Pyrebound - 6.3

Chapter 6.3 – Pyrebound
Bal shook him awake very early the next morning. Between trying to sleep in a chair and recurrent dreams of the sword tearing through Kamenrag, he’d gotten little rest, and he grumbled and stumbled his way down three flights of stairs and out the door. He had little confidence in Darun’s plan to smuggle him out of the pyre, but he plainly couldn’t stay where he was.

The streets were already crowded with men and women going about the errands they’d put off the day before; there were an unusual number of flamekeepers about as well, and the odd handmaiden, scanning faces at intersections. Every such checkpoint created a backlog in traffic, so that Ram could have avoided them even if he couldn’t sense them. They only slowed him down.

“Any idea what they have the girls out for?” Darun whispered to him.

“So they can find me, maybe? Flamekeepers aren’t indwelt.”

“Then why haven’t they caught you, if you can see them so easily?”

“Beats me. Maybe girls can’t do it as well. I’ve only known I could do this stuff for a single day.”

“This can’t all be about you. Why have flamekeepers out at all, if they can’t touch you? If I were them, I’d scrounge up a bunch of long knives and hide the ‘keepers in the crowds in plain clothes, so they could—”

“Shit, don’t tell me that now! I don’t know, okay? I just don’t know. Now drop it, before somebody hears you.”

They had most of the pyre’s width to cover, east to west, and staying well away from the plaza only increased the distance. The added need for detours around flamekeepers or handmaidens at checkpoints was outright maddening; he kept being pushed away from their goal, until he wondered if he’d been caught somehow, and was being herded into a trap.

The morning was well advanced by the time they arrived at the far southwest dropmill. Dul Karagi had twelve of the hundred-foot brick towers, spaced around its north and south ends to grind the harvest as it came in, with a set of canals to carry the yield and replenish the pools. They were very simple machines inside; a team of handmaidens stood at the bottom of the feeder shaft, sending a steady column of scalding steam up to the chamber at the top. Once it condensed, it fell down the driver shaft on the other side, gathering speed to turn the wheel at the bottom.

At the moment, the southwest mill was making an enormous racket—it sounded like they were driving a loom in there. Harvest was still months away, so they put it to other uses. Naturally, he felt more than a little nervous as they traipsed past it. He could feel four separate haranuu inside it, and there were no crowds to hide in here. Only a thin line of bondservants fetching the boiled water for their families to use, and a few idle tinapi hanging about in the water by their barges, waiting for them to be loaded with the finished product.

Bal and Darun had their blacks on. They hadn’t been able to scrounge up matching gear for Ram, so he would have to be a client they were escorting. Blackbands were a common enough sight passing by a dropmill, and the bondservants paid them no mind. Tinapi could seldom tell humans apart anyway.

A plain dirt path led them on from there, apparently going nowhere in particular; it would lead them, after a few minutes’ stroll, to a spot where the path bent discreetly out of sight from the mills and every other inhabited area. To their right marched a long row of majestic cedars, nearly tall enough for harvest; across the canal to their left was a less impressive but equally well-ordered orchard.

It was quiet, and soothing, and peaceful, and Ram didn’t like or trust it. He had to be the pyre’s most wanted criminal, and everyone knew this was where savvy travelers went to duck out of the pyre. If Ram were the Lugal, he’d have a dozen men waiting in ambush right around here. In fact—

He threw out an arm, stopping Darun. “Spirit,” he whispered. “Up ahead. Just around the bend.”

“That I can feel. Could have fifty people with it.”

Ram concentrated. “Not much. Just standing there.”

“Right where we hitch. Hell,” she growled. “Maybe if I go on ahead and scout it out, I can play dumb?“

“Do stop dallying, Ram,” an older woman’s voice called out from around the bend. “It’s really not wise to hang about here, and you have places to go.”

Ram exchanged glances with Darun. Neither of them moved. Behind them, Bal drew two of his swords.

“I know you’re there. Let’s not be silly; I couldn’t hurt you if I wanted to. Come along!”

It could have been a trap. But it didn’t feel dangerous, for whatever reason, and for once the sword wrapped up in the bedroll on his back wasn’t screaming for murder. Besides, the voice seemed familiar. Gesturing for the others to stay back, he trotted on ahead.

Six men lay on the ground at the water’s edge. Every one of them wore a scrap of black somewhere, and was armed in some way. None of them was moving, though two had their feet in the water and a third was half-submerged with his face under the surface. A short, thin, elderly woman stood ten paces up from the waterline with her hands on her hips.

“Who else? Don’t tell me you came here alone.” She shouted, “Come along, the rest of you. There’s no time to tip-toe!”

“How did you know where to find me?”

“We have known and will always know where you are, Rammash, from the time the spirit woke in you yesterday until the day you die.”

Ram stifled an absurd urge to look behind him. “Then everyone can track me wherever I go?”

“No. We know where to find you. They do not.”

“Who’s we and who’s they?”

“The Ensi’s party and the Lugal’s, respectively. Really, couldn’t you figure out so much for yourself? I’m disappointed.”

“Yeah, I got that, but why—“

“Who’s the crone?” Darun interrupted, strolling around the corner with Bal in her wake.

“The woman who killed Ushna and Lashantu.”

“Oh. Hey, it’s Rasha Dai’s group,” she said, looking at the men on the ground. “I wondered what they were up to these days. A good gang for snuff jobs. How much is the Lugal offering?”

“Twelve gold, eight silver, I believe,” Shennai told her. “But the rate is increasing rapidly.”

“I’ll bet,” Darun said, looking around at the bodies. “You haven’t picked them yet, have you? We’re short on cash here.”

Shennai shook her head. “We don’t need the money, so do help yourself.”

“Sweet!” Darun made a dash for the nearest corpse and set to work emptying his pockets, while Bal started hauling the half-sunk one out of the water.

“While you’re there, though, would you mind marking the bodies a bit for me? I need a plausible cause of death, you see.”

“Yes, ma’am!” Darun said cheerily, saluting her with a gold-hilted dagger before driving it into the corpse’s back.

Ram turned away. “You’ve been shadowing us all morning, Shennai?”

“More or less. You’ll have to be very careful once you leave the pyre. As you may have gathered, things have not gone entirely according to plan.”

“Yeah, I noticed. What happened?”

“Our secrecy was compromised shortly after the bloom, resulting in a series of disasters. Most notably, the death of the Ensi the night before last. We had planned to have me escort you quietly out of the pyre. Now I am needed here, to protect the interests of the new Ensi.”

“Is that … the man in the dark room?“

“Yes, Ram, the man you spoke with after our last meeting. The former En. Younger brother to the late Ensi. He will need all the help he can get.”

“So what do you expect me to do?”

“Exactly what you are doing: leave the pyre, as quickly and quietly as possible, and don’t come back. You can best serve us by staying alive and out of the way, for now. Do hurry, young lady.”

Alive and out of the way? “What if I don’t want to serve you anymore? What if I’m tired of being strung along by people who never tell me what’s going on?”

“Then you are free to stay and get yourself killed for spite. The Ensi could force you to cooperate, now that you are indwelt, but I don’t believe he will. However, do bear in mind that your sister will likely die as well, along with the rest of your family and much of Dul Karagi.”

“So … I’m exiled. Kicked out. On my own.”

“Effectively. But you needn’t be dramatic about it. We can provide a measure of help from afar, and we won’t be idle. The time will come when we will have the upper hand. Stay alive, and watch, and wait.”

“Wait for what? I didn’t sign up for this!”

“You certainly did. At our new Ensi’s personal request. Miss, aren’t you done yet? Do you really need to get every last quarter of a copper?”

Darun stood up, stuffing a tanbir down the front of her dress. “Yeah, I guess we’ve got enough to go on with.” Bal cracked a skull with its owner’s old hammer, and stood up as well. “You need Ram to hack up a couple too?”

“No, it’s more confusing if he doesn’t. Confusion is quite helpful at the moment.”

“Not for me, it isn’t.”

“It suits your masters’ purposes that you remain ignorant, and moreover explaining would take far too long. Please stop being petulant, we’re going to a great deal of trouble to keep you alive right now.”

“Petulant! Thanks to you, my whole family—“

“Has been getting regularly paid for the past bloom, and living well above your father’s station for most of a kindling before that. Without Gelibara’s intervention, you personally would have died a long time ago, so you’ve really no cause to complain that the bill has come due. He did ask you, did he not, if you were prepared to suffer and die for this pyre?”

“The barge is coming,” Darun observed, craning her neck to see around the bend. “We good to go?”

“It will be some time until the next one, if you aren’t. Rammash, why are you angry? Every living soul in the Dominion serves Haranduluz in its own way, and few of them get a choice about it. Do you really believe you were brought into this world, naked and screaming, with a right to special treatment?”

“We only wanted to be left alone.”

“So do most people. I, personally, would have rather liked to have a husband, and children. I’ve never met a handmaiden who didn’t. The God had other ideas. I have never had a child and never will, but I have killed too many other women’s children to count or remember. When you are gone, I will do it again, over and over until I am caught and killed myself. Would you like to change places?”

Ram found he couldn’t meet her gaze, and turned to watch the barge instead. It was loaded down with bales of hemp cloth, so heavily that Ram couldn’t see where they would find space for three people. Darun had waded out till she was thigh-deep in the canal, holding a cheap bronze sickle aloft, and the six tinapi hauling it were already moving it closer ashore.

“This is difficult for you, I know,” Shennai said in his ear. “I am sorry that matters went awry. But you and your family are not the only ones suffering. The Ensi has died, along with several other people, and if we fail we will likely see open war in the streets.”

War in the streets … “There’s a soldier, a first-bloom militiaman in my company, named Busugarta. Average height, round face, heavyset. He helped me take on the flamekeepers, when it was five to one. Can somebody, I don’t know, check on him? I don’t want him to get killed.”

“Busugarta, you say? At the moment, the entire militia is under suspicion, and confined to barracks. But I will look into it. Now go.”

Darun was haggling in pantomime with the tinapi at their towlines. Froghitching wasn’t technically legal; human sailors didn’t care for the competition, and the tinapi companies frowned on any trade arrangement with humans that wasn’t spelled out by contract. But waterbound tinapi had an insatiable lust for the metal wares they couldn’t forge for themselves, and nobody really cared if a few blackbands and other vagabonds tagged along with the merchandise, provided they did it quietly. She surrendered the sickle, a pair of knives, and a small mirror, and the three of them were free to climb aboard and wedge themselves between the bales.

“I wish we had Shazru along,” Darun griped as she tossed her bag over the gunwale. “He can actually understand these things. They creep me out.”

Ram looked at the nearest tinap, who was paddling slowly to keep the barge in place. It did indeed look something like a frog—or maybe like a fish—with a broad mouth, goggling eyes, and slick green-brown skin. Under the water, he could make out traces of fins below the webbed hands that gripped the hawser. He bowed his thanks; the big eyes swiveled to look, but it gave no sign of understanding.

“Don’t bother,” Darun said. “Some of them are pretty smart, but they leave tow duty to the idiots.”

“It doesn’t hurt,” Ram said, dragging himself aboard. The barge started moving again, quickly, before he could even get his feet inside. “These things aren’t built for speed, are they? What if they send a sunbarque? Or fly?”

“Then I guess they’ll beat us there, won’t they?” she said with a shrug. “Now keep your head down. You don’t look much like a hemp bale, and the field-hands gossip.”

He took a last look around before complying—he would likely not see the pyre again for a long time. But there was nothing to see, only a row of lovely cedars with the light of the pyre shining above them and six mangled corpses on the bank below. Shennai had vanished.