Hammerfall (6 page)

He rose with difficulty. The joints of his knees felt assaulted, still aching with the fire she had loosed. A roaring was in his ears, making him dizzy. He was not fit to ride, not today; but he would. If her promise brought him the means to leave this place and walk out under the sky again, he would do that. He made out the voices past the roaring in his ears.
East
, they cried,
east!
and he realized he was set free, to do what the voices had wanted all his life. Freedom racketed about his whole being, demanding a test, demanding immediate action.

East. East. East.

He backed away, wobbling. The Ila rose and mounted the steps, and sat down in her chair, composed and still.

But reaching the door he realized it had no latch, and he had no knowledge how to open it. She made a fool of him, consciously, perhaps. He gazed at it in dismay, reminded in such small detail how far the holy city was beyond his expectation.

She opened the door, perhaps. At least it sighed a steamy breath and admitted one of her chief captains, a man scowling, hand on dagger, ready to kill.

“Here are my orders,” the Ila said from her chair high at the end of the room. “Give him the madmen, an au'it, and a master caravanner, and whatever canvas and goods and beasts he requires. Marak Trin Tain is under my seal. When he goes out from this hall, respect him. When he comes back to these doors, admit him. Write it!”

The au'it, Marak saw from the doorway, had slunk back to sit at the Ila's feet. Quickly she spread out her book, and the au'it wrote whatever seemed good to write.

“I have sent for the wife and daughter of Tain Trin Tain, and spared Tain his fate. Write it!”

What would they cry through the holy city and through the market? Marak Trin is the Ila's man?

His father would hear it, sooner or later. His father would be appalled, outraged, and, yes, shamed a second time.

But could he refuse to yield up to the Ila's demand his cast-off wife and daughter, where he had sent his son?

And could his son have done otherwise, when Tain Trin Tain had once bowed to the Ila and signed their armistice?

In that sense it was not his decision. It became the Ila's. And Tain would have known, when he threw down the damnation against his wife, that he had cleaved the two of them one from the other and thrown conscience after, a casual piece of baggage. He only hoped the Ila's men reached Kais Tain in time for his mother's safety.

Love of his father? Loyalty? He no longer knew where to find that in himself. In the Ila's promise, he had lost one direction and found another. He did not resent the pain of the Ila's blow: lords struck when offended. It was an element, like heat, like thirst, to be endured. She had met the price, and he
was
bought. Had his father done as much, for all his blows through the years?

He walked out with the captain, sure as he did so that here was a man, like his father, who had sooner see him dead. But the captain said not a word against the Ila's wishes, took him directly to the armory and let him equip himself with good, serviceable weapons: a dagger, a boot-knife, even considering that rarest of weapons, a pistol, difficult to keep in desert dust, and hungry for metal.

“Sand will impair it,” the captain said, plainly not in favor of him having it. “And aim is a matter of training.”

“I have no time for that,” he said, and put aside that piece that, itself, could have hired a regiment.

A bow—there were numerous good ones—might give him both range and rapidity of fire, but nothing to defeat a mobbing among the vermin, and it was a lowland weapon. In the summer heat of the Lakht the laminations outright melted and gave way.

In the end he settled for the
machai
, a light, thin blade, as much tool as weapon, that he hung from his belt, and a good harness-knife.

The captain looked at him oddly, and honestly tried to press at least a spear on him.

“An encumbrance,” Marak said. It was the same reason he wished none of the Ila's regiments, which encumbered themselves with all these things and baked in hardened leather besides, in the desert heat. “I want only this. For the rest of us, good boots. We'll ride. We'll all ride. But good boots. One never knows.”

“As you wish,” the captain said, but after that the captain seemed worried, as if he had failed somehow in his duty, in sending him out short of equipment with an army of well-shod madmen, of which he was chief. The captain tried to make up for it in other offerings, silver heating-mirrors, a burning-glass, two fine blankets, and a personal, leather-bound kit of salves and medicines, all of which Marak did take.

Then the captain walked him out to the pens, a fair distance, and pulled a riding beast from the reserve pens, a creature of a quality Kais Tain rarely saw.

That, he prized, and found that he and the captain had reached an accommodation of practical cooperation. Under other circumstances they would have been aiming weapons at one another. But now the captain seemed to understand he was not there to steal away goods, but to carry out the Ila's wishes, economically, and asking no great show about it.

In that understanding they became almost amiable, and the captain chided sergeants who hid back the better harness. They laid out the best. The captain's name, he learned, was Memnanan. He had spent all his life in the Ila's service as he had spent his in Tain's.

They walked companionably through areas of the Beykaskh that Marak knew his father would spend a hundred men's lives to see. He looked up against the night sky at the high defenses, the strong walls and observed a series of latchless gates that sighed with steam.

They had never even come close to piercing these defenses. Only their raids on caravans had gained notice, and that, likely, for its inconvenience, unless they should have threatened the flow of goods for a full year.

The storerooms they visited and those they passed were immense. All the wealth in the world was here. They passed the kitchens. The vermin of the city ignored morsels of bread cast in a drainway. It lay and rotted. He found that as much a wonder as the steam-driven doors.

“We have sent for a caravan master,” Memnanan said. “We count forty-one who will make the whole journey, including yourself. Getting them outfitted will take hours, at the quickest.”

The captain ordered a midnight supper and shared it with him under an awning near the kitchens, the two of them drinking beer that finally numbed the pain, both getting a small degree drunk, and debating seriously about the merits of the western forges and the balance of their blades. In pride of opinion, they each cast at a target, the back of a strong-room door.

They were within a finger of each other and the center of the target. Another beer and they might have sworn themselves brothers. And in that thought, Marak recoiled from the notion, and sobered, as the captain must surely do.

A sergeant reported that the caravan master had come into the outer courtyard. This arrival turned out to be a one-eyed man with his three sons, who together owned fifty beasts, six slaves, and five tents, with two freedmen as assistants. This caravan master had served the Ila's particular needs for ten years, so he said, and took her pay and feared her as he feared the summer wind.

“There are not enough beasts to carry us,” Marak said to the man. “If the party numbers over forty, we're short, and it needs more supply than that.”

“To Pori,” the caravan master said, which might be his understanding of the mission.

“Off the edge of the Lakht. Beyond Pori.” There was no lying to the caravan master, above all else. This was the man on whose judgment and preparation all their lives depended.

“There is nothing beyond Pori,” the caravan master said.

“That's why we need more beasts and more supply,” Marak said, and appealed to the captain with a glance. “I need more tents, more beshti, first-quality, far more than the weapons.”

The captain snapped his fingers and called over the aide who had brought the caravan master; and the aide went in and called out an au'it, who sat down on a bench in the courtyard and prepared to write on loose sheets. A slave brought a lamp close to her, and set it down on a bare wooden table, while small insects died and sparked in the flame.

“How many beasts?” the captain asked Marak.

“Ask the caravan master,” Marak said. “He knows that, or he knows nothing.”

“Ask wide, but prudently,” the captain said sternly to the master. “This is the Ila's charge.”

The master, whose name was Obidhen, looked down and counted, a rapid movement of fingers, the desert way, that took the place of the au'it's scribing. “Sixty-nine beasts,” Obidhen said. “The tents are enough, ten to a tent. More will mean more beasts, more food, more pack beasts, more work, more risk. I have slaves enough, my grown sons, and the two freedmen.”

“The tents are enough,” Marak agreed.

“This is a modest man,” the captain said to Obidhen. “The Ila finds merit in him, the god knows why.”

Obidhen looked at Marak askance, not having been told, perhaps, that his party consisted entirely of madmen.

But after that, the supplies must be gotten and loaded, and the caravan master went out with orders to gather what he needed immediately, on the Ila's charge, and form his caravan outside the walls by the fountain immediately. Obidhen promised three hours by the clepsydra in the courtyard, having his beasts within the pens to the north of the city, and his gear and his tents, he said, well-ordered and waiting in the warehouses by the northern gate. He could find the rest, with the Ila's seal on the order, within the allotted time.

“We will need for each man or woman a change of clothing,” Marak said. “Waterskins. Mending for their boots and clothing. And salves and medicines for the lot.”

“Done,” the captain said then, and appointed aides to bring it, and a corporal to rouse out a detail to carry it down past the fountain gate, to be parceled out as Obidhen directed, every man and woman a packet to keep in personal charge . . . not so much water as might be a calamity to lose, but enough to augment their water-storage by one full day and their food by a week.

“Sergeant Magin will escort you as far as your first camp out from the walls,” the captain said, when the au'it had written down the details for whoever read such records. “I know,” Memnanan said. “You wish no escort. This is not an escort.”

“I take the warning,” Marak said.

Memnanan, looked at him as if there was far, far more he wanted to ask, and to say, and to know, before he turned an abjori lowlander and a caravan of good size loose in his jurisdiction.

“You will carry a letter and water-seal,” Memnanan said, “for the lord of Pori.”

It would speed their journey, if they might water to the limit of their capacity before descending the rim. Marak approved. For the rest, he trusted Obidhen knew the wells, and the hazards.

It was approaching dawn by the time he was satisfied about the rest of the baggage, and by the time the Ila's men reported the mad were delivered to the bottom of the hill. He had thought it might take longer, and saw now that there would be no rest, not even an hour, but that was well enough. His back ached, his ears roared, his joints ached, and his eyes blurred with exhaustion, but the expectation of life and freedom had become bedrock, underlying all actions, the urgency of the departure as overwhelming as the direction, and the Ila's officers were inclined to take her orders as like the god's, instantly to be fulfilled.
East,
his voices said, persistent, though the Ila's blast had deafened him.
East. Now. Haste.

“I will come back,” he said, if Memnanan had doubted it.

Memnanan eyed him at a certain remove, as if still trying to sum him up. He likewise fixed Memnanan in his mind, a man not remarkable to look at, but distinguished by honesty, by wit, by intelligence. Someday they might be bitter enemies. In this hour they were close allies, and he meant to remember this name, this face, for good, whatever fell between them.

Then still haunted by his voices, half-deafened and aching in his bones, he turned and left, to walk down the hill like any common traveler. Memnanan sent the sergeant and his men down with him, and the au'it that the Ila had instructed to go with him walked with him, too, down the streets he had walked up mere hours ago as a prisoner.

The city rested neither by day nor by night . . . only changed its traffic. As folk did in the downland villages, people in Oburan did their major business by day; but the city being also of the Lakht, there were still plenty of curious onlookers abroad even in the depth of the night. They wondered at him, perhaps, not having had the rumor from the day people what he was. But they seemed to wonder more at the au'it, red-robed, the visible presence of the Ila, where they crossed the occasional circle of bug-besieged, oil-wasteful lamplight. Omi, they said.
Lord. Lady.
They bowed, or covered their faces, fearing her more than weapons.

When they reached the gates, gates that stood open by night in these times of peace, they had only to walk outside, there by the Mercy of the Ila, where Obidhen had arranged his beasts and their burdens. The pack beasts all sat saddled. Their burdens, which seemed all apportioned, sat ready to be bound to the saddles just before they set themselves under way. The riding beasts, too, were saddled, awaiting their riders. Obidhen had been a busy man.

“We are ready,” Obidhen reported, bowing.

“The au'it will ride with us,” Marak said. “I doubt she knows how. I doubt many of the others do.”

“We have been advised,” Obidhen said. It was still a question of how much Obidhen had been advised, but Marak thought likely Obidhen had by now heard the nature of his party.

The sergeant commanding the Ila's men, too, gave the necessary commands to the caravan master, and went off to secure their own riding beasts from somewhere near, while Obidhen began to appoint his party of madmen to their beasts.