Eight: A Servant of the Sun

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“Magic” is an unfortunately broad term, encompassing a diverse and little-understood set of phenomena. The best-known variety, to humans of the Dominion, is the power of the pyres, as channeled by handmaidens and perpetuated through regular blood sacrifice. The arts of the moonchildren are far less familiar, but are believed to involve traffic with Kur in some way, due to their worship of the bazu deity Nidriz. Nonhuman magic is likewise mysterious. The tinapi can produce fertility, prosperity and life in ways that defy nature, but the mechanism is unclear. The craft of the bazuu is known only by its bloody use in war. Murrush have only the magical nature of their draconic metabolism, while the brutish reshki, in sufficient numbers, are rendered nigh-invincible by the psychic bond known as the sul. All of these can be described as the violation or transcendence of ordinary physical limitations by living or conscious beings; no other common element can be discerned.

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Four tetrads later, Ram sat on the deck of a very different boat, sailing north. He was stationed at the side of the barque, the spot closest to the brick firepit that powered the sail. Given that he was wearing full bronze armor on a hot summer day, this should have struck the others as odd, but they had a six-man tile tournament going, acolytes versus flamekeepers, and weren’t about to waste time paying attention to him. None of them had so much as glanced in his direction for five minutes, nor come close enough to wonder why he wasn’t sweating. The handmaiden might have, but she was young and inexperienced, and had to focus on steering the ship.

This plan had seemed much more difficult and dangerous, when he’d first hatched it in his room at Tirnun’s house. Their timing was fortunate; they were coming down the Teshalun just in time for Dul Karagi’s quarterly tax assessment. It was only the summer session, and yields would be poor, but still more than enough. At least he hadn’t had to beg to get on the boat this time. He only had to show up in a flamekeeper’s armor, holding a flamekeeper’s sword.

Which was a second stroke of luck: the Lugal had recently decided to step up security. Not enough to pose a threat to Ram, or even a real inconvenience, but enough to reassure a public made nervous by the recent destruction of Urapu hearth at the hands of the infamous sorcerer Rammash im-Belemel. Possibly their enemy was looking out for subversion by the Ensi’s faction, as well; Ram neither knew nor cared. Either way, it amounted to ten militiamen posted in every hearth, supervised by one listless flamekeeper.

The tax assessors had picked up one such unhappy soul at Mishlada—now the southernmost of Dul Karagi’s hearths—this morning. His armor didn’t fit very well, and they didn’t recognize him, but neither was remarkable. It was less than two months into the bloom, after all, and a solitary hearth posting was exactly the kind of wretched detail they would foist off on a new recruit with secondhand gear. After tetrads of monotonous travel, they’d waved him onto the boat before he could get halfway through his sad tale of a deathly ill relative back at the pyre.

Now Ram had only to sit by the side of the boat, gratefully ignored, and watch the empty riverbank pass them by until he saw a trio of hearthless peddlers stopping to refill their water-skins. He gave it a few more minutes to be sure, then stood up, carefully stretching out the kinks in his legs and back. This seemed like the sort of occasion where he really ought to be feeling at least a bit nervous, but he didn’t. After all, it wasn’t like they could hurt him.

Ram palmed the little knife from his belt as he walked into the center of the brick platform, where the handmaiden was channeling at least twice as much heat as necessary over too large an area. Her haranu had to know it couldn’t hurt him, but it apparently had some consideration for his flammable clothing, because it promptly went out. The girl was so intent on her job that she took a moment to realize what had gone wrong. She might have figured it out a half second before he grabbed her by the back of her neck, and held the knife to her throat.

Even then, the men were too wrapped up in their game to notice. He cleared his throat. “Gentlemen! Please put your swords and armor on the deck, and jump in the river.”

He probably enjoyed the next several seconds’ display of mounting indignation, confusion and panic more than he should have. The acolytes would have been no threat even before Ram was indwelt; they froze in place. There were still three flamekeepers, and one of him, and it didn’t look like they’d figured out who he was yet. But this was a problem they couldn’t solve by rushing forward sword-first, so they had no clue how to handle it. All they could do was look at each other, lost and helpless as new lambs.

Possibly they would have eventually worked their way up to trying something—probably something daft—but he saw no reason to find out. The boat was starting to drift back downstream, and he needed them all off before they reached the rendezvous. “My name,” he said, “is Rammash im-Belemel. You are traitors to the Ensi, and this boat and everything on it is rightfully mine. So get the hell off. I could kill all of you, if I felt like it.”

One of the men looked like he was working up the courage to argue. Possibly making speeches was a mistake. “I’m not going to hurt you, miss,” he whispered to the handmaiden, as much to silence his angry haranu as to reassure her. He was close enough to see her face through her veil; she was distractingly pretty. “Do you know how to swim?” She only stared at him with her mouth open, so he pulled the knife-point slightly back and said, “Just nod if you can swim.”

Her head bobbed, briefly. He tucked the knife back in his belt, picked her up, and chucked her over the side. All three flamekeepers charged the moment she was out of the way; the leader’s first swipe missed Ram by several feet, and he got kicked in the crotch for his troubles. The next two ran into him, then each other, on the narrow deck.

There was no need to kill, or even injure, these men. Not only were they no threat, it seemed like it would make life more difficult for the Lugal to spare them. The first had already dropped his sword to clutch at his balls; Ram simply wrenched the blade from the hand of the next, ignoring his futile attacks. The remaining sword evidently got the idea, and forced its owner to let go with a burst of heat.

“Shuck your metal and swim for it,” he repeated. “The current’s not that strong this time of year.” He drew Beshi, for a little extra encouragement, and the acolytes promptly followed the handmaiden overboard. The flamekeepers lost what little nerve they’d had, and the lot of them were stripped and over the side within a minute.

Five minutes later, the drifting boat got stuck in the mud along one side of the river. He let down the anchor, just to make sure, then waited. Soon enough, he saw three people approaching from downstream: one very tall man, a boy about his own age, and a lovely young girl, all dressed as traveling peddlers. The girl raised her hands and whooped when she saw him; Ram whooped back.

“That easy, huh?” Darun said, looking the boat over with her hands on her hips. The boy beside her was much less nonchalant, but then he’d had a pretty bad time of it lately. Barely twelve hours earlier, he’d learned a brutal lesson about trusting strange, alluring women, and spent the night bound and gagged in a hostel room as a consequence. Now his hands were free, but Bal had his sword, Ram had his armor, and he plainly didn’t have any fight left in him.

“The hard part’s next,” Ram corrected Darun. “You’ve got a lot of crap to sort through.”

“Just let me at it!” she said, and splashed through the shallows with an almost indecent smile on her face. She’d been more enthusiastic about this plan than Ram had. It was just her style: lazy, insolent, and lucrative. Or so they hoped. Darun heaved herself up over the side and down into the hold. After twenty seconds of thumping, her voice came up from below: “You like melons, Ram? Because we own a shitload of melons right now. Beans, too. Broad beans, lentils, chickpeas … ”

“It’s the summer assessment,” he reminded her. “Most payment’s in kind, and that’s what’s in season. Keep digging, they pay some cash too.”

“This’d be done faster with help,” she said.

“It’d be too crowded with two people. Besides, you should change while you’re down there. A lady needs her privacy.” He started throwing mail shirts to Bal, who was tying the hapless flamekeeper back up. When he was done with that, he started changing as well.

Darun emerged in a fine but somewhat wrinkled dress, bearing a small, locked hardwood chest. Beshi knocked the lock off with a blow, revealing (by Darun’s estimate) about twelve or fifteen gold, mostly in copper or silver fragments. Less than they’d hoped for, but it could have been worse. A good haul for a single morning’s effort. Sadly, they couldn’t find a perfectly ripe melon to snack on.

They left the boat’s canopy in shreds on its deck, and their captive bound on the bank in its shade. A quarter hour’s brisk walk brought them back to Mishlada hearth, where a boat was already waiting to carry a highborn lady and her two flamekeeper escorts back home to Dul Tenzen, just down the river. If anybody wondered what such people had been doing strolling around the riverbank, or why the hem of her dress and their pants were wet, they didn’t ask. Given the physical fitness of the acolytes, it would probably be at least an hour before the half-drowned assessment team stumbled back to the hearth, and the lady had made clear that she expected to set off on a moment’s notice.

It was more of a raft than a boat, really, with a crew of four stringy tinapi to tow it while the human husband and wife on deck tended to cargo and any passengers. Hundreds of such little craft made a meager living off odd jobs up and down the Teshalun; Ram had even seen a few look for work at Urapu. Now it was late summer, too hot for any sensible person to want to travel. If three well-heeled people were offering money up front, the man and his wife weren’t about to annoy them with delays. The tinapi pulled them away from Mishlada’s docks less than thirty seconds after a pair of silver tanbirs landed in the owner’s palm.

Now they were under way, as safe as they could hope to be. Dul Tenzen was the last pyre before Pilupura, and both were downstream; soon enough they could finally begin looking for Imbri. In the meantime, their biggest worry would be yet another tedious river journey, with a pair of mostly-idle (but likely sharp-eared) strangers for company.

Ram retreated to the shaded space in the middle of the deck. Heat and light had ceased to bother him, but now that he was close to Dul Karagi again the haranu was less ravenous than it had been up in the mountains. Bathing in the sun too long felt like hanging about the table after he was full, picking at his plate just because it was there. If he kept it up, he knew, the spirit would get restless, and push him to work off the glut of energy by doing something aggressive.

It hadn’t been like this just after the bloom. Handmaidens were indwelt young so the spirit could mature with them; was Ram’s spirit growing too? There was no telling what he might be like in six months, or next bloom. With every day, it became harder to forget that he was a marked man, in more ways than one. He wasn’t half so frightened of attacks, now, but far more frightened of himself. He’d almost preferred it when he’d just had a few useless little tricks.

Now he seldom got tired, didn’t sweat, shrugged off the white sun, got by with less sleep. He was stronger and faster than before, as long as he had enough fire inside him; he felt sure that, if he’d brawled with Kamenrag in his current state, he would have beaten the man to death. He wouldn’t have been able to stop himself, really. Would this end with him becoming a monster, a weapon like a shab to destroy the Ensi’s enemies?

On a sudden impulse, he sank to his knees, facing the pyre. Father Haranduluz. I have done as your servant asked, as well as I knew. I don’t know how else to show my trust or devotion, even if I don’t feel it. And I don’t know what else to do. You’ve shown me the way before; please, light my path again.

As he finished the prayer—inadequate as it seemed—he felt a strange sensation, a sudden awareness of another mind looking down on him across the miles that separated their little raft from the Temple at Dul Karagi. A male mind, he thought. The Ensi? Karagi’s spirit, waking out of the pyre? Or Haranduluz himself?

The mind regarded him from a distance with cool detachment for some time. Ram knew he had no way of hiding; that lofty soul would see him, sharp and clear, if he sank to the bottom of the sea. But he could catch only a shallow glimpse of its own intentions in return.It studied him for a long time, then flickered away, focusing on the light at Mishlada instead, where it watched with growing consternation, then annoyance, then rage. Ram felt himself beginning to tremble—not his own fear, but the terror of the haranu within him.

He was starting to hyperventilate when the furious eye turned back to him, and the vision ended with a searing pain in his chest that knocked him flat to the deck. It spread out from his heart, driving tendrils of fire and pain into every nerve and vein in his body. He could not think, could barely even breathe. All he could do was lie on his back with every muscle in his body taut, and hurt until the anger passed.

“Sir? Sir! Are you all right?”

The ship’s owner was leaning over him, showing a surprising level of concern. More concern than Darun, who was still leaning against one of the poles holding up the sunshade. Ram spent several minutes reassuring the man with disjointed phrases, racking his brain for plausible explanations and coming up dry. At last Darun volunteered that her bodyguard had recently come down with a strange heart condition, and suffered odd pains as a side effect of the medication he was taking for it. Satisfied, the man returned to bossing his tinapi.

“You couldn’t have said that sooner?” he asked as he rose to his feet.

Darun shrugged. “I wanted to see how you’d do. You really can’t improvise for anything. What the hell was that, anyway?”

Ram looked around, but the man was safely out of earshot at the other side of the raft. “I think the Ensi figured out what we just did, and he didn’t like it.”

“What a dick! It’s not like he’s been a lot of help, and he’s not going to miss that money.”

“I don’t think it’s about the money. He told us to lie low and out of the way, remember? He got upset, maybe even a little frightened, before he settled on being angry. I think that, whatever he’s trying to do, we just made it harder for him, somehow.”

“Pssht. He should have given better directions, if this was so damn important to him.”

Which was very reasonable—but Ram still felt guilty. The worst of it was, he didn’t know if it was his own feeling, or the haranu’s, or if there was a real difference anymore. Maybe he was like Bal, after all, and the best he would be able to hope for before long was to have moments of sanity.

“Oh, geez, you’re freaking out, aren’t you? We have got to get you to let go a little, Ram. Tell you what, you want to grab my ass?”

“What?”

“That woman keeps staring at me, like I’m going to jump on her gross little man the moment she turns her back. I want to see what she does if we do something actually naughty, you know? So come on, grab my ass. Maybe we’ll make out a little too. Sound fun?”

Her veil was a perfect mask; he couldn’t tell how much of that was joking, or a ruse to rile him up. “Darun, what is wrong with you?”

“Hey, they can’t afford to kick us off the boat, and she’s too scared of Bal to get rough. Bet you anything she just looks away. If she screams or faints, I owe you a drink.”

“You’re wearing a veil. Weren’t you supposed to be some kind of upper-class lady?”

“You think those women don’t like a little honey on the side? They’re, like, half the perks of being a flamekeeper. I could tell you some of the stories I’ve heard, boy—“

“Please don’t.” He was on the verge of thinking up a further biting rejoinder when he happened to glance toward the front of the boat, and saw the ruins of Urapu coming up on their right. Whatever slim courage he’d recovered during the squabble bled out of him.

He’d originally planned to donate some share of the spoils from the assessment to help his home recover. Darun had argued against it; a good part of the information in their warrants had to have come from the hearth. Ram had doggedly insisted, until they drew near to Dul Karagi, and heard that it was a pointless argument. The hearth had been “evacuated” a couple of tetrads after they left.

Nobody they spoke to knew what had happened to the survivors. Mostly bonded, Ram was sure, in service to people who wouldn’t listen if they talked, or sold by ones and twos to faraway places where nothing they said would be any more than a wild rumor. Some might have abandoned the hearth on their own, fleeing with their remaining wealth to set up house elsewhere, or even taking their chances as hearthless to avoid being bonded.

Whatever had happened, the light of the hearth itself shone bright from the tower, but no handmaidens tended it, and nobody lived in the houses. There would be passing squatters, scavengers, looters, and travelers, taking temporary advantage while they could from what little was left behind. In time, when the current struggle was ended and forgotten, there might be a new community on the site. But nobody would ever gather the Urapu Ram had known again.

He couldn’t see much of Darun’s expression through the veil, but she could see his plainly enough. She didn’t resist when he took her in his arms and held her tight. She was still a terrible person, and he wouldn’t trust her, but there were some things a man—or a woman—couldn’t face alone. One of those was to sit on a boat and watch the ruins of a home drift away. She knew that even better than he did.

Are you angry, Ensi? Fine. Be angry. But I’d do it all again, if I could. You’ve got no right to tell me to do anything, after this. His name was Rammash im-Belemel ta-Urapu ni-Karagi. Belemel was a captive, many miles away. He’d be killed if he ever went back to Dul Karagi. And now Urapu was gone. Now he was only Rammash, and that seemed a pitiful thing to be at the moment.

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