Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (24 page)

Holding fast to her courage, Soraya slipped into the house, following some men who were carrying in a guardsman, unconscious and covered with blood. Soraya didn’t know if he was a traitor or loyal, and the people the peddler called his ground team had cut up the man’s tabard to bandage his bleeding ribs.

The peddler had done well here. In fact, he had probably saved the city. Markhan and Kaluud had been willing to die to defend the gate, but after watching the fight this morning Soraya knew that without the peddler’s plan, they would have died. And the city would have fallen. Kavi had earned the name the peasants attached to his exploits, never knowing that the man they called Sorahb was
the familiar peddler who sat before them, drinking beer, as he himself gossiped about the legendary hero.

The stairway was at the end of the hall, where she’d expected to find it; one girl, climbing quietly out of the chaos below, could go up unobserved. On the second floor of the house she would have been noticed, but there was no one on the second floor—they were all downstairs dealing with the terrible aftermath of battle.

For a moment Soraya’s resolve weakened. She could go back down the stairs and assist the healers. Surely if she did that—such a useful, urgent task—no one could call her a coward. If the storm’s lightning found her, not even the best of healers would be able to do anything for her charred remains. In fact if she didn’t go below and help, they would call her a coward—a useless lady-deghass who wouldn’t dirty her hands even with the blood of men fighting for her own cause!

But if she went on, if she faced the storm, far fewer men might bleed, and more would remain to fight again. It had nothing to do with what people called her, Soraya realized. Not even with what she knew in her heart to be true. It was about Farsala. About her three-year-old brother growing up a Hrum slave, and all the other children, men, and women enslaved with him.

Soraya gritted her teeth and climbed the last flight of creaking stairs. The third floor was smaller, the ceiling slanting beneath the pitch of the roof. At the end of the corridor Soraya saw a door,
which she found opened on to a small balcony. It would give the servants and clerks who slept in the chambers under the eaves a place to look out and judge the day’s weather. Barely large enough for three people to stand on, it was bright with peasant paint, and stray arrows had gouged the wood of the railings and door. If the Hrum shot more arrows over the wall, they might kill her before the lightning could. But the balcony gave Soraya the view she needed.

The Hrum reinforcements hadn’t yet marched out of their camp, but looking over the wall she could see them ordering their ranks in the field in front of their tents. They carried many more ladders now, and Soraya, looking at the battle that raged along the wall, felt a fresh chill of fear. The Farsalans were already hardpressed.

The tattoo with which Garren had hoped to humiliate her when he declared her a slave had not ached in months, but Soraya found herself rubbing it and snatched her hand away. She had concealed it from the lady Mitra and her family—easy enough in long-sleeved winter garments—for she knew they would have been horrified. Soraya had never minded the mark, for she saw it as a badge of honor. She had never been a slave, whatever the Hrum might have thought—she had been a rebel and a spy. But what if she became a slave in truth? She might, along with all of the townsfolk of Mazad, if the Hrum won today. Soraya turned to the sky.

At least she wouldn’t have to call this storm to her; it swept in on the cold, damp wind with the relentless ease of the winter rains. Soraya’s shilshadu senses touched it, feeling its smooth, restless energy. Soraya drew a deep breath and opened herself to the storm.

It seemed to flow into her as easily as it flowed through the air that formed it; the light trance claimed her with no effort at all. Soraya had always had an affinity for storms, she realized, much like the peddler’s affinity for steel—but that didn’t mean the storm wouldn’t slay her, any more than he was immune to burns from the hot metal. That was the last human thought to slip through her mind before the storm claimed her.

It was an odd sensation, for she still looked through her own eyes, watching the Hrum troops rush across the muddy ruins that surrounded the walls from the same position as she had before. But she saw them as the storm would see them, less than ants—for to a human ants are alive, and to the storm they were nothing but bits of landscape that moved.

The storm favored them more than earth that didn’t move, for the storm was all movement, flowing without effort through the warm and cool currents of the air, using them to build its energy. Build and build, for it was born of air and the energy air generated. Water gave it weight and mass, and it gloried in its own power and existed for nothing else.

But the part of the storm that was Soraya did care for some of
those moving bits of earth, and she willed the storm to stop, here, above them. Stopping was no part of the storm’s nature, and the alien thought almost pushed Soraya back into herself. So instead she drove the storm into motion, motion that swirled around itself, motion that was not stopping, but simply moving in the same part of space.

The storm’s charged air was unbelievably slippery. Trying to twine it around itself was like trying to knit with wisps of unspun wool, the strands escaping in every direction at the whim of the storm—and Soraya was even worse at knitting than she was at embroidery. But soon the storm found that when it twisted on itself in a certain way, its energy grew, and it followed those paths as eagerly as water flowing downhill, for it loved growing upon itself.

The loose clouds became denser and formed thunderheads, large and black, stretching into the cold of the highest sky More water added mass, creating its own energy. Lightning was born in the swirling currents of the wind, and it blazed and struck, illuminating the moving things in the darkness below.

Soraya laughed in delight, for the part of her that was the storm, by far the greater part, had no more fear of the lightning than she had of her own hands. Some part of her that was still Soraya didn’t dare to grasp the liquid fire with hands and mind made of mortal flesh. But she urged it to be born and rejoiced when it struck, struck again and again in the city, the camp, the countryside.
She cared not where, for the earth meant nothing to the storm, and now, deep in her trance, she was almost wholly inhuman.

Her body didn’t feel the cold drops pelting her clothes and flesh. Instead she felt the rain as a great release of pressure, of weight, like grain slowly spilling from a basket she had carried for too long. It felt good to drop the rain, and she dropped it faster and faster. Only her human eyes saw water pouring from the gutter spouts, running over the cobbled street in rushing streams. Only the smallest, most buried part of her mind knew what this dense rain would do to the already sodden earth around the walls. Carrying a ladder through that sea of sticky mud would be like dragging logs through a swamp. Raising a ladder, as its legs sank and slithered in the muck, would be impossible. So the human part of her laughed at the deluge, and lightning cracked in echo, and she laughed at that, too. When the Hrum army retreated, she didn’t even know it, because the storm didn’t care.

E
VENTUALLY THE STORM
, having shed its energy, dissolved into the wind and dissipated, and Soraya came slowly back to herself. She was lying on the balcony, one cold cheek flattened against the wet wood, the other covered with strands of dripping hair.

But she wasn’t as cold as she should have been. Stirring, she discovered that though her clothes were wet, she was tightly
wrapped in several wool blankets, which were almost dry since an oiled-silk tarp had been wrapped around them in turn.

She was chilled and damp and spent … so spent that she felt almost as insubstantial as the last wisps of the storm, as if she too might dissolve into the air. But she wasn’t freezing.

It must have been the peddler who had wrapped her up and left her there; no one else would have recognized the shilshadu trance. The others would have carried her in and tried to wake her. Remembering the storm, the vivid seeking of the lightning, Soraya knew that that would have been disastrous.

She had hidden herself from the lightning, she slowly realized, by burying herself in the storm. It hadn’t been attracted to her because she had barely existed.

In one sense, she supposed, that was cowardice, but she was too tired to care. And despite her exhaustion a deep satisfaction welled within her. If the peddler had had time to come looking for her and bundle her up like an infant, then the Hrum had been beaten off. And if their all-out attack had failed, failed badly, Soraya didn’t think even Garren would be able to try again before the senate committee arrived.

Her lips were almost too stiff with cold to smile, and she realized she’d better move. It was a struggle to extract herself from the blankets. When she finally crawled through the door, she collapsed on the floor as soon as she was inside. Usually working the Suud’s
magic gave you more energy, but the storm had stolen hers away. In a few minutes, Soraya resolved, she would recover enough to stand. Then she would go downstairs, resting a time or two along the way, eat a huge meal, topple into bed, and sleep for a week.

Surely she would have at least a week before Governor Garren made his next move.

D
URING THE DAY
, with so many eyes upon the prisoner and the men guarding him, Jiaan had no fear that he would “disappear,” even if the guard were distracted for a moment. But in the darkness …

“There’s no help for it,” he told Hosah grimly. “He’ll have to sleep in my hutch. No one would dare try to get to him there.”

Jiaan had spent the rest of the day among the soldiers and squad leaders, mostly listening. He now knew that Fasal commanded the loyalty of less than a third of them, and even those men preferred that there be no power struggle between their two leaders. But they did see the army as having two leaders, not one commander and several subordinates, and that was dangerous. If they
could distract the guards and get their hands on the prisoner, they would do so—more to uphold their chosen commander’s authority than out of any need for information. But in Jiaan’s own hutch the prisoner would be safe, for no one would go so far as to fight Jiaan for him. Not yet.

Less than four months,
he thought.
If I can hold this army to its purpose, keep some part of Farsala free of the Hrum for four months, then Fascal can do whatever he likes.

Yet his heart ached at the thought of abandoning his men, the army he had created. For all the stress and irritation that were daily parts of the job, he knew he was good at it—better than Fasal would be anyway!

Hosah, who seemed to have attached himself to Jiaan, promptly provided one of those irritants—subordinates who questioned his decisions. “Are you sure about that, sir? I thought you said that inside a hutch they’d be close enough to take a guard by surprise. And there’s not enough room in your hutch for you, a guard, and a prisoner.”

“The guard will stand outside,” said Jiaan patiently, “with orders to cut his way through the walls the instant he hears anything suspicious. If we shackle the prisoner’s right wrist and ankle to the posts and keep anything that could be used as a weapon out of his reach, what can he do to me, even in my sleep, with just one hand?”

Hosah thought it over, and his troubled frown lightened. “That’ll do, sir. I’ll get shackles from our stores and see that your hutch is prepared and the prisoner settled before you’re ready for bed. That way he won’t be disturbing you.”

“He’d better not,” said Jiaan. “Or I might change my mind.”

He had saved the man, but that didn’t mean that he liked him, and the thought of sleeping under the eyes of an enemy officer was … disturbing. But it seemed the only way to make sure that the man stayed safe—and that Jiaan’s army remained under his control.

H
E HAD PREPARED HIMSELF
, as he left the circle of men who gathered around the big cookfire shortly after the winter’s early sunset, but it still felt odd to enter his own hutch and find a man chained there. The silk walls admitted enough light to see that Hosah had stacked the chests that held Jiaan’s personal possessions at the foot of his bedroll, binding the prisoner by his wrist and ankle on the other side of the small hutch—with rather short chains, Jiaan noted. He might, if he stretched as far as possible, be able to touch the chests with his free foot. But he couldn’t reach behind them to pull them toward him, and if he kicked them over it would wake Jiaan and alert the guard.

There was nothing within reach of his left hand except the blanket and pillow of his own bedroll, and just possibly Jiaan’s. If
he tried to smother Jiaan in his sleep with just his left hand … Jiaan found a small, malicious smile tugging at his lips and banished it. It was as wrong for him to want to take out his rage and grief on a helpless prisoner as it was for Fasal—worse, for he hadn’t even the excuse of seeking information. And, he reminded himself, this man had had nothing to do with the attack where Aram died.