Thick as Thieves Read online

  Every evening the guards not on duty ate together before their shifts started, so there was a group around the fire as the Braeling told us his plans. He meant to make enough money fighting for the emperor that he could go back home and buy land. The other guards were pessimistic. Tikir and Simkit, who I’d learned were brothers, exchanged a look and then dropped their eyes, but no one said anything.

  “The money is good,” insisted the Braeling. “Two years, and I’ll have the stake for a small farm. Four, and I’ll have a stake for a large one.”

  I thought it was a sensible plan, but even the Attolian was shaking his head.

  “Bah!” said the Braeling, dismissing all of them. “You are old women, afraid of sweat and blood. And you,” he said to me, “don’t have any meat in your dish.”

  It was true—I didn’t dive into the common pot to claim my share. I wasn’t going to try to chisel a piece of meat away from a man twice my size, especially not when that man was eating with his knife. I made myself content with whatever was left once they’d served themselves.

  The Braeling generously filled up my bowl and castigated the Attolian. “You should take better care of your little friend,” he said, and the other guards joined in agreement, happier to give the Attolian a good-natured ribbing than to talk about the Braeling’s future.

  Later, when we were alone, I asked the Attolian why he and the other guards had seemed so doubtful about the Braeling’s plans. “He’ll overstay his luck,” said the Attolian. “He’ll take a wound that kills or cripples him, and he’ll live out his life among strangers. He knows he’ll never see his home again.”

  “Why not turn back, then?”

  The Attolian shrugged. “Maybe he left debts behind. Maybe he killed the wrong man.” The other guards had asked us no questions about our past. No one would ask the Braeling about his. He would go east and fight the emperor’s wars, carrying out the bloody business of larger countries eating up the littler ones. It wasn’t a matter of theory in a tiny office in the emperor’s palace. It was the work of their lives and the end of many of them.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We were more than halfway to Perf. Everything around us was rocks and chalky red dirt. We had spent the previous day climbing up to a rocky and narrow passage that twisted through the range of hills that lay across our path. The guards had been particularly alert—this was where a few daring bandits might have swept out of a narrow side canyon to pluck up a sheep or a goat or a child and disappear back into the rocky terrain—but the pass was behind us without incident. On our right, the hills still rose, and on our left, the ground fell away to a rolling, mostly barren plain. Presumably there was life growing out there, but I couldn’t see it. Ahead of us, we had a long and gradual descent and the fading possibility of bandits. Two of the guards, as well as the Attolian and myself, were relaxing on the back end of the last wagon of the caravan.

  I was counting the hours left in the day when we heard hoofbeats echoing in the pass behind us. We all looked up at the sound, alert but not particularly concerned. It was only when two horsemen came into view behind us, riding hard, that the guards stiffened. The Attolian suddenly dropped off the back of the wagon, pulling me with him.

  “Ride on,” he said. “We will take care of this and catch up.”

  He didn’t need to say it twice. I heard the driver shout, passing an alarm toward the front of the caravan, and the wagon began to rumble faster down the road. Not so fast that I didn’t have time to see the shocked faces of the guards staring back at us as they rolled farther and farther away. I looked toward the approaching riders. Even with my poor eyes, I could see that there were only two of them, and the guards’ alarm seemed outsized. For them, I mean. My alarm was perfectly reasonable, as the horsemen appeared to be waving at us, and I was certain that what they were waving was swords. The Attolian, meanwhile, was striding confidently back uphill. Awkwardly I pulled my sword out of its sheath and followed him.

  The first horseman, well ahead of his companion, tried to ride the Attolian down, but the Attolian stepped abruptly to the side at the last possible moment and swung his sword up toward the head of the horse. It reared and fell backward with its rider still on its back. The Attolian began to run then toward the second rider, who was more careful in his approach, swinging his horse away from the Attolian at the last moment and striking as he passed. They were too far away for me to see anything except that the second rider’s caution did him little good. He was unseated a moment later and fell to the ground. I didn’t see whether he got up. I had a more pressing concern. The first rider had struggled out from under his rolling horse and was limping toward me.

  I clutched the sword in both hands and tried to imitate the stance I’d seen the guards take as they practiced together. As my attacker got close enough to see clearly, I realized with horror that he was no bandit. He was one of the Namreen, the emperor’s handpicked bodyguard. No wonder the wagons had rumbled away and no wonder the other guards had been shocked at the blithe way the Attolian had hopped off the cart.

  I considered dropping the sword and running, but the Namreen was already too close. Even limping, he moved too fast for me to be sure I could escape him. I backed up a few shuffling steps as he shifted his sword to his left hand and reached for me with his right.

  “Gut him!” screamed the Attolian from up the road, and I lifted my wobbling sword. The Namreen rolled his eyes, and without even switching his sword back to his right hand, he swung it at my head. As if it would help, I tried to duck. I felt the blow like a searing light followed by darkness, probably because I had closed my eyes, and I stumbled back as the Namreen knocked the sword from my hand. Putting both hands to my head, I continued backward off the road, the rough ground dropping away under my feet. I avoided the Namreen’s next grab by virtue of falling over. The Attolian bellowed from somewhere close by, and the Namreen must have turned to face him.

  He didn’t reach for me again, and a moment later he was dead. His body dropped beside me, the Attolian’s sword straight through his head.

  Jerking the sword back out and wiping it on the dead man’s clothes, the Attolian said, sounding puzzled but not angry, “Why didn’t you gut him? He had no guard up at all.”

  Sitting up, I stared at the dead man lying in front of me while trying to blink the wetness from my eyes. It was my blood, I realized. I held my hands away from my head and looked at them. They were scarlet, the blood covering them an impossibly bright red. I would have screamed, but my throat was so tightly closed that only an airy whistling sound came out.

  “Do you know,” I said in a strangled whisper, “do you know what happens to a slave who arms himself in the empire? Do you have any idea what they do to slaves who even look for too long at a sword, or a dagger, or anything more dangerous than a penknife? Do you have any idea, you imbecile, what they do, what they do . . .” My voice seemed to be getting higher and higher as I repeated myself.

  The Attolian dropped his sword in the dirt beside the dead Namreen and without another word grabbed me in his arms. I’d just called him an imbecile. I was sure he was going to kill me with his bare hands. I struggled but couldn’t get free. He only squeezed tighter until I stopped thinking of anything but drawing my next sobbing breath.

  “Kamet,” the Attolian said quietly in my ear, “it’s a flesh wound. It will be all right. It’s messy, but it will be all right, I promise. Don’t be frightened.”

  There was blood everywhere. All over me, all over the Attolian. It was not going to be all right. I was going to die out in the dirt in the hot sun on the road to Perf, and my whole life would have amounted to nothing. Nothing. I would not direct the empire, or be a great patron of the arts, or collect my own library of manuscripts. I would die. I conjugated it. Will die, would die. Present tense, dying. I was dying. I was dying.

  But the Attolian just kept repeating over and over that all would be well. “Head wounds bleed, but we can stitch it up, I’ve done it before,
don’t be afraid. Kamet, I wouldn’t tell you this if it weren’t true. I swear to you, I am not going to leave your dead body beside the road to Perf. I didn’t come all the way to this godsforsaken cesspit so that I could go home and tell my king I failed him.”

  Suddenly so chatty, I thought, and what was he calling a cesspit? Attolia, that was a cesspit. A backward, savage, stinking hole in the ground. I knew because I’d been there. They couldn’t read there. They lived like animals. They were still counting on their fingers, for gods’ sakes.

  My feet stopped kicking and my breathing slowed down. He loosened his grip and sat supporting me with an arm behind my back.

  “It really will be all right, Kamet,” he said.

  “They are Namreen,” I wailed hopelessly, my tongue almost too numb to form words, doubting that the Attolian would even knew what I meant. The dead men were the elite of the emperor’s guard. Loyal and deadly and supported by the bottomless funding of the emperor’s purse, they were unstoppable. Obviously the emperor was not content that I might disappear carrying with me the guilt for my master’s death. He meant to bring me back, no matter where I might run.

  The Attolian grunted and swiveled to look over his shoulder at the body behind him. He clearly did know who the Namreen were. “I suppose we won’t be catching up with the wagons after all,” he said.

  A little later, he got to his feet and helped me to mine, then led me across the road where the ground rose into the hills we’d been winding our way through for the last few days. He found a place where a rocky outcrop provided a sliver of shade and sat me down. It only took a slight pressure on my shoulders and my knees folded up underneath me. He handed me a piece of fabric; he must have pulled the Namreen’s headcloth off as we passed.

  “Hold this to your head. Press down on it.” He moved my hands into the correct position. “Just sit here while I take care of a few things.”

  One of the horses was still nearby. The Attolian caught it and rode away, coming back later with the other horse. He stripped the bodies of anything useful and then loaded them onto the backs of the horses, tying them in place. He reined the horses together and sent them, with a few well-placed rocks, down the road toward Perf. Distressed by their grisly cargo, the horses would keep moving until they caught up with the caravan ahead.

  “Why not keep the horses?” I asked, not seeing the point in advertising the death of the Namreen. I didn’t care if they rotted by the side of the road, but the Attolian shook his head.

  “We can’t rejoin the caravan, and we can’t ride by it on the road. We can’t go back toward Sherguz—there may be more Namreen behind us, and if there are, we can’t outrun them on the open ground.” He waved out at the undulating plains below us. He meant I couldn’t outrun them on open ground. “We’ll find a place to hide and see what happens. We don’t want the bodies lying out here like road markers.”

  He used his shirt to elide the telltale marks in the dust of the roadway and then looked ruefully at it before tucking it into his belt. Slinging his armor on over his bare chest, he shouldered the saddlebags and supplies from the Namreen and climbed back up to where I was sitting. Then we walked into the hills.

  From a rise, the Attolian looked back down at the roadway.

  “Why Namreen?” he wondered aloud. “Why send the emperor’s bodyguard after an escaped slave?”

  I knew why. I also knew that the Attolian wouldn’t live to see his king again. I’d thought the worst he would suffer was pointless travel and some embarrassment when he returned to his king, but I’d failed to evade him in Sherguz and now he was much too closely tied to me to escape my fate. The innkeeper would have told the Namreen whom they were pursuing.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. I could apologize to him even if I couldn’t tell him the truth.

  “It makes no sense,” said the Attolian, slowly shaking his head. He wasn’t as stupid as I’d thought back on the riverboat. If he put too many things together, it would lead to more than the hostile look he’d given me in the trading city’s back alleyways. If he knew I’d deceived him, if he knew what he and his king had been entangled in by my hand, he might march me right back to the city of Ianna-Ir and turn me over to the emperor. It was his only hope at this point—and my only hope was to continue to deceive him.

  “It’s because I’m so valuable. I was to be a gift to the new emperor, so my disappearance was an insult to him as well. Do you know what I’m worth?” I asked. At my price, the Attolian’s eyebrows went up. I’d thought that would distract him.

  “Perhaps your king did not know?”

  The Attolian shrugged. “No one knows what my king knows,” he said. Without saying more, he led the way to the next hill. Though the sun was still high in the sky, dark shadows filled more and more of my vision. The Attolian gave me his arm, and I leaned heavily on him. I knew I was moving slowly and struggled on, mumbling apologies. Finally, the Attolian left me sitting again and went to scout ahead. He came back saying he’d found a good spot and led me to a cave under a rocky overhang, with a small entrance. He helped me slide in and then left me again while he went to find water.

  I woke lying on my back, the ceiling just above me as if I were in a very high bunk, but I was puzzled by the sense of hard ground directly underneath me. I thought I was back in the emperor’s palace, waking after a beating. I turned my head to see the sandy floor of the cave and remembered the Namreen. My head throbbed as I tried to make sense of my surroundings. The cave was low, but deep, the back of it filled with darkness. It smelled strongly and very badly of whatever animal had lived in it before, probably a cat, possibly a herd of cats. The Attolian was squatting beside me, a dripping cloth in his hand.

  “It stinks,” I said.

  The Attolian nodded. “It’s all right, though. We’ll be safe here. I’m going to have to stitch your head.”

  My panic had passed, replaced with a fatalism that was far more familiar. Hoping it would carry me graciously through to my demise, I nodded. Gently the Attolian began to wash my head until he could part my hair and see the wound clearly. I don’t know where the needle and thread came from; perhaps the Namreen had it in their supplies, or perhaps the Attolian had bought it along with his other purchases back in the river town. He’d gotten a leather wallet that he wore strapped to his belt and may have carried the needle and thread in it. Anywhere else and it would have been on its way with the rest of our possessions to Perf.

  As he threaded the needle, the light dimmed, and there was a scrabbling sound from the entrance to the cave. Keeping my head still, I rolled my eyes to see a lion cub poking its head through the opening. The Attolian hissed and threw a pebble. The cub hissed in return and retreated and it dawned on me that the cave stank not because it had been a lair in the past, but because it still was one. Twisting to look around, I found myself surrounded by gnawed bones.

  I gaped at the Attolian, who was now clearly revealed as a madman.

  “No one will look for us here,” he said defensively.

  “The lion will!” I said, my short-lived fatalism shattered.

  “She’ll care about the cubs more than the den,” the Attolian said soothingly. He nodded to the relatively small opening and assured me we could keep out a full-grown cat. “It was just luck that I saw the cubs playing outside the den as I passed and that the lioness was away.” He seemed so unconcerned I almost believed him.

  “Put your head back down,” he said. “Do you know any long prayers?”

  “What? Ones to keep lions away?” I asked. I was thoroughly bewildered, and winced as the Attolian used both hands to adjust his work surface, my head.

  “No, just something that will distract you while I stitch. I need you to hold still. Can you recite a poem?”

  “I don’t think so,” I said. I find it hard to think clearly when I am in pain. It has always been a wonderment to me that people beat their slaves and ask them questions at the same time. Surely it is counterproductive to expect sens
e from someone you are beating senseless. “I can’t remember any poems.”

  “No prayers?”

  The Attolians recited long prayers in their temple rituals. “We don’t pray that way,” I said. I couldn’t think of any texts except the instructional ones from my homeland, taught to very small children.

  Ine brings the rain

  Ire starts the grain

  Rae brings the dust

  Harvest first we must

  I remembered sitting in the dark temple chanting it with other children my age as the rains pattered down outside. I thought the Attolian’s stitching would take longer than my reciting, though.

  “You understand my language pretty well,” he said.

  “Yes,” I answered. My Attolian was probably better than his. He had a farmer’s accent and didn’t always conjugate his verbs correctly.

  “Good. I’ll recite the chant we use. It’s called the surgery song. I’ll say it one time through first so you will know how long it is.” He looked at my head speculatively, turning it back and forth in his hands. “I’ll probably have to say it several times through,” he warned me, “but this way you’ll have an idea how long it will be until I am done.”

  This was not a technique I’d ever encountered in my experience with Mede healers, but then, I was not a soldier.

  “It goes like this,” the Attolian said, and recited very slowly:

  There was a girl in Attolia town

  Could knit and stitch with the best of them.

  Wish she were here with my legion,

  Wish she were here instead of the surgeon.

  She’d take care of this painful lesion

  With tiny little stitches

  And without any reason