The Golden Griffin (Book 3) (26 page)

“That’s no monster,” Daria said. “He is a golden griffin.”

“Nevertheless, it takes guts to fly something like that.” He nodded at Daria’s mother. “You raised your daughter well.”

“She mostly raised herself. It’s in her nature.”

“I’m sorry about your husband.”

“He fell in your war, but it was his choice. He could have said no.”

“Tell me,” Daria said, “Why were you so concerned about rescuing dead knights? Is it your custom to burn them, or what? And why would the enemy take them?”

Hob’s expression turned grim. “That’s what a ravager is, a dead man raised to do the dark wizard’s bidding.”

“Those men were dead?” she asked, unsure if she was hearing correctly.

“Did you see the man with the skull mask?”

Daria nodded.

“My captain. Roderick, King Whelan’s brother. He fell last week, not twenty miles from here. They raised him, enslaved him to evil, and set him as their champion and master.”

“Then we’ll go after them. Come. I’ll fly after my riders, bring them back. Mother—”

“No,” Hob said. “It’s already too late. They only need minutes.”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t understand before.”

“There’s no way you could have known. And now they are lost to us. The only thing we can do now is free them from their torment. Will you help?”

Chapter Twenty

Darik and Markal drew their hoods as the caravan approached Marrabat. The city stretched below them across the dry plain, the low-slung red mud buildings looking from a distance like a vast encampment of tents. The smoke of a thousand cook fires trailed into the sky, and the falling sun flamed red and orange as it fell into the devouring horizon.

The camels picked up the pace as they approached, and shortly began to bray and jostle, both with each other and with other caravans on the road. Darik licked his salty lips. His waterskin was dry, and his tongue like leather. And they weren’t going to reach water any time soon. Two men in turbans and flowing robes stood in front of the city gates, inspecting donkey carts, camels, horse traders, and spice merchants as they sought entrance into Marrabat.

Darik and Markal had spent eight full days on the Spice Road. The first two had been on foot, disguised in rags as pilgrims on the way to visit the ruined ziggurats south of Balsalom. They shed the pilgrim disguise when they reached the Salt Sea, which was a shallow, briny lake surrounded by a vast, flat plain of baking salt.

There, Markal talked his way into a caravan of Kratian salt traders. To avoid the merciless sun, the Kratians traveled at night. Most mornings they trudged into date palm oases, where they spent the sweltering hours in shaded caravanserais, but twice they had sweated out the days in tents among the dunes. The wind drove particles of sand into the tents and left them gritty all over.

After leaving first the salt flats and then the dunes, they’d crossed a seemingly endless stretch of rock and cactus. Vultures circled overhead, and once, an enormous lizard burst from a hole to seize one of the camels. It dragged the terrified animal into its hole before the Kratians could draw their scimitars and fight it off. At night, desert lions stalked their caravan.

Darik thought about Daria flying her griffin through the cold mountain air. What he wouldn’t give to be free of this blistering wasteland and at her side, riding on the wind. But still, the desert went on, mile after mile, day after day.

And now, a final delay while they waited in the crush trying to enter the city.

Markal sniffed at the air. “Chantmer is here, all right.”

“You’re sure?”

“He passed through these gates several days ago. It’s fainter—he’s growing stronger and better able to cover his tracks. But yes, I’m sure.”  

Darik strained for a look over the mass of men, animals, and carts ahead. “What’s going on up there? Why aren’t they letting more people through?”

Markal cocked his head as if listening to a distant conversation. “They’re looking for Balsalomians.”

Darik couldn’t hear over the din of bleating goats and braying camels, the shouting of the Kratians as they tallied the gate toll based on what the inspectors had told their chieftain. The wizard’s ears must be impossibly sensitive.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure,” Markal said. “Something about a princess. They’re searching for spies and assassins, detaining anyone who might be from Balsalom. Can you manage a southern accent?”

“Maybe, but not a great one. How about a Kratian accent instead? After a week with the caravan, I could manage it better.”

“No good. Your skin isn’t dark enough.”

“It’s not dark enough to be from the sultanates, either,” Darik pointed out.

“Marrabat is a large city. There are people from all over.”

A pair of guards sauntered down the road, looking over the salt traders and their camels. Darik felt for the sword he’d taken from the abandoned griffin tower, hidden beneath his cloak. He wouldn’t let them take him. Could he fight free and flee on the camel into the desert? Doubtful.

When the guards were past, Markal reached for the reins of Darik’s camel. “Come closer. Good, now open your mouth.”

Darik gave him a questioning look, but did as he was told. Markal’s hand slid from the sleeve of his robe. He muttered a few words.

“What was that about?” Darik started to say, but his mouth felt funny, and the words died in his throat.

“A simple illusion. If it wears off before we enter the city, do not speak.”

The guards passed by them again, headed back toward the gates. The procession inched forward. Soon, they’d reached the main inspector. He was a Selphan with a blue turban and a heavy silver chain around his neck with a bronze medallion at the end that Darik supposed was an indication of position. He spoke with the Kratians at the head of the caravan. The nomads swallowed their consonants, while everything out of the Selphan’s mouth seemed to glide across his tongue. In contrast, the dialect of Balsalom was shorter, clipped syllables.

“Let me see faces,” the inspector said. “Hoods back, uncover your keffiyehs.”

When the salt traders had obeyed, the inspector fixed an eye on Markal and Darik. “You aren’t Kratians.”

“I never said we were,” Markal said. His accent had changed entirely, and he used the same liquid tones as the inspector. “What do you take me for? I am a leather merchant. This boy is my slave and bodyguard.”

“If you are a leather merchant, where is your caravan? Where are your goods?”

“Eriscobans commandeered my cargo. They paid me for the leather and bought four of my slaves, which they took for their army.” Markal threw up his hands. “I didn’t have a choice. Left me with this one, called themselves generous. Bastards.” He spat on the ground.

It was the same story Markal had told the Kratians, but in more detail. The salt traders hadn’t much cared once the wizard provided a few coins to buy their passage through the desert.

The inspector looked suspicious. “The Eriscobans paid you?”

“Yes, poorly.”

Markal jingled a coin purse within his robes. It was all silver dinarii stamped with the visage of either Kallia or her father, picked up when they’d passed through Balsalom.

“The boy looks like he’s from the khalifates,” the inspector said. “What’s your name, and where were you born?” he asked Darik.

“He was born in Veyre,” Markal said. “Lived there until he was fifteen, before I bought him to train as a guard. That’s why the Eriscobans wouldn’t take him—he’s Veyrian. Well, that and he can’t talk.”

“Oh, he can’t, can he?”

Markal nodded at Darik. “Show him, Likum. Open your mouth.”

Likum? What kind of name was that? Sounded like a dog.

Darik opened his mouth, which still felt strange. His tongue was numb, like he’d eaten a strange mushroom.

“What happened to his tongue?”

“Stealing sweets from his former mistress. Her husband was a harsh man. I’m much softer—I don’t think I’ve beaten him more than once or twice.”

“Don’t be too soft,” the inspector said. “Especially with a bodyguard. If you don’t show him mastery, he’s likely to cut your throat in your sleep.”

“Perhaps.”

All this talk made Darik squirm. Not too many months had passed since he had, in fact, suffered in slavery. Now Markal and this Selphan discussed him as if he were invisible.

“Twelve shekels.”

“That’s robbery.”

“Two shekels for you, one for the boy, and a toll of nine for your cargo.”

Markal blinked. “What cargo?”

“The one you sold.”

“In the khalifates. A week ago.”

“For all I know, you got rid of it in one of the villages up the road and are attempting to cheat your tolls. Pay, or don’t enter the city.”

Darik tried not to stare in alarm as Markal reached into his cloak. All the wizard had were dinarii from Balsalom. While the coins were interchangeable enough, it would shatter the illusion of Markal’s story. The Eriscobans would have paid him in guilders.

The wizard shook out several gleaming coins with a crown on one side and the outline of the Golden Temple on the other. Arvadan guilders. Where the blazes did those come from?

“Those bastards paid me in their own money, of course,” Markal said. “I assume you’ll take it on exchange?”

“I suppose so,” the inspector said, “but only at a discount.”

“Of course,” Markal grumbled.

The two men haggled over the exact exchange rate, and the wizard finally handed over one of the larger coins and six of the smaller. Moments later, the entire caravan was passing beneath the gates and into the city.

The instant they were inside, Markal jumped off the camel and paid a couple of coins to the Kratian chieftain, then urged Darik to follow him in a different direction from the caravan. The wizard dragged him into one of the narrow warrens off the main road. Women and children lined up with baskets of dough in front of a communal oven made of bricks, where an old woman baked it for them. A dog with mange tried to swipe flatbread from a boy, who fought it off with a stick. Markal pushed through the crowd. They came into a tiny, crowded market where people sold copper kettles, rugs, and clay pots. It wasn’t divided up by guilds, and there was no apparent order to the shouting and haggling.

Still Markal urged him on. They entered a maze of alleys too narrow even for a donkey and cart. A man with a basket roped across his shoulders collected pots of foul-smelling night soil where they’d been set in the alley in front of tall, narrow doors.

Darik tried to ask what was happening, but his tongue still wouldn’t work, and his words came out in a slurred mumble.

“Keep going,” Markal said. “Any moment now, the crown on those guilders is going to turn into Kallia’s face. The inspector going to see not only that I gave him dinarii, but that I shorted him on the toll. That alone will be enough to send him looking for us.”

Darik found his tongue at last. “Why didn’t you just give him the full amount?”

“Are you kidding? The bastard was trying to cheat me!”

They left the dirty alley and came into a wider street. But stalls holding leather goods, cobblers repairing shoes, and men selling cups of water so crowded the edges that it was hard to fight through. Orange and pomegranate trees grew behind a ten-foot wall on the far side of the street. Where their branches draped over the edge, people had plucked off the fruit. A row of impaling spikes along the top of the wall discouraged more active foraging.

Markal stopped him. “There it is.”

Darik caught a glimpse of an onion dome and a red tower behind the wall and through the trees.

“Look here.” Markal pointed to something at his feet.

For a second, Darik thought he spotted something dark on the ground, like a shadowy trail along the packed dirt of the street, then it was gone.

“Don’t you see it? It’s the Betrayer’s trail, and it leads this way.” Markal pulled him down the street another hundred yards.

The road widened, and they found themselves standing in front of a set of broad gates that broke the wall. Two men with pikes guarded either side. Through the grating they could see more guards patrolling the gardens.

“And goes in here,” Markal added in a low voice.

The guards with the pikes glared at Darik and Markal, and so they continued on. When they were back in the crowds, the wizard stopped with a thoughtful look.

“Was that the sultan’s palace?” Darik asked.

“Yes.”

“Which means that the tattooed wizard is a friend of the sultan.”

“Mufashe has several mages in his service. Or maybe it’s the other way around, and he’s in their service. Hard to say.”

The wizard glanced up at the walls that separated the palace grounds from the city. “Well, at least we know what to do next.”

“Do we?” Darik asked, warily.

Markal met his gaze, and a half-smile came across his face. “We need to infiltrate the palace.”

Chapter Twenty-One

In the aftermath of the battle on the Old Road, Daria’s mother refused to enter Hob’s tent. Even when Narud appeared—the wizard who had been fighting with the knights—Palina wouldn’t let down her guard.

Exasperated at her mother’s standoffish attitude, Daria followed Palina back to the griffins. Yuli was staring in awe at her larger, golden cousin from a respectable distance. Talon glared at any knight who approached for a closer look.

“Mother, they’re just men. Like Father or Uncle Jhon. Now I know that any man is a strange beast and harder to control than a wild griffin, but I’m sure we’ll manage.”

Palina didn’t look amused. “Flatlanders, Daria. Never forget that. They’re different from you and me.”

“How? Their captain fell in battle. Their fallen men have been enslaved, and they want to free them. You can’t understand that motive? How are they so different?”

“The dead soldiers are their problem, not ours.”

“So what, you’ll fly out of here without a second thought?”

“We will fly out of here. Both of us. We’ll give it a second thought when we’re home, protected by the walls of our own tower.”