Star of Cursrah (4 page)

Everyone, civilians and military alike, shuffled out the door into the early evening. White buildings still pulsed with the sun’s heat, though a breeze from the eastern grasslands was sweet and cool. Sunset’s golden glow cast long shadows as workers and shoppers streamed home.

Star’s veil had gotten sodden and filthy, so she discarded it. Keeping her sleeve before her face, she crowded Gheqet as if whispering. The dark man told her, “You draw more attention holding your sleeve like that. You look like a vampire.”

“People know my face.” Star pretended to scratch her ear. Her hair was jet black, cut in square bangs and woven into cornrows above her shoulders. Her aristocratic face was a vibrant bronze, her eyebrows sharp-plucked, her eyes outlined with black kohl to look bigger. Despite her simple maid’s shift, passing citizens peered at her curiously.

Gheqet was an architect’s apprentice with stone-rough hands and limestone dust in his dark curls. “I should have left my work apron on,” he said, brushing at beer and avocado dip. “Oh, here’s Taf.”

Their blond friend was fair and freckled because his parents were foreign-born mercenaries enlisted in the bakkal’s army. His yellow tunic and red kilt were stained and crusted.

He sighed, “I’ve the brains of a bull. The commander demands my presence in his office tomorrow at dawn.”

“Ooh,” teased Gheqet, “that’s when they hang criminals. You’ll be sore as a whipped camel from wrestling. Maybe you should beg a pardon from a certain princess—”

Erupting from the milling crowd, assailants struck like lightning. Gheqet yowled as a metal-wrapped club smashed behind his knee. He fell heavily, and only an upthrust arm prevented the club from creasing his skull. As it was, his elbow was crippled by a vicious stroke.

To Star’s left, a female assassin sliced downward with a hooked katar, its curved blade like a crescent moon. Star shrieked and ducked sideways, tumbling over the fallen Gheqet. The clubber grabbed for her but only tore her hem.

Tafir’s short military training took control. The cadet scuffed his feet to keep his balance and jabbed his bare hand flat and hard at the woman’s throat. Quick as a cobra, she bobbed her head and raked backward with her hooked blade. Tafir flinched, tangled with Star’s legs, and so saved his arm from being slashed to the bone. His wild flailing to stay upright made the assassin jump back. Desperately, Tafir swayed, then raised clawed fingers to fend off the next attack.

People who’d been homeward bound stopped, stared, shrieked, and pointed. A woman called, “That’s Samira Amenstar!”

Star, actually Amenstar, eldest princess of Cursrah, was the assassins’ target. The club-wielder lunged over the prostrate Gheqet and snatched a fistful of Star’s cornrows. Jerked backward, Star crunched down onto her thin-padded rump and tailbone. Pain shot up her spine, making her yelp. Flicking his club, the assassin smashed Star in the stomach. Her breath whooshed out. Star sobbed, trying to pull air into empty lungs as she was dragged by the hair.

As the female assassin retreated and ran, Tafir bellowed in imitation of his instructors, “To arms! To arms! Samira Amenstar is kidnapped! Aid the princess, citizens! To arms!”

The cadet stooped to lift Gheqet, who couldn’t rise on a paralyzed knee, then ran after his other friend.

Like water spilling through a weir, soldiers charged from the crowd. Stunned citizens were bulled aside by half-drunk soldiers who’d sworn a blood oath to protect the lives of their sovereigns. Rosey was first on the scene, with Eye Patch clattering behind in hobnailed sandals. More men of action raced from the street, shouting to confuse the enemy, whoever they might be. By then, some citizens had joined the rush. Housewives clattered down stone stairways with cornmeal on their hands. Masons ran with tool bags and baskets jingling. A goose boy whipped his squawking flock aside. A fat drover puffed up, ox goad ready.

The assassins didn’t flee far. Man and woman had hammerlocked both Star’s arms behind her back and gripped her hair to steer. Despite the searing pain, Star saw that they aimed for a sunken stairway framed by an iron grill. Hoisting her feet, she wrenched both arms to wrap both knees. Her sudden extra weight slowed the kidnappers. They cursed and almost threw her down the stairwell, but the princess jerked free one hand and latched onto the grillwork. She lost a hank of cornrows as her captors jolted to a halt.

The female killer kicked Star’s hand to knock it loose, then flashed the knife before her face and said, “Let go or lose your hand.”

Though fascinated by the curved blade, Star glimpsed a tattoo encircling the woman’s wrist like a bracelet. A row of crooked crocodile teeth revealed these were hatori, assassins of a guild that emulated the fearsome sand crocodiles of the desert. Like those camouflaged and armored reptiles, hatori thugs swam below the surface of society, popped up, bit hard, then disappeared. The hatori were an undying infestation the palace chancellor had vowed to stamp out.

The male assassin gabbled at his partner in thieves’ cant, but the samira interrupted, “You gutter trash! You wouldn’t dare kill me. If you’re smart, you’ll ru—urk!”

A garrote of braided camel hair looped around Star’s throat. She gagged, gasped, and almost vomited. The cutthroat’s coarse clothes rubbed her shoulder through her thin shift, then the garrote twisted as he lifted her off her feet. He hoisted Star on his back like a lamb, not caring if she strangled. The world dimmed for lack of air.

Footsteps pounded from all directions, but Star feared they’d be too late to prevent her strangling. Vaguely, through a red haze, she saw the female assassin snap a latch at the bottom of the sunken stairwell. She hissed for her partner to bring his burden, and Star was dragged halfway down the stairs. Amenstar shuddered and clawed wildly. Once these killers bolted that solid door, they might confound their pursuers long enough to escape—with Star either a prisoner or a corpse.

“Release her!” Amenstar heard Tafir shout, then saw the cutthroat lift her katar to fend off an attack.

Star wanted to shout a warning, but her wind was cut off. In agony, she saw Tafir leap clear over her head and down into the stairwell, obviously aiming to kick the female hatori’s head off.

The woman dipped like a cobra and sliced with her curved dagger, and the knife sizzled across the hobnailed sole of Tafir’s sandal. Scrambling, hands braced against the wall, the cadet poised on a step and kicked wildly to avoid the blade. Obviously, Tafir only needed to harry the enemy and block the door until help arrived. Through a fog Star saw panting soldiers cram the stairwell. Rescue was close, if only her throat wasn’t crushed.

The stairwell grew darker, the light eclipsed, and Amenstar feared her vision was fading, that she was dying. Then she smelled smoke. Out of the doorway boiled black smoke tinged with green curls, as if the building were afire. From under the smokescreen charged more assassins like bees from a smoked hive.

Star couldn’t track what happened next. Her captor, still with his death-grip garrote around her throat, booted her down the stairs against the oncoming assassins. The dark depths had to be a thieves’ den. Star tried to grab someone rushing nearby, but the awful pressure on her throat made her sick, and she crumpled. Smoke stung her eyes, scorched her gaping mouth, and made her nose itch abominably.

The cutthroat shoved her downward. A thief banged her hip dashing one way, then thumped her again in retreating. Star wondered how her rescuers fared. Assassins, wrapped in gauze or light cloaks, flashed knives or hurled what looked like big copper coins—until Star saw a soldier’s arm gashed to the bone. The coins were razor-edged quoits. The palace chancellor, who studied the methods of assassins, would find that fact interesting—if Star lived to tell it.

Darkness engulfed her. Dragged inside the doorway, Star had an impression of a narrow, low corridor, probably lined with murder holes. Tafir was down on his back, and her captor tripped over him. Was her friend dead? Would she to follow?

The black smoke suddenly parted like a sandstorm, and through the rent charged a big sergeant with a strawberry birthmark—Tafir’s friend, Star thought. Rosey streamed blood from a dozen cuts on arms and hands and face.

Outraged, he roared, “Save her highness!”

The veteran threw a knotted fist, too fast to see, that whistled by Star’s head. The man-killing blow crunched on something soft. Star felt the garrote loosen, and she yanked it free of her throat. Hard hands clutched her against a man’s sweaty, bloody chest. She smelled wine and onions and knew Rosey had rescued her—a good thing, for her legs went weak as jelly, her feet too numb to stand.

Five stumbling steps brought light piercing the gloom. More hands caught and lifted her from the smoke that coiled like death’s touch. Star’s legs gave out, and her knees banged stone as she collapsed in the street, rubbing her throat and retching. Rosey hadn’t followed, and Star wondered why.

Shadows flickered as someone hurtled over her head. Like sheep over a fald, five more bodies vaulted down the stairs. Star’s spinning vision couldn’t identify them.

Noise exploded from below: shouts, screams, a rampaging trumpet like an elephant’s call. Forcing her eyes open, Star saw a woman in a blue tunic and kilt smash a spear haft against someone’s head. On her breast was painted an eight-pointed star—Amenstar’s own emblem. Her royal bodyguard had arrived.

The trumpet blared again, and Star cried for joy. As the smoke dimmed, she beheld a ten-foot monster looming over cowering humans.

The creature’s upper half was a black woman with a fist-sized bump on her broad nose and breasts like watermelons encased in a harness of blue leather. From the waist down, extending more than twelve feet, was the street-filling bulk of a rhinoceros draped with a star-painted mantle like a tent. M’saba, formerly of the bakkal’s heavy cavalry, was the biggest of Amenstar’s thirty bodyguards. Seeing the rhinaur’s savage fury directed at the assassins gave the samira a twinge of shame. She shouldn’t have ditched her faithful guards just to lark with her common friends.

The smoke was exhausted. Amenstar’s bodyguards searched the thieves’ den while M’saba blocked the street in one direction and more guards blocked the other end. Captain Anhur, chief of Star’s bodyguards, snarled, “Everyone lie down immediately or I’ll personally ram a spear through your guts!”

Citizens and soldiers dropped flat. Some people were already down, streaked with blood, dead or dying or wounded. Some thieves looked like bundles of rags soaked in blood, so viciously had they been pounded and stabbed.

Yuzas Anhur crouched beside her mistress and gently offered a calloused hand. Still weak, Star rose meekly to distinguish friend from foe. Friends were hustled at spear point past the huge rhinaur to where the local populace goggled. Gheqet and Tafir went quietly. One by one Star tolled off the soldiers from the tavern, and they were also released. She felt a pang when her guards exited the thieves’ den dragging two of the bakkal’s soldiers by the heels. One was Rosey, slashed across the throat by a long curved knife, his blood redder than his birthmark. The man had given his life for hers. Star’s eyes stung, and fat tears washed runnels through the dust and smoke that darkened her cheeks.

Star pointed out the assassins who’d initiated the attack, and Captain Anhur had them bound hand and foot and gagged. The captain said, “The bakkal’s chancellor will wish to know your motives, and our dark vizars will be glad to torture out your truths.”

The captain summoned neighbors to identify the other suspects and so dismissed a few terrified civilians caught in the sweep. Left cowering on their knees were four men and a mere girl in dark rags who couldn’t account for themselves. Three were tattooed with the crocodile teeth bracelets of hatori.

“Condemned, all,” the captain pronounced. “Roll up that wine barrel. Ges, Rhu, bring up a prisoner. M’saba, do the honors.”

Pinned by the arms, the first hatori was draped across a wine barrel. M’saba’s four feet, each as big as the barrel, drummed forward. The rhinaur hefted a halberd long as a flagpole with a steel axe head big as a tabletop, raised it toward the sky, and swept it earthward.

The massive axe lopped off the thief’s head like a chicken’s, shattered the oak barrel into splinters, and buried itself in the street three feet deep. M’saba loved her mistress Amenstar and hated her attackers. Her frustration showed.

Captain Anhur snickered. “Roll out another barrel. Not so hard this time, ‘Saba.”

In a trice, the thieves’ bloody carcasses were stacked in the street with the heads plunked atop as a warning.

Captain Anhur detailed six guards to watch the house until the palace chancellor could search it.

“A lucky rescue, your highness,” concluded the captain. “Only three soldiers and two innocents were killed, and you were only grazed. We’ll return you home now.”

It was not a request. Surrounded by guards, Amenstar went meekly.

“… you could have been killed, darling, or held for ransom. That, you must understand, would upset your father’s plans terribly. With you prisoner, those hatori criminals could make outrageous demands, such as the release of their cronies from prison. These kidnappers don’t work alone, but they conspire with our enemies. Even some noble houses in this city plot against us. Their demands are more plebian, centering on money, of course. They scheme for lower tariffs, or trading favors against rivals, or that we install some vagabond to a high office…. Are you listening?”

“Yes, Mother.”

Amenstar resisted the urge to roll her eyes and sigh deeply. Her mother was cranky enough, awakened early: that is, just at sunset. Star slouched and stared through the tall windows at her courtyard. A fountain danced above a glittering pool laced with fading shadows. A servant fed tidbits to bug-eyed carp. On a perch near the window, two scarlet and blue macaws nuzzled. An ocelot rolled in its sleep, brass chain chinking. One of her saluqis, a slate-blue greyhound, yawned so widely that Star had to clamp her own jaw shut. Four maids, identical in simple linen shifts, square-cut black hair, and eyes lined with kohl in tribute to their mistress, waited along the wall like painted effigies—punished along with their mistress. Four personal maids comprised the day shift, and eight more attended Star by night, when the royal compound became active.