The Huntsman's Amulet (Society of the Sword Volume 2)

by Hamilton, Duncan M.

  Although it was almost evening, Soren was eager to begin right away. His duties were done with for the day and while it would be noticed if he was not present for the evening meal that all of the officers usually shared together in the guardroom, there were a great many diversions in the city that could easily explain his absence, and that were often responsible for the absence of others.

  He changed out of his uniform and went straight toward the market square, casting a wary eye toward the alley that led to the slave market when he arrived. He was quite confident that if he strayed too close, his appearance would be noticed and trouble might follow. Not what he needed.

  On the walk down from the palace he had considered taking a room at the inn he had stayed at on his first night in the city. He’d need to store whatever supplies he gathered — and it could work as a place for them to meet after Alessandra had gotten out of the palace. However he didn’t think it could be relied on.

  He wandered around the market for a while to get a feel for what was on offer, which was pretty much everything imaginable. Cloths of every colour, foods of every smell and objects of every shape. He decided the easiest approach to finding what he was looking for was to ask.

  He approached a merchant with a large stall that had a good selection of sturdy looking work wear and equipment laid out on his counter. Being larger and more prosperous looking than those around him, Soren hoped that he might have experience with foreign trade and speak some Imperial as a result.

  ‘Do you speak Imperial?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes, yes, a little.’

  ‘I’m planning a journey into the desert. What will I need to bring with me?’

  He already had a fair idea of what would be required, but there was no harm in getting the advice of someone who was familiar with the desert.

  ‘Water,’ the vendor said, with a broad smile. ‘Lots of it.’

  He supposed he had invited a glib answer, but he did wonder if being a smart arse was a cultural aspect of Shandahari traders, or if it was just the people he chose to speak with.

  ‘Most people who want to go across the desert join a caravan. It’s the safest way. You pay them and they will take care of everything else, food, water, baggage. You will need good desert boots though,’ he said, gesturing to a selection of tough leather boots on his stall. ‘Suitable clothes too.’

  ‘Thank you. I’ll think about the boots and clothes.’

  A caravan. It made sense, but he would just have to find one that would be willing to take them along, that would also be leaving at a time that fit in with his plans. While it was definitely worth investigating, it was unlikely that Soren would be able to fit in with someone else’s timetable for leaving the city.

  He found a passer-by that spoke Imperial, and got directions to the main city stables located near the landward gate in the city wall. It stood to reason that this would be a likely place for a desert caravan to start off from.

  The stables were large, busy and smelly. There were many horses, but their numbers were easily equalled by camels. Soren had seen them in the menagerie in Ostenheim a number of times when he was younger so they were not completely unknown to him, but he had never been this close to one before. With two humps on their back and shaggy golden-brown fur, they looked comical to Soren, and to see them being used as anything other than a menagerie attraction was decidedly odd.

  He approached a man giving out orders to various stable workers while doing very little himself. That could only mean he was in a position of authority. After establishing that the man could speak Imperial, Soren discovered that caravans left the city nearly every day, most often from those stables as Soren had thought. He was assured that there would be no problem in finding a place on one so long as he had the coin to pay his way.

  The caravans left early in the morning, before the sun came up. The stable master told him that they made their way through the desert from one oasis to the next. Not the most direct route, but the one most likely to be survivable.

  The timing was not ideal. The disappearance of the women from the seraglio would be noticed first thing in the morning. If he sneaked them out of the palace during the night, they would have to wait for several hours before the caravan left and wouldn’t be as far from the city as he would have liked by the time their absence was discovered. The alternative was to hire a guide and camels so they would be ready to go whenever he was. There were benefits and drawbacks to both, greater safety and anonymity with a caravan, greater flexibility and speed with a guide.

  Further inquiries got him the name of a guide, Sharbo, who worked out of the stables and owned five camels, enough to take them south without having to hire more. Soren’s experience with the street trader made him wary of a guide recommended by a complete unknown, stable master or not. Being robbed and abandoned in the desert was not an attractive eventuality. His concerns were such that joining a caravan seemed a far more sensible option.

  However, he wasn’t going to dismiss the option out of hand, and spoke to Sharbo, who seemed to know his business, and had the look of a man accustomed to travel, discomfort and hard work. Looks could be deceiving, but Soren had few options and had to make a decision based on his gut feeling.

  For a suitably large payment — not all up front — Soren got Sharbo to agree to wait at the stables, ready to go at short notice, from dusk until dawn for the next five days. The guide thought it odd, but the money on offer was enough to quell his curiosity.

  With the bare bones of a plan in place, Soren headed toward the harbour, concerned that he was going to lead them all to a miserable death in the desert.

  There were two ways out of the city and the territory that it controlled. While Soren had discounted the sea, there was no harm in laying as confused a trail as he could. It was a hassle, but it might give them a few more hours before pursuit began in earnest.

  He started making inquiries at the docks about the ships in the harbour, and where they were headed. For the most part the men he tried to talk to shook their heads blankly and walked away, but there were a number of northern vessels there too and Soren was able to speak with some of the sailors from them. Most importantly, plenty of people saw him make his enquiries.

  He found the names of several ships that would be sailing north over the next few days before returning to the guardhouse. He had no idea when his plan would be carried out, but he could return when he had a better idea of timing and make the fake purchase then.

  Chapter 55

  The Bluecloaks

  Three days later he was wandering idly around the palace and the passageways beneath it, ostensibly on roving guard duty — which amounted to much the same thing — counting away the minutes. He had still not heard anything else from Alessandra. His plans were in place and he was starting to wonder if he should try to get a message to her. The guide was storing the clothes and boots that Soren bought, and would put together rations for a half dozen people for the journey. Keeping the details as vague as possible made it difficult not to arouse suspicion, but he couldn’t see a way around it.

  Alessandra had made it clear to him how difficult and dangerous it was to get out of the seraglio when they’d spoken, so he wasn’t overly worried that she had yet to try, just impatient. If she’d been caught sneaking out, he would have heard about it.

  He had two men of the Northern Guard with him as Vaprio had changed his advice on not going about the palace alone to a standing order. Soren arranged for a dozen other similarly sized patrols to make their way around the palace, all following different looping paths that would intersect every so often so they could update each other on how things were going. He planned to make one more circuit of this route before returning to the guardhouse to check on things there. As they approached an intersection with another corridor, he could hear raised voices.

  He was not expecting to encounter one of his other patrols there, and the Bluecloaks were not supposed to be in that part of the palace. If it was Ales
sandra, it could make for a difficult job of explaining things to his men. He beckoned for them to stop and slowly walked forward alone. The voices were still too muffled to discern, and Soren tried to work out what was being said.

  He reached the intersection of the passages and peered around the corner. An Ostian sergeant of the Northern Guard was squared up to a member of the Bluecloaks. He was alone, which would require an explanation, but that could wait until the situation was dealt with. The Bluecloak was not.

  ‘What’s going on here?’ Soren shouted, hoping that he would be able to raise his voice enough to be heard over the ever-rising voices of the Ostian and the Shandahari.

  The sergeant reacted and stepped back in deference to his superior officer, ending his tirade of abuse at the Shandahari guard.

  ‘Haven’t a clue, sir,’ he said. ‘This fucker bumped into me and started shouting.’

  The Shandahari was still talking loudly and aggressively, gesticulating furiously. There were two other Bluecloaks with him, but with Soren’s arrival and the men behind him, they were now outnumbered.

  ‘Does anyone speak Shandahari?’ Soren said to his men.

  No one spoke up; one man shrugged apologetically.

  ‘Imperial?’ he asked hopefully in the direction of the Bluecloaks. Even if they did, he expected they would be too objectionable to want to discuss things in a reasonable way. The Bluecloak who had been arguing with the sergeant continued his diatribe unabated, with Soren recognising one or two of the words as fairly commonly used insults.

  What to do now? If the Bluecloak didn’t back down, or just shut up, then Soren couldn’t see any way out of the situation that didn’t involve a fight. The only way to deal with that type of aggression was to mirror it, and hope that the other party would back down.

  He stepped forward quickly and summoned up as much anger as he could muster.

  ‘Shut your fucking mouth,’ he screamed at the Bluecloak. ‘Back off!’ He gesticulated aggressively with his finger, but stopped short of poking the Bluecloak in the chest.

  One of the other Bluecloaks muttered something and the one doing all of the shouting glanced back over his shoulder. He was smiling when he returned his gaze to Soren. Soren could quickly see the reason why. Another four Bluecloaks were making their way down the other corridor, wiping out Soren’s advantage.

  The Bluecloak reached forward and shoved Soren, which was crossing a line and they both knew it. Soren’s hand instinctively went to his hilt while with the other he gestured for the Bluecloak to stop. The Bluecloak looked back to his comrades for support and seemed satisfied, for when he turned back he shoved Soren again.

  Soren grabbed him by the wrist and twisted it hard, pulling the Bluecloak off balance. Without really thinking about what he was doing, he smashed the heel of his hand into the Shandahari’s face. The Bluecloak dropped to the floor like a sack of rocks.

  The speed and aggression with which Soren had acted took everyone else in the corridor by surprise. The Bluecloaks shouted and all went for their weapons. Soren drew before any of them out of an instinct of self-preservation, but regretted doing it the second that he had; there was no backing down now. There was a series of rasping sounds as swords were drawn from their scabbards, both in front and behind. Any chance to diffuse the situation seemed to be well and truly gone. As naturally as his hand had gone to the hilt of his sword without his thinking, he suddenly felt the tingle, and saw the faint blue glow of the Fount. As he could see from its dimness, down there in the bowels of the palace it was weak, but with the dense pack of nearly a dozen men there would be enough to give him an edge.

  Someone shouted in Shandahari and pushed his way forward, shoving men and drawn blades out of his way as he went.

  ‘Put your sword away,’ he said. ‘My men will do so as well, as soon as you have.’

  The Gift made his voice sound slurred and Soren felt an instinct deep within him crave a fight, tempting him to ignore the Shandahari’s offer. He knew accepting it was the only way to avoid several deaths, but Soren had no reason to trust this man. He pushed his own increasing desire for battle aside and reasoned that if he ordered his men to put away their weapons, but kept his own drawn, he could hold the Bluecloaks back for long enough for his own men to get back in to the fight.

  ‘Put them away, lads,’ he said.

  Behind him he could hear some grumbles, but more importantly the sounds of weapons being resheathed. The Bluecloak that had come to the front nodded and issued what Soren took to be a similar command to his men. They began to put their weapons away.

  Once Soren and the man who appeared to be in charge of the Bluecloaks were the only two who still held weapons, Soren put his sword away. He never took his eyes from the man opposite him, and didn’t relax until the Shandahari had put his blade away also.

  When they were both no longer holding weapons, Soren spoke. ‘You should teach your men some manners.’

  The Bluecloak looked at him disdainfully, but said nothing. He gave an order to his men and two of them moved forward to recover their comrade from the floor. The Bluecloak in charge watched as his man was scraped up off the floor and helped away. Only then did he return his attention to Soren.

  ‘You should fuck off back to whatever northern hole you crawled out of,’ the Bluecloak said.

  ‘Perhaps if your Khagan had any confidence in you, he wouldn’t have need of us,’ Soren said, feeling his hand drift back toward the hilt of his sword.

  The Bluecloak sneered at him and turned back to his men. They all shuffled off down the corridor leaving Soren and his men alone. He ordered them all back to barracks. He knew that he would have to make a report to Captain Vaprio and didn’t want them to have another run in with the Bluecloaks without him.

  ‘It’s not the first time, I doubt it will be the last,’ Vaprio said, after Soren had finished filling him in on what had happened. ‘From your description I think the Bluecloak that you spoke with was Captain Gulan. He’s been quite happy to let any confrontations run so long as they don’t get overly violent. Sooner or later one will get out of hand, though, and someone will be killed.’

  ‘Doesn’t sound like a situation that the Khagan can allow continue,’ Soren said.

  ‘He doesn’t intend to. The Khagan’s given orders to have Bayda tai Azaf arrested. He’s all but lost control of the Bluecloaks, and if he doesn’t move against tai Azaf soon he won’t be able to. His last outburst was too much for the Khagan to stomach; the challenge to his prestige is too great to allow go unchecked. With Azaf out of the way, the other Baydas will fight amongst each other for a while before one of them emerges as the new leader. That should give the Khagan enough time to finish his negotiations over the Rala. If they work out well, he expects they’ll put him in an unassailable position. If not, well, I doubt he’s giving much thought to that eventuality.’

  Soren nodded. The politics were so ruthless, and so similar to Ostenheim; powerful men happy to kill one another to climb to the top of the pile.

  ‘With no unified voice,’ Vaprio said, ‘the Baydas won’t be a threat, and the Bluecloaks will have no alternative but to stay loyal to the Khagan, at least for the time being. I dare say one or two of them will join tai Azaf on the chopping block though, your new friend Gulan among them.’

  The thought of the sneering Captain Gulan meeting his end was a warming thought. ‘When do we arrest tai Azaf?’ Soren said.

  ‘Now. The order’s only just come through, but it has to be done right away, before tai Azaf can catch wind of it. I’m taking Veyt with me, and twenty men. I want you to keep an eye on things here. We’ll be bringing tai Azaf back to the guardroom initially, so try to keep the Bluecloaks away. I’d like to have tai Azaf secured in here before they catch wind of what’s happened.’

  Sitting around while knowing that there was something important happening, something that he could make a useful contribution to, was difficult for Soren. Boredom had never been something he took to we
ll, but under the circumstances it was even more agitating.

  Vaprio and his men left the palace as discreetly as they could, hoping not to draw any attention from the Bluecloaks. They left in small groups, the intention being to meet up outside the palace and continue on to tai Azaf’s residence.

  Time passed and minutes became hours. Soren started to grow concerned. The mission should have taken no more than an hour from start to finish, and he expected that they would have returned by then. He got up from the desk that he was sitting at and stretched. His legs had grown stiff from the idleness and he felt awkward as he made his way out of the guardhouse to look down the avenue to the palace gates.

  There was still no sign of them returning, but otherwise everything seemed to be normal. There were two figures clad in crimson standing by the blue archway as there should be and there was nothing out of the ordinary. Perhaps the Bayda’s house was farther from the palace than he thought? He went back into the guardhouse, flopped into an easy chair and allowed himself to doze.

  When he woke, it felt as though the guardroom had been hit by a storm. Lieutenant Veyt was shouting for him to get up and arm himself.

  ‘We’ve got to get out of here,’ Veyt said. He was rummaging through the shelves and stuffing things into a bag.

  ‘What are you talking about?’ Soren said. He was still a little groggy from the nap.

  ‘The arrest was a fucking disaster. Azaf knew we were coming. He had half the Bluecloaks guarding his house.’

  No wonder things had been so quiet during the afternoon.

  ‘Vaprio’s dead. So are most of the others that came with us. I managed to fight my way clear and get back here.’