Golden Daughter (15 page)

Another minute more and they crested the hill and gazed down into a rock-strewn valley through which a stream ran. On the far side of the stream was the campfire surrounded by four, five—no, six figures. And a single sentry on that boulder up above, sitting cross-legged with his head bent. Hardly a worthy lookout. Seven then. Seven total.

And the slaves lay in a pile of limbs, sickness, and despair just beyond the firelight. Sairu couldn’t be certain from this distance, but she believed there were five of them.

“Which one is our guide?” she asked the cat.

“How should I know?” the cat replied.

“Because you told me he was captured. You must know which one he is.”

“Well, I don’t,” said the cat. “I never set eyes on the man.”

“How did you—”

“I have my sources, all right? Nagging wench!” With this he sat down and set to grooming again, washing his face with delicate care. “You’d best rescue them all. Just to be certain.”

“And what will you do?”

He gave her a sideways look. “Probably work on my tail. It’s collected a number of burs.”

“You’re not going to help me?”

Here he smiled his cattish smile at her again, so smug in the glow of his own eyes that it took every ounce of self-control Sairu possessed not to smack him on his pink nose. “Do you
need
my help?”

Sairu vowed to herself then and there that one day she would get the best of this demon. She would turn his own words back on him and leave him speechless even as she now was. One day she would serve him what he served her, and she would enjoy watching him eat it!

But . . . not today.

The slopes down into the rocky valley were scrub-covered, but no trees grew upon them, so cover was sparse. The sun had dropped behind the horizon, leaving only a purple haze low in the sky. Up above, clouds scuttled across the face of Hulan, blocking out the stars for long intervals. Occasionally the blue North Star—
Chiev
, as he was named by the priests—would peer through, as though curious to see what went on in the world of mortals. But his light was not strong enough to reveal Sairu to those below.

Princess Safiya always counseled her girls act at once when they saw the need, not to plan. “
Begin to act,
” she always said, “
and the plan will come
.
Wait to act, and the plan will wait as well.
”

It wasn’t a mantra suited to every aspect of life, but it suited Sairu rather well, for she hated sitting still. Leaving the cat to his ablutions, she slid carefully down the steep incline, feeling out where she placed her feet so as to make the least noise possible. At first her heart leapt about in her breast with the thrill of danger.

And then, as she drew near and began to read the slavers below her, her heart calmed to a slow, steady pulse. This was her element, and everything inside her went quiet, analytical, precise. No room for fear. No room for anxiety. Room enough for the right amount of nerves to keep her senses keen, but no more.

She read the slavers by the light of their own fire. It was difficult to discern much from their faces, cast into flickering red and black contrasts as they were. But she read enough. She saw how they sat near to each other but not too near, with weapons lying across their knees or beside their legs. They ate simple travelers’ fare, watching each other even as they tore into the tough beef jerk and stale flatbread. Each face was uglier than the last, not in feature but in expression. Their eyes were dead inside, but their mouths were alive with malice.

She turned from them to read their slaves and learned more about the slavers in the process. The five wretches sat together in a lump, underfed, hopeless, and weak. And yet they were bound to an unnecessary extreme, heads attached by chains to their wrists, wrists attached by more chains to their ankles. In addition, ropes secured cruel wooden bars behind their backs, over which their elbows were hooked, rendering it impossible to sit comfortably or to sleep.

One more lay facedown, hooked elbows pointed at the sky, trembling with a ravaging fever. Helpless as a sickly lamb, and yet they hobbled him like that!

The sight of that one slave alone told Sairu everything she needed to know about the slavers. They were cowards. She could make use of cowards.

Keeping well out the firelight, she crept along the bank of the stream and crossed over. She considered using stones to avoid wetting her feet, but the chance of slipping in the dark was too great. So she walked in the water, slowly dipping each toe and sinking it beneath the running gurgle until it found secure ground. Not a sound she made could be heard over the voice of the stream itself, but she could hear the slavers’ voices as they talked amongst themselves, and she even picked up a few of their names.

Soon, her shoes filled and dripping, she climbed out on the far side. Here she faced a rocky slope so steep that she was obliged to catch hold of the stout-growing scrub to pull herself up. She could not take the easiest route, for that would bring her too close to the sentry’s line of vision, which she dared not risk even in the dark. But she was in no hurry, so she climbed slowly, testing her weight on branches and uncertain footholds as she went.

At last she was level with the top of the boulder upon which the sentry sat above his fellows. Scarcely daring to breathe, she navigated a narrow path and, like the shadow of a passing owl, slid onto the boulder and crept across, stepping on the balls of her feet, crouching to support herself with her fingers.

The sentry, oblivious, nodded at his post. But he had not survived all these years in his hateful profession by being stupid. Possessed of a certain animal cunning, he sat upright suddenly, sniffing the air. Something was wrong. Very wrong. Something was—

One knifepoint pressed deep into the flesh of his thick throat, and another touched between his ribs. He gasped, but his survival instinct kicked in, and he made no other sound. If he wasn’t dead yet, then whoever was behind him wanted something. He waited.

A voice, so soft it might almost have been a woman’s, whispered in his ear. “Call your friend Guntur’s name. Call it once. If you say one word more, I will kill you.”

For a moment the sentry could not breathe enough to make a sound. Then he called out in a loud but trembling voice, “
Guntur!
” And that was the last he knew until the following morning when he woke with a horrendous headache.

Sairu backed away from the unconscious sentry into the shadows on the far side of the boulder, pressing herself against the steep slope wall. She heard a voice below, “Eh? What’s that? Bouru, did you call me?”

When no answer came, there was a murmured conference below. Then Sairu heard the heavy sound of a man climbing the easier trail up to the boulder. Hulan peered out from behind a cloud to reveal Guntur’s large shape as he found his balance and made his way across to the sentry’s form, which still sat cross-legged in place. “Bouru? What is—”

Then he too went deathly still as he felt the knife at his throat and the other at his rib. Big man that he was, his innards turned to curdled milk, and he whimpered softly then swallowed his voice when the knife pressed deeper.

“Call your friend Kechik. Just the name,” hissed a voice in the darkness. “One word more and you die.”

“Kechik!” Guntur cried, his voice a thin wail, which was not what Sairu had in mind. Irked, she struck the slaver in that tender place behind the ear, and the bruise stayed with him as a reminder of that night for weeks to come. But he knew no more until late the next day. He sank to his knees and then on to his side.

Sairu peered over the edge of the boulder, using the propped-up form of Bouru as a shield. She saw the next slaver get to his feet, heard him calling, “Guntur? What is it? Bouru?”

It wouldn’t work much longer. Possibly this once more, then she’d have to move into the second stage of her plan. As Kechik started toward the wall, Sairu swiftly stripped the first two slavers of their weapons, her mind calmly running through her next three, four, five steps.

But none of them came to pass. For down below, several voices cried out at once: “Great Hulan’s eye!”

Sairu felt her heart stop then start again. Afraid of what she might see, she peered around Bouru into the camp below. “Oh, great Hulan’s eye!” she breathed in echo of the slavers.

For Lady Hariawan stood just within the circle of firelight.

She wasn’t wearing her cloak, and this little fact filled Sairu with such an unprecedented burst of rage toward Tu Syed that it was just as well the poor man was wringing his hands a good five miles distant, unaware how dearly Sairu wished to throttle him.

The night blew a cold wind through the forest of the foothills, and the rocky valley seemed to gather it up and freeze it cooler still. Lady Hariawan shivered, blinking in the firelight like a new lamb just come into the world. She was very frail and very beautiful to look upon, and not a single man there was unaffected.

This did not stop them from scrambling for their weapons. Once armed, however, they stood staring at the lovely apparition, as mute as she and far more uncertain.

She took a step. They all backed away. Then someone said, “Is it a ghost?”

All of them feared ghosts. All of them had left men and women dead or dying on this same trail. If the dead ever returned for vengeance, none of the slavers would dare beg for mercy.

But another man scoffed at this suggestion. “She’s no ghost!” he snarled. Then his voice softened strangely, an appalling sound from his cruel mouth. “She’s an angel.”

And Sairu knew by the tone of his voice that this man truly believed in angels. That he needed them somehow, as a man needs to know that dawn will follow the desolation of midnight. He needed them to exist so that one such as he, a man as far from an angel as any could become, wouldn’t ultimately
matter
that much. He could commit his sins—such minor sins in the grand scheme of the universe—and they didn’t really hurt anything, because the angels would work their greater good, and everything would be all right in the end. And they’d forgive him. Of course they’d forgive him. That’s what angels were for.

“She’s a Dara come down from the heavens,” said the slaver whose name was Idrus, the leader of this band.

Sairu clung to the lookout boulder, and her mind screamed at her,
Go! Go! Go! Get down there!
But she couldn’t make herself move.

One of the slavers, a thin man with a scar down his face and neck, stepped forward suddenly, nocked an arrow to his bow, and pointed it mere inches from Lady Hariawan’s breastbone. Her pilgrim hat was gone, and only her long black hair—caught and snarled during her passage through the forest—veiled her face as she looked down at the bright tip of the arrow.

“Who are you, girl?” the thin slaver demanded. “Who sent you? Was it Nhean the Butcher sent you to spy? To count our numbers?”

“Back away from her, Eyso,” Idrus growled. “She isn’t the Butcher’s pawn. Look at her! She isn’t of this world.”

Even as he spoke, Lady Hariawan lifted her face. Her hair parted, revealing her lovely features, her liquid eyes, her gentle mouth, her thin brows lightly puckered. She did, indeed, appear angelic.

Save for the red burn across her face, which seemed to writhe in the firelight.

The thin slaver gasped. “She’s no angel!” he declared, his hands trembling even as he drew back his arm. “She’s a demon sent from hell to—”

He never finished. His scream cut off whatever else he might have said as Idrus’s cleaver struck him a death blow from behind. The arrow fell unused at Lady Hariawan’s feet.

That scream awoke Sairu, and suddenly she was flinging herself over the edge of the boulder, scrambling for handholds and footholds she did not know were there, falling when she found none, catching herself when possible. She was down to the stream’s level in ten beats of her heart, and already another man was dead. Three of the remaining four fixed fury-filled gazes upon Idrus, Lady Hariawan’s defender.

“Murderer!” one shouted, nocking his own arrow to the ready. Idrus roared and raised his cleaver, then roared again in agony as the arrow planted in his chest. He fell over backwards, convulsed, and was still.

But Sairu saw none of this. Before the archer could ready a second arrow, she flung herself into him, knocking him over against his two fellows. They turned upon him, terror leaping in their eyes, and one, younger than the others, swung the weapon in his hand. He did not kill, but his blow struck home, and the archer fell to his knees, screaming and clutching his shoulder and useless arm.

By then Sairu was across the stream and grabbing Lady Hariawan by her wrist. “Come away! Come away!” she urged breathlessly and tugged her mistress toward the incline and the trees.

But Lady Hariawan seemed to slip like smoke from her grasp. Before Sairu could catch her again, she was kneeling, she was reaching out.

Then she stood, poised, the dead Eyso’s bow in her hands, her arm drawing back the string. The bow should have been far, far too heavy for her thin arms to draw, but she bent it with apparent ease.

Sairu, staring at her, thought suddenly,
The Hari Tribe of the Awan Clan. The Emperor’s foremost artillery brigade.

She learned more about her mistress in that moment than she had learned in all the previous weeks.

“I have never killed a man,” Lady Hariawan said. Her soft voice filled the whole of the valley, and even the wounded archer swallowed the curses he’d been spitting at the younger slaver and turned to stare at the pale lady. She pointed the arrow-tip first at him, then at the other two, thoughtfully. “I should like to know how,” she said.

Something moved inside Sairu.
Don’t let her kill. Don’t let her!

With a gasp she threw herself in front of her mistress, her arms wide, her chest open to the arrow. “Please,” she gasped, truly frightened for perhaps the first time in her life. “Please, you cannot do this. Put it down. Put it down, my mistress.”

“My father slew fifty men in a single day. He was honored among the people.”

“But you don’t need to kill. You don’t have to,” Sairu pleaded. She sensed the slavers gathering themselves behind her. She half expected to feel their weapons in her exposed back, but she dared not turn from Lady Hariawan and face them. Her own death was preferable to her mistress’s spilling their blood.

“Put it down, I beg of you,” she said. Trying to catch Lady Hariawan’s gaze was like trying to catch starlight and hold it in her hand. Her mistress’s eyes wandered here and there, up to the sky, down to the stream, around in a world no one else saw.

The hand holding the string began to quiver.

Then, with a shudder and a deep, deep sigh, Lady Hariawan lowered her weapon and stood still, her head bent so that her black hair covered her face.

Sairu whirled about in time to see the three slavers tripping and falling over themselves to escape, leaving behind their supplies, leaving behind their bound wares, fleeing into the darkness of the mountain forests.

Trying not to think about what she did, Sairu knelt beside the dead body of Lady Hariawan’s erstwhile protector and found on his person a set of keys. Then, hardly knowing how she got there, so steady and dreadful was the pound of blood throbbing in her head, she was kneeling before the five bound slaves, undoing their chains, and sliding the poles out from behind their backs and arms. She only paused when she reached the chains of the largest slave, a huge brute of a man with murder in his eyes. She stared into his face and saw death there. But not her own death.

She saw the death of a wife and of a child. She saw the burning of a village, of lands and of crops. She saw the death of dreams, simple dreams, dreams of life and love and growth, all vanished in fire and hatred.

And she saw the death of the slavers as clear as a bloody dawn.

Sairu undid his bindings and stood back as he shook his wrists and ankles free of the manacles and broke the wood pole. “Your captors flee into the dark,” she said. “If you hurry, you will catch them.”

The slave said nothing. He brushed past her, knelt at the body of one of the dead, took up a sword with a hewing blade, then vanished. Three more slaves followed after, and Sairu never saw any of them again.

She turned to the last two slaves and focused on the one wearing a very tattered and dirty monk’s robes. She smiled at him and for once did not receive a cringing response.

“O great daughter of all goodness and grace!” said the monk, whose eyes were so wrinkled as to have almost disappeared, but whose cheeks were as smooth as a child’s. “I thought I was bound for the Aja slave markets and a most unholy end! You and your great lady are indeed angels, even as that wicked Idrus declared. You are—”

“We are come from Lunthea Maly, my mistress and I,” Sairu said, gently removing the manacles from around his hands. His wrists were raw where the chains had chafed, and one showed signs of a nasty infection developing under the skin. “Are you the guide sent from Daramuti?”

“I am!” he gasped. “How did you know? How did you learn of my unlucky fate? Where—where is the rest of your company? Surely you are not . . .”

But though the monk continued talking at a great rate, Sairu heard no more. For Lady Hariawan approached, moving unsteadily, her hands extended and shaking. Her gaze, more bright and aware than Sairu had ever before seen it, fixed upon the slave lying in the dirt, the one wracked with fever.

“Don’t touch him,” Sairu warned, but too late. Lady Hariawan knelt and caught the slave by the back of his shoulders. Tatters of what might have been a shirt were mostly torn away, revealing welts and bloody flesh beneath. Whoever this man was, he’d been a nuisance to his masters, an unwilling product in their line. And he bore the many marks of his opposition. Some of the places where the slavers’ whips had lashed showed signs of infection far more advanced than the tender places on the monk’s bony wrists.

Sairu shuddered at the sight. “Please, my mistress,” she pleaded. “Don’t touch him. You may do him more harm.”

“Unbind him,” Lady Hariawan said, not letting go. Sairu obeyed, sliding the pole out from behind his arms so that he might collapse more completely upon the ground. She thought by the sound of his breath that he might be awake, and she pitied him. In that state of agony, he had probably not slept for some while.

The chains fell away with thick-sounding clinks. Lady Hariawan touched the back of the slave’s head, putting her fingers into the mats of dirt and blood. Sairu winced again and wished she could draw her mistress away.

Suddenly Lady Hariawan turned the slave over, rolling him so that he rested in her lap. Sairu’s eyes widened in surprise. She hadn’t expected the fevered slave to be quite so well-made and fine-featured.

“All right, put him down,” Sairu said sternly. “He’s getting blood on your garments. Please put him down, and I’ll see what I can do for him.”

Lady Hariawan cradled him like a baby, one arm supporting his neck and shoulders, the other wrapped along his body and arm. He was heavy, but she held firm and rocked to and fro, gazing into his face.

“I heard you,” she said. “I heard you calling. I came as fast as I could.”

“I didn’t call you,” Sairu said, then frowned. Lady Hariawan had not been speaking to her.

The slave groaned and his eyelids fluttered. Slowly, as though it pained him, he opened his eyes and gazed up into Lady Hariawan’s beautiful, serene face. He opened his mouth. His throat constricted in an effort to speak, and one hand even lifted, hesitantly, as though he sought to touch her cheek.

Then, with a deep sigh, he sank back into the fevered stupor that was not sleep, that was nothing like sleep, but that was hardly wakeful either.

Lady Hariawan’s eyes flashed suddenly to Sairu’s face. In that moment she looked almost . . . normal. Like a lovely palace princess giving orders to her slaves and expecting immediate gratification of every whim.

“You will take him,” she said to Sairu. “You will heal him. And he will come with us.”

“Yes, my mistress,” Sairu whispered.