by Micah Yongo
“I can’t be certain but I think I just saw–”
There was a sudden crash from behind. The dancing women started screaming. When Neythan turned, several houses along the square’s south side were suddenly ablaze, dirty black smog spilling up from the windows, flames glimmering from the doorways as those inside came running out. The crowd by the cookfires was standing there, stunned, watching, then shifting restlessly, starting to panic.
Neythan was about to rise when Arianna leapt at him and drove him to the ground. He landed hard, glared up at her, then saw the arrow buried by his shoulder, the shaft still shuddering from impact as it protruded from the dirt where he’d been sitting a moment before. Arianna scrambled to her feet quickly and yanked him up. Neythan stood and turned to scan the gathering by the pyre opposite. He saw the hooded man again, standing still amid the increasingly panicked multitude on the square’s north side, his copper-skinned face lit by the hue of the bonfire, the curved length of a longbow in his hand and those familiar cold sleepy eyes staring back across the clearing. At Neythan.
“Jaleem.”
Arianna turned. “What?”
Neythan nodded toward the pyre. “I said it’s–”
Another crash. More screams. People were beginning to swarm the clearing; an old woman scooping up a child, two men wrestling with a halter-rope as the attached mule bucked and yanked. Others knocked over barrelled cookfires as they fled, bodies bumping in confusion as the crowd rushed to escape the growing blaze.
Arrows began to streak across the sky, quarrel tips aflame, flying from every direction like tiny comets as more houses were set alight.
“What is this?”
A man leapt at Arianna from the crowd before Neythan could answer.
Another came at Neythan from the side, blade swinging. Neythan dodged and rode the man’s momentum as he yanked free his own shortsword, then turned and slashed at the man’s back as he stepped aside.
The square was filling with more of them, men, haggard and armed, spilling in from the side streets and pushing their way through the panicked mob toward Neythan and Arianna in the middle as villagers scattered and ran.
Neythan swivelled around; Arianna was at his shoulder, hacking in short, sharp arcs as another pair lunged at her from the throng.
A tall, rangy man came shoving his way toward Neythan through the crowd, pushing aside a fleeing old woman as he swung a battleaxe at Neythan’s chest.
Neythan felt the bump of villagers against his back as he danced out of the way, then watched the axe-wielder come at him again, jolting to an abrupt stop as Neythan’s thrust sword sank in beneath his ribs. The man doubled over and coughed blood. Neythan twisted the blade, kicked him to the ground, and then turned, ready for the next oncomer.
Arianna stood a few paces away now, bodies sprawled by her feet. She’d claimed a bow and quiver and was spraying arrows across the clearing.
Neythan looked back to the square.
Jaleem was nowhere to be seen.
More fires along the eastern banks of housing, smoke billowing across the sky like a grimy fog.
Where was Caleb?
He glanced about for the gypsies and saw nothing but scrambling bodies. He shoved a few aside and went striding toward the spot where Caleb had been haggling moments before.
A large man stepped out from the crowd ahead in light furs. Wide gut. Wider shoulders. Face smeared with soot and the whites of his eyes shining. He held a longsword low in one hand. He saw Neythan and hefted the blade, patting the edge expectantly against his ample palm.
Neythan could see Jaleem beyond him by the banks of housing to the north, standing still as the crowd’s tide spilled around him.
“Jaleem!”
But the hunter said nothing, didn’t seem to hear, just stared out at Neythan from across the distance, solemn and silent.
Neythan glanced around.
Arianna was still rapidly loosing arrows on the attackers in the street, marching forward, firing as she went.
Neythan turned and started to run toward Jaleem.
The giant began to move into his path, gripping the longsword with both hands.
Neythan sped, then hopped, long-strided, and swung his sword from the shoulder at full-pelt, tossing it blade over hilt and watching it whirl through the air across the square and hammer, blade first, through the big man’s skull, lodging with a solid thud as it split the eye socket. The man grunted and toppled slowly back like a chopped tree.
Neythan kept sprinting as he went down.
Jaleem stood ahead of him by the banks of housing, not fleeing, not moving, just watching Neythan come as he neared and then passed the bonfire and sprinted up onto the green on the other side.
He was within a ship’s length, could see the blacks of Jaleem’s eyes. Could see him calmly step forward, clear of the crowd, and reach into his sleeve for what Neythan assumed would be a weapon but turned out to be no more than a closed fist.
Neythan pulled his dagger free from his waist.
Jaleem swung his fist overhand, throwing something.
Neythan watched the thing through the air as he ran, saw it arc slowly overhead, over the crowd, blurred by the night, then beyond his view as his gaze lowered to fix back on this man from Ilysia who’d come and hunted him all the way since–
Everything whited out. Sound like a thunderclap. Neythan abruptly weightless, pitching rapidly forward as the ground jolted violently and swung him through the air like a dashed stone. He slammed against something hard; bounced and skidded.
He blinked. Ears ringing. Night overhead, chunks of ash floating slowly down in pale flakes like dirty snow. Acrid smell on the air. He tried to rise. Couldn’t. Just lay there awhile. Tried again, rolled onto his front and pushed up onto his elbows.
The air was clogged with dust. Rubble littered the dirt. Small fires shimmered here and there through the chalky smog. Neythan saw shadows wading through it, people staggering around, then figures approaching, nearing, standing over him, bearing down.
They reached down and rolled him over.
“Neythan… Can you hear me, Neythan?”
Blurred faces, heads and chests powdered by grit. They pulled him up. Arms draped over shoulders.
“Come on, Neythan.” Arianna’s voice. “Let’s get out of here.”
Thirty-Eight
D U S T
“So they weren’t trying to sack the town?”
Caleb, holding the reins, shook his head. They’d left the town almost immediately, once they were sure Jaleem wasn’t among the bodies that littered the square following the blast. The explosion had gusted outward from the pyre, spraying shards of splintered timber beyond the clearing and showering the green that ringed it in ashen chunks of debris. In the end it had harmed relatively few; all the bodies, bar a pair of middle-aged men in linen shifts, were marked by the bloody puncture wounds of Neythan and Arianna’s shortswords, and a number of others by arrows. A mother and several children had been hit by the scatter of stone and mortar where a muralled wall, now rendered rubble, had sat by the bonfire’s west side.
“All a distraction, I think,” Caleb said. “There were no more than, say, twenty men. They knew they’d a better chance of getting to you in the chaos of a blazing town than coming straight for you. Probably learned that lesson the last time, when they attacked us by that well. And with the two of you being together this time, well, it seems they, or this Jaleem at least, were wise enough to think better of engaging you both openly.”
“And you’re certain Jaleem wasn’t among the dead.”
“He wasn’t there. The pair of you had felled most of the men with him. He probably only used the blast to be certain of getting away.”
Neythan and Arianna sat in the bed of the cart beneath their blankets as Caleb drove them north along the dry scrubbed plain. The moon was dim. They’d need to sleep soon, and eat. They’d already been two days in open country before arriving at the township, but with the pani
c of the inhabitants and Jaleem still unaccounted for it made little sense to risk staying there.
“That blast,” Arianna said. “I’ve never seen anything like that.”
“Neither have I,” Caleb said. “Although I may have read of it. Years ago, in the library at Dumea. There are parchments there that speak of something like what we witnessed. The writings name it firedust. I hadn’t thought their witness true until now.”
“You’ve been to Dumea?”
“I’ve been to many places, Neythan.”
“Where is this firedust found?” Arianna said.
“It isn’t. It is made. Sulphur. Cavestone. Copperwood. Cidlewood perhaps. The mixture is uncertain. The way the method is described differs from one writing to the next, and there are many writings in Dumea, believe me. Everything from the scripts of ancient tribesmen to the writings and letters of the old priesthoods speak of it. But what they say of its properties changes with each account. I could never succeed in making the stuff. As far as I knew, no one had. In Dumea the scribes think the tales of it no more than a fiction. It would seem this Jaleem has discovered otherwise. One thing is certain; that man is no more a carpenter – as you have called him – than I am a handmaid.”
“It is what he was in Ilysia,” Neythan said. “What he may have been before then only the elders would know. It is like that with every villager on the mount.”
“Well, let that the elders chose to send him after you shape your notion of him. Twice he has found us. Twice he has caused problems. Whatever he was – or is – at the very least he knows how to make a nuisance of himself.”
“So what do we do now?” Arianna said. “If he has been able to find us, others will do so too.”
“Maybe,” Neythan said. “Maybe not. Either way it changes little. The land is wide from here to Ilysia. We’ll find high ground to rest for tonight. And then continue on tomorrow. If all is well, and the mule and cartwheels hold up, we will arrive in Ilysia before the week is out.”
Thirty-Nine
M A M M O N
“The old comely hag was besotted with him,” Barat said.
Yasmin just looked at him. Even with Yaram’s counsel it had taken more than a week to find this man, seven days of bribes and whispers and winks and waiting. Yet after no more than an hour in his presence she was already beginning to regret the meeting. Not wholesome, Yaram had called him. The old man could barely have spoken better truth. Barat sat there, loudly chewing aromatic leaves of some kind, plucking them from the stems and branches of a clipping he held loosely in one fat meaty paw. Yasmin noticed the odd white bud along the branches but felt no inclination to ask what flower it was. Fear she’d be offered one. Fear at being here.
They were sitting in a sort of shack, wood planks and fodder scattered loosely over the top for roofing, lying abreast of brick walls roughly a man’s height. The shack cornered what Yasmin assumed, from the smell, to be a garden, where Barat had plucked the strangely fragrant branch. As for where that garden was, she had no idea. She and Mulaam had met Barat’s man outside the city in a grove of pomegranates. They’d been blindfolded, led away, brought here, the blindfold only removed once she’d been taken to sit in this small narrow hut. When the rag over her eyes lifted, Yasmin found herself sitting opposite the barechested, shaven-headed, pot-bellied Barat with Mulaam nowhere to be seen. Barat smilingly went on to introduce himself, counselled her not to be concerned with Mulaam’s whereabouts, he was safe, he was fine, mere precautions, and then commenced answering her questions.
Yasmin watched as the man leant forward, letting his broad, hairy stomach hang between his thighs as he eyed her and smirked, half-smile, half-sneer, making the row of gold earrings in his chubby left lobe tip and jingle. His voice was a low, gentle growl. His sweaty lips sifted through a thick black beard as he spoke.
“Zaqeem was besotted with her too,” he continued. “You try to warn a man in these things, but once he’s heat in his loins there’s no sense in him. Might as well reason with a bear over meat.”
Yasmin tried not to let her revulsion show. “And you are sure it was her?” she said.
“Sure as the silver Zaqeem paid me to keep it secret. I saw her with my own two eyes. It is as I’ve said, the sovereign queen is a comely one. And I seldom forget a comely face.”
The man sat back again, rubbed the bullish red girth of his neck and let his back rest with a gentle slap against the wall behind.
Yasmin cleared her throat and tried not to fidget. Her hand was trembling. They’d taken her purse already when they came upon them in the grove, pulling the wool rag over her eyes from behind before manhandling her all the way here.
She swallowed. Her throat was dry. She decided against asking for water. “How was it arranged?” she said instead.
“Zaqeem would bring the silver to my man. I’d set a place for them, different each time. I’ve many houses in the city, and many friends whose house I might borrow, sometimes by favour,” he smiled. “Other times by force. After the place was set I’d bring her to it, then send word to him of where to go.”
“Bring her to it?” Yasmin said. “How?”
“Ah, Dumean…” That was the other thing that made Yasmin nervous. It was rare for men this far east to know the accent, most here seldom travelled west of the Yellow River. That Barat evidently had, and had taken to nonchalantly addressing Yasmin accordingly, only served to discomfort her further. Which, from what Yasmin could tell, seemed to be precisely Barat’s aim. “I told you at the start,” he said. “Some questions I answer for silver, others for gold.”
Yasmin swallowed dryly. She could almost feel the heat of the other man the shack was so small. “Perhaps you can tell me how long it went on for then,” she said. “How it began?”
“Agh.” Barat slapped his ample stomach and tossed a palm at the air; a Haránite gesture. “How it began? Who can tell? Zaqeem was given to banquets. His tastes always ran richer than his pockets. The best wine, the best food, the best dancing and music and all else. He often found himself in company humbler souls such as you or I never would. It was part of his charm. Some days I’d be tempted to cancel a debt of his here or there, just to hear another tale of his doings. I never did though – cancel a debt that is, I’m not that way minded – but if I was, Zaqeem would’ve been the one to draw it from me.” The man smiled again, plucked another leaf from the stem and tossed it into his mouth and crunched.
“What of how long?”
“Hah. How long? Listen, he came to me when he’d found no other way around it, when he’d begun to feel the danger of his doings. He may have been at it a year or more before then for all I know. All I can say was I helped him this way for a year myself.”
“A year? That long?”
Barat looked at Yasmin; it could almost have been pity if not for the grin. “Yes, Dumean. That long.”
Yasmin breathed in the truths, forcing them down like bitterleaf. Bilyana’s words together with Barat’s not only placed the sovereign queen in Zaqeem’s lap, it made her the most likely means by which he came upon his secret – a banished heir still living, and an ineligible one on the throne. It was enough to split the Sovereignty. So why would the sharífa have told Zaqeem? Why risk war? Stray words born of fondness? Or was there some other reason? “You say he began to feel the danger of his doings…”
Barat shrugged, tipped his big hairless skull and grimaced, cracking a bone in his neck. “Zaqeem was a reckless sort,” he said. “Like me. But just because the moth likes the light of the flame does not mean he cannot feel its heat. That last week I could tell he felt it. It’s why I set them a place away from here. Zaqeem insisted. Said people were following him. If any other man had told me that I’d have slit his throat ear to ear where he stood. The kinds of people who talk of being followed, they’re either careless or sullied. Neither one is good for business. But like I said, I liked Zaqeem. He was the kind to bring out my forgiving side. And so I set him a place far away from he
re, just north of the Havilah.” Barat took another leaf from the branch and folded it into his mouth. “It saddens me now, but then what choice did I have. The offer was good, a lot of gold. A man has to do what is best for himself.”
“How much did he pay you?” Yasmin asked.
“No, Dumean, it was a she. Comely also.”
“I don’t understand. You said Zaqeem was the one who–”
“Listen to me, Dumean. There would be a banquet in the township where I sent him, a rich banquet. They have many in the townships there, by the Crescent. And so Zaqeem would be there too, at the banquet, and then leave to meet the sharífa in the place I set for him. But there would be no sharífa… Zaqeem would meet those who’d been sent for him instead.”
“Sent? I don’t understand what–”
“Too much gold you see, Dumean. A man like me, I must do what is best for myself. It saddens me, yes. Just like us, here, today. This saddens me too. But as I have said, a man must look to himself and his own.”
It was then the men came in. They were not Barat’s men. They wore the pale tunics and tan sashes of the cityguard. They pulled Yasmin to her feet roughly, yanking her up by the arms.
“I am sorry, Dumean,” Barat said. But when Yasmin, being hauled from the shack by the armpits, turned to look back, Barat was smiling.
An hour later Yasmin was sitting in what felt like a small wicker chair in a corner chamber, underground somewhere, listening to the shuffled scrape of leather on stone behind her as unknown footsteps made their way down a stairway to where she sat, bound and alone. Again her eyes had been covered, a sack this time, tossed over her head as they dragged her, toes scraping, from Barat’s presence to wherever she now was. The fabric was rough and tickled her nose, itching her nostrils. She kept wanting to sneeze.
“You’re a curious one, aren’t you?”
A man’s voice, quiet and smooth. Very calm. Yasmin didn’t recognize it.
“Yes, you are very curious, asking questions wherever you go. Many questions… But tell me, what is it you seek?”
