Restoration (26 page)

“So this is your slave, Lord... Vanye, is it?”

“House of Mezzrah, from Capharna.” Sovari nearly tumbled off his horse as he swept a bow. “Visiting my Fontezhi cousins. And yes, this squirming little vermin is the slave that my father charged to be my wet-nurse. I commanded him to wait at the gates until I came back from—”

“Shhh,” said Aleksander, with exaggerated gestures. “Mustn't tell the captain where the roses can be found.” His haffai was wrapped just enough to cover his boot, but expose a gold-wrought tef-coat embroidered with the Fontezhi kayeet. “So where is this girl-child?”

“In the potter's shop just behind me, my lord.” The captain's voice was stiff. Anyone would have grown impatient with their reeling silliness.

“Is she fair?”

“Quite pretty for a Manganar whelp. Shall I have her brought out to you? If not, I‘ll—”

“Do you need another rose, Vanye?” said Aleksander, clapping his hand on Sovari's shoulder. “Or have we been pricked enough this night?”

“I think we're the ones have done the pricking!” More hilarity. “My slave will do nicely. I'll have him bathe me with rose petals before I take his foot.”

Sovari flipped a coin in the air toward the guardsman, but it fell in the dirt out of the Derzhi's reach. The officer had either to bend over to pick it up, risking an appearance of avarice, or ignore it, risking the “noble‘s” wrath at his ingratitude. I could have sworn I heard a murmured oath. After bowing with strained politeness, he attached my ropes to Sovari's saddle, and then asked if there was anything more he could do for the two lords.

“This fair girl-child,” said Aleksander, wagging his finger at the captain. “We mustn't have our roses plucked by slaves or tax collectors. You put it about that any man who touches this house will hang in the marketplace without his balls—right beside the cursed traitors. Do you understand me, Captain? By the honor of my father's house, you are commanded to see to it. And don't think I'm too drunk to remember. Is it understood?” Even with his wine-soaked slur, the command was clear. Derzhi nobles had a certain way with words, and Derzhi guard captains recognized it.

The Captain bowed his head. “Understood, my lord... I didn't catch your name . . .”

But Aleksander and Sovari had already spurred their mounts to a fast trot and broken into song again. I stumbled along behind them into the dark.

 

 

“I knew you were going to do something stupid,” said the Prince as Sovari unhooked the ropes from his saddle and hauled me up behind him. “When are you going to leave off this damned playacting? Do you
want
to be a slave again?”

With the tail of Sovari's scarf, I blotted a cut on my forehead that was bleeding enough to blind my right eye. “I can't ever seem to think of anything else at the time,” I said, vowing to improve my repertoire of deceptions as soon as I could think clearly again. “The results are always predictable, and people notice the slave rings before they notice my face. Gives me time to figure out what I'm doing. Where in the name of the gods did you get the Fontezhi tef-coat?”

“After I watched your little performance—”

“You watched?” Of course he had watched. I remembered the scrabbling noises behind the goat shed. No wonder he had gone off without arguing. Damned, hardheaded fool of a Derzhi.

“As I said, I knew you were going to do something stupid. The back of that shed is built right into the hill. Easy enough to crawl up and take a look inside. Thought I was going to have to come in after you. You didn't have a rabbit's twitch of a chance to convince them of that story—”

“Until Borian confirmed it.”

“The potter did well. Indeed he did.” Aleksander shrugged. “Anyway, when I saw the guardsman getting different tales from all sides, I knew we needed to prevent your having to do anything too extraordinary to get away.”

“You roused the neighbors!”

“Easy enough. Gave us time to go hunting. I've had some good times in Karn‘Hegeth. So I knew where to look for some stupid young bastard who had drunk too much and was seeking pleasures where he oughtn't. Found one, too. Sovari bashed him on the head and left him in an alley. He'll wake without a clue as to where his clothes got off to.” Even as he told me, Aleksander stripped off the tef-coat and threw it into the muck.

“I'd recommend you keep your leg well covered, my lord,” I said. “They're going to be looking everywhere for you.”

 

We rode quickly through the streets and into the unsleeping caravan quarter, seeking Malver among the wagons and chastou, casks and barrels and boxes, slaves and sledges. We threaded our way between two teams of mountain oxen, their wickedly pointed horns wider than a man's arm span, only to be brought to a standstill by a herd of pigs. The beasts squealed in frantic chorus as they were herded into a torchlit slaughterhouse, there to be hacked into slabs or ground into sausage to hang in the meat merchants' stalls at dawn.

“Where is the blasted fellow?” said Aleksander, peering into the crowds of merchants and vendors of every race who were haggling with each other over accounts and market spaces and screaming at their slaves and bondsmen who were loading and unloading their merchandise. “How can you find anyone in such chaos?” He cursed as two brawny men, carrying a wooden booth on their shoulders, bumped his leg.

“How does a warrior tell his enemies from his brothers in a battle?” I said. “You just have to know where to expect them. Besides, Malver said he knew some cloth merchants.” I pointed to a knot of men and women arguing and gesticulating as they clustered around an open chest. A tall woman with braided hair and skin the color of ebony stood serenely in the middle of the small crowd. She wore a purple loobah—a graceful Thrid garment made of one long strip of cloth draped about the body—and a necklace of interlaced rings of ivory or bone. Every once in a while she would point to one of her agitated customers, and the one so favored would pull a length of colored fabric from the chest and drop coins into the woman's slender hand. She transferred the coins into the folds of her richly colored garment. Watching the proceedings from the seat of a long wagon hung with scraps of fabric was Malver.

Sovari raised a hand, and Malver jumped down from the wagon, surveying the milling throng anxiously as he motioned us to ride around behind the knot of cloth buyers. “Wasn't expecting to see you here tonight, my lord,” he said, pulling our horses into a shadowed nook. “Something's not gone quite to plan?”

“We need a place to stay out of sight for a few hours,” said Aleksander. “I'm still seeing Kestor before leaving the city.”

I could think of few worse ideas than for Aleksander to meet with a Fontezhi noble, even if the man was bound to him by the blood of their first battle, and if I could have worked some sorcery to remove the Prince from Karn‘Hegeth in that hour, I would have done it. But I was in no condition to be of use. I'd been holding on to Sovari's waist with my left arm, because I could scarcely move my right, and indeed the numbness was affecting more than my arm. When I looked down, the ground seemed very far away. Sovari got himself off the horse gracefully, while I sat there wondering how I was going to manage my own dismount.

“W' Assani will transport you, my lord,” said Malver, moving close and keeping his voice low. “She's joined up with a caravan that leaves after tomorrow's evening market. I told her only that I had a friend—pardon the presumption, my lord—who needed to get out of the city discreetly. She has moved goods that were perhaps... not properly taxed... in the past.”

“What kind of fool are you to trust the Prince to a Thrid smuggler—and a woman?” said Sovari. “I thought you had sense. Thrid take whatever position pays them best, and the usurper can pay better than we can at the moment.”

Malver was not ruffled in the least. “I've fought beside Thrid half my life. They hold to their bargains. Once paid, no one is more trustworthy. She—”

I heard no more of Thrid virtues, for just then a ripple of unease passed through the throngs in the streets: here and there an edgy glance cast toward the center of the city, a noisy conversation dropped to whispers, a hand reaching out for friends or children, drawing them out of the center of activity. I passed the back of my hand before my eyes, forcing my senses alert. The source of the disturbance was a distant knot of Derzhi warriors moving slowly through the crowd in our direction. A second group rounded a corner at the opposite end of the long street. Farther away, horses were galloping through the main streets of the city. Hunters.

“We can't wait for evening market,” I said, my tongue thick. “And we can't wait to see the Fontezhi. We need to go now.” The night was closing in. “With the Thrid woman or without.”

Aleksander inspected me from bruised head to bootless feet. “Perhaps we've done all we can do here.”

Malver ran to speak to the woman, while Sovari helped Aleksander from his horse. I gripped the lip of the saddle with my left hand and swung my leg over, but the horse was very tall, and I was suddenly very dizzy, and the ground was very hard when my face met the dirt.

I didn't meet W' Assani until the chest she dropped on my arm waked me abruptly from a dead sleep with a vow to dismember whomever had done it.

“You've had the free use of my home all morning. I'll not apologize for reclaiming a bit of it.”

I pulled my left arm out from under the hide-covered box, relieved to find the limb intact, and I tried to disengage my head from a pile of colorful woven goods. I scarcely had time to glimpse the flat silver light of desert noonday before a wad of coarse gray linen hit me in the face.

“Put this on.” The woman was not at all in good humor.

Her command was easier spoken than obeyed, as first I had to untangle myself from the unending folds of the garment, and one of my hands seemed to be firmly attached somewhere else. And even beyond these difficulties, my head ached so ferociously I could scarcely see.

Someone released the immovable hand by untying the ropes that bound it. A similar activity in the region of my ankles told me they had been tied, too—a disconcerting discovery.

“Sorry for the bindings. We said you were W‘Assani's new slave who had misbehaved.” Malver's dark face swam in a blur of sunlight and gray cloth. “Didn't have time to see to you. Here.” He shoved a waterskin into my hand. “W' Assani will look at your head.”

“Where are the others?” I had only vague recollections of falling and whispers and hurried jostling. Someone had told me to keep my mouth shut or she would sew it that way.

“Captain Sovari's been sent off to Tanzire to set a meeting with the Bek. The Prince is up forward. Safe for now.” Malver backed away into the dazzling sunlight.

I wasn't sure I wanted anyone to look at my head, much less a woman who had dropped a chest on me. But as I sat up and began to assess the damage, trying to resist draining the entire contents of the waterskin, I realized that part of my vision problem was that blood had congealed over my left eye. From the feel of the rest of my face, there was likely a good deal of dirt crusted in with it. And manure and considerable other filth. I was rank.

“Bloody Athos, woman, were you trained in healing arts by a shengar?” Aleksander's bellow sounded quite healthy. I dribbled a few drops of water on a corner of the gray haffai and dabbed at my eye, more convinced than ever that I had best tend to my own problems.

“Forward” was the half of a large, deep wagon bed that was exposed to the brutal sun, as opposed to the semi-shade provided by the roof of woven cloth scraps above my head. Once my eyelid came unstuck, I crept toward the light, threading my way between stacked barrels and chests and overflowing baskets of cloth, slightly nauseated from the heat, my head, and the stink.

The wagon wasn't moving. We seemed to be sitting on the edge of nothing; to my left, as far as I could see, were rocks and sand. Four donkeys harnessed to the well-built wagon were nosing at a mud hole on my right, where the last remnant of a stream had cut through this rocky apron of the desert. Jutting out of the jumbled rocks on the far side of the cracked mud were a few dusty tamarisks and a tangle of brown and brittle weeds. I could not see Malver.

Aleksander was sitting just behind the wagon seat with his back braced against the side of the wagon and his arms stretched out along the rim. The unlaced riding boot was tossed on top of a pile of ropes and harness, and someone in a white haffai was kneeling beside him, bent over his bare leg. Her long black hair was tied into a hundred tiny falls, each of them wound tightly with purple and blue thread.

“Look,” said Aleksander, jerking his head at me, “here's a fellow so wounded he gets off a horse face first. Can scarcely move his sorry bones. Why don't you go tend him for a while?”

The woman straightened up and pointed a long finger at the Prince. “One more word from you and the both of you are out of my cart.” Her brown eyes sparked like dry tinder lit in a desert midnight. As the sunlight bathed the fine planes and angles of her narrow face, I could not but think of the exquisitely carved obsidian game pieces on Nyel's game board. “You cost me a day's profits in the best market west from Zhagad, and instead of having a pleasant evening's journey to Khessida, where women appreciate fine weaving, I'm in the middle of Srif Naj on my way into Manganar, where people think they're god-blessed to wear goat hide. And who is like to be chasing me but every blood-handed Derzhi in your cursed Empire's service? No more push than a moth's wing on my backside would convince me to put bakza thorns in these wounds instead of this ointment that costs me fifty zenars a box. So you, my Derzhi friend, had best curb your proud tongue.” With a single movement of her finger that directed every word of her diatribe to me as well as the Prince, she went back to work.