The Hidden Fire (Book 2)

by James R. Sanford

  They retraced their footsteps again, looking for the place they entered the trail. “Here it is,” said Lerica, just as a man came around the bend in the trail.

  He was dressed much like Kyric, in a plain shirt and trousers, but they were torn and filthy, like he had been camping in the forest for a month. He also carried a short, heavy spear, but it was the hawk nose and jutting chin that Kyric noticed. The man was clearly a Syrolian.

  He was close enough to use the spear, but in his panic he dropped it and reached for the pistol in his sash, yelling, “Over here!”

  Aiyan seized the man’s wrist with his free hand, clubbing him over the head with the flat of his sword. He fell backward without another word.

  “I see them,” came a distant call from the treetops. A stalk of bamboo near Kyric’s head exploded even as he heard the whistle and the faraway report of a musket.

  “A marksman in a tree,” said Aiyan. “Run.”

  “This way,” said Lerica, plunging into the thick undergrowth. She tore through the broadleaf shrubs and Kyric ran after her. She veered towards some buttress-root trees where the going looked easier, and Aiyan called, “No, that’s not the way we — ”

  She tried to leap sideways as she tripped the line, and the loop only caught one of her legs. A tall whip of a tree began to straighten, lifting her and pulling her along. Kyric watched in horror as it pulled her toward a wall of bamboo spikes that had been hiding behind a curtain of tall brush.

  She mule kicked with her free leg and twisted, reaching out and somehow grabbing an errant vine. The vine held. She bobbed and swayed on the two lines, almost upside down. Kyric went to her and jumped as high as he could, but didn’t come close to reaching her.

  She drew her knife, grunting as she stretched for the rope around her ankle. She couldn’t quite get to it.

  Aiyan motioned to Kyric’s bow. “See if you can cut it with an arrow.”

  Kyric unslung his bow and selected his heaviest broadhead arrow. Much would depend on the luck of the spin.

  He heard the breaking of brush and pounding footfalls. The rope holding her ankle drifted up and down.

  The shot felt true as he loosed. It severed nearly half the strands, but not enough to cut the rope.

  Aiyan had drawn his little pistol, and was about to take his shot at the rope when five men burst through the bush, machetes in hand, coming at them with murder in their eyes. A part of Kyric’s mind calmly reasoned that this should not be so. Here were these Aessian men in a jungle wilderness, men who spoke the same language as he, and they wanted to kill him without knowing who he was or what he was doing here. Shouldn’t they talk before deciding on violence?

  Aiyan shot the closest one in the forehead.

  One of them came at Kyric. Holding his bow like a sword, he thrust it at the man, nearly catching him in the eye as he twisted to the side, slashing wildly. Kyric ducked the machete, swinging two-handed at the man’s knee.

  The blow caught him on the shin instead, and it rang like a wooden bell. The man tripped, falling on Kyric and bringing them both down in a heap. The wrestled and rolled, Kyric trying to take away the machete while the man gouged him in the ribs. They rolled over a vine that looked poisonous, and Kyric pushed the man’s face into a cluster of white flowers.

  “Everyone stand still!” a stern voice commanded.

  Two more men now stood in the clear space beneath the trees. They were older, old enough to have greying beards. The skinny one with the green headband shouldered an extra-long musket with shiny brass fittings. The other one carried a horse pistol in each hand. He wore a hard leather vest with no shirt beneath it, knee-high boots, and shark teeth bracelets. He was well-weathered, and well-muscled considering his age. He looked at each of them in turn, his eyes very hard. He was their leader.

  The other three had surrounded Aiyan, one of them getting a deep cut on the shoulder for his trouble. They each took a few steps back. Aiyan sheathed his sword and placed his hands on his hips, staring at the two older men.

  The skinny man’s mouth fell open. “Good Goddess. Don’t you recognize him, Colonel? He’s one of the boys from the old company. What was it we used to call him?”

  The colonel squinted at Aiyan for a long moment, his lips parting in an excuse for a grin. He nodded to himself. “It’s Candy. I’d know him anywhere.”

  Aiyan held still, expressionless. “Thurlun . . . and Pacey.”

  Thurlun turned to the others. “Put your weapons away, boys.”

  The one with the cut shoulder only raised his machete higher. “But he killed Marto!”

  “Of course he did,” Thurlun said cheerfully, “he’s a killer. The best killer I’ve ever seen. Could have killed you if he had wanted to. The night he got his nickname he gutted two enemy officers just to get their peppermint sticks.” He almost smacked his lips. “Damn but I’m glad to see you, Candy.”

  Aiyan returned the smile with only a little insolence. “So we’re not your prisoners?” He nodded at the horse pistols still leveled at him.

  “Well,” said Thurlun, “I’ll have to disarm you until I hear your story. But what I really want is for you to come and work for me again — seems we have an opening. And by the way, the vine that the girl has hold of is starting to slip, so if you want her without punctures you’d best unbuckle that sword belt.”

  CHAPTER 8: Killers

  Thurlun’s men each carried a short length of rope with a knotted end, tucked in their sashes. They used these to bind the three of them, tying their hands behind their backs. When one of them searched Lerica for hidden weapons he let his hands stray, and she kicked him in the knee.

  “You bitch,” he cried, reaching back to slap her.

  “Serves you right,” said Thurlun, leveling one pistol at the man. He froze in mid-swing.

  “Don’t forget you swore an oath along with me and everyone else,” continued Thurlun. “No drunkenness or messing with any woman, slave or free, till this job is done.” He held up the pistol. “I will enforce this by simple means.”

  They marched single file to a camp by the river. Thurlun carried Aiyan’s sword. Twice they left the trail to go around a trap, and each time Kyric spied a folded palm leaf with a twig thrust through it.

  They have to mark them, he thought. There’s so many traps out here that they can’t remember them all.

  The camp was far more than a camp. It was a makeshift fishing factory. A wide strip of ground had been cleared of underbrush, and a dozen men worked at the riverbank, most of them hauling in a long heavy net while two others manned a small dingy, spreading a second net across the river. Several teams of three men each picked the catch off the net with large hooks at the end of eight-foot poles. The nets were strung loosely with wide openings, and they held few small fish, the catch being mostly rays along with some lakka. All the men were Terrulans, and all of them were naked save for native loincloths. Then Kyric noticed that each one had been fitted with a set of leg irons.

  They had a ray off the net, and it was hauled up the bank to a row of rough-cut tables where teams of men and women waited with little handsaws and some other tools. Unlike the prisoners at the river, they all wore leather aprons that stretched from the neck to the knees, but like them, they too were shackled at the ankles.

  Thurlun led them past this, past a tree where a guard sat on a platform in the treetop, a musket across his knee, and past a lagoon that came in from a small lake to the north, narrowing the high ground to a strip about half a furlong wide between the lake and the river. Several small islands rested in the lagoon, one only about thirty feet out. Kyric saw a couple of women on this island. They seemed to be cooking beneath a thatched awning stretched across a clump of trees. He tried to imagined what this place looked like in the dry season, the waters pulled back, the river narrow, the islands only shallow knolls.

  They stopped in front of some stick and mud huts — two short ones and a long one that was much like the one in Kyric’s dream — bu
t it turned out to be the barracks of the machete men, not the slave house. Above the odor of fish guts and urine, the place had another stink. A putrid smell, as if it were all rotting away.

  Thurlun turned to his men. “Guppy, find a needle and sew up Harlon’s shoulder. Tebble, take a couple of slaves and bury Marto, but not too close to camp. Do it right and bury him deep, but do it quick — we only have a couple of hours of daylight. And be careful with the slaves. I have damn too few as it is.”

  He handed Aiyan’s sword to the last one. “Ral, you stay here.”

  He hooked his oversized pistols into some cording on his vest and set two stools beneath a tall canopy tree. Another crude platform had been built about halfway to the top, and slinging his musket, Pacey climbed up to take his place there. Ral tied Kyric and Lerica to a nearby post and stood guard over them. Aiyan was set on one stool and Thurlun sat on the other, taking a long drink from a wine skin.

  He looked at Aiyan. “Well?”

  “We had arranged to sail to Baskillia with this trader captain. He had told us that he needed to deliver some cargo to a coffee plantation before we sailed east. When we got there, the plantation owner had some important friends who demanded passage to Ularra, and he started waving papers at the captain and using words like contract and lawsuit. So the captain says he has to take them, and that he has to dump us here for a week or two to make room for them.”

  “So you decided to take a stroll in the jungle?”

  “The plantation owner — “ Aiyan began.

  “What is his name?” demanded Thurlun.

  “Dorigano.”

  Thurlun nodded. He had already known the name.

  “Dorigano,” Aiyan continued, “wasn’t very hospitable, and we were getting bored, so I asked his native overseer about the hunting around here. He says forget hunting — that there’s this magnificent ruined city out in the jungle. He didn’t tell me there was a lake around it.”

  “There’s a land bridge on the other side,” Thurlun said. “Probably underwater right now. No need to bother with it. The Baskillians picked it clean a long time ago.”

  He stood and paced a circle around Aiyan. It was clear to Kyric that he was a man used to getting the lie.

  “I notice that you haven’t any camping gear.”

  “We weren’t planning to spend the night. The overseer made it seem like it was only a couple of miles away. We were speaking in Cor’el, and I guess I misunderstood.”

  Thurlun placed one foot on the stool and leaned against his knee. “Your story’s plausible, if not very likely. If you’re telling the truth, I know that Dorigano won’t come looking for you. Hell, he and his boys have never gone more than a hundred paces into the jungle. What do you think the trader captain will do if he comes back and you’re not there?”

  “He already has my money. He’ll just sail on to Baskillia without us.”

  Kyric looked at Lerica. Aiyan was trying to convince this man that no one in the world would come looking for them. Her eyes were wide and dark and he felt he could read her thoughts there. She understood. She wouldn’t give it away.

  “So what’s going on here?” Aiyan asked casually, gazing out at the camp. “I know that you’re not simply fishing.”

  “But we are,” said Thurlun with a smile. “We are fishing. Wait till you hear this, Candy. There’s this type of ray that breeds only in these rivers.”

  “The angel ray?”

  “Yes. Do you know why they call them that? They have this little circle of bone on top of their heads. The halo, you see. When the females get ripe, their halos swell up and get a little spongy.” He took another drink.

  “The Baskillian governor during the sugar days, one Count Yastikan, he deems himself some kind of naturalist, and he gets fascinated by the breeding rays. He cuts them apart to see what they’re made of. After a while he declares that the halos are medicinal if cut from the ray when swollen.”

  His smile got bigger and he almost chuckled. “So now, some of the high aristocracy in Baskillia — and I’m talking ties to the Imperial family here — have got the idea that the halos from the breeding females will cure everything from limp dick to consumption. It’s rumored that it has magical properties, and they are willing to pay an unbelievable amount of gold for one.”

  Aiyan nodded. “But they can’t risk getting caught violating the treaty, so they hire foreigners. They must be paying you very well to believe that you’ll keep their secret.”

  “I’m getting better than paid,” Thurlun said. “I’m a full partner in this venture.”

  “So why all the Terrulans? Why not bring your own Baskillian slaves?”

  “They wouldn’t last. You see, when it comes to the angel rays there’s a catch — if you will pardon my pun. When they die, the halo shrivels up, and that’s worth nothing. So you have to saw them off while the ray is still alive. And if you think they thrash hard when pulled out of the water, you should see them on the table. That venom they ooze just flies everywhere. You get a little on you and it makes you sick, more than a little and you die, and it doesn’t matter if you wash it off quickly. And then there’s those that get stung by the tail. They die fast.

  “I need a sixty-man crew to get the best yield from this river, but I can barely maintain forty. Between the rays, the lakka, the crocodiles, and the tree with the purple figs — they smell like honey, but don’t even touch the purple figs — between all this, and the ones who make a run for it and get killed by the man-traps, I’m losing two or three slaves a day. A big croc tipped the dingy this morning and killed my best net-layers.

  “And there’s more and more coming in, the way we’re feeding them. But what am I to do? We don’t have time to bury everything that dies around here, and it stinks enough as it is.” This last part he said to himself, as if he had forgotten that Aiyan was there.

  “You have to keep replacing your loses,” said Aiyan, “so you go on a slave hunt from time to time.”

  “Almost constantly. I have a handful of men from the sugar days — hardened jungle fighters. They’re upriver right now.”

  “Only a handful? How do they get away with it? The Baskillians had to land companies of marines. Even the Enari could slaughter a few slave hunters. Any tribe could.”

  Thurlun smiled again. “Not the Ilven. They don’t fight. The only thing keeping us from bringing in a herd of them is that we can’t find their main village.”

  “That’s strange, coming from Tle Espide’s expert trackers, the men who fearlessly stalk the night. Why haven’t you, ah, questioned one of them to find out.”

  Thurlun smile fell away. “We did. Tortured one of them to death right in front of his woman. Neither one would tell. They kept saying that they couldn’t tell, kept saying that you either knew the way or you didn’t.”

  Thurlun pushed the thought away and took another drink. “So you can see how I could use another man with field experience — more slaves, more halos.” He glanced at Kyric and Lerica. “Who are the two kids?”

  “They are my assistants. They each possess a special talent. Despite his youth, Kyric is an expert with the longbow.”

  “And the girl?”

  There was only a little irony in Aiyan’s voice. “She’s a cat burglar.”

  Thurlun sat down and leaned forward. “Sounds like they would make excellent guards for the slaves. Here’s the deal I’m offering you: The three of you work for me till the end of the season — that’s sixty days — and when the ship comes to pick us up, I pay you nine hundred kandars. How you split that with the other two is your own business.”

  Kyric blinked hard. It would have taken him five years as a day cook to earn that much money.

  “For guarding slaves,” said Aiyan.

  “Yes,” said Thurlun. “At least that’s what the kids would do. I want you to command the slave takers and try to find the main Ilven village.”

  When Aiyan remained silent, Thurlun said, “Alright. I’ll give you a bon
us of two kandars per slave taken. Considering that I’m going to need around a hundred and fifty more before this is over, that’s not bad.”

  Excellent, thought Kyric. He could see Aiyan’s plan. They would agree to work for Thurlun, maybe learn the location of some of the traps, then they would slip away in a day or two. They could steal the dingy and head upriver faster than anyone could follow, and they wouldn’t have to worry about the man traps. Yes, that was a good idea. Once they got back to the Dorigano estate and Captain Lyzuga returned, they would arm everyone and sail up this river. Calico mounted a swivel gun on each side.

  Aiyan stood. “I have one more question for you,” he said, his face hard and his eyes smoldering. “How did you come to this? What could you have possibly suffered to bring you so low?”

  Thurlun leapt to his feet, placing one hand on a pistol. “What?”

  “The Colonel Thurlun that I knew was a killer, but he had a cause. The Jakavians were on our soil, killing our people. That man was hard, and he was imperfect, but he would never have been a slaver. What happened to you?”

  “Don’t you remember, Candy? You were there. You heard what they accused us of — war crimes! All trumped up by agents of the war financiers because while making a profit from war was good, making even more was better.”

  Aiyan spoke quietly now. “The Doge didn’t like the way we killed officers in their sleep.”

  “As I recall, your parents were sleeping when the Jakavians killed them.”

  He reached for his wine skin then decided against it. “They didn’t just cheat us out of our war pay. They ruined my career. After Sevdin, I couldn’t get a commission even in Drendusia.”

  Aiyan looked across the camp. “So it comes to this?”

  “After Aleria, yes. They wanted me there, you see, when the situation got hot. They needed a man of my talents, a guerilla captain who understood that kind of warfare better than any of them. I changed the nature of the fighting, alright. And I wisely made them pay each month in advance, because the moment the natives started talking peace the militia disarmed us and put us on a ship. Said I was dangerous, a loose cannon. And I won their Goddess-damned war for them.”