Hammerfall

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.