Rise of a Hero (The Farsala Trilogy) (26 page)

From the sounds, she guessed the guard had started pacing back and forth on the covered porch—perhaps for warmth, perhaps to keep himself awake, but it didn’t matter. What mattered was that, like any sane man, he stayed under the shelter of the small roof instead of moving out into the rain. Feeling the drops crawling under her saturated hair and down her neck, Soraya grinned and moved to the narrow window at the back of the building. It was placed too high beneath the eaves for the rain to enter, so they hadn’t bothered with shutters, but it was also too high for her to climb in without help. No matter.

Soraya went back to the rain barrel and dragged it to the window. It was already half full, and might have been too heavy for her to move if the mud hadn’t lubricated its passage.

Clinging to the edge of the window for balance, she pulled herself up till she knelt, then stood on the barrel’s rim. First she lowered her supply sack through, then she carefully reached down and swished one muddy foot, and then the other in the clean water. Not knowing where she might have to go next, it would be best if she could leave the Hrum camp without arousing suspicion. She’d already prepared her lie for Ordnancer Reevus—an ailing aunt in a distant village, who might be moved to make a helpful niece her heir.

The window was a tighter fit than Soraya expected, long and narrow, and it was very dark inside. A quick wiggle took her head and shoulders through, but then she had to squirm forward, dragging her ribs painfully over the hard wood. Even her slim hips almost wedged, but she rocked back and forth and her bones passed the frame, her buttocks squashing through behind them.

Fortunately no one had moved the stack of document boxes she’d noticed beneath this window—though the room was so crowded, it would have been hard to find any wall space that didn’t have boxes stacked almost to the rafters.

Careful as she was to move silently, knees and elbows hitting wood made a few soft thumps as Soraya groped her way to the floor. But the rain on this roof was as loud as it was in the kitchen, and Soraya didn’t think the guard would hear.

Still, once her feet found the floor, she closed her eyes and waited, listening again, till her pounding heartbeat slowed and her breathing quieted. If the guard was out there she couldn’t hear him, so hopefully he couldn’t hear her, either. Good enough.

Soraya opened her eyes and considered her first problem: Inside the record room it was pitch dark. The windows made squares of slightly lighter blackness, and she thought she could make out the corners of a few of the higher boxes, but even the Suud, with their wide-dilating pupils, couldn’t have read anything.

She’d come prepared for this, though she’d hoped it wouldn’t be necessary. Half a dozen drying cloths from her sack covered the windows, secured with nails from the blacksmith’s reject pile, pushed into the cracks between window frame and wall. She rolled another pair of cloths together and laid them quietly along the bottom of
the door, for light seeping through that crack would certainly alert the guard.

Making any kind of light was still insanely risky, but Soraya had no choice. Surely working magic now wouldn’t attract the distant storm. Suppressing the apprehension that quickened her pulse, Soraya pulled flint, steel, and a candle from her sack, and summoned up a light shilshadu trance. The clicks of flint on steel sounded very loud. Without magic, no one could ignite a candle with a single spark. With her mind touching its shilshadu, Soraya was able to convince the tiny flake of fire’s birth that here were air and fuel aplenty. It responded to her persuasion with a brighter glow, a wisp of smoke, and then flame bloomed.

Candlelight illuminated the small room, bright after the near total darkness that preceded it, and Soraya watched the door, holding her breath. No exclamation. No startled, running footsteps. No key rattling in the lock. Soraya took a deep breath and began to read the labels on the crates.

Calfaer had taught her the written Hrum words for money, pay, and supplies, and she thought she could ignore those boxes. The first
unfamiliar words sent her for the box of keys, still in the cabinet where she had seen the clerk put it this morning, though many men must have used them since. Such methodical people, the Hrum.

To her delight, the keys were numbered to match the chests.

Opening box fourteen enabled her to deduce the Hrum word for “map,” another to guess at “building plans.” Yet another phrase she didn’t recognize led to a box filled with closely written documents that might have been letters or reports—whatever they were, they didn’t look like records of slaves, so she relocked that box and went on. Between excitement at being so near her goal, fear, and the need for haste, her fingers began to shake. The lid of the next box slipped, and it closed with a thud. Listening through the pounding of rain on the roof, she still heard nothing from the guard, and the same rain pounded on the roof over his head as well. She was safe. Soraya took a deep breath and forced herself to relax. This was going to take time—she would simply have to resign herself to that.

But only three boxes later she came across a box of neatly rolled scrolls, each labeled, not with
some Hrum word, but with the name of a Farsalan town or village. Her heart beginning to pound, Soraya took the top scroll and opened it. The first item was a rough map, showing where in Farsala this village lay. There followed a list of names, and each name was followed by several paragraphs of writing. Dates, written in the Hrum manner, began each paragraph, but Calfaer had taught her to read them.

On 23 Hyrum, 204, Duram, butcher,
adrias
to sell
murous
meat to the garrison, in order to . . .

Soraya’s eyes moved past the details of this Duram’s crime and capture, though not without a flicker of curiosity about how he’d poisoned the meat, and what he’d been trying to accomplish by doing so. At the end of the paragraph she found what she was looking for.

After his capture, Duram was
varsele
and sent to the
sele
market in K’navan, in the imperial province of Drhur.

Sele
. Slave. She’d have felt better if she had any idea where Drhur was, but if Sudaba and Merdas had been sent there too, then she’d find out.

Soraya rerolled the scroll and put it back.
Sudaba and Merdas had been taken on the estate of High Commander Merahb. She spent some time looking for her father’s name before she came across that of the small village that served the manor.

Her lips compressed. To say that Merdas and Sudaba had been captured in Paldan, amid the grooms and laundry maids, was an insult. But the Hrum would hardly care for that, and it was the nearest village to the manor. When she told her mother this story, she could leave that detail out.
When she told her mother . . .
Soraya’s hands were shaking again as she pulled out the scroll. She would have to edit a lot of details about this adventure. Her mother would be aghast at the very idea of her working as a servant—especially in an army camp. On the other hand Sudaba had been a slave for several months now. What work might she be doing? Would it change her? It was hard to imagine the haughty Lady Sudaba doing menial work, or changing in any—

A key rattled in the lock.

Soraya dropped the scroll, then snatched it back before it had time to touch the box, and leaped for the pile of crates below the far window. Scrambling like a squirrel, she had her head and
shoulder through and was wiggling her hips past the frame when a firm hand closed around her ankle and dragged her back into the room.

She skidded over the crates, knocking her chin on the edge, and crashed to the floor with a violence that stunned her.

Half dazed, still clutching the precious scroll, she rolled over and stared up at two soldiers, and the astonished, affronted face of Master Clerk Marcellus.

“Wait, I’ve seen you before!” Marcellus exclaimed. “You’re one of Hennic’s assistants, aren’t you? What under three moons are you doing here?”

Three moons? Where in the Hrum’s vast empire did this man come from? But Soraya had heard many odd exclamations from the soldiers. She struggled to gather her wits. Her chin hurt. “I’m that sorry, sir, truly I am. There’s a woman in town, she’s being a friend of mine. She has a nephew, a dye trader, who went to Desafon a few months back and they haven’t heard from him since. Rumor has it he was getting himself caught up in something, and shipped off as a slave. She was asking, begging me, to find out if it was true.”

There, not bad for such short notice, and the tremor in her voice at the end was particularly good. As long as no one asked for the nephew’s name.

“Hmm.” Marcellus rubbed a bristly chin. He wore nothing but a light tunic and boots, with a cloak over the top, as a man will when suddenly wakened to investigate a suspicious disturbance. Soraya wished he looked sleepier. “If that’s the case, why didn’t this woman come and ask about her nephew?”

Soraya felt her eyes widen in genuine surprise. Could someone simply ask the Hrum about the contents of these scrolls? Well, perhaps some could, but not Commander Merahb’s daughter.

“She was afraid, sir. I told her that you weren’t being such hard folks, but she didn’t believe me. And I like this job, truly I do. I’d hate to jeopardize it.”

“But the scroll you’re looking at isn’t for Desafon,” said Marcellus slowly.

How could even a clerk see that, at this distance, in this light?

“I had this one in my hand when I started to run,” Soraya lied. “I don’t even know what town it’s for.”

Every instinct screamed in protest as she held it out to him, praying for belief, for forgiveness. And if he was willing to tell the Farsalans who had been captured, and where they were sent, could she get a list of names from Setesafon’s townsfolk, and slip Sudaba’s and Merdas’ names in among them? After all, the scroll would say that they were taken in the village.

Marcellus took the scroll, but he was staring at her face . . . no, at her hair. The long, straight, black hair that was the mark of pure deghan blood.

“ ‘. . .
jeopardize
your job,’ ” he said slowly, and his accent on the word was the same as hers had been—a deghan’s accent. This was a man who had dealt with many Farsalans: merchants, peasants, deghan captives, slaves. Soraya closed her eyes in sudden despair.

“ ‘. . . rumor has it . . . ’ You don’t sound much like a kitchen girl . . . Lady?”

“I’m not being a lady,” Soraya protested, trying to sound frightened instead of betraying her sudden fury. She’d been so close! “My grandmam worked in a deghan’s household. That’s where Mam and I got the hair.”

“And the accent? Did you get that from your ‘grandmam’? Oh, don’t bother. We’ll find out, one way or the other. Take her to the holding pen. We’ll send for someone who may be able to identify her.”

“The holding pen? Where the slaves are being kept?” It wasn’t hard to sound appalled at that. “Please, sir, won’t you just send for Master Hennic? He’ll be punishing me proper. I promise—”

“Don’t bother,” Marcellus repeated. “I wouldn’t dream of letting this pass without investigation. But I will give you a word of advice . . . Lady. It’s not that your deghan’s accent shows, it’s that your peasant accent’s so exaggerated. The lowest hick from the smallest village doesn’t talk that broadly.”

Soraya gazed at his calm, shrewd eyes. He knew, and he wouldn’t let it go. If nothing else, catching her would look good on his record. “Arzhang take you then,” she said, dropping into her own, clear, deghan’s speech. It felt strange on her tongue after so many months, but good. Like walking into a familiar room after a journey.

T
HEY TOOK HER TO THE
holding pen. There was no real building there, just a shed filled with straw, open on one wall so the watch could see in.

The soldiers seized her wrists and searched her clothing for weapons before they thrust her through the gate in the high fence. Their touch had been utterly impersonal, but it was still an insult, and Soraya gritted her teeth. The open ground had turned to mud, but at least the rain was finally lessening, and by heaping the straw around her, Soraya was able to keep warm. Despite her fear, and the furious frustration of her shattered hopes, she had actually fallen asleep when rough hands pulled her out of the straw and swept her tumbled hair away from her face.

Blinking in the torchlight, Soraya could see nothing beyond the fence that surrounded the pen, for the Hrum had threaded boards through the iron ribs that curved inward at the top. But she heard voices, one Hrum and one with a Farsalan accent—the clearer speech of the city, she thought, though she couldn’t make out most of the words. On the other hand, the clink of coin changing hands was unmistakable.

She’d been identified. All Setesafon had seen her last year, and of course the Hrum had paid informants in the city—men who wouldn’t want to come to this camp in the daylight.

Fine then! She was glad to be rid of that humble, pathetic Sani. Of scrubbing, and fetching, and avoiding Hennic’s slaps. She’d had to pay attention to the temper of a cook! No more. For better or worse, she was the lady Soraya. And the lady Soraya would never dream of missing the warm bulk of Casia’s body between her and the hearth, or the comforting drone of Ludo’s snores. Or the wry laughter of a slave . . . a slave, for Azura’s sake! The lady Soraya needed no one.

The lady Soraya cried herself to sleep.

I
T WAS AFTERNOON WHEN
they took her to the governor’s quarters. No breakfast, no midmeal. Soraya had done her best, combing straw from her hair with her fingers and braiding it back—so good to have it off her face, instead of hiding behind it—but she still felt grubby, unkempt, and very tired. The kitchen girls were allowed to wash . . . but evidently not the prisoners.

She stepped through the door, head lifted proudly, and every officer gathered in the big room turned to stare at her. She knew a moment’s longing for the time, only yesterday, when men’s
eyes had passed over her as if she wasn’t even there. But that time was gone, so she stiffened her neck and stared back, not even flinching from Ordnancer Reevus’ angry astonishment.