“Just tell me Saldibar. I’ll pass my own judgment.”
“There are reports of beasts among them. Mammoths, giants, fire salamanders, dragon kin, wights.”
Kallia initially dismissed the reports as the vizier himself had done. But she reconsidered. “Could it be true?”
“Perhaps a few mammoths. The northern cities sometimes bring them down from the ice to keep chained in their gardens. But surely no more than a handful, designed solely to throw fear into our armies. No military significance.”
He paused. “As for the others, giants and dragon kin haven’t been seen east of the mountains for a hundred years. And no wizard has dared bind a fire salamander since the days of King Toth. That part is certainly invented. Wights, perhaps. Cragyn has them aplenty in Veyre to do his bidding. But they are of little consequence. Battle will bring the Harvester and his hounds to reap the dead, and he will scatter any wights.”
Kallia looked through a couple of letters sent by the grand vizier’s spies. “This one is quite detailed. Not accurate?”
“Fa! A forgery, sent to frighten us.” Saldibar had so long taken even the most minor threats seriously that his disdain did much to relieve Kallia’s fears. He said, “What worries me most are not mammoths, or wights, or invented armies of giants, but the fire-breathing siege weapon built in Veyre’s forges. It is said that it can cast a hundred pound iron ball fifty yards. Ten such balls a day. I don’t know what magic built such a weapon, but it will break down our walls within a fortnight. But it will take him several weeks to bring it to bear.”
Kallia said, “So we wait until he brings it into position, then we attack and capture the infernal device. Unless we defeat them in open battle before then.”
“Shall I call council with the pashas tomorrow?” he asked.
Kallia noted how gradually he’d changed over the years, from instructing her every move to standing back and letting her lead. In times like this she regretted the change. She hated the chance to make decisions that might kill thousands of Balsalomians.
“Yes, summon the pashas. We go to war.”
Chapter III
AS SOON AS ELETHRA SCREAMED, Kaya cried out in surprise and groggy fear. Darik froze, terrified into inaction. Heavy footsteps pounded up the stairs and he heard voices downstairs. He turned to run, still cradling Kaya in his arms.
His sister and Elethra kept screaming as he carried the girl into the hall. Graiyan emerged at the top of the stairs, face red and anxious. He held a long cooking knife in his hand.
All fear disappeared from his face when he saw Darik. “You!”
Darik flinched backwards. Graiyan stepped toward him, knife held in front, while Kaya buried her head in Darik’s shoulder and cried.
Graiyan shook his head in warning, his jaws clenched. “Boy, you put her down or I’ll unman you right here and now.” He hesitated with the knife, afraid to move while Darik still held his sister close.
The baker outweighed Darik by over a hundred pounds, and from the look on his face, Darik knew he meant his threats seriously. But Darik also knew that if Graiyan caught him, the corrections guild would castrate him anyway and sell him to the salt mines. By now, Whelan would have heard the commotion and fled with Markal, taking advantage of the confusion.
Something else besides fear tore at Darik’s heart. He’d heard the longing in Kaya’s voice when she called out to Elethra. The child had never known her mother, and Graiyan replaced a father she would never see again, a father who’d let moneylenders sell his children into slavery. What kind of brother was Darik to tear her away from that kind of happiness and drag her to barbarian lands?
Deciding instantly, Darik dropped Kaya to the floor and threw himself at Graiyan. He ducked to one side and tried to wiggle past the larger man, who caught him with his free hand. Darik struggled to escape. Graiyan wrestled with him for a moment, before letting him break free, so he could turn to check on Kaya, still crying on the floor.
Darik raced toward the stairs, hoping desperately that he could catch Whelan in the street before the two slaves left him. He spun himself around the stairs as they curved toward the lower level, but met others coming up.
“Ho, there. What’s this?” One of the other slaves caught him by the arm. Two others stood behind his shoulder, including Jesnan, Graiyan’s apprentice.
Darik tore free, but the other slave and Jesnan caught his arm. “Let me go!”
The two men hesitated and their grip on his arm went slack. Darik pulled to free himself.
“Hold him,” Graiyan shouted down the stairs.
With a cry of mounting fear, Darik thrashed one more time, but the three men held him fast. Elethra and Kaya fell silent upstairs. Graiyan eased himself down the stairs a moment later, his face red and angry. He pronounced judgment.
“I don’t know what you were doing,” he said, “but I won’t have a revolt in my house. Hidras, wake the others. Jesnan, call the night watchman and have him summon the corrections guild.”
The two men rushed to obey, while Graiyan and the other slave held Darik. The baker shoved the long knife into the sash holding together his night tunic. The two men dragged Darik into the kitchens.
Panic seized Darik. His bowels were hot and loose. And above all, he felt shame for betraying Whelan and Markal. Hidras would quickly report that Markal and Whelan were not in their rooms. The corrections guild would bring in one of their torturers who would extract the other slaves’ plan through efficient, long-proven methods.
Slaves and servants gathered, some annoyed, others blinking in groggy surprise. Hidras rushed in with the bad news just as the night watchman came. Whelan and Markal had gone.
The watchman was a large man with forearms that would look comfortable on a blacksmith or stone mason. He put Darik in a chair and bound his hands behind him. “Tell me boy. Where are the other slaves?”
Darik shook his head. “I don’t know. I didn’t do anything. I just wanted to see my sister.”
“Fa,” Graiyan said. He walked around the room lighting candles, then poured himself a flagon of wine, no longer concerned about appearances. “You were running. Where?”
Darik shook his head and tried to appear bewildered. “Running?”
Graiyan sent the others to watch outside his bedroom in case the other two slaves came to steal Kaya from her mother’s arms. Not likely, Darik thought bitterly. The others would be fleeing the city while he covered their tracks as long as possible.
Two more watchmen arrived, and the first consulted with them for a moment before turning to the baker. The lead watchmen shook his head and said, “I can’t do anything until the correctors arrive.” He rubbed his hands together in a nervous gesture. “I do my job and they do theirs.”
“Very well.” Graiyan looked at Darik and shook his head in disgust, making Darik lower his head in shame. The baker cut bread for the watchmen and lit a fire in the smallest stove where he heated a pot of spiced tea for the men to drink.
Any hope Darik had of rescue disappeared when the correctors arrived. The first man wore the red tunic of a journeyman corrector, with lashes strapped to each hip. A pair of cruel-looking iron tongs hung from his belt—bloodless castrators.
Darik had never seen the likes of the second man before but immediately knew him for the evil that he was. This man wore a long gray robe inscribed with two blood-red cartouches written in an old tongue. Another cartouche of power lay tattooed on one cheek and Darik stared at it through watering eyes as it pulsed with a green glow. The grotesquely embroidered figure of a grinning man with gaping wounds on his face and naked torso sat over the torturer’s right breast.
Several chains dangled from his robe, each carrying an evil device: pincer, crucible for hot lead, thumb screw, maker’s thorn. A veritable iron-monger’s shop of torture. The man looked at him with a dark, eager expression.
Hands still bound but no longer pressed into his chair, Darik leapt to his feet and tried to run. The torturer lifted
his right hand and said. “Nach Mobla.” Invisible hands shoved Darik back into his chair and held him there.
The watchmen shrank back against the wall, afraid of this newcomer. Graiyan opened his mouth to say something then thought better of it. He muttered to himself and took another flagon of wine and turned away from Darik when the boy tried to give his master a pleading look.
At last Graiyan cleared his throat and said, “Really, I don’t think that will be necessary. He’s just a boy.”
The torturer withered Graiyan with his glare then turned his awful gaze back to the boy.
Shudders racked Darik’s body and his teeth chattered together in terror. “Please, don’t. I’ll tell you everything I know.”
The torturer nodded solemnly. “I am quite certain that you will. But first, I will practice my art.”
He pushed aside the kettle of boiling tea Graiyan had set upon the stove and set his crucible on the fire instead. He removed two small lead ingots from a pouch at his waist and put them in the crucible to melt, then turned back to Darik. Removing the maker’s thorn from its chain, the torturer caressed it in his hand like a sculptor might caress a favorite mallet or chisel, then stepped toward Darik.
Darik tried to scream, but nothing came out. He struggled helplessly against his invisible bonds. Graiyan and the watchmen cowered in the corner, eyes bugging. The journeyman corrector at the torturer’s shoulder stared grimly into Darik’s eyes.
Suddenly, the door opened at the back of the kitchen and Markal lurched in, visibly drunk. He stared at the spectacle with blinks of surprise, then staggered toward Graiyan with outstretched hands. “I’m sorry,” he slurred. “Too much wine.” He fell into the baker’s arms. The watchmen rushed to grab him.
No, Darik thought. Don’t try this. Whelan had sent the old man back to start some foolish diversion. But it would take more than an old slave or even a few smugglers to free him from the powers this torturer held bound in the cartouches on his robe and body.
Markal grinned at the men and held up his left hand. “Better not get too close.” He looked pasty white. “I’m going to throw up.” He put his left hand over his mouth and staggered convincingly, while the watchmen hesitated.
“Bind the fool,” the torturer instructed. “Put him next to the boy.”
Markal’s next move surprised even Darik. Left hand still raised, he pointed it at the torturer and said, “Di Nach Necram!”
His hand glowed with a red heat that radiated into the room. Too late, recognition dawned on the torturer’s face and he formed a ring of warding with his thumb and index finger.
A thunderclap burst from Markal’s hand. The intensity of the noise struck Darik like a blow. Pottery in the window shattered, Graiyan’s flagon broke in his hands, spraying his face with dark purple wine. The men cried out and collapsed to the ground. The torturer crumpled in a heap, while the invisible hands holding Darik in his seat dissolved into the air.
Markal jumped to his side and untied his hands. “Hurry boy, follow me.”
The man pushed open the door and stepped into the street. Heart still pounding and ears clanging, Darik staggered to his feet and followed. Behind, the others struggled to regain their footing. All but the torturer. He lay dead in a pool of his own blood, which trickled from his ears to mingle with the flour dust.
Welcome night air enveloped them. Warm and dry, it carried the sound of hundreds of crickets and the smell of drying rugs in the Weaver’s Corner just to the east. Darik heard voices to the south, coming from the cluster of taverns near the brewery. He heard every sound and tasted every smell. A moment earlier all his senses had drawn inward to shield against the torturer and now they reached outward in relief at this unexpected pardon.
Markal grabbed him and dragged him down the alley. “Don’t just stand there gaping like an idiot.”
Darik couldn’t quite grasp the transformation that had overtaken the old slave. Only that he’d grossly underestimated the old man. A torturer, master of dark magicks, lay dead by Markal’s hand.
Whelan emerged from the shadow of the olive tree twisting its way alongside the house next to Darik’s window. He’d extinguished the lamp, but held a sword in hand, not the graceful, curving scimitar of the khalifa’s guard, but a straight barbarian blade. It glowed softly in the moonlight, and was so long that Whelan gripped it with two hands. He wore hardened leather, covered in brass nubs in the Eriscoban style.
“You’ve got the boy? Good.”
Darik looked from one man to the other. The past few minutes left him confused and frightened, and he struggled to make sense of the change in the two men. “What is happening? Who are you?”
Whelan said, “No time now, boy. You think Markal’s magic got you out of trouble? Oh no, we’re in far worse straits than a torturer or two.” He tossed a pair of boots to Darik. “Here, put these on. Where we’re going, you don’t want to be barefoot.”
Darik pulled on the boots. They fit snugly, but felt strange as he was used to sandals or bare feet.
Markal explained, “Those fools in the bakery are helpless for a spell, but what I did won’t go unnoticed.”
Darik looked down at the old man’s left hand in alarm. The hand he’d used against the torturer had withered and blackened until it clenched into a claw. “But who are you? And with such magic, what have we to fear of watchmen?”
Markal let out a short laugh. “Not watchmen. Wights. So long as I kept the magic hidden we were safe, but now I’ve drawn them like vultures to a funeral tower.”
Wights! Darik’s stomach clenched in rediscovered fear. He followed the two men down the alley. Darik could, indeed, sense an aura drifting from Markal like steam from a fresh bun on a cold morning. The spent magic, he supposed, wafting out onto Balsalom’s night currents, advertising the old man’s wizardry as loud as any street vendor barking out his wares.
Darik’s estimation of the two men had turned completely askew. He’d taken Markal for a fool, Whelan a little more than that, but not much. At every junction or turn of the alley, Whelan deferred to Markal’s instructions. The tall former captain slid his barbarian sword into a scabbard over his left shoulder, but moved with the deadly grace of a cobra.
The wights first picked up their trail on the edge of the Slaves Quarter.
The Slaves Quarter was a festering sore on the west side of the city. Gathered in a single square mile, thousands of slaves packed its crammed tenements and built their hovels on its filthy alleys. Only the lowest slaves lived there: the mudders and stone-haulers for the roads and walls, the mine slaves, the unclean who disposed of the city’s human waste and its dead.
Rats, disease, and slave revolts bred in the quarter, and over the years, various guilds and viziers had tried to tear it down. But grand vizier Saldibar, with the decree of the khalifa, fought such measures. Destroy the quarter and the slaves would have to go somewhere else. Better to keep the problem in one location where it could be watched and controlled.
When they slipped past the Beggar Gate that led into the quarter, Darik noticed a curious thing. The crickets had fallen strangely silent. Even the lowest slave kept a cricket in a tiny stick basket just inside the threshold of his house. Indeed, he glanced through the slatted windows of a few hovels and saw the crickets in their cages, but sitting silently.
Darik turned to ask Whelan about this, but the tall man pointed a finger to his ears. “They’re warning us with their silence. Listen.”
Yes, Darik heard it. A rasping sound like dry, drifting leaves floated along the wind from the north. He felt something too, sniffing, searching for them.
They shrank against the mud wall of a low-slung slave house. Quiet murmurs drifted through an open window and the smell of a cook fire followed. The rasping noise paused at the dark head of the alley, then scurried further down the main street that passed through the quarter. Markal and Whelan let out deep sighs and Darik realize that he, too, had been holding his breath.
But just when Da
rik thought the danger past, the rasping came back to the alley. Blue light flickered and Darik saw his first wights. They merged together and dissolved, sometimes separate, sometimes moving in a solid blue flame of light. When they moved separately, they took the figures of slaves and beggars, noble ladies, and merchants. And their eyes! Both purposeful and completely insane in turns.
“Run!” Whelan cried. They turned and ran, with wights screaming in pursuit behind them.
The alley, narrow to begin with, choked to a bare gap between two buildings at the far end before opening onto the street beyond. Rubbish clogged its far end: heaps of rags, broken crates, the gnawed body of a cat. A bony dog yelped from the shadows when they approached, struggling to pull free some bit of filth it had been eating, then saw the wights and fled. The three slaves pushed through the garbage, kicking up a stench.
The wights caught them before they could get through. Darik turned to see one leaping at his throat with outstretched arms. He threw up his hands to protect himself and slipped in the filth. The wight fell on him, slicing its claws across his face. Darik kicked it away, but his blow felt like kicking through sand. The wight screamed and slashed at his unprotected belly. Other wights boiled down the alley to join the fight.
With a cry, Whelan threw himself between them, sword in hand. It glowed as bright as a fiercely burning torch. Under its blaze, the wight shrieked and scuttled backwards on its belly, but as it drew backwards, it pulled strength from the others who surged forward in a wave of blue spirits. Whelan stabbed his sword into the wights, who flowed around the blade like he’d thrust it into water. The wights pulled back at the attack, then crested to strike again.
“No!” Markal cried behind them. “At its head. Its head.”
Darik saw what Markal meant. Wights rose and crested: a mass of limbs and heads and eyes. But behind the individual wights, he saw something else, as if his eyes had become slightly unfocused. Collectively, the wights formed a horned serpent with coils of blue light, and a head with a tongue that darted out and tasted the air. The head reared back to strike. Darik fell back next to Markal, the burning pain across his face fading with the fear of the moment.
FIERCE: Sixteen Authors of Fantasy Page 283
