Forgotten (10 page)

He almost stopped. Kaie was absolutely certain he didn’t want to find the girl, to see what she looked like when what little of the life left to her was drained out. But he needed to know. He needed to be sure that the little Hollow was not going to appear at his elbow again
some day
.

Tovan dropped down beside him and helped the digging. Kaie was only vaguely aware of the boy, intent on his grisly task.

They found her a moment later. There was no doubt how the little girl died. The slash, thick with sand, running from one ear to the other told the story quiet well. As soon as he saw her, so innocent and empty, Kaie knew he would find no answers here. What was wrong with the gods, that they accepted such a sacrifice?

Tovan pulled a folded parchment from his shirt and tossed it at Kaie’s feet. It was Kissa’s letter. He picked it up with disgust, wrestling with the urge to bury it under the sand. It was the reason for all of this.

“Is it worth it? Whatever it really says, is it worth these lives?”

Kaie laughed bitterly and shook his head. “I don’t know.”

They sat for a while, staring down at the dead girl. The night passed without his noticing and, when the scout ran through the outpost announcing the Ninth Rit and his
host were
arriving, it took him a while to realize that was what he was supposed to be waiting for.

As though that announcement were some signal they agreed on, he and Tovan began pushing the sand back over the little girl. She was lost again far too quickly. It wasn’t right.

The Ninth Rit and his small entourage came upon them just as they finished. Tovan made a very rudimentary report about the entire journey and its rather bloody conclusion, leaving out everything about the girl. When he was done every eye was on Kaie. They were waiting for him to tell his story, or give some sort of explanation for his presence. Anything that would indicate what their reaction should be.

He was preparing for this moment since he first set foot on the wagon, going over a thousand different things he could say to win the Ninth Rit over to his cause. Now, looking into the black eyes and steeled expression of Sir Gregor Ironfist, Kaie couldn’t summon up a single sound. Finally, with nothing else to do, he handed the folded letter to the other man and waited.

Gregor read it quickly, the faint lines in his face deepening as the hint of a frown he was wearing solidified into something harsh. The man’s lean form and young appearance undoubtedly led to many underestimating him, but Kaie saw the threat of power lurking in those lines.

The Ninth Rit turned to the only female in his party. “Bring me my Aulis.”

There was no true audible reaction to that order, but Kaie felt every soul draw in a deep breath of surprise. The dread, still lingering from the girl’s discovery, took on new and viscous life. The woman darted away in the direction they came from.

A moment later, she reappeared with long, thin golden chain pooled in her hands. It was so clearly wrought by a master smith that it seemed almost sacrilegious to be exposing it to the harsh desert elements. As Sir Gregor took the chain from her, its movement so smooth it was all but liquid, Kaie saw the flash of an iron penny attached to one end. It was huge and ugly, a mockery of the beauty it was inexpertly soldered to.

The tall man turned to Kaie and, in a movement too fast to counter, wrapped the chain around his neck. Panic surged through him, but Kaie found
himself
unable to move away.

“By right of the Aulis, I claim this slave as my own,” the Ninth Rit said to all around him. “Brand him, relieve him of these clothes, and make him ready for me in my tent.”

Part Two:

Ninth Rit

“The servants will send him

Across a sea of sand.

He will lose

And be lost.”

-
Excerpt from “The Book of Endings

Sparrowfall Dynasty 445
2
0
th
year
After
the
Fall

Kaie scowled as he tugged the Aulis through the neck of the loose-fitting white silken shirt, just as he did every morning. It made no difference to him that Gregor considered it nothing but show. To him, it was exactly what it was meant to be: a collar, one that weighed heavier around his neck each day. It was magically sealed, so that there wasn’t
so
much as a break in the links that held it closed. No one would be able to pry it off or slip it over his head. He wore it always, even here in the rooms. It was necessary. Just like so many other humiliations he wore for the sake of the Rit’s game.

He glanced into the mirror, more out of habit than concern for his appearance. A year and a half of practice made it easy to fall back into the costume of the broken boy everyone was supposed to see. His skin was pale to the point of being able to see through it, and the thin, feminine braids littering his dark red hair were neat and visible. He couldn’t spend much time outside. The blistering sun would tan his skin in just a few hours, and Gregor was well known to prefer his bed-warmers milky-white. Of course, before Kaie’s arrival, Gregor was well known to prefer free women who climbed into his bed willingly.

There was a dark purple bruise across his jaw. He poked at it a couple times, wondering if it was from their sparing match the night before, or one earlier in the week. It was rare that Gregor landed a blow on his face. They both worked to keep the injuries in places clothing would hide. But, if one of them was going to wear a trophy from their matches, it was better him. The occasional shiner or bruise could be passed off as the normal wounds slaves suffered under capricious masters. Or a remnant from a rough night together, but Kaie preferred the former lie.

His primping done, Kaie sighed deeply and let go of the scowl. In its place he fixed the vacant expression he once used to play a Hollow and locked his eyes firmly on the floor. Now he truly looked defeated.

It was disturbing how easy the role came to him. When Gregor first explained the ruse, he fought against it. Kaie didn’t care that it was the only way to survive or that anyone not enlisted into the ranks or claimed by the Aulis was considered fair game. All he saw was the trap springing closed around him. Calmly accepting his fate with the Hollows was one thing. Back then, Kaie thought the Rit’s arrival would mean freedom. Knowing that all that waited for him was more slavery cost Kaie, for a time, all his self-control and careful planning.

Twice, he tried to escape Gregor. The first time was stupid. He slipped out of the man’s tent in the dead of night with the intention of running out into the desert. Kaie’s plan didn’t include how he would survive from there, or where he would go. All he could think about
was getting away. One of the members of Gregor’s regular entourage caught him before he could make it to the latrine pit. When he was dragged back, Kaie fully expected a beating that would leave him broken for weeks. But the Rit simply scowled. From that night on, the hanging end of the Aulis was wrapped around Gregor’s hand. It made sleeping challenging and dangerous – rolling the wrong way could easily end up in Kaie
strangling
himself – but he didn’t bother complaining. The angry red marks it left on his throat seemed to encourage the mutterings about his purpose in the Rit’s tent, which served Gregor’s purpose quite well.

The second attempt was slightly more thought out, though ultimately just as futile. The reason for Gregor’s sudden arrival in at the outpost took him some time to sort out. The Rit was amiable, but the man was reluctant to enter into any true conversation with Kaie. As they marched he pieced it together.

Kaie was not allowed into ranks with the soldiers, instead stuck walking in the clump of hangers-on it seemed every army accumulated. But, at camp each night, he was expected to see to Gregor’s needs. So long as he was circumspect about it, and stuck to the shadows cast by the light of the soldiers’ campfires, he was able to overhear a great deal.

The Urazian push into the nation of Jorander was not going as the Empress was accustomed. Despite their overwhelming numbers, the nature of the desert turned that into a liability. Supply lines, where the
y
existed, were strained. Urazin won nearly every encounter with Jorander forces, but the enemy was making sure those victories won nothing. They would destroy any city or port about to be taken before falling back. As a result, the empire’s invasion was on the verge of collapse. More troops were starving than were lost in battle, and morale was almost non-existent.

Gregor, Kaie discovered, came up with a plan to turn the war in Urazin’s favor. Instead of wasting more energy pursuing the Jorander forces, always just close enough to present a tempting target, the Ninth Rit decided to turn the Twelfth Brigade around. Sending no word to his superiors, he marched them back through the established supply lines and then on past, heading toward the coast.

Most of his soldiers couldn’t figure out what the man was thinking. Some even speculated he was mad. A few supposed that this was what came of promoting a slave into the ranks of the Rit, especially one as young as Gregor. But a few saw
genius
in the move, and those were the ones Kaie spent most his time straining to hear.

The capital of Jorander was deep in the heart of the desert, somewhere along a great river. The First Rit, commander of the Empress’s armies, intended to cut a path to the city of
Azos
. Once it was taken the rest of the nation would fall. That was not, however, the only city hidden in the desert sands. The city-state of Hudukul was long considered a holy city. It was founded by
Takuu
, god of order and faith, and rested on the far coast where that great river and the ocean met. It was a nation in and of itself, considered a neighbor to Jorander rather than a part of the largely nomadic desert nation.

Gregor intended to take it. He saw that a push to
Azos
would only draw them further away from food and drinkable water, leading to a siege that would likely end in their defeat
at the hands of a well-prepared army waiting for them. But if he could take Hudukul, they could use it as a foothold, opening up new supply chains and giving them access to the river that supplied
Azos
itself. Not to mention the devastating blow to the enemy’s morale, when the Untouchable City was taken by a relatively small force of the Twelfth rangers.

Of course, all of that depended on Gregor’s ability to take Hudukul. Even those who devised his purpose and admired the brilliance saw that to be a pivotal flaw in the plan. It was called the Untouchable City for good reason. Rumored to be ensconced in a wall so high that it blocked out the sun itself, the city was unconquered for the extent of remembered history. That was, as one very enthusiastic ranger pointed out, before the gods saw fit to create sappers.

Nothing would make Kaie happier than to see the empire defeated. But being driven back to Urazin, starving and living off of bitter wine, was not a notion he relished.

Milling around with blacksmiths and whores, Kaie was too far away from the battle to see what took place. He watched the wall just the same. It was a dark blot against the sky that was in no way exaggerated by the rangers during the march, hoping for some visible proof that Gregor was successful. When the sign came, it wasn’t something he saw though. It was an explosion so loud that Kaie could feel it in his teeth.

In a matter of hours the
camp followers
were being summoned forward, ushered through a gaping hole blown into the side of the massive wall. The wall itself was a
mazing:
made of light tan slabs fitted together nearly seamlessly, with no sign of binding agent at all. Stacked one on top of the other, they were completely uniform in size and shape, and the surface was impossibly flat. And it didn’t end. It stretched out forever, blotting out the sky completely. It cast a shadow like the edge of the Abyss, an impossibly straight line along the ground where the light ended and darkness began.

The hole was just as amazing, for all the opposite reasons. It looked as though Gregor’s men made the very earth beneath the wall simply vanish. The tan stone seemed to have collapsed in on
itself
, giving the Twelfth a doorway in which to pour into Hudukul. It was the gaping maw of the Abyss, waiting to swallow souls into the emptiness beyond.

Hudukul was considered unconquerable. It was poised at the edge of a small bay, where the largest river in Jorander met the ocean. The river cut the city in half, and the wall encircled every bit of it, running out far enough to protect even the poorest of buildings. Outside the wall, covering all the rest of where the sediment the river carried
collected,
there were farms for rice and other grains. Further out there were some small fishing camps that the Jorander nomads occasionally resided in. But the people of Hudukul all lived within that wall. And, as if the wall itself were not protection enough, there was a great chain stretched across the mouth of the bay that could be lowered only from inside the city.

There were only two other ways in – three, counting the hole Gregor’s Twelfth made. The Merchant’s Gate was on the side furthest from the bay and arranged over a giant bridge that spanned the width of the river. It was wide enough for no more than a single cart to pass through at a time, and the slab of stone could be slammed closed in an instant. It was also constantly crowded. The other was the Villain’s Gate, and only the most
despicable of criminals ever got the pleasure of exiting through that one. Neither of the gates provided access to the city unless the people inside wanted them to.

It was said that when the High King came to the wall of Hudukul he fell to his knees and wept. He knew this wall would thwart the gods themselves, and that no mortal could ever hope to breach it. It was the end of his conquest, and the edge of his kingdom. It took the rangers six days to overcome.

He wasn’t sure how they managed it. The art of the sappers was beyond Kaie’s experience, even if they were willing to share their secrets. Not even Gregor seemed to be privy to those. From the best of his understanding, they discovered some sort of collapsed tunnel running underneath a section of the city and dug it out. Then they used a strange device to cause an explosion huge enough to send the slab of wall toppling to the ground. Or so he heard from some drunken soldiers.

It was as they passed through the hole and into the city itself that he made his next attempt. More thought out than the first, Kaie intended to be lost in the shuffle of the invaders and disappear into the ranks of the dark-skinned residents peering at them from the gap between every building. He didn’t need to know the city or the language to steal food and water enough to survive, and the soldiers all made a point of discussing how huge Hudukul was supposed to be. Large enough for one escaped slave to hide.

It didn’t work. Kaie made it exactly four steps into the first side-street when his feet were knocked out from beneath him. A second later, he felt the tug at his neck that was already becoming quite familiar. Gregor, anticipating the attempt, sent one of his soldiers to fetch him. What followed was every bit as humiliating as the talk about what went on each night with him in the Rit’s tent. Being dragged back by his hair, through a pile of dung, was an event that still haunted him.

He didn’t even think about escape anymore, except to reminisce on his humiliation. That was worse, in some ways. He hated the gold chain around his neck and the brand on his shoulder. But Kaie acknowledged that Gregor was his most likely route to freedom. And, no matter how often he tried to tell himself that the Rit could never be a friend, he found he couldn’t help a deep fondness for the man.

None of that mattered today. Not really. After two years, and not so much as a single Namer in the city, Kaie was confident Gregor didn’t intend to betray him. Whatever Kissa said to precipitate it, the man had his own reasons for keeping Kaie around now. Part of that was why he was being sent out into the streets today. Gregor wanted him to get a sense of growing unrest among the Huduku.

Before Hudukul, Kaie never suspected his skill at accessing people was unique. It didn’t occur to him that most people lacked the ability to imagine people they met in telling situations, let alone judge the chances that such situations would unfold. Kaie just did it, and it felt natural. But Gregor acted like it was some fantastic trick, and it was still fairly recent that the Rit came to believe in it. Now, the man trusted the sense just as completely as Kaie did. Which sounded great, being useful and trusted, but turned out rather
differently in practice. Mostly, it meant he got sent on trivial errands, traipsing about a city that inevitably got him lost, being looked down on and occasionally openly harassed.

The soldiers were the worst. Most of them didn’t say it, but Kaie knew they weren’t happy that their Rit was keeping a boy. The empire didn’t approve of such behaviors, though there wasn’t any active opposition among the armies, and the stigma carried down through the ranks. The few who didn’t seem to mind that part weren’t any better. Those seemed to think the Rit ought to share his acquisition, Aulis or no.

At least the Huduku took strides to make sure they didn’t offend the Rit.
Until recently.