Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) (2 page)

The scout rode past without so much as a twitch that would reveal he’d seen anything. Then he reached some invisible limit, turned his horse, and trotted back, paying even less attention on the return trip.

Kavi frowned. Why weren’t the Hrum sending men out to check the sides of the road? One rider wasn’t enough to trip an ambush, and though the Hrum’s overconfidence sometimes led them into folly, he’d have thought they’d take more care with a cargo as valuable as the siege towers. Towers it had taken them almost two months to build, and which would probably give them victory over the city of Mazad. A victory their commander needed desperately.

The main unit of the towers’ guards had marched around the bend by now, more than a hundred of them, and Kavi could see the four-ox hitch that pulled the long wagon that held the first length of the tower. The towers were being shipped in two sections, the peasants had told him: the long, upper halves on one set of wagons, and the thicker bases on another—four wagons in all. Only the framework had been assembled; the boards that would clad them were stacked in the wagons under the nest of beams. Yes, he could see the scarlet-painted lattice now, and beside it …

Kavi felt the blood drain from his face, leaving it numb and cold, even as the lady-bitch behind him hissed a curse.

On both sides of the tower’s skeleton walked a line of slaves, each with one wrist shackled to a bolt driven deep into the hard wood—shackled with a very short chain. If the towers burned, the slaves would too. They couldn’t—

“Arzhang and Gudarz take you, you treacherous beast!” The hissing whisper was softer than the sound of her knife being drawn from its sheath.

“You think
I’m
responsible for this?” Kavi glared at her, too insulted to be afraid—though judging by the fury in her face, he should be. “Only a deghan would be after guarding property with … with a wall of lives! No peasant would ever do such a thing.”

Arzhang, the djinn of treacherous ambition, and Gudarz, the djinn of cruelty, were deghan inventions—and it seemed to Kavi as if they possessed every deghan who’d ever been born!

“Those are Hrum, not deghans,” she whispered fiercely.

“Sometimes there’s no difference,” said Kavi, turning back to survey the column.

His neck prickled. But when you came down to it, a deghass was more likely to stab you face to face than in the back—more fool she. Several long seconds passed and nothing sliced into his flesh. Kavi relaxed slightly and returned his attention to the towers.

All four wagons had come around the bend by now, each one with its living shield tethered to its side and a line of Hrum soldiers marching beside it. Yet another troop brought up the rear.

Jiaan’s attack would draw off the soldiers, perhaps even more soldiers than they’d expected, since the Hrum could leave the vulnerable slaves to guard their precious cargo. Could the Farsalans carry the towers off into the hills and free the slaves at leisure? No, the hills were too steep, too choked in brush, and the towers would be too heavy. They’d chosen this place because an unburdened man could make his escape more easily than an armored soldier marching in formation. Carrying the towers they wouldn’t get ten yards. Drive the oxen down the road? Oxen couldn’t run for long, not laden as these were. They wouldn’t make it far enough. Which only left—

“We have to destroy these towers,” said the lady softly. “If they get through, Mazad will fall. And Mazad is our only hope.”

Kavi turned to face her, but his bitter words about deghan willingness to burn peasants alive were checked by the despairing misery in her expression. Besides, many of the slaves chained to those towers likely were deghans, for more of the deghans had resisted outright than peasants had. They might even be poor fools from some other land entirely—but whoever they were, Kavi couldn’t let them be roasted alive.

“Let me go,” he said rapidly.

The towers were approaching their position. Jiaan would attack soon. Or would he abandon the plan? No, curse him, he would go ahead with it, sticking Kavi and Soraya with the task of freeing the slaves. Being chased by the Hrum was easy compared to that.

“Let me go. I was a smith once. I can pick locks. I’ll set them free, then you can signal the archers to fire.”

“No,” said Soraya flatly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not after this. I ought to kill you now. And besides, you could never free them in time.”

“Then I’ll go too,” said Hama. “I can pick locks faster than he can.”

Kavi opened his mouth to protest and then shut it. He had taught Hama to pick locks himself, training her to be a burglar.
This was far more dangerous than anything he’d ever dreamed of getting her into, but she really was faster than he was with his scarred right hand.

“No,” said the lady again. But there were tears in her eyes.

“Can you give the order to fire if they’re not free?” Kavi demanded. Giving that order was her job.

Her gaze turned to the towers creaking down the road behind the oxen. “They’re barbarians,” she whispered. “Worse than barbarians! The Suud would never do this!”

“They’re not barbarians,” said Kavi slowly. “At least, not most of them. This is—”

The first section of siege tower was now in front of them, and, right on time, Kavi heard the snap of bowstrings. From the lower rise on the other side of the road came a flight of arrows—headed not for the helpless slaves, but for the Hrum troops who marched at the head of the column.

Kavi had heard tales of the speed with which the Hrum could raise their shields into formation, but he hadn’t really believed them. Oh, in battle, when they were ready for the command, perhaps—but marching down the road with no reason to expect attack?

The moment the strings snapped, half the Hrum soldiers began lifting their large rectangular shields—some even got them up and angled in the right direction. But for all their training and discipline the Hrum were only human, and some of them didn’t move swiftly enough.

The arrows pelted down, thudding into shields and rattling off armor, but a few of them found flesh, and Kavi bit his lip as several men screamed in pain. He’d spent time in the Hrum camps—first spying for them, later spying on them. They weren’t bad men, for the most part; most were guilty of nothing but serving the empire into which they’d been born.

He was almost glad when, in the handful of seconds before the next flock of arrows swooped down, they rallied their ranks and got all their shields above their heads, positioned so precisely that no more arrows got through—though one man somewhere in the tightly packed formation was still screaming.

“They’re not barbarians,” Kavi repeated. “Except maybe a few. This is Governor Garren’s work, trying to force us to be as barbaric as he is.”

Commander Jiaan’s mounted archers were streaming down the road now, but instead of charging, they stopped just inside bow range and began firing arrows at the Hrum’s front rank.

The lady Soraya had moved up beside Kavi, and now she snorted softly. He supposed their horsemanship was a bit ragged. Even as he watched, one man slipped in the saddle and nearly fell off—he would have fallen if he hadn’t dropped his bow and clutched the saddle’s cantle. But until the deghan army had been crushed at the Sendar Wall, these archers had been foot soldiers, most of whom had never sat on a saddle before, much less fired a
bow from one in battle. And if their horsemanship left something to be desired, their aim was dead on target, their arrows pounding into the shields of the first line of Hrum troops.

But the thundering approach of the horses had given the Hrum the warning they needed—there were no chinks in that wall of shields. As Kavi watched, the men under the carefully constructed shell started down the road toward the horsemen, and the troop that had followed the column was already moving into the hills to drive off the first set of archers.

Arrow fire from the hillside ceased as the archers proved themselves sensible men and fled. But as Kavi knew, their orders were to run, and on the swift horses that awaited them they’d soon catch up with their companions on the road. Young Commander Jiaan was surprisingly good at this kind of thing.

The mounted archers got off two more ragged volleys before Commander Jiaan’s voice rang out, “Retreat! Retreat! Rally on Sorahb and flee!”

Kavi had to smile. Jiaan himself had been called Sorahb—who else could be leading the army, after all?—and Kavi had said, as he raised the countryside to resist the Hrum, that he worked for the legendary champion. As far as he could tell, every lad who stole a Hrum mule or broke the supports out from under a bridge before a Hrum troop marched over it was claiming the name Sorahb.

But Governor Garren, commander of the conquest of Farsala,
had succumbed to the myth. “Sorahb” now had a price of three hundred gold centirus on his head—so that name was guaranteed to get the Hrum’s attention.

The Hrum’s mounted scouts took off at a gallop after the fleeing Farsalans—not to catch them, Kavi knew, but to keep them in sight and signal the foot soldiers, who now broke into not a run but a ground-eating jog. No man could catch a galloping horse, but a fit and determined man could outlast a horse and run him down when he tired. Jiaan’s order to rally on Sorahb had encouraged a lot of determination.

But they were still competent. The Hrum were almost always competent, curse them. The officer in charge of the troop that followed the column took two thirds of his men with him, racing to join the others in chasing a myth down the dusty road. But that left fifty armed soldiers guarding about sixty slaves, who were chained to piles of very flammable wood.

The score of Farsalan archers who remained, with most of their arrows wrapped in pitch-soaked rags, couldn’t possibly defeat them. And those towers had to go.

“This is Garren,” Kavi repeated, looking down at the black-haired deghass who could order his death. “Trying to force us to be as bloody as he is. Don’t let him do it, girl. Lady. Don’t let him bring us down to his level. Let us try, Hama and me. Trust me that far.”

It maybe wasn’t the most eloquent speech he’d ever made. As a peddler, Kavi took pride in his ability to talk people into buying whatever he happened to be selling. But his words came from the heart, and sometimes that would make folks loosen their purse strings when nothing else would.

The girl was looking at him, but her expression was distant and still, and for a moment her eyes didn’t seem to see him at all. It was an expression Kavi had seen on Suud tribesmen’s faces a time or two, and his shoulders shifted uneasily. Then she blinked, and the familiar sharpness returned.

“Yes,” said the girl. “Go, both of you. And hurry. If they’re too far from the towers, the soldiers might decide to keep chasing Sorahb, even when they see the smoke. I’ll signal the archers to fire the moment everyone is clear.”

Without waiting to hear another word—she could always change her mind—Kavi turned and crawled down the hill, keeping to the cover of the brush. He could hear Hama behind him, and without even looking back he knew she was doing a better job of keeping quiet and concealed than he was. It was supposed to be good to have a student surpass you, and Kavi was proud of her, but to be out-sneaked by a girl four years younger than he was still annoyed him.

In a sense it didn’t matter how stealthy they were, for most of the remaining Hrum soldiers were staring down the road after their
departing comrades and, from the sound of it, cursing their bad luck at being left behind—though one decimaster had mustered enough wit to send his men to tend the wounded who had been left beside the road. The man who had screamed was moaning; Kavi hoped he’d be all right, but right now he had other matters on his mind.

Hama edged away, making for the wagons at the rear of the column. Kavi forced aside the thought of what her mother would say if she came to harm, and slithered through the bushes at the edge of the road. The only Hrum soldiers in sight were far ahead of him, with their backs turned to boot, but several of the slaves noticed him.

They had dropped to the road to rest when the wagons stopped. The wagons—specially designed to carry the siege towers, Kavi realized—were low enough that the slaves could sit on the ground with their wrists suspended at about the level of their shoulders. Now they stared at him, and one young man started to his feet in alarm.

“Shh!” Kavi whispered. “Stay down. No, stand up, and spread word for the others to do the same.” His drab clothes weren’t so different from their rough tunics and britches. “I’m going to pick the locks and free your wrists, but no one is to run until I give the signal. You got that? No one runs till all of you are free!”

Half a dozen heads nodded agreement, and a middle-aged
woman set the example, climbing casually to her feet and stretching as well as she could.

“We’ll be passing word down the lines,” she murmured as Kavi slipped in behind her and pulled out his lock picks. He’d taken to carrying them on his person at all times, since he’d first started spying for the Hrum. As he’d taught Hama, if you engaged in a risky trade, it was best to be prepared for things to go wrong.

“Are you working for Sorahb?” the woman whispered.

K
AVI TOLD HER YES
, and replied similarly to other questions as he worked down the line, assuring folk that once they escaped the Hrum, Sorahb would see to their safety. Even the ones who weren’t Farsalan had heard of the rebel leader and seemed willing to trust Kavi’s statements in his name. In fact Kavi thought that most of the men would choose to join Commander Jiaan’s army, and welcome he’d make them, for he needed all the recruits he could get. As for the women and the sane men, Kavi would get word to the nearby villages to take them in.

In the Hrum Empire, he’d been told, the government kept track of folk and all their kin, since they had to know who was to be drafted and who was to be taxed. But here in Farsala they’d barely begun working up their tally of the populace. If someone claimed this woman as a niece or that man as a grandfather, they’d have no reason to suspect a lie.

The first side of the two wagons Kavi was working his way down proved easy enough, for the wagons were parked close to the edge of the road, and the Hrum guards, even when they carried the wounded to a resting place, had stayed on the other side, where there was level ground and space. They were settling in for a wait now, arguing about whether they’d have enough time to build a fire and brew tea.