jiaan wondered how often it was possible for Fasal to forget the plan.
“I want them to follow us, remember?”
“No, you wanted them to track us. That’s not the same thing,” said Fasal.
“They’ll turn back when they see the smoke,” said Jiaan.
“Assuming the others manage to set the towers on fire in the first place. What are they going to do about those slaves?”
Jiaan wished he knew. The memory of the men and women chained to those towers still made his stomach sink. Not that he feared they’d come to harm. His half sister was spoiled and arrogant—or at least she had been; Jiaan wasn’t certain that was true anymore—but she wasn’t that ruthless. As for the peddler, he probably was that ruthless—look at all the men he’d gotten killed at the Sendar Wall—but he wasn’t in charge of this operation, Azura be praised. Jiaan hoped Soraya had killed the traitor the moment she saw the slaves.
“It doesn’t matter,” said Jiaan. “Even if they don’t burn the towers, the Hrum troops will turn back when they learn that we’ve remounted. Once they see that we have fresh horses—and for all they know we’ve arranged for more—they’ll know they can’t run us down. That’s when they’ll go back and send for a tracker. That’s not what bothers me.”
“There’s a lot about this plan that bothers me,” said Fasal. “I still think we should have brought the whole army and wiped out the Hrum guarding the towers. If we’d done that, they’d be burning now.”
Jiaan thought that what bothered Fasal most about the plan was that it was Jiaan’s—the first battle plan he’d come up with entirely on his own.
“They may be burning by now,” he said, though he didn’t see any smoke. “And most of the rest of the army is still being trained in the rudiments of fighting. If we’d attacked in force, we’d have lost more men than the Hrum. And the Hrum can replace their men more easily than we can.”
Though he’d wondered about that, too. He’d been told it was some sort of point of honor with Governor Garren to conquer Farsala with only ten tacti—ten thousand men. But the Hrum army was spread thin. Surely it was time for the man to swallow his pride and send for reinforcements.
“Then why can’t we see any smoke?” Fasal asked. “If those towers get to Mazad …”
The cool breeze ruffled his straight black hair. He looked
cheerful, for all his grousing. Fasal liked to fight; Jiaan was good at planning. Together, Jiaan thought sourly, they almost made a whole officer. And if you added Jiaan’s eighteen years and Fasal’s seventeen, you had someone old enough to command an army as well. What they really were was a couple of inexperienced boys who had found themselves in charge because no one else had survived. But they hadn’t done badly so far, Jiaan reminded himself. And their experience was growing. Almost everything had gone according to plan today, which was better than usual. Only two things worried him.
“The towers can burn at Mazad,” said Jiaan. “The city guard can shoot fire arrows as well as we can. Assuming the accelerant acts the way the paint mixer said it would, they might get a few men onto the walls, but they won’t get many in.”
“Assuming,” said Fasal, “that the accelerant was added to the paint in the first place.”
All right, three thingé to worry about.
“But if you hadn’t thought of that,” said Fasal, reading Jiaan’s expression with ruthless accuracy, “what are you worried about?”
“That Hrum scout back there,” said Jiaan. “Does one man riding up and down the road strike you as a sufficient scouting force for a troop carrying something as important as those siege towers?”
Fasal frowned. “Maybe they were relying on the slaves to keep us from burning the towers.”
“But they had no way to know we intended to burn the towers.”
Unless, of course, the peddler had told them. Jiaan’s blood chilled. He should have killed the bastard when he had the chance. But when you had a war to win, you couldn’t yield to revenge. No matter how much you wanted to.
“For all the Hrum knew, we might have been attacking in force, just as you proposed,” Jiaan went on, pulling his mind away from the memory of his father’s death on the blood-soaked battleground near the Sendar Wall. “So why -was their scouting so inadequate? And even more important, why were they carrying their shields on their arms instead of slung on their packs?”
Fasal opened his mouth to reply, then slowly closed it. He had seen enough Hrum troops on patrol, on the march, to know what they carried and how.
“They expected to be attacked,” he said, finally. “They may not have known exactly when or where—we did surprise them. But they were expecting an attack sometime.”
Rakesh lifted his head and pranced, and Jiaan tightened his grip on the reins. “They might have been taking extra precautions because they were transporting the siege towers.’
“Then why was the scouting force so light?” Fasal demanded. “If they were expecting attack, wouldn’t they have—”
Rakesh inflated his lungs and whickered.
Jiaan, becoming aware of his mount’s focused attention, looked between Rakesh’s pricked ears at the orchard that filled a small valley to the north of the road. He saw nothing. Certainly he could hear nothing over the thud of hooves and the jingle of the tack—but the wind was blowing from that direction. Had Rakesh scented—
It was only a small flash of sun on metal within the grove, but suddenly everything made sense.
“It’s a trap! This way!” Jiaan spun Rakesh off the road and galloped across the open field beside it—a farmers field, crops harvested, level and relatively clear, perfect for running horses.
Unfortunately, the Hrum had horses too, and they crashed out of the orchard and raced after the fleeing Farsalans. It was the first wholly mounted Hrum troop Jiaan had ever seen.
If anything had been needed to tell him that this was a well-prepared ambush, that would do it. The Hrum infantry hadn’t been trying to run them down; they’d been driving Jiaan and his troop into their net. Only Rakesh’s keen senses had given them warning.
Thanks to Rakesh, they had a decent lead on their pursuers. Looking back, Jiaan saw that the Hrum’s mounts were the sturdy, sure-footed horses their scouts used, not Farsalan chargers. It looked like most of the Hrum were no more comfortable on horseback than his archers were, but they still outnumbered his small force by over two to one. No, they had to flee. The Hrum’s horses were fresh, and Rakesh was already breathing deep. If Rakesh was winded, most of the other Farsalan horses would be in even worse shape.
Jiaan’s mouth tightened. His plan was falling apart, but he had finally learned—Azura knew it had taken him long enough—that plans did fall apart, and he had a plan in place for that possibility.
“Scatter and regroup!” he shouted to the men beside him, and heard them passing the order on. A few moments later four of the archers, the worst riders among them, pulled their horses out of the troop and galloped off in different directions.
Looking back, grateful for Rakesh’s smooth gait, Jiaan saw that he’d been right. The Hrum, trained to fight as a unit, to stay together in the midst of battle and disaster, ignored the handful of fleeing men and remained focused on the larger group. And the Farsalan horses, weary as they were, were pulling ahead of the Hrum. But for all their famed stamina, the chargers couldn’t run forever.
They galloped out of the field and onto a rough track that bordered it. Jiaan turned to follow the track, which paralleled the road, for he didn’t dare circle back toward the infantry. Five more men scattered out from the group, and Jiaan wondered where he should go next. When the ambush had appeared, he’d instinctively fled into the small flat valley between the low hills, where his horses had room to run. But couldn’t the Hrum have predicted that?
They could have, he decided grimly. So there may be another ambush ahead. And the worst riders had already fled.
Jiaan turned Rakesh sharply off of the track and into another field, headed not for the tempting open ground, but for the rough, low hills that bordered it.
Another five men galloped away from the troop just before Jiaan sent Rakesh flying into a shallow gap between the hills. If this small valley ended in hills too steep for the horses to climb, they would be trapped, but Jiaan knew this area, and most of the hills were passable. Passable for a fresh horse, climbing at a walk.
Eight more men shot off into side canyons as they galloped on. Remaining with the troop were the good riders Jiaan had detailed to act as decoys if they had to run for their lives. Mostly grooms before the invasion, their archery was only fair, but their horsemanship was superb—sometimes better than their deghan masters’ had been. But however good the riders might be, the horses were beginning to tire.
Jiaan chose the mildest of the hills and urged Rakesh upward, letting him drop to a scrambling walk, for galloping up a rocky slope on an exhausted horse was an invitation to disaster.
The Hrum reached the bottom at almost the same time the Farsalans reached the summit. A few arrows skittered among them, but the Hrum archers were firing uphill, the range was long, and they all missed. For a moment Jiaan was tempted to order his men to return their shots, since the height would extend their range, but all his good archers were gone, and the Hrum force now outnumbered his by almost three to one.
He pulled Rakesh to a halt and turned back to watch the Hrum begin their ascent. Their stocky, agile mounts might have an easier time of it on the hill, but they were tiring too, Jiaan was pleased to see. Before they reached the top, his troop would make it down and gain more distance crossing the next field. Looking at the irrigation ditch on the far side of that field, he knew that would be all they needed.
“So why not fire back at them?” Fasal asked, pulling his sweet-tempered mare up beside Rakesh, black to the gelding’s dappled gray. “Aren’t you supposed to be good with that?” He gestured to the unstrung bow strapped to Jiaan’s saddle.
“Well, it might just make them mad,” said Jiaan. “And I’d hate to do that.”
“You saw the ditch.”
For a moment, Fasal seemed to forget that Jiaan was a peasantborn bastard who had snatched command of the army away from his betters. His grin held only the fellowship of one horseman for another.
“Let’s hope the Hrum aren’t as quick as you are,” said Jiaan,
matching Fasal’s grin as the last of his men trotted over the hilltop and started down the other side.
Picking their way down the slope was almost as slow as climbing up. The Hrum’s horses had gained some ground and were starting down themselves by the time the Farsalans reached the bottom of the hill, where another wide field lay before them.
Jiaan took the lead, holding Rakesh at a canter, for he wanted to save the horse’s strength.
The Hrum must have assumed the Farsalan horses were slowing from exhaustion; their horses charged off the hill and into the field, hoofbeats rolling like thunder.
Jiaan turned Rakesh toward the irrigation ditch and let go of the reins, firmly clasping the streaming gray mane. There were very few riders good enough to stay on a jumping horse with only the strength of their legs gripping the horse’s body to keep them in the saddle. Jiaan had never heard of the Hrum doing so, though the deghans had made a sport of it. Jiaan, peasant-born, wasn’t as good a rider as most deghans.
The banks of the ditch were only a few feet high, but it was five feet across, and most streams in this part of the foothills were deeper than they looked. Jiaan hoped he wouldn’t find out about this one the hard way.
Rakesh, who knew more about jumping than Jiaan ever would, quickened his stride to a rapid lope, shortening his paces as he neared the earthen barrier. Then he gathered his muscles and surged upward.
Jiaan suppressed his shout of exaltation, for it didn’t do to startle your horse as you sailed through the air, one with your mount, one with the sky. Then, as it always did, the ground arrived.
Rakesh’s hooves thudded to the earth, and Jiaan slammed into Rakesh’s withers, trying to grip the horse’s slippery hide with his knees and mostly failing. Only his fists, clenched on a double handful of mane, kept him from falling—though Rakesh’s forward surge into a rocking canter helped him to regain his seat. He glanced aside in time to see Fasal’s mare sail over the ditch and land daintily. Fasal took the landing much better than Jiaan had, but Jiaan had no time for envy—the rest of his troop was approaching the ditch. Only three men fell, and they quickly rolled to their feet and remounted, cantering across the field after the others. Jiaan followed the last of them, tracking the Hrum’s progress with his ears. When the Hrum neared the ditch, he pulled Rakesh to a halt and looked back.
