Fires of the Desert (Children of the Desert Book 4) Read online

  Captain Ash stood some distance away, leaning on a wrist-thick wooden staff taller than himself and smiling with catlike satisfaction. His gaze flickered up as soon as Tank stepped out of the archway’s shadow, and he lifted his chin briefly. It was a warning, not a welcome.

  Tank stayed where he was, waiting.

  “Oh, get up already, boy,” the captain said.

  The pole abruptly spun in his hands, prodding the cowering youth in a delicate spot. With a yelp, the young man rolled farther away and scrambled to his feet, eyeing the captain sourly.

  Captain Ash grinned at the young man; a baring of small, stained teeth, less than friendly. “You’re a useless sack of shit, boy, whatever your beloved father may have said. I can teach you, but you’ll mop the floors and wash dishes for it while you learn. Still interested?”

  The boy spat out a sullen curse by way of answer and staggered past Tank, his face damp and blotchy. One eye was already beginning to swell, and a nasty split in his lip oozed blood over his chin.

  “Useless,” Captain Ash repeated, leaning on the staff again. “Comes of nobles teaching their children a fancy dance and calling it fighting. That boy doesn’t know the first thing about aqeyva, though his parents told him that’s what he was learning. Sunlord’s-pox on the watered-down nonsense northerns are trying to pass off these days. Bloody useless. And now his father will come fussing at me over abusing his son. Hells with them.” His eyes fixed on Tank as he spoke, intent and searching; he seemed hardly aware of his own words. Then he said, abruptly, “You still with Yuer?”

  “Yes.”

  The captain grunted, apparently hearing more than a simple affirmative. “I won’t protect you on everything.”

  “I know.” Tank paused, to see if the captain had something else to say, then went on, “Merchant Dasin is running Yuer’s main caravan from Bright Bay to Sandsplit for the next few months, on a trial basis. I’m working for Dasin, as is another mercenary Yuer suggested. Dasin’s meeting with him now.”

  “Which one?”

  “Raffin.”

  Captain Ash’s mouth tightened, but he said nothing.

  Tank waited, giving the captain time to offer up the information, and finally asked. “Is Raffin an unsworn?”

  “No. He’s still hanging on to his sworn status, last I knew,” the captain said. He squinted, seeming to consider. At last, he added, “Not someone to tangle with, mind you. Experienced. Holds grudges. Knows his business. He won’t take second place to you without a fight; and I know you’re good, boy, but flat straight: he’s meaner. You buckle under if you have any sense.”

  Tank let out a breath, not surprised at all. Yuer wouldn’t have let it be so easy as all that, not until he and Dasin proved themselves.

  “Situation in Kybeach you ought to know about,” Tank said, letting the matter of Raffin go for the moment. “I—uhm—scrapped a bit with the local stable-boy. He’s shaken more than anything else, but seemed the sort to whine. Might have trouble on my way through next time; wanted to know about...well, limits.”

  Captain Ash’s frown relaxed. “Man comes at you with a fist, use a fist. Comes at you with a knife, use your knife. They try to arrest you, show your Hall marker, give ‘em your name, and tell ‘em to bring me the complaint. They fuss past that, tell ‘em to stuff it up their arseholes. Nobody along the Coast Road messes with my hall. North of the Forest, different situation; but you’re only going to Sandsplit, so that’s a talk for another time.”

  “Thank you.” Tank began a step backwards, intending a polite retreat.

  “Tank.”

  He stopped, balanced, squared his stance again. The captain’s face crinkled in thoughtful amusement.

  “I could use your help with training the nits as come through the door,” the captain said. “If you want another road.”

  Tank shook his head. “I’d rather be moving,” he said. “And Dasin’s not so bad to work with.”

  “I may not know him, but I know him, if you take my meaning,” Captain Ash said. “And what I see is, he’s a sneaky little shit.”

  Tank held back a smile.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I know what Dasin is.”

  Captain Ash shook his head dourly, but let it go.

  “Come back alive,” he said; his usual farewell.

  “I’ll do my best.”

  “You’re learning.”

  Chapter Four

  The palace seemed like an alien land as Alyea strode through its halls and rooms. Sights she’d once taken for granted now seemed crisp and fresh, filled with new symbolism. Smells came sharp and pungent: traces of cleaning vinegar, of oranges and mint, of human sweat and harsh soap. A whiff of roast chicken and fresh bread drifted by as she passed the entrance to the kitchens. Whether the new clarity came from being blind for a short while, or from some continuing development as a desert lord, she couldn’t tell, and didn’t really care.

  She’d used one of the servant entrances, deliberately, to avoid a fuss. The single guard on duty there had eyed her thoughtfully but let her pass without challenge. Servants spared her faint, perplexed glances as she went by, but made no protest, which told her others had used this route—likely for the same reason—in the past.

  The entryway was simple but not plain, a wide wooden door with a pattern of three-lobed brickroot leaves in a wide strip down its center, and the same pattern repeated along the frame. Tenacity, that meant, and strength against adversity; a fitting symbol for a servant’s entrance. The flagstones underfoot in the following corridors were coarse, pale grey slabs, probably from the Horn or one of the southern mountain ranges. Seeing something odd, she paused to study them, and discovered shallow carvings on each flagstone.

  “Excuse me,” she said to a servant passing by, a short, fat woman with several missing teeth and the scars of a hard life all over her sallow, wrinkled skin. “What do those marks mean?”

  The woman eyed Alyea for a moment, as if debating whether or not to answer, and finally said, “Names, my lady. Palace servants who’ve passed on, or fallen in service. We remember them.”

  She bobbed a quick bow and scurried away, while Alyea stood as breathless as though she’d just been punched in the stomach. Slowly, she turned and looked back at the path to the door, then around again to the way forward. Every stone she could see held marks.

  How many had been added during the Purge?

  Alyea shut her eyes, shuddering. “Too many,” she whispered. “Too damn many.”

  After a few moments, she collected herself and moved on, glancing down only occasionally.

  She took a circuitous route after that, examining her surroundings with more care. Huge archways led out into courtyards filled with abundant plantings, wide stone benches, and gravel paths, all glistening under the constant drizzle of rain that had been going on since early morning. Chill, damp air drafted through the outer hallways that opened to those courtyards. She shivered in spite of her heavy cloak and turned to a more indoor route.

  The inner hallways, not as wide for the most part as the outer, had floors decorated with a vaguely geometric pattern. The tiles were a mixture of the coarse, light grey and some of a smoother, charcoal grey. The pattern was punctuated on occasion by triangles of an oddly familiar pale yellow stone. It looked newly laid to her eye; she paused again, frowning at it, trying to remember where she’d seen that yellow stone before. At last, giving up, she moved on; the memory would come to her if it was important.

  The walls held thick tapestries displaying historical events: the first she came to showed King Ayrq of Bright Bay as he accepted the surrender of the last warring tribe. His booted foot rested on a pile of skulls and his hands reached up to place the crown on his own head as his former enemies knelt before him, eyes downcast. A similar mural decorated the formal palace dining hall; Alyea had never liked it much, finding it entirely too grim for her taste. But something about this one felt different. She paused to examine it more closely.

  In th
e background, she spotted three small, hardly noticeable robed figures: one in green, one in white, and one in black. Their hoods were pulled forward over their faces, obscuring their expressions, but their hands were outstretched, palms up and raised to the sky, as though calling down the blessings of the gods upon the moment.

  Alyea moved on, smiling now, and at each new tapestry paused for just a moment, finding some small, often subtle symbol of the Three Gods worked into the background. A few were worn, frayed, or damaged; clearly they’d been hidden during the Purge, then pulled out to decorate the hallways as a mark of triumph after Oruen banished all the priests from Bright Bay.

  Did that mean Oruen had sworn his allegiance to the southern three, rather than the northern four? Or was this a servant subtlety, a minor rebellion reflecting the change of regime? Alyea wasn’t sure how to interpret it, and knew Oruen was canny enough not to reveal the answer until it suited him to do so.

  Hall tables and shelves, also, held the signs of change: candelabra worked in complex forms that resembled the desert symbols she’d seen on the Scratha Conclave banners; sprays of flowers arranged in color-patterns that she suspected had more meaning than simple beauty; small, beautifully worked stone figurines of a nearly translucent, striated stone that reminded Alyea of the delicate cups of the teyanain.

  Hard to believe these hallways had ever been grim and lifeless. Hard to remember that the bleak decorations of the Four Gods had been the only permitted display throughout the palace, and indeed the entire of Bright Bay. It had all swept away, like a receding tide, as swiftly as it had come in, leaving only detritus behind.

  Alyea glanced down at the floor, her mood sobering again even though the tiles here held no marks, and quickened her pace. She’d seen enough, idled enough; and the king would be waiting for her.

  Rain pattered and streaked overhead, smearing the glass in the ceiling to a watery refraction; the room, normally cheerful in sunlight, held a grey chill even against the light from numerous torches and candles. Once again, Alyea looked around with a new appreciation of her surroundings.

  The chairs, well-padded and covered with thick blue fabric, had wide seats, thick legs, and slender backs decorated with carvings, each one different. One bore a seagull design, another a sea-eagle, a third a desert hawk. She couldn’t tell what the carvings on Oruen’s more elaborate chair showed, because he was sitting in it.

  Grey and blue tiles, interspersed with squares of that same strange yellow stone, had been laid underfoot. She couldn’t recall what the floor had looked like before she left for Scratha Fortress, but thought that here, again, the work seemed relatively new.

  The walls held more tapestries than she remembered, showing an array of animals: one displayed four different types of badgers, another twenty different snakes, a third a series of turtles. She ignored Oruen for another few moments as she turned in place to examine the new decorations; when she finally looked back to him, his expression was a mixture of bemusement and annoyance.

  “You’ve never paid so much attention to my casual room before,” he said.

  She sat down in the chair with the desert hawk carving as she said, “I’ve never paid attention to a lot of things before, Lord Oruen. You wanted to see me?”

  He regarded her with an unusually cool intensity. “Your mother has been to see me.”

  Alyea’s spine stiffened. His expression did not bode well for the result of that meeting. I should have gone to see her before this, she thought ruefully. I was too busy...enjoying myself to even think of her.

  “In...in Open Court?” Alyea guessed, dreading the answer.

  “No, thank the gods,” he said, and rubbed at his eyes with one hand. “She asked for a private audience.” He paused, then added, “She’s seriously upset with you.”

  “I know,” Alyea said, repressing a sigh. “What did she want?”

  “She believes that you’ve lost your mind.”

  Alyea sat up even straighter, shocked. “She said that? Literally? Good gods!”

  Oruen nodded, a tired smile quirking across his mouth. “She told me that you’d spun a bizarrely nonsensical story to account for your whereabouts and actions, then walked out and haven’t been seen since. She believes you’re off raving through the city somewhere. And as your tale was all obviously fantasy, she wants you found, restrained, and removed from official authority over Peysimun Family.”

  Alyea sat still, speechless.

  “I think she’s still a touch peeved over your interfering with my attendance at that party she threw for your return,” Oruen said dryly. “I believe she actually lost quite a bit of respect, promising that I’d be there and then having to endure the disappointment of some fairly influential people. This could be, in part, revenge for that.”

  “What did you say?”

  Oruen tugged at his lower lip and studied her face for a long, quiet moment before answering.

  “I told her,” he said finally, dropping his hand to the arm of his chair, “that the matter stood between the two of you, and that I had no authority over a full desert lord’s actions. I told her that I did not think you were insane, nor raving; I said I was fairly certain she could locate you in short order, simply by asking Lord Eredion. She declined.” His mouth quirked. “In rather strong terms. So I told her that I would find you, and call you in for a talk. I also told her that I believed you were quite probably telling the truth about your experiences.”

  “Thank you,” Alyea said, then drew a deep breath and asked, “How did she take that?”

  “She wasn’t quite upset enough to challenge my sanity,” Oruen said, “but you really do need to have another talk with her. Soon. And settle the question beyond a doubt.” His expression hardened. “I suggest not bringing Deiq to that conversation. She’s even more angry at him than at you, and I can’t say I blame her. He has a habit of bringing complications to every situation he involves himself in, and I’d like nothing better than to see him out of this city for good.”

  Alyea stood, her nerves snapping taut, and said coldly, “That matter is between the two of you, Lord Oruen. If there’s nothing else, I’ll take my leave now.”

  He stayed seated, regarding her without affection. “There’s quite a lot else,” he said in clipped tones, “but I suspect that’s all you’ll listen to at this point.”

  “Good day, Lord Oruen,” she said crisply, and strode from the room without looking back.

  The Palace took up as much room outdoors as in. There were the royal food gardens, flower gardens, and herb gardens, all interspersed with fruit and nut trees; the royal leisure-area; the lesser lounging spots, where benches and pavilions afforded shelter from sun and rain for courtiers and palace staff; even a small outdoor meditation spot, which for some reason had not been entirely destroyed during the Purge.

  Apparently even priests of the Northern Church had liked a quiet area in which to pray from time to time. All they had done was to remove all traces of the `pagan’ southern religion from the area. Even Alyea had to admit that the difference, in the end, was minimal.

  On sunny days, Alyea had often visited the meditation area herself; as it afforded no shelter from poor weather, she bypassed it today. She considered pausing to brood in one of the pavilions, but the grey of the day seemed to be creeping into her bones. She wanted to get out of the rain, out of the chill, into somewhere warm and comforting.

  Her thoughts turned to Deiq, waiting for her in what had once been the Northern Church tower. Ironic, that the place she had hated the most out of the entire city of Bright Bay was turning into her refuge.

  Oruen had been almost right, she mused: Deiq had a habit of bringing changes to any situation he became involved with. And those changes could be complicated.

  She passed through the outer palace gates with an absent-minded nod to the guards, barely noticing that they’d opened the gates for her and bowed. Normally she would have smiled at them, perhaps even paused to say hello if she knew one by name
, but today such small courtesies seemed unimportant against the problem of what she was going to do about her mother.

  Pausing a few steps past and to one side of the gates, she admitted to herself that Oruen had been entirely right on one point: bringing Deiq to see her mother at the moment would be a bad idea. She’d have to handle the discussion alone, and she might as well do it now, while she stood within the Seventeen Gates.

  She turned left, deciding to pick up a bottle of Stecatr blue wine first. It was her mother’s favorite—and, of course, one of the most expensive wines sold in Bright Bay. Perhaps that would sweeten the discussion.

  Peysimun Mansion’s grounds boasted a tall fence and wide, sturdy gates that hadn’t been closed since the Purge; and even then, the gates hadn’t been guarded. But now they stood not only firmly shut, but attended by four burly guards in House livery of blue and green. Their expressions, under their rain hoods, ranged from surly to nervous.

  Alyea didn’t have to ask questions to understand the situation: her mother, in the face of the king’s refusal to help, had decided to set her own restraints and refuse her daughter entry altogether. As she’d never seen the men before, her mother must have gone to the unprecedented extent of hiring mercenaries.

  Idiot. She shouldn’t have allowed Deiq to distract her. This could have been avoided—probably.

  Two of the guards, older men with bristly, jowly faces and flat stares, moved two steps forward and a step closer together as Alyea stopped in front of the gates. The other two, both considerably younger, darted nervous glances at each other and actually backed up a step, provoking a snort of disgust from one of the older men.

  “Sorry, lady,” one of the older guards said, tone indifferent. “Peysimun Mansion is closed to visitors today.” His cold blue eyes watched her as though sizing up her desirability as a bed partner.