The Warrior King (Book 4) (21 page)

That wasn’t exactly what Darik thought of as a gift. “Then why go to Balsalom to trade? Why not just take what you need from the khalifates?”

Abudallah looked horrified. “What do you take us for, thieves? Pah!”

Darik guarded his words after that. Do not question the man’s honor or his hospitality, he later decided. Keep that rule and one could say anything to Abudallah without causing insult.

Now, riding with Sofiana, Darik saw with some amusement that the girl was about to learn the same lesson. She was still bristling from the taunt about the man’s annoying younger sister.

“I don’t need you or any of you. Bunch of smelly camel riders.”

Abudallah turned once more in his saddle, his eyes and grin widening together. “This fly can bite!”

“I’ll show you a bite, you thieving, plundering—”

Now the Kratian’s expression darkened. He spat to the ground. “Uncharitable girl, do you forget how we saved you from the desert? You could barely walk from hunger. And your waterskin? Filled with sand, it was. You would not have lived to see another sunset. And you call me a thief?”

“You didn’t save me! I managed perfectly well on my own and could have crossed this desert on my hands and knees, if necessary. Without any of you!”

The other Kratians laughed, and after glaring at them for a moment, Abudallah began to laugh as well. He laughed until tears ran down his cheeks, and he wiped them with his beard.

“Yes, yes, you are right,” he said when he managed to catch his breath. “You are our guide, and we are your humble followers.” His voice turned stern. “But you must never accuse me of thievery again.” With that, Abudallah turned back around and dug his heels into his camel to urge it forward.

When he was out of earshot, Sofiana turned to Darik. “I don’t understand these men. Is he insulted or not?”

“Yes, and no. Don’t question his honor or his hospitality. Nothing else bothers him.”

The girl cast a look at Darik’s sword, now returned to its sheath of tooled leather inscribed with the shape of oak leaves. Curiosity was evident on her face, and he knew he wouldn’t have long to wait.

“How did the guards find you, anyway?”

“I made sure to announce my presence,” he said. “After you ran away that night, I stayed on your trail for a bit. The transformation left an aftertaste of magic. Once you know it’s there, you can follow. It faded after a few hours—maybe Markal could have followed longer—but I knew you’d gone into the desert instead of simply traveling up the Spice Road.”

“You didn’t think I’d be so stupid to stay on the road, did you?”

“No, but I also knew that Mufashe’s men would figure that out soon enough and go into the desert to look for you. They might have dogs or falcons, or the tattooed mages might use magic to hunt you down. So I returned to the village, bought a horse, and told the man I was traveling with my younger sister—”

“Again with the sister!”

“—and spread the same word up the highway as I traveled from caravanserai to caravanserai. I was careful for ambushes, but I didn’t get away unscathed.”

One of the battles had very nearly cost him his life. He’d rented a room at one of the inns, then crept out to get his horse and ride out of town again, knowing that he was in too much danger to simply sleep the night away in a real bed. Renting the room was meant to establish a trail for the sultan’s men to follow, nothing else.

But as he came up to the Spice Road at dusk, he came upon three men with turbans and robes who had been riding north on swift desert ponies. They ordered him to stop and drew scimitars when he did not. Darik’s horse had already spent hours on the road and couldn’t outpace the three enemies. So he brought the animal around and charged them.

He killed one man, traded blows with another, one of which very nearly unhorsed Darik, before the riders fled. At that point, he figured he’d be safer off the road himself. That was when he met Abudallah and the Kratian nomads, where he heard the story of the missing camel. He encouraged the man to ride hard to get ahead of the girl, then they all settled down to wait. A few gentle spells encouraged the firelight to spread farther than usual across the desert, made the cooking meat smell more enticing, and helped lure Sofiana into camp, as Darik had hoped.

“So you did help me,” she said when he was finished. She cast one more suspicious glance. “Assuming you’re telling the truth.”

“It doesn’t matter if you believe me or not. I intend to escort you all the way to Balsalom. And I’m afraid you now carry a tracking spell that I cast on you while you were asleep. I’ll find you wherever you go.”

This was entirely untrue. He didn’t have that particular spell in his limited collection, and neither would it be a simple thing to call forth if he had. But he could tell by Sofiana’s sour expression that she believed him.

#

They crossed over an old road late that afternoon. Apparently pressed into the hard ground by tens of thousands of camels over the centuries, the road had no fresh markings and disappeared into a dune that had drifted across its path. Darik asked Abudallah where the road led. 

“Wabur,” Abudallah said in a solemn voice. “Once the greatest city of the desert. Gold and pearls lined its streets, and every window was built of giant cut rubies. The sultan’s treasury filled a thousand-thousand rooms with gold and silver and precious gemstones.”

Darik raised an eyebrow. The Kratian chieftain sometimes gave himself to fanciful statements, and this was obviously one of them, but the road was so wide that he had no doubt that some great city had once sat at its end.

Curiosity lit up Sofiana’s face. “What happened to Wabur?”

Abudallah gave a sad shake of his head. “They grew proud and proclaimed to all the world they had created themselves from the dust of the land. They tore down the temples of the brother gods. One day, hundreds of years ago, the Sky Brother and the Mountain Brother took offense at their arrogance and rained fire and brimstone upon the city.”

“Do the ruins still exist?” Sofiana asked. “Surely someone has searched for the treasures. Assuming they really exist.”

“Who would do such a fool thing? The land is filled with evil djinn and giant scorpions. Cursed.” He leaned back in his camel and wagged his finger. “But never doubt the treasures. They exist.”

Darik thought about Wabur. In his mind, he sometimes thought of the world as no older than King Toth, so terribly did his evil change it. But Mithyl was much older than that, he must remember, his soul just as old. He might very well have lived a hundred lifetimes in this world, his soul gathered and sown by the Harvester again and again. Perhaps he had even stood on the streets of Wabur at one time, part of some merchant or prince.

The Kratians reached the Spice Road again, where Abudallah proclaimed it safe, and they continued north. They must have traveled twenty-five miles since morning, their pace accelerating as they reached the far northern edge of Marrabatti influence, almost to Balsalom’s lands. Sand and rock turned into dry scrub brush and gnarled trees. They saw more animals and could find springs and seasonal streambeds when they needed water.

They did not, however, have enough food for the Kratians to cross the empty regions into Balsalom, so Abudallah decided to stop at al-Sabba to replenish their supplies. This trading town of several thousand lay on a rich oasis where olive trees and date palms spread their limbs. It was the largest town since Marrabat, and Abudallah said it would be garrisoned with at least a hundred men. Possibly more, given the war raging to the north.

“But I have parchments that say we’ve paid our tolls, marked with the sultan’s own seal.”

The forged documents didn’t impress Darik. “And if the people of that town you raided sent someone to watch for you?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Abudallah said. “My cousin is the sheik of al-Sabba. He answers to Sultan Mufashe’s pasha, who garrisons permanently in the city, but he is not without his own tricks. I will go into the city alone, and then come back for you when it is safe.”

He turned to his men and spoke quickly in Kratian. A brief argument broke out between two of the riders, but Abudallah silenced it with a sharp word. He turned his camel and plodded toward the city, leaving the others to watch from a rise some two miles distant from the town gates. Darik stared longingly at the date palms that grew around the town and wished he could go sit in their shade.

Sofiana turned to the nearest Kratian, a young man with the first wisps of a beard on his chin and a scraggly mustache that looked like a fuzzy caterpillar had settled to take a nap on his upper lip. “How
long
before he returns? Tonight, or should we pitch our tents?” 

The young man smiled, showing a mouth already half-emptied of teeth. “Pleased to be meeting you.”

Darik grinned, but dropped his smile when the girl turned to glare at him.

Sofiana tried the others to see if they understood her. They didn’t. She pantomimed pitching a tent and starting a fire. Two men smiled and nodded, but didn’t move, while a third man offered her khat and another offered her the last skin of fermented camel milk.

“What do you think?” she asked Darik at last. “Should we make camp?”

“Not this close to town, no. For all we know, we’ll be running for our lives in about two minutes.”

The camels were snorting and grumbling. They could smell the town and were growing anxious standing here when food, water, and rest waited so close. Sofiana crawled down from the camel and leaned back against a rock. She looked up at the clouds gathered overhead as if wondering how long before it rained.

Abudallah returned about an hour later. His camel lumbered forward at a healthy clip, braying angrily. As soon as the man drew close enough, they could see him waving his hands for them to remount. Two of the Kratians rushed to gather the camels, while the others scrambled onto the backs of their own animals and goaded them to their feet. Abudallah drew closer, shouting.

Darik and Sofiana joined the Kratians in fleeing up the road. The men lashed at the pack camels to urge them on faster.

Abudallah caught up with them. “A disaster! There are hundreds of Marrabatti in the city. One of the sultan’s sons is there. My cousin said that there are patrols out looking for us.”

“Why would they search for us?” Darik asked, confused. “The stolen camels? Or is it the girl?”

“No, not the camels. And you can forget the girl. Something else is happening here. They stopped all traffic on the Spice Road. Maybe they think we’re spies.”

Sofiana turned to look back at al-Sabba, and her eyes widened in alarm. Darik followed her gaze.

Behind, some twenty horsemen came boiling out of the gates and galloped hard in their direction. The Kratians and their camels could never outrun them. He drew his sword and prepared to fight for his life.

Chapter Twenty

Markal struggled to keep up with Whelan as his friend strode down the hillside with his long legs. The wizard was stiff from sitting atop the fallen stone on the hill since the previous night. He whispered a spell to give him energy. It was a weak spell, costing little and affecting him no more than a cup or two of strong tea would have, but by the time he came into the vale below his thoughts had cleared.

A pair of horses waited for them at the bottom of the hill, and Whelan was in the saddle and galloping up the dirt road that divided the Balsalomian camp before Markal could gain his horse. He rode hard after the king, trying to avoid the foot soldiers and mounted horsemen in their flowing robes who were riding all about him. Whelan continued to outpace him as the armies parted for the king in a way they didn’t for Markal, unrecognized as he was among these men from the khalifates.

By the time Markal came riding through the broken castle gates to dismount in the bailey, Whelan had already scaled the castle walls to the battlement overlooking the Tothian Way. Here he stood with Hoffan, several men from his signal corps and their flags, and a trumpeter. The castle had shed the mass of fighting men who had occupied it the previous night. All that remained was a contingent of perhaps twenty Knights Temperate from Whelan’s personal guard, plus several dozen bowmen from the khalifates, who kept watch from the castle walls.

In front of the fortress however, Whelan had gathered a mounted force of some five hundred Eriscobans. They weren’t Knights Temperate, but nevertheless appeared to be sober, disciplined fighting men who kept even ranks while waiting for the king to give command. It was a powerful reserve that could ride out to engage the enemy wherever the king saw it was needed.

Whelan was speaking to his staff as Markal approached, wheezing from the exertion of running up the stairs from the bailey. “Macklin is too far south,” the king said. “He won’t do any good there.”

The wizard took a more careful inspection of the battle. This was an even better vantage point than the hilltop with the standing stones. From here, they commanded a clear view in every direction. Pasha Ismail’s enemy army came marching from the northern, opposite side of the highway. It was a strong force of seven or eight thousand men from the look of the dust kicked up by their marching boots and the extent of their lines. In addition, a powerful cavalry of perhaps two thousand enemy horsemen cut in from further to the west. Against them was a solid mass of two or three thousand Balsalomian footmen, wedged between two of the hills, with dozens of archers commanding the heights. It was enough to hold up Ismail’s forces until Whelan could bring in the bulk of his army, thousands of them streaming toward the battlefield.