Fox's Bride (5 page)

Wisps of sand rose from the peaks of dunes. The yellow and reds of the land met the blue of the sky in a battle of rippling air.

“No matter how many years I may live,” the skin-stitcher said, “I would never wish to leave this city. But I can understand why you do.”

“What?”

“The enchantress seeks flight, does she not?”

“What enchantress?” Chandur touched the cloth covering his face. He had not given himself away. A tightness spread from his chest down his right arm.

“You must forgive me.” The man pulled off his mask.

Chandur recognized the man's braided wig, and, yes, those eyes. He was the embalmer from the Water Palace. His face matched the desert: golden brown in tone, smooth in its ridges, and breathtaking.

The embalmer said, “I am used to identifying colleagues by their eyes and how they stand. You have a fearless stance.”

On his cheeks below each pupil descended a black streak of a camel's tail.
The Founder's mark,
Chandur thought.
So he honors the god of hard work and truth.
To his side and at the corner of the city, the step pyramid of the same god rose in square foothills of stone stacked on top of each other. Murals of oases colored the blocks green and blue, and painted men followed a colossus of a camel with the sun balanced on its hump.

Aware he had clasped his hands into fists, Chandur relaxed his arm. “She told me you were the one to warn her.”

“And she trusted her spellsword to help her.” The embalmer's smile was as white as a cheetah's.

“I'm to find a ship, one leaving tomorrow.”

“You are fortunate to have found me. I know of one.”

Chandur felt the hand of fate in this meeting. Relief pooled through him at the thought of a goddess guiding his future. “It casts off in the morning?”

“At noon.”

“Are there any before then?”

“No.” The embalmer still smiled, teeth edge to edge. “The only ship to leave this week.”

“Then it’ll do.” Chandur clasped the embalmer's arm in a sign of friendship. He felt a hardness of muscle. “We have saved her.”

“You have.” The embalmer returned the gesture. “No need to mention me. I think you two have a connection, and I shouldn't want anything to distance you from her. She is most fortunate.”

Chandur frowned under his turban. He wished Hiresha could have a fate as bright as his own, but he wondered if it was not meant to be. As he walked down the docks with the embalmer, he worried for her.

My future is victory and happiness and a family,
he knew.
Can't die until I have that.
He was oath bound to give his life for Hiresha, and he would if he could. The fate given him warned Chandur that if it came to a balance of lives, something would prevent him from sacrificing himself for the enchantress.

He could only hope it was not her fate to die.

In the dimness of the next day's predawn, Fosapam Chandur checked the inn hallway for any servants awake as early as he. A glance downstairs showed three guards lounging in the common room. He crept past a display case holding historic coins, glinting with the faces of dozens of pharaohs all portrayed to look fit and noble and exactly the same.

The door to Hiresha's chambers opened to his touch. He locked it behind him.

Janny scowled. “You walk like a gouty elephant. Every servant must've heard you.”

“Sorry,” he said.

A curtain covered the window, and the light that seeped into the room came from a rent in the ceiling. Water dripped from the hole into an urn. Whitewashed rocks were piled in one corner while in another sat urns full of cloudy water.

“Um.” Chandur blinked up at the ruined ceiling. “I didn't hear any pickax crashing last night.”

“The rubble was Lightened during its fall,” Hiresha said. “Maid Janny used pulleys to press me against the ceiling. I slept, Attracted it down on top of me. Channeled the falling water from the recrystallization pool toward jewels in urns, using much the same enchantment employed to condense water vapor into the sky streams. Simple work, yet thank you for noticing.”

“Ah.” Chandur had also noticed today a henna design of lotus leaves spread from her eyes, in the fashion of a worshiper of the goddess of desire. A white dress of plain linen clung to her curves.
A disguise, for her.
He looked away, to the curtains. “Nothing against climbing through ceilings, but wouldn't it have been easier to use the window?”

“Someone is watching it.” She crossed her arms over her breasts. “Enough dawdling. The sun has risen. Maid Janny, the rug.”

Janny's knees creaked as she knelt. She unfolded a throw rug under the hole in the ceiling. Hiresha slid her slippered feet over the carpet's gold-thread design of a garden with palms. She squinted upward, blinked a few times, flicked her own earlobe—perhaps to wake herself—then leaped eight feet upward onto the roof.

When Chandur stepped onto the rug, he felt a Lightening enchantment breeze over him. The air seemed to thicken, pushing him, buoying him onto the balls of his feet. The instant that he jumped, his weight returned, but his unnatural momentum carried him through the hole to land beside Hiresha in the drained rooftop pool. Salt crunched under his feet.

Janny tossed Chandur a pack from the chambers. She said, “Not sure I have the bones for this sort of frog work.”

“Maid Janny,” the enchantress said, “if I can manage in half a doze, you can with half a mind.”

“But Fosapam could pull me up with this rope, couldn't he?”

“At once, Maid Janny.”

Grey turban leading, the middle-aged woman tumbled upward and landed on her bottom. She scuttled to her feet, glanced at the salt crusted on her backside. “Could you brush this off for me?” She winked at Chandur.

Hiresha stepped between them. A rope had been tied around Janny's waist, and the enchantress used it to pull up the throw rug. Janny took the rug, rolled it under an arm, and she followed Hiresha and Chandur to scramble onto an adjacent roof.

As Chandur stepped over the gap between the buildings, he thought he saw a woman staring up at him from an alley, a scar stretching across her face. He felt as if he swallowed water that was too cold, and it froze his stomach. Either the woman had been a servant who had risked the break of dawn, or she had waited outside the inn at night. Only Feasters went out under the stars, them and their prey.

She can't harm us now,
he thought.
It's light out.

They used the gilded carpet to spring between buildings farther apart. Landing in salt pools cushioned their fall but splattered their clothing. Chandur wore the same turban and over robes as the day before, with the bulk of his enchanted sword strapped to his back. Though his robes covered the blade and the turban was wound around its jeweled hilt, anyone could tell he carried something huge.

On one rooftop, a pool had dried to leave a snow of salt. Chandur had jumped first, and he Lightened his sword, landed, and bent his knees to absorb the impact, skidding on the white crystals. Not wanting the women to slip and strain something, he turned to catch them. Janny was the softer of the two.

After traveling a city block, they threw the rug down into an alley. Chandur dropped from the rooftop onto the gold patterning and felt as if he had fallen no more than an inch. Hiresha tilted away from the rug as she fell and would have smacked into the ground, but Chandur caught her again.

Janny called down. “She's doing it deliberate, you know.”

Chandur could not help but notice a red tint to the cloth between Hiresha's breasts as if she wore a jeweled necklace. He knew that could not be, though. Such pendants were engagement presents in Morimound culture.

Hiresha pushed out of his arms and began furiously scrubbing at the salt caked to her dress.

After Janny landed and tucked the rolled rug under her arm, the three of them set off toward the southern docks. They walked below two brass towers, and Chandur grinned up at the tall buildings. Colorful carvings ringed the structures in likenesses of wealthy men and women. He always found it hard to believe that each painted sarcophagus encased in the perimeter of the tower covered a mummy entombed in brass.

The enchantress, spellsword, and maid had to cross through the center of the city for a chance of reaching the docks by noon. Crowds had already begun to gather in the boulevards around the Pyramid of the Opal Mind, awaiting the procession of gods chosen for that day. Above the blocky roofs of countless white buildings, a gold chain coiled into the sky like a floating strand of sunlit hair. The pilgrims gaped as water wicked along the chain, growing into a stream in the sky.

Chandur did not believe he and Hiresha would be caught. His insides disagreed with him, prickling and tensing. To fulfill his good fate, he kept watch for guards. The camelry might think he and Janny looked like thieves lugging valuables. He blinked at the gold-embroidered rug.

“That's the inn's?”

“Maybe it is,” Janny said, “but we couldn't leave it on the street. Anyone might step on it and hurt herself.”

A guard sitting on a camel's hump came into view. Chandur felt the guard's gaze cut through him, but the spellsword continued as if he had nothing to fear, guiding the women to walk behind some tall tribesmen. After a few thick breaths, he decided the guard had not given chase.

Hiresha had them stop at the side of the pyramid so she could kneel before a false door, a rectangular indentation in the marble. Chandur worried someone might remember the oddity of a woman bearing the face paint of the Red Lotus praying to another goddess, the Opal Mind, but neither did he want to keep Hiresha from her devotions. Several baboons made of glaze rested in the alcove as offerings. The enchantress frowned down at the figurines then placed an opal among them. She closed her eyes, muttered a few words, and slumped forward in sleep.

Janny hauled her upright, waking her, and they were on their way again. Palms swayed and rustled overhead. High among the green fronds hung yellow and orange clusters of dates.

The maid folded and refolded her arms over the rug. “Do you think they've found us gone yet?”

“There are some advantages,” Hiresha said, “to being known as a late riser.”

A servant ran into the common room of the inn, knocking over a breakfast dish, shrieking, and pulling at her hair. “She's been eaten. The Silver Crocodile's eaten her!”

While priests and guards struggled to make sense of the woman's ravings, Inannis glanced at the fennec. The shouting should have upset him from his nap, but only one ear lazed upward before drifting down again. Inannis had laced the fennec's meat with milk of the poppy.

Mortal flesh,
Inannis thought,
mortal weakness.

Blood rattled in his throat as Inannis breathed. Shivers of fever ran down his spine, but his hands held steady. He rested an empty wine jar beside the drugged fennec and walked to hear what the sobbing servant was saying.

“Was—I was only checking the salt pools when I saw...I saw a hole in the roof. Over the enchantress' room.”

A priest frowned, and the metal shaft of his false beard angled upward. “A ventilation hole?”

Her hands shook as she gestured. “A big, awful hole. I ask you, what could've done it but a crocodile the size of a house? Oh, I just knew she'd been eaten!”

Inannis had started up the stairs halfway through her speech and met the owner heading toward the enchantress' chambers. The thief in priest’s robes pressed the man's shoulder, a sign to wait while Inannis spied through the keyhole. More light shone through than he would expect, but inside he saw no movement.

He gestured to the owner, who unlocked the door. Inannis pushed inside first.

Stealing one of the rich man's amulets was probably a mistake, Inannis admitted to himself a second after doing it. His blood skimmed through his veins, pulsing faster as he slipped the gold camel medallion into his sash belt.

Part of the roof had been disassembled, rocks and tile stacked against the wall. He also noted the rugs were not wet, despite the roof pools. Behind him, the owner cried out.

“My inn! The Silver Crocodile has broken my inn.”

Inannis had stayed away from the legendary crocodile that hoarded treasure beneath the city. The silver-plated being was known to surface to hunt down those who had tried to cheat it, but Inannis doubted the enchantress had numbered among them.

Her dress lay on the bed, the garment stuffed in an amateur fashion to resemble a body. The emerald bracelet was wrapped around one empty glove. Inannis brushed the enchanted jewels with his fingertips. His heart pattered, and he could feel the warmth from blood leaking into his lungs. No one else had seen the bracelet yet. He slipped it into his sash, and his joy churned with fear.

He had expected a challenge in taking the bracelet from the enchantress. Without it he would have needed to leave behind the fennec's enchanted collar. This felt too easy, too fortunate, and Inannis meant to shame the god of fortune.

The two other priests jostled into the room. “Where is she?”

“What happened to the roof?”

“She was not eaten.” Inannis patted the innkeeper on his back, to console him and clasp the stolen camel amulet back to its owner's neck.
Don't want any suspicions.
Not now that it's begun.
“She ran away.”

“From her divine wedding?” The priests spluttered, blinking up at the torn ceiling and looking close to tears.

Guards mobbed the stairwell. Inannis had trouble breathing so close to armored men, but he forced himself to push past them, to explain that the enchantress had escaped through the roof and that they should search the surrounding buildings.