Heir of Iron (The Powers of Amur Book 1) (8 page)

Taleg appeared through the curtain a moment later. “That was not so bad,” he said.

“Not so bad?”

“He didn’t immediately try to run away, at least.”

Mandhi stopped her pacing. Taleg still stood by the door, rubbing his head. “Kiss me,” she whispered.

He looked up. “Come again?”

“Give me something else to think about. Hurry, before Navran decides to come back.”

Taleg walked towards her. Mandhi met him halfway, seized his face in her hands, pushed her lips against his and opened her mouth.

Mandhi’s sari and choli were heaped on the floor with Taleg’s dhoti and kurta, while the two of them lay spent in the bed. She was nestled into his chest, drawing her hand gently across his collarbone, while Taleg sat up on one elbow, his free hand wandering from her spine to her thighs. She leaned forward and kissed the center of his chest.

“Tonight you don’t have to run away,” she said. “Finally.”

“And if Navran comes back and finds us here?”

“I don’t care. He knows.”

“He knows everything, now.”

She flicked his chin. “I asked you to take my mind
off
that subject.”

He bent down and kissed her ear. “Sorry.”

“How long do you think we should stay in Jaitha?”

“You don’t think we should leave right away?”

“I want,” she said kissing his neck, “to stay here a few more nights. Davrakhanda and Sadja can wait for us. And maybe Navran needs a little more time.”

“I can’t say I’d mind that.”

She rested her head on the cushion and listened to Taleg breathe. The sounds of gossip from the dining room had died down, and through the curtained window the only sounds were the droning of frogs and flies.

Taleg sat up. “What was that?”

There was a scrape in the dining room and the mutter of voices. Someone cried out, and a violent hollow thud sounded.

Taleg leapt to his feet and tied the dhoti around his waist. “I’ll see what it is. Wait for me here.” He disappeared through the curtain.

A moment later she heard his cry, followed by a thunderous fall. She leapt up, slung the sari around her waist and breasts, and bolted through the curtain.

The dining room was a confusion of shadows and movement. Paidacha cowered in the entrance to the kitchen holding an oil lamp, the only source of light in the room, which cast a flickering glow across a jumble of cushions and baskets strewn about in violence. Two bodies lay sprawled in the center of the room atop the low tables where the evening’s feast had lain. A silhouette stood at the outside door with bronze glinting in its fist. “Leave us alone, woman,” a man’s voice hissed.

One of the bodies on the floor heaved forward and reached for the shadow’s foot. The man leapt and struck downward with his blade, but missed the grasping hand. He scampered back a step and alit on the top of the ladder which descended to the street, then disappeared from sight with his blade held ready before him. The man on the floor lumbered up and stuck his head out the door, but returned a moment later.

The shape resolved itself into Taleg’s looming bulk. “They’re gone,” he said. “Lost already in the darkness.”

Paidacha stepped forward with the lamp and illuminated the scene. Taleg hulked in the doorway, blood trickling down his temple, while a strange man lay on the floor in a slowly spreading pool of blood. It took Mandhi a moment to understand the scene. And then it hit her like a falling stone.

“Where is Navran?” she asked. “
Where is Navran?
”

“They took him,” Taleg said. He collapsed onto a cushion and hung his head in his hands.

“Who took him?”

“Four men. Three got away with Navran. One of them….” He gestured to the limp body on the floor. “I hit him pretty hard. He fell on his knife.”

Mandhi put her hand over the man’s nose to feel his breath. “He’s dead.” She cursed under her breath. She would have liked to question the man. “But you? Are you okay?”

Taleg grinned. “They knocked me down for a moment with a good blow to the head”—he reached up and touched the gash on his forehead that was leaking blood—“but other than that I’m fine.”

Mandhi tried to hide the depth of her relief. No use getting Taleg worked up, nor giving Paidacha any ideas. She glanced over at the innkeeper, who still stood in the doorway to the kitchen, his mouth opened in an expression of wordless horror.

“What is it?” she said. “Do you know who did this?”

He shook his head and moved his tongue silently, as if he had forgotten how to speak. “I had no idea. I didn’t know. I didn’t know.” He began to weep.

Mandhi thundered across the room and grabbed Paidacha by the beard. “What didn’t you know? Did you have something to do with this?” He continued sobbing. She shook his head with her grip on his beard until he cried out in pain. “Tell me!” she shouted.

“They threatened my wife,” he said. “And little Kalishni. They said they would hurt them unless, unless…”

“What did you do?”

He covered his face with his hands. “Mandragora in his beer. Just a little, not enough to kill. Just enough to make him delirious and disoriented. And when I called for them, he couldn’t fight.”

Mandhi let go of him. He slid to the ground, put his forehead on the floor, and chanted a prayer for forgiveness. She looked across the room at Taleg, who sat rubbing his temples with a grim look on his face.

“Sadja-dar,” she said.

“It would seem so. He wanted Navran more than we thought.”

“But how did he know we were coming? And have time to corrupt—” She gestured at the trembling face-down Paidacha.

“Same way he knew to send the original message? Farsight, perhaps.”

Mandhi nudged Paidacha with her toe. “When did these men come to you?”

His mantras stopped. He looked up and spoke in a creaking voice. “Four days ago. They gave me the root and told me to wait for a man named Navran.”

“Why didn’t you tell someone? Your saghada, a militiaman, anyone.”

“You don’t understand. They had imperial seals.”

“What? Are you sure?”

“I’m sure!” He bowed and kissed her hand. “Believe me, please.”

“Maybe it wasn’t Sadja-dar,” Taleg said. “Unless he is working with the Emperor.”

“Or someone else is. Ulaur save us. The Emperor.”

“And now Navran knows.”

A chill went down Mandhi’s back. Her fists clenched.

“Knows what?” Paidacha said.

“You don’t get to know,” Mandhi said. “You gave over a fellow Uluriya to agents of the Emperor. You should go to your saghada and beg that he doesn’t strike out your name from the books.”

Paidacha began to weep.

“Have pity, Mandhi,” Taleg said. “He was protecting his family. And he has no idea who Navran is.”

“And I have to protect
my
family. My father. And even my drunken half-wit brother.”

Taleg bowed his head. “So what now?”

“We follow them, obviously.”

“Do we know where they’re going?”

“There are only two ways out of this city that make sense. Either they take a boat down-river and then sail to wherever they’re going, or they head north over the Emperor’s Bridge. With a little time and coin we can find out if anyone saw them. Then we follow.”

“They’ll be ahead of us.”

“We’ll move faster. We leave at first light.” She wanted to leave now, but there was no way they could follow the men in the darkness, and no way they could figure out which way the kidnappers had gone while the city slept. She turned back to the whimpering innkeeper. “Paidacha, you will supply us with food for the road. As much roti, cold rice, and dried fruits as we can carry.”

Paidacha nodded and retreated into the kitchen. “Yes. Of course. I’m so sorry. Anything I can do to help.”

Mandhi pulled her sari closer around herself. It was slipping off of her, and she realized that she was half-naked and dressed in obvious hurry in the middle of the dining room. Paidacha, fortunately, seemed too distressed to notice. “Might as well try to get some sleep,” she muttered.

Taleg stretched. “I’ll join you.”

When they reached their chamber, Mandhi let the sari slide off of her and slipped naked into her bed. Taleg came a moment later and lay down next to her, putting his hand on her belly. She rested her hand on top of his.

“If we had waited another day to tell him,” she whispered.

Taleg kissed her ear. “You had no way to know. Now, sleep.”

She turned towards him and kissed him on the lips. Then she nestled her head in the crook of his neck. How was she going to sleep after this? But she closed her eyes and remembered nothing else.

“Three Red Men, and a man with tied hands between them. Yep, I saw ’em.” A guard for the city of Jaitha stood at the entrance to the Emperor’s Bridge and spat a red lozenge of saliva, briefly showing them the betel nut in his mouth. “Left at first light this morning.”

Red Men, Mandhi thought with a scowl. Last night they had been dressed in ordinary clothes, but if the bridge guard called them Red Men, then they were wearing the uniform of the imperial guard. But what was the imperial guard doing here in Jaitha? The vassal kings of the empire had their own militias, like the bridge guard standing before them who served the king of Jaitha. Ordinary military action was delegated to them. The Red Men stayed near Majasravi most of the time, unless there was some duty of the Emperor for which they were needed—revolts or riots or threats of independence on the part of the Emperor’s vassals.

But the Red Men were here in Jaitha, and they had taken Navran. She turned back to the guard. “Did you ask where they were going?” Mandhi said.

“I don’t question imperial guards carrying prisoners,” the man said with a shrug. “But if you want to know where they were going, I could tell you.” He grinned and tapped his palm.

Mandhi flicked a coin at him. The man caught it and spat again. “They crossed the bridge and took the north-east road.”

“Very good.” Mandhi tossed another coin at the man and nodded to Taleg. “If anybody asks, you never saw us.”

“Pleasure to help you, dear lady.” The soldier bowed, and the two of them proceeded through the gate onto the bridge.

The Emperor’s Bridge was a wide expanse of cut stone, as wide as three Jaitha streets, with a stone railing as tall as a man on either side. It leapt on arches from the south bank of the Amsadhu River to the stone sliver in the center of the river, where an imperial temple to Am rose, then crossed at a slightly different angle to the north shore. It was the surest sign of imperial power here in the south, the symbolic union between the halves of the empire, built by the first Emperors to fuse their conquests together. The edges of the causeway were tiled with ramshackle kiosks and tables of wares, an informal market presented to everyone who crossed the great river of Amur, and the bridge was choked with traffic in every daylight hour. Mandhi and Taleg could only proceed forward in the narrow channel through the middle of the bridge. But once they emerged on the other side, the crowd thinned, as travelers spread out onto the six roads which converged at the bridge. Taleg nodded towards the north-east road, and Mandhi followed.

Only a hundred yards from the bridge, the crowd of the city receded to a distant murmur. The road became a wide, flat path winding between gum acacia trees and coconut palms. Ahead of them a shepherd whacked at the laggards of his flock of goats with a thorny branch.

“So what’s the plan?” Taleg said quietly.

“We follow them. Ask in every village who saw them to make sure we don’t take a wrong path. They have a half a day’s lead, so we walk morning and night until we catch up.”

“And when we catch up with them?”

“We take Navran back.”

Taleg stroked his beard. “I appreciate your confidence in me, but we
are
talking about three Red Men. I don’t know if I can take that many at once.”

“Did I say we should fight them?”

“What other option do we have?”

“I have plenty of coins.” Mandhi gestured at the pouch that she hid between her breasts.

Taleg raised an eyebrow. “That could be expensive.”

“More expensive than the alternative?”

He laughed. “The problem with the alternative isn’t the
expense
.”

By the time they stopped that evening, their feet were sore from walking, and the first stars had begun to peek through the dying sunlight. The guest-house was not Uluriya—there were none in this village as far as Mandhi could see—so they were rendered unclean by eating the food and spending the night and would have to purify fully the next time they came into a proper household. Mandhi discounted this as a necessary annoyance. The fact that they had a bed at all was miraculous enough under the circumstances. The innkeeper recalled having seen Navran and his captors pass through earlier that day. Mandhi and Taleg were still about half a day behind. They slept and woke at the crack of dawn to continue the chase.

And so it continued for the next ten days. The winter rice harvest was coming in, and the paths were busy. Women carried baskets and men pulled carts of rice stalks and clay jars. The mosaic of rice paddies alongside the road was filled with peasants, dhotis and saris tied above their knees, their sickles slicing swick-swack through the stalks, building up the great golden heaps of grain that crowned the village squares. The mood of those they met on the road was pleasant, and at every pause, they asked those whom they met if they had seen the Red Men leading a captive north. The reports they got indicated that they had made up some of the distance, as the captors had been seen only a few hours, then two hours, then an hour beforehand. Every evening Mandhi collapsed to sleep next to Taleg, and every morning they rose exhausted, but continued.

“Isn’t that Ganatha’s head?” Taleg said, pointing up the road to a lump of yellow stone lying beside the road.

Mandhi squinted and shaded her eyes. The stone resolved itself into a weather-worn human face wearing an expression of divine indifference. She grinned. “Old Rajunda already! We
are
moving fast.”

“I think my aching feet are a testament to that,” Taleg said. “But I appreciate Ganatha the Unwise donating the head of his statue so that you could remember as well.”

Mandhi snorted. “Wasn’t the head of the monument left by the road as a warning to others? Much like his actual head was put on a spear.”

“To warn us to slow down, maybe?” He raised an eyebrow at her.

Mandhi smiled wryly. “Is this your way of asking if we can stop here in Old Rajunda?”

“It would be a waste to not respect Ganatha’s donation.”

Mandhi sighed and shifted the position of her pack. “The Red Men might be here in Old Rajunda as well. And they’re just barely ahead of us, so I think we can risk it.” She tallied the days on the road between Old Rajunda and Majasravi. At the pace they had kept, they might catch up with Navran’s captors in another day or two. And the sun was falling in the west anyway—at most, they had an hour or two before they would have to stop anyway. A single day of extra rest was an acceptable risk.

Just beyond Ganatha’s head lay the village of Old Rajunda itself, a haphazard collection of mud-brick homes tucked between the ruins of the old city. Stones had been borrowed from the fallen palaces to form the corners of the peasants’ hovels, and between the rice fields lay piles of stone with the worn echoes of friezes visible on them. The central square of the village was ringed by heaps of harvested rice, and the threshers were heartily beating the sheaves into enormous baskets. Just beyond the threshers, a pair of farmers stood next to their filled basket of rice and accepted the chanted blessing of a dhorsha, who wafted a hand censer desultorily about the rim of their basket. Just beyond the dhorsha waited an agent of the majakhadir, holding a scale and a palm-leaf ledger book to collect his tax. Mandhi was about to ask the agent where to find a guest-house, when Taleg touched her elbow.

“Look ahead,” he whispered.

Two shirtless men in red dhotis with spears at their sides crouched outside a building with Thikram’s spiral above the door. They gestured and spat, paying no attention to Mandhi and Taleg, but they glanced every now and then into the building.

The Red Men.

Mandhi’s heart pounded. They had seen no other imperial guards the whole trip: these had to be the ones they pursued. She looked away from the men and pretended to watch the dhorsha blessing the harvest. “They must have Navran inside,” she said quietly.

Taleg looked pained. “I don’t like our chances. We can’t just walk up and ask to buy their prisoner.”

“No, we can’t. But we can just ask the innkeeper to let us buy a room for the night.”

“And then?”

“Night will come. And with it, opportunity.”

The master of the guest-house had only one room left to offer them, but he was pleased to sell it to them along with an evening meal. The food was impure, of course, but Mandhi accepted it into their room without comment. The soldiers had taken the other room in the guest-house, and they kept the curtain over the door drawn. One man always stood guard at the door, while the other two came and went. Mandhi and Taleg took turns spying on the door. They never heard Navran’s voice or saw any concrete evidence that he was there. But he had to be.

Shortly after full dark, Taleg whispered to Mandhi, “It’ll be time, soon.”

Mandhi was lying on the bedroom floor, attempting fitfully to sleep while Taleg watched the guard across the hall through a hair’s-width crack in the curtain. In a moment she was fully awake and crossed the room to him. “What?”

“They changed their guard. The old one has gone into the chamber to sleep. The one at the door is the only one still awake.”

“Give them a few more minutes. Then we’ll go.”

Taleg grabbed his staff. “We go with the quiet plan first?”

“Yes.” Mandhi counted the coins in her purse and slipped out a handful. They might still have enough to get back to Jaitha. And if they didn’t succeed, there was no point in returning to Jaitha.

When the sounds of breathing from the other chamber were completely still, Mandhi nodded, and they both crept out the door into the narrow corridor between the chambers. The soldier standing watch looked at them with eyes narrowed, and they tensed as Mandhi approached him.

“I make you an offer,” Mandhi said.

The man put his hand on his sword. “What is this? An offer for what?”

“Your prisoner.”

“How do you know we have a prisoner?”

“Please. I’m not a fool. I see what you’re doing in your chamber there.”

“And what’s your interest in him?”

“Does it matter?” She opened her fist and showed him the gleaming metal within. “He’ll just slip away in the night.”

“My comrades will kill me.”

“Split it with them. This is more than enough to be worth the trouble for all three of you.”

The man laughed. “You have no idea what the trouble would be if I let him go.” And he opened his mouth and bellowed, “Alarm!”

Taleg rushed forward swiping his staff, but the man’s sword was out in an instant and parried the blow. He thrust the point towards Taleg, who leapt back, but just as quickly brought the flat edge of the sword around and smacked Mandhi in the cheek. The dim corridor splintered into stars.

She staggered back and slumped against the wall. Her vision tilted and blurred. The grunts and clangs of Taleg’s blow and parry with the guard thundered above her. The lamplight brightened. The curtain into the soldiers’ room was thrown aside and the other two appeared with their swords in hand. She put her hand to her cheek and felt blood.

Get up, Mandhi. Taleg can’t take all three of them alone.

She lurched forward and grabbed the ankle of one of the men as he rushed towards Taleg. The man fell, his sword clattered to the ground, and the man crowded next to him stumbled. With a groan he looked back and swiped at Mandhi, but the blade passed harmlessly over her head. She ducked and crawled back. Taleg’s stave smacked against steel and bone at the far end of the hallway. The soldier looming over her thrust the blade at her again. She put her hands over her head and screamed. Let them see that she was a woman and leave her alone. She had given Taleg a moment; hopefully it was all he needed.

Shouts and crashing metal sounded in the hallway. There were more voices now. The innkeeper. The grunts of the soldiers. Someone shouted curses. Metal crashed against metal. Wood splintered and ceramic shattered in the dining room at the end of the hall. Someone screamed and fell.
Taleg.

Mandhi opened her eyes. The hallway flickered with ghastly lamplight. Indistinct bodies glittering with steel clashed in the gloom at the end of the hall. “Taleg!” she screamed. She pushed into the crush of bodies. There he was, face-down on the remnants of the table, blood spreading underneath him. She reached his side, grabbed his kurta and heaved. Not enough. Why did he have to be so heavy? She hooked an arm under his limp bicep and lifted again. Fighting men jostled around her. Someone tripped over her feet. Curses and shouts echoed on every side.

If Taleg has fallen, who is fighting?

She slipped her other hand under his torso and grunted trying to raise him onto his side, but to no avail. He was half a yard taller than her and heavy as a boulder, and for the first time she regretted it.

Behind her, fabric tore and voices receded into the night. A breath of silence filled the room.

A broad-nosed, muscular man appeared next to her. “Let me help you,” he said. Before she could respond, he put his shoulder to Taleg’s limp torso, and with a groan rolled him onto his back.

Mandhi shrieked and put her hand over her mouth. His kurta was torn and bloody. A narrow, deep gash pierced his belly, gushing blood the color of pitch in the lamplight.

“He lives,” the man said. “We can save him.” He tore the kurta and stuffed the strips into the wound. “Bring me water and salt from the packs,” he shouted to someone nearby.

Mandhi looked up. There were three other men in the room with unsheathed swords, wearing grimaces and sweat from the battle. One of them immediately left through the front door of the guest-house. The other two moved to the periphery of the room keeping watchful eyes on the windows and the entrance.

“Who are you?” Mandhi asked. “What are you doing here?”

“My name is Bhargasa. We belong to the guard of Davrakhanda. Our king sent us.”

Sadja.
Her thoughts whirled. “You aren’t the ones that took Navran?”

“I don’t know who Navran is, but we took no one.”

“But Navran. Where is he?”

“I told you, I don’t know who Navran is—”

“A captive! The soldiers had a captive with them. We were here trying to free him.”