Revelation (20 page)

Farrol was engaged with another Derzhi. The warrior had no weapon but his bleeding arms, and the outlaw was forcing him to the ground with his sword, teasing and taunting the stunned, heavy-eyed Derzhi. I would have stopped it—there was nothing to be gained by such slaughter—but a Veshtar tried to slice off my arm just then, and I was occupied for a while. When I looked again, the Derzhi was dead, his throat gushing blood onto the dry stones. Killing Veshtar slavers was one thing. Slaying unarmed Derzhi another. I backed away.

Some of the slaves scrambled back through the gates and into the open, helping each other, snatching weapons and horses and waterskins from the fallen Veshtar. Some wandered about in a daze, allowing themselves to be led to safety. A few began to exact bloody revenge on the fallen overseers. I looked away and reminded myself of despair. A few were too weak to move and sat numb and weary on the paving, waiting to be recaptured. To get all of them away would be impossible.

For an uncounted time I was caught up in furious combat. A small troop of Thrid mercenaries arrived from a guard post somewhere up the causeway. I could not see others of the outlaws, and the thought crossed my mind that Blaise and his men might think it humorous to abandon me in the midst of the carnage. But five Thrid gave me little time to worry about anything.

A mounted Veshtar overseer, trying to control his maddened horse, flailed about with his whip, cutting a slave woman across the face as she stumbled weakly away from the fray. She fell to her knees in the middle of the roadway, but the Veshtar spurred his mount forward, heading for the safety of the castle garrison above us. He rode right through her, his horse’s hooves and spiked anklets slashing her body to ribbons. In mindless fury I abandoned the sole remaining Thrid, leaped over the unmoving woman and gave chase, dragging the Veshtar from his saddle and savoring the terror on his face as I kicked him onto the stones and plunged my sword into his gut. I pulled out my weapon and shoved it in again. Then again and again, expending rage I had believed used up in bloody dreams.

I might have hacked at the Veshtar merchant forever, but a steady hand fell on my bloody arm and I looked up into a coal-smeared face, painted with white daggers. Blaise. His stillness fell about me like a mantle. He pointed up the sloping roadway, and as the fire in my veins cooled, I heard running footsteps only a few sharp turns above us. Soldiers. At least twenty of them. Together we ran down the road, gathering up the others of our band, urging the lagging slaves to hurry into the protection of the night and the rocky hills. From the distant north, along the line of the Emperor’s Road that came from Zhagad, a torchlit army of no less than five hundred men came into view. As we rode away, I glanced back over my shoulder and saw what would meet their eye as they approached the fortress—a man-high dagger of white, splashed on the ancient gates.

 

 

 

No more than three hours passed before the tired outlaw band returned to the lush green valley where their fellows waited. By my reckoning we had traveled some three hundred leagues from the gates of the Nyabbozi baron’s fortress. It was impossible. Just as it was impossible that Blaise alone had scaled the walls of the fortress, killed two guards while leaving the others asleep, and opened the gates to let us in. The plan had been foolhardy, but clever—so much more devastating to take the slave caravan within the very walls of the Nyabbozi stronghold than somewhere in the wilderness. How in the name of the gods had he done it? My body was mortally tired. My mind more so.

In the chill gray light, as birds fluttered from their perches calling mournfully to the coming dawn, I knelt by the stream and scooped water into my hands, scrubbing the blood from under my fingernails and the coal from my face, letting the dirty water drain into the grass. I longed for some answer for my confusion and some cleansing for my sickness of spirit; Saetha’s demon healing and my frenzied vengeance on the Veshtar merchant weighed heavy.

Those left behind were celebrating our return with a bonfire and a slaughtered deer to roast on it, greeting the story of the well-timed assault and the scattered slaves with cheers and laughter. I wanted no part of celebration. I could not regret the death of Veshtar slave keepers, nor the freedom of those slaves resourceful enough to keep themselves hidden and safe. But the raid had been ill conceived in every point. The outlaws had no idea of the harsh truths of the world. I knew what would happen to the slaves who were recaptured and those too weak to run. I knew what would happen to the remaining gate guards when the baron found his fortress violated. And I knew what would happen to nearby settlements when the Derzhi found one of their own with his throat cut and no weapon in his hand. I could not bear the thought of Saetha’s demon hearing the tale.

“A man of violence. I judged you rightly.” Blaise was sitting on the opposite stream bank, leaning against a crooked pine.

“You know nothing about me.” I judged myself well disciplined for not jumping out of my skin at his sudden appearance. Blaise’s mysteries were becoming exceedingly annoying.

“You’re weeping.”

“Yet you name me a man of violence.” Was I forever to be plagued with companions who could read my soul?

“I’d like to understand it.” He leaned forward so that his dark eyes glittered in the last light of a fading crescent moon. “It’s not just the slaves you mourn, is it? Farrol says you protected the Derzhi. And I suspect you weep even for the Veshtar pig you hacked into pulp. I was taught that Ezzarian sorcerers care nothing for the sorrows of the world.”

“I would like to understand how we traveled six hundred leagues in a night’s work and how you broached a Derzhi fortress that has not yielded to an enemy in five hundred years. Perhaps we could exchange a tale or two.”

He shook his head, laughing. “Not yet. All I ask for now is that you warn me if you decide to kill me. I can think of a number of ways I would rather die than by your hand.”

“And you will keep your friend from knifing me when I’m asleep? Unarmed?”

It was not a pleasantry I spoke, and Blaise did not laugh at it. “My friend is none of your concern. You are under my protection.”

Somehow that did not make me feel any better.

 

The Yvor Lukash led his bandits on three more raids in the next two weeks. Each time I swore to myself I would not go. Yet each time Blaise made it clear that my participation in his war was the measure of my truth. I learned quickly that no one else in the band had the least idea where Blaise sent the Ezzarian children, and he had told no one that I claimed kinship to one of them. I could not leave without abandoning my son, therefore I could not refuse to go where he led.

One raid took us into the middle of Vayapol to steal hoarded tax revenues from a corrupt Manganar tax collector named Govam. Govam was known to inflate the tax assessments on prosperous merchants—keeping a good proportion for himself and paying his superiors enough to keep them quiet about his activities. If a man could not pay, Govam would take his home, his shop, his slaves, or his land. Poorer folk were required to tithe to the Derzhi, and many had to choose between feeding their children or paying their taxes. Govam pretended sympathy with their plight and allowed them to put off their payment, building up a backlog of debt. When the tax collector had squeezed all he could from the prosperous citizens of Vayapol, he would call these debts, claiming that his baron had discovered his generosity. Of course no one could pay, and even as he wept and apologized to his debtors, Govam would take their wives and children and sell them to the Veshtar as slaves. This practice was not uncommon throughout the Empire. Govam was just better at it than most.

Once I got over the churning discomfort at performing an act for which Aleksander would have us pulled apart with maddened oxen, it was somewhat amusing to see the stolen coins stuck to the inner walls of Dolgar’s shrine with daubs of mud. The poor worshipers could come and exchange their snips of tin and iron for a coin that would feed their children for a year. I was pleased that at least there was no bloodshed involved. Blaise left the tax collector trussed up to a lantern post naked, his beard and hair shorn off. Proper justice. The tax collector had done the same to shame poor Manganar craftsmen who could not afford to pay bribes on top of their taxes. Farrol painted a white dagger on Govam’s belly.

Though the raid itself went well, no one had bothered to make a reasonable plan to get us out of the city. The night was stifling, the city stink hanging thick in the narrow lanes. The Derzhi governor had lent the Manganar magistrates seasoned troops to give chase. With disciplined inevitability, they descended on us from every quarter, and I was sure we were done for. We raced down a narrow alleyway, kicking aside scrawny cats, crowding past slaughter pits and refuse heaps that were seeping in the heat, only to see torches and swords waiting at the other end. Back on our tracks, we pushed through gaping beggars who had come out to watch, up a worn stone staircase and into a dark courtyard filled with the choking stench of human waste and burning yaretha, the mind-destroying herb so prized by wealthy, bored women and the hopeless poor. We hurried across the foul nest, leaping over prone bodies—dead or alive, it was impossible to tell—intending to cut through a block of houses on the other side. But I held up my hand for a moment to stop the others. Horsemen held themselves quiet in the lane beyond the ramshackle buildings, and I whispered a warning to Blaise and Farrol.

“I’ll find a way,” Blaise said, and he ran back the way we’d come, disappearing into the shadows. He was back quickly, directing us through a maze of alleys and shops, only to disappear again. Four times he did the same, meeting us at each turning of the road to tell us which way to go next. He was never wrong.

The second raid took us to the crowded city of Dargonath in the extreme western reaches of the Empire. A season’s supply of grain shipped from the south lay rotting in Hollenni warehouses, while a famine raged throughout the poor quarters of the city. The Derzhi factor had gone to Zhagad for horse races without authorizing any sale or distribution of the grain. Blaise happened to know that the man had been arrested for attempting to poison one of the Emperor’s mistresses and would not be returning, but the factor’s Hollenni assistants had refused to hear the pleas from the starving population and locked the precious grain away. Blaise found a way into the locked warehouses—finding a way into impossible places seemed to be a special talent of his—and the rest of us shared out the stores to the ravenous crowds. Farrol wanted to execute the traitorous Hollenni, but Blaise said he had no time to do it properly. He wanted to serve justice, not vengeance. Since the foray was even worse planned than the Vayapol raid, the city garrison was breathing down our necks, and Farrol had no time for his usual symbolic gestures. He had to be satisfied with abandoning the traitors undefended in the middle of the poor quarter.

The next venture took seven of us to a border outpost where a Basran guard captain was enriching his coffers with outlandish bribes extracted from travelers. As the little band set straw bales about the guard captain’s house and the guardsmen’s barracks and soaked them with lamp oil stolen from an unguarded storehouse, I tried to convince Blaise that reporting the matter to the Emperor might be more fruitful than burning people in their beds. Farrol accused me of Derzhi sympathies. “He must have found a master to his liking. Perhaps it was a mistress—a rich Derzhi cow to lick his backside and addle his mind.”

“Even an addled mind can see the difference between legitimate grievance and pointless murder,” I said.

“I need to make sure my lessons are noted,” said Blaise. “I don’t have time to beg or bribe the fifty different magistrates who sit between me and the Emperor, only to be scorned and refused every time with nothing gained. The Emperor cares nothing for justice, nor does any man who obeys him.”

“There are innocent people in the house—children, slaves—and ignorant, stupid soldiers in the barracks. Most of them are illiterate conscripts from the borderlands. They have no power. What justice is served here? What lesson is taught?”

“Light the fire.”

The other raiders threw their torches onto the straw, though they could have lit it as easily with their blazing fervor. But as we rode from the city, Blaise left us for a time, returning with blistered hands and half his shirt burned away. He would not answer Farrol’s questions about what he had done.

I took part in all these raids, trying to understand how Blaise’s magic was done, trying to keep my skin and my honor reasonably intact. My skin stayed whole. My honor less so. Deception ate away at me as acid eats paper. I learned nothing of the magic, which was very purposefully hidden from me, and little of Blaise himself, save that every man and woman of the outlaw band would die for him without hesitation. The longer I watched and listened, the more I came to understand it. Though I disagreed with most of his awkward schemes, and thought his view of the good and bad in the world far too simple, I could not fail to recognize his worth. He was clever and generous, gentle and devoted to his people—a population that seemed to include everyone in the world who had need of what he could give. His passion for justice was infectious. Whether it was an illiterate peasant worked to death in Derzhi fields or mines while his family wore rags and starved, or the tenant farmer whose hut was burned because it offended Derzhi eyes, or a child who was ripped from her family to polish the insides of prized Derzhi oil jars from dawn to midnight because her hands were small enough to do so, no one was beneath Blaise’s notice. I came to think that if I could but bring about a truce between him and Aleksander, both prince and outlaw might find their lives a great deal easier, and the world might be a great deal better off.