by Bell, Hilari
“Over here.” The clerk steered them into a corner where they laid the chest on top of several others. “Io, this place is hotter than an oven.”
“That’s maybe because the windows are small,” said Soraya in her best ignorant-country-girl accent. “There’s lots of records in here, aren’t there?” She scanned the boxes as closely as she dared. Her fingers itched to pry into them.
“And Marcellus will skin me if I get them out of order,” said the clerk. He took a small box from a cabinet, opened it, and dropped in the key. It clanked as if there were other keys there, and Soraya’s eyes widened. She looked down hastily, peering through her hair as the clerk replaced the box and closed the cabinet. “Thank you, lass. Let’s get out where it’s cooler.”
He didn’t seem to expect a reply, as he guided her out of the record room—which was good, for Soraya wasn’t sure she could have controlled her voice. She knew where the keys to the chests were kept! All she had to do was to get into the building—the locked, guarded building—and find and translate the right records. Soraya had been watching this building for months; the door was always guarded, but the windows weren’t.
Of course, they’d deliberately made the windows small, too small for a grown man to climb through them. But a slender girl might manage it, if there was something going on to distract the guard from any small noises she made. Something like the first summer thunderstorm, which would probably arrive tonight. Soraya shivered. She had seen a man flogged for disrespect, just a few days ago. She didn’t dare imagine what the Hrum might do if they caught her. But now she knew where the keys were. This was her first chance to get her hands on those records. Her best chance. She would try it tonight.
MONTHS WENT BY, and Mazad’s walls held fast, so the Hrum became impatient and decided to send more troops. Then the governor of Mazad, once more grown fearful, sent a message to Sorahb. “The Hrum are sending a great force to overwhelm us. It is time for you to fulfill your promise, and come to our aid.”
Sorahb was sorely torn, for he knew his soldiers were not as skilled as the Hrum, but he had given his oath to assist the governor in time of need. The honor of the Farsalan army was at stake, so Sorahb led them to Mazad.
“Fear nothing,” he told his men, as Azura’s sun illuminated the trampled plain and the Hrum’s mighty host. “The Hrum are skilled, but they fight only for pay, at the command of their officers—their true hearts are not here. But we are fighting for our families and our homes, and mere mercenaries can never defeat such men.”
Sorahb’s soldiers cheered, and Sorahb’s sword flashed in the new sun as he raised it. Then Sorahb himself led the first charge against the Hrum camp.
All that day the battle raged. At first the Hrum were surprised, so advantage fell to Sorahb’s peasant army. But soon the Hrum’s superior experience asserted itself, and they were able to hold their ground. Yet Sorahb’s army outnumbered them, and as Sorahb had told them, they fought for their homes, so they fought strongly if not well, and refused to be defeated.
The charge Sorahb led against the Hrum camp was the first of many. Time and again he led his forces against the Hrum’s formation, felling the soldiers who guarded the Hrum commander like a scythe, almost killing the Hrum commander himself on more than one occasion. His soldiers, watching, marveled at his skill, and were further heartened by their young commander’s courage.
But in the end the Hrum were too skilled, too experienced to be defeated. Sunset drenched the battlefield in light the color of blood, and Sorahb saw that for all they had accomplished, his army could not win. He signaled for retreat, and the Hrum were glad to see them go and did not pursue them.
But later, when the count of the wounded and the slain had been tallied, Sorahb found he had lost a full third of his men to death or capture, and many more were wounded and would not be able to fight again for a long time, if ever. Though he knew they had hurt the Hrum most sorely, it was not enough to break the siege. And he realized that more Hrum troops would be sent out, and then more, and more, until sooner or later, Mazad would fall.
“So I am forsworn perforce,” Sorahb whispered. “And these men I have trained and led to their deaths, have died for nothing. How could I be so mad, so vain, as to think I could lead peasants to defeat this army when they had defeated deghans already? The fault is mine.”
Unable to bear the sight of the misery he had caused, Sorahb abandoned his army, and fled into the darkness.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
SORAYA
THE STORM’S FIRST FURY had eased, but rain still pounded on the kitchen’s roof, noisy enough to drown far louder sounds than Soraya made as she slipped a few things into a sack and made a quiet exit. Not that she feared waking the other servants, who slept on the floor beside her—if anyone woke, she would say she was going to visit the privy. If anyone noticed the amount of time she was gone, she would say that after so much heat, the rain had tempted her into going for a walk. It should ring true—if she hadn’t had other plans for the night, Soraya might have done just that, for she had always loved storms. Until tonight.
Unrolling her pallet on the floor, trying to behave normally, Soraya had sensed the storm hovering out at sea, the dark clouds boiling over the stars, the rising wind that sang in her blood. The humming tension that preceded lightning.
Hours had passed, and the storm stubbornly refused to approach land. It happened sometimes, especially with the first storms of the season. They spent all their power at sea, trapping the fisherfolk in their docks, cursing the landsmen with heat and bad tempers, without the cooling relief of rain. But Soraya needed it to arrive tonight!
Storms resonated with her shilshadu as nothing else did, not even fire, but the last time she had opened herself to a storm the lightning had come seeking her, and only her sudden panic had pushed it away to strike elsewhere. When you opened your shilshadu to fire it wouldn’t harm you—Soraya wasn’t at all sure the same was true of lightning.
Lying in the warm darkness of the kitchen, surrounded by the servants’ peaceful snores, Soraya had opened her shilshadu to the storm. It rushed to fill her, vast and careless, dancing with delight at its own power. For a time Soraya’s spirit danced with it—it was all she could do to remember that she was a human thing, to summon human will and try to persuade the storm to come toward her. For all its might the storm’s shilshadu was thin, eluding her will as if she was trying to catch mist in her hands. A headache grew behind her eyes, and sweat rolled down her still body. When the storm, ever so slowly, started toward land, Soraya wasn’t certain if her own will was moving it, or if it had finally decided to come on its own. Once she was sure it would continue in the direction she had chosen, she sighed with relief and released it.
But the storm wouldn’t let her shilshadu go. Soraya’s heart began to pound. She had pulled her spirit back into herself, well contained in flesh and bone, but she still sensed the storm’s shilshadu, fixed on her, seeking its dance partner.
Soraya sat up in bed, no longer caring if she woke the others. She pinched herself, hoping pain would center her spirit in her flesh sufficiently that the storm would lose its hold. She banned all thought of magic from her mind, anchoring herself in her body alone.
Perhaps it had worked—perhaps it was only her awareness of the link that had dimmed. All she knew for certain was that the leading edge of the storm had crashed over the Hrum camp like the wrath of Kanarang. Soraya wasn’t the only one who cowered in her bed in terror of the lightning.
Eventually the violence of the storm front passed on. The other servants, grumbling, had resettled themselves for sleep. Now the thunder only rumbled in the distance, and the lightning was an even more distant frisson at the edge of her sensing as she crept out of the kitchen. Only the rain remained, pelting through her hair in thick, wet drops, turning the dusty streets to mud, and keeping everyone but the night watch snug in their quarters.
She would never have a better chance.
Soraya
had been scouting the positions where the sentries were posted for months now. It took a little extra time, especially in the rainy darkness, to make her way to the back of the record room without encountering anyone, but it was far from impossible.
Barrels had been placed at the corners of many buildings to catch the clean rainwater, and Soraya crouched beside one, listening for any sound that could make itself heard over the soft rush of rain. For a long time she heard nothing. She weighed the stupidity of going close enough for the guard to see her against her need to know that he was where she thought he was. Before impatience lured her into foolishness, she heard the small clanks of metal on metal that accompanied the movement of armed-and-armored men.
From the sounds, she guessed the guard had started pacing back and forth on the covered porch—perhaps for warmth, perhaps to keep himself awake, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that, like any sane man, he stayed under the shelter of the small roof instead of moving out into the rain. Feeling the drops crawling under her saturated hair and down her neck, Soraya grinned and moved to the narrow window at the back of the building. It was placed too high beneath the eaves for the rain to enter, so they hadn’t bothered with shutters, but it was also too high for her to climb in without help. No matter.
Soraya went back to the rain barrel and dragged it to the window. It was already half full, and might have been too heavy for her to move if the mud hadn’t lubricated its passage.
Clinging to the edge of the window for balance, she pulled herself up till she knelt, then stood on the barrel’s rim. First she lowered her supply sack through, then she carefully reached down and swished one muddy foot, and then the other in the clean water. Not knowing where she might have to go next, it would be best if she could leave the Hrum camp without arousing suspicion. She’d already prepared her lie for Ordnancer Reevus—an ailing aunt in a distant village, who might be moved to make a helpful niece her heir.
The window was a tighter fit than Soraya expected, long and narrow, and it was very dark inside. A quick wiggle took her head and shoulders through, but then she had to squirm forward, dragging her ribs painfully over the hard wood. Even her slim hips almost wedged, but she rocked back and forth and her bones passed the frame, her buttocks squashing through behind them.
Fortunately no one had moved the stack of document boxes she’d noticed beneath this window—though the room was so crowded, it would have been hard to find any wall space that didn’t have boxes stacked almost to the rafters.
Careful as she was to move silently, knees and elbows hitting wood made a few soft thumps as Soraya groped her way to the floor. But the rain on this roof was as loud as it was in the kitchen, and Soraya didn’t think the guard would hear.
Still, once her feet found the floor, she closed her eyes and waited, listening again, till her pounding heartbeat slowed and her breathing quieted. If the guard was out there she couldn’t hear him, so hopefully he couldn’t hear her, either. Good enough.
Soraya opened her eyes and considered her first problem: Inside the record room it was pitch dark. The windows made squares of slightly lighter blackness, and she thought she could make out the corners of a few of the higher boxes, but even the Suud, with their wide-dilating pupils, couldn’t have read anything.
She’d come prepared for this, though she’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Half a dozen drying cloths from her sack covered the windows, secured with nails from the blacksmith’s reject pile, pushed into the cracks between window frame and wall. She rolled another pair of cloths together and laid them quietly along the bottom of the door, for light seeping through that crack would certainly alert the guard.
Making any kind of light was still insanely risky, but Soraya had no choice. Surely working magic now wouldn’t attract the distant storm. Suppressing the apprehension that quickened her pulse, Soraya pulled flint, steel, and a candle from her sack, and summoned up a light shilshadu trance. The clicks of flint on steel sounded very loud. Without magic, no one could ignite a candle with a single spark. With her mind touching its shilshadu, Soraya was able to convince the tiny flake of fire’s birth that here were air and fuel aplenty. It responded to her persuasion with a brighter glow, a wisp of smoke, and then flame bloomed.
Candlelight illuminated the small room, bright after the near total darkness that preceded it, and Soraya watched the door, holding her breath. No exclamation. No startled, running footsteps. No key rattling in the lock. Soraya took a deep breath and began to read the labels on the crates.
Calfaer had taught her the written Hrum words for money, pay, and supplies, and she thought she could ignore those boxes. The first unfamiliar words sent her for the box of keys, still in the cabinet where she had seen the clerk put it this morning, though many men must have used them since. Such methodical people, the Hrum.
To her delight, the keys were numbered to match the chests.
Opening box fourteen enabled her to deduce the Hrum word for “map,” another to guess at “building plans.” Yet another phrase she didn’t recognize led to a box filled with closely written documents that might have been letters or reports—whatever they were, they didn’t look like records of slaves, so she relocked that box and went on. Between excitement at being so near her goal, fear, and the need for haste, her fingers began to shake. The lid of the next box slipped, and it closed with a thud. Listening through the pounding of rain on the roof, she still heard nothing from the guard, and the same rain pounded on the roof over his head as well. She was safe. Soraya took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. This was going to take time—she would simply have to resign herself to that.
But only three boxes later she came across a box of neatly rolled scrolls, each labeled, not with some Hrum word, but with the name of a Farsalan town or village. Her heart beginning to pound, Soraya took the top scroll and opened it. The first item was a rough map, showing where in Farsala this village lay. There followed a list of names, and each name was followed by several paragraphs of writing. Dates, written in the Hrum manner, began each paragraph, but Calfaer had taught her to read them.
On 23 Hyrum, 204, Duram, butcher, adrias to sell murous meat to the garrison, in order to . . .
Soraya’s eyes moved past the details of this Duram’s crime and capture, though not without a flicker of curiosity about how he’d poisoned the meat, and what he’d been trying to accomplish by doing so. At the end of the paragraph she found what she was looking for.
After his capture, Duram was varsele and sent to the sele market in K’navan, in the imperial province of Drhur.
Sele. Slave. She’d have felt better if she had any idea where Drhur was, but if Sudaba and Merdas had been sent there too, then she’d find out.
Soraya rerolled the scroll and put it back. Sudaba and Merdas had been taken on the estate of High Commander Merahb. She spent some time looking for her father’s name before she came across that of the small village that served the manor.
Her lips compressed. To say that Merdas and Sudaba had been captured in Paldan, amid the grooms and laundry maids, was an insult. But the Hrum would hardly care for that, and it was the nearest village to the manor. When she told her mother this story, she could leave that detail out. When she told her mother . . . Soraya’s hands were shaking again as she pulled out the scroll. She would have to edit a lot of details about this adventure. Her mother would be aghast at the very idea of her working as a servant—especially in an army camp. On the other hand Sudaba had been a slave for several months now. What work might she be doing? Would it change her? It was hard to imagine the haughty Lady Sudaba doing menial work, or changing in any—
A key rattled in the lock.
Soraya dropped the scroll, then snatched it back before it had time to touch the box, and leaped for the pile of crates below the far window. Scrambling like a squirrel, she had her head and shoulder through and was wiggling her hips past the frame when a firm hand closed around her ankle and dragged her back into the room.
She skidded over the crates, knocking her chin on the edge, and crashed to the floor with a violence that stunned her.
Half dazed, still clutching the precious scroll, she rolled over and stared up at two soldiers, and the astonished, affronted face of Master Clerk Marcellus.
“Wait, I’ve seen you before!” Marcellus exclaimed. “You’re one of Hennic’s assistants, aren’t you? What under three moons are you doing here?”
Three moons? Where in the Hrum’s vast empire did this man come from? But Soraya had heard many odd exclamations from the soldiers. She struggled to gather her wits. Her chin hurt. “I’m that sorry, sir, truly I am. There’s a woman in town, she’s being a friend of mine. She has a nephew, a dye trader, who went to Desafon a few months back and they haven’t heard from him since. Rumor has it he was getting himself caught up in something, and shipped off as a slave. She was asking, begging me, to find out if it was true.”
There, not bad for such short notice, and the tremor in her voice at the end was particularly good. As long as no one asked for the nephew’s name.
“Hmm.” Marcellus rubbed a bristly chin. He wore nothing but a light tunic and boots, with a cloak over the top, as a man will when suddenly wakened to investigate a suspicious disturbance. Soraya wished he looked sleepier. “If that’s the case, why didn’t this woman come and ask about her nephew?”
Soraya felt her eyes widen in genuine surprise. Could someone simply ask the Hrum about the contents of these scrolls? Well, perhaps some could, but not Commander Merahb’s daughter.
“She was afraid, sir. I told her that you weren’t being such hard folks, but she didn’t believe me. And I like this job, truly I do. I’d hate to jeopardize it.”
“But the scroll you’re looking at isn’t for Desafon,” said Marcellus slowly.
How could even a clerk see that, at this distance, in this light?
