Forged by Fire (3 page)

Within moments of the attack, the courtyard looked as it had upon our arrival. The unnatural white fire spawned by Gen’s Djimbi magics had completely consumed the three Auditors it had made contact with; no bones, no ashes, no smoke to be seen. The only indication that something had recently burned was the lingering stench of charred hair and meat. The other corpses lay concealed beneath bed ding chaff in the feed loft, and would be disposed of under cover of deep night.

We won’t get away with this. Even at high noon, with the bayen quarter asleep in the heat, people will have heard the shrieks.

In our favor was the terror that Auditors inspired in all folk, bayen and rishi alike. Everyone knew that where Au ditors walked, interrogations and screams followed. Even Temple’s daronpuis were uneasy around the sacred hench men veiled in white. So perhaps questions wouldn’t be asked. Perhaps fear would keep mouths shut, would put a clamp over curiosity. After all, Malacarites are good at not seeing and hearing the visible and audible. When it suits them.

The dragonmaster lay upon a bale of hay, the gap ing wound on his chest bleeding sluggishly. I was aching so badly that I no longer denied to myself that I craved venom. Ghepp had promised to send a healer; one had yet to appear.

I didn’t like that I’d been left with no weapon with which to defend myself. Especially as I didn’t wholly trust Ghepp. No. The way he’d looked at me . . .

Not just his look. The facts didn’t add up. If he and the Auditors had been about to mount up to verify the Clutch boundaries, why had some of Ghepp’s men carried bows and arrows? Strange choice of weapon, when soldiers were usually armed with swords. Unless a long-distance defense was required. As was the case against quoits.

And what about those quoits?
Auditors were forbidden to carry ordinary arms, save for the decapitation axes used when performing a holy execu tion before a Temple tribunal. The only weapon Auditors were permitted to carry—and use in self-defense—were
furgkri
, spinning razor-rings. Quoits.
The Auditors wanted to make their attack look like selfdefense.
Had Ghepp known about the ambush, or had it been co incidence that they’d all been in the byre courtyard upon our arrival? What about Ghepp’s men . . . had the Auditors known that some of them were armed with bows, or had the bowmen appeared in the byre without the Auditors’ knowledge?
Again, I could speculate a thousand possibilities. I doubted I’d ever know the answers. The end result re mained the same, regardless: Even here, on my own Clutch, I wasn’t safe.
Well after high noon, an Auditor—one of Ghepp’s dis guised men—brought us a flagon of watered wine, a hand ful of plums, and a Djimbi woman. The woman wore the blank expression of someone on the brink of terror, and she carried a reed basket upon one hip. I was nonplussed by what she was wearing; it looked to be no more than a bolt of cloth, plum-colored and patterned with black fish bones, that had been artfully wrapped about her from bo som to thigh. Never would such exposure be publicly toler ated on Clutch Re. I wondered if her mode of dress marked her as a whore.
The Auditor gestured toward the dragonmaster, and the woman went to him, set her basket on the floor, and be gan tending to his wound with visibly trembling hands. He flailed; she murmured to him in Djimbi; he settled and per mitted her to continue.
The Auditor withdrew bundled brown cloth from one of his long sleeves and dropped it at my feet. “From the clo ven one.”
He meant Gen.
Moving stiffly from pain, I picked up the bundle. It was a bitoo, one of those ankle-length hooded gowns deemed ap propriate wear for a Malacarite woman. The style—brown, no tucks or pleats, made of serviceable byssus—was popu lar amongst rishi.
The bitoo had been wrapped about a tunic, which was in turn wrapped about a dowry-sword. In the manner of all dowry-swords, the object was two sticks tied together with red twine to form the quillion and blade of a toy sword. It had been covered with an assortment of hole-punched coins, Temple chits, and copper drippings, all linked to gether by red twine. It wasn’t a long dowry-sword, nor did it bear any silver or gold, but it was impressive enough. It would adequately purchase me and the dragonmaster in clusion in the arbiyesku.
The Auditor crouched before me. I disliked his nearness, his veil, his studied calm.
“What?” I snapped.
He took his time handing me a small roll of parchment. The instructions on it were terse:

The dragonmaster is a hatagin komikon who’s lost his caravan and status in an inopportune Arena wa ger. You’re his roidan yin. Give your Arena cape to the bearer of this note. I’ll summon you when I feel it’s safe to do so, and provide a token so you’ll know the summons is mine.

So the dragonmaster was to play the part of a caravan owner, and I, his claimed woman. The wound on his chest would readily be accepted, for it was not uncommon for a caravan master to be hurt by one of his surly, overworked dragons.

I shredded the parchment into tiny strips. “Burn them,” I said. “And turn your back. I need to change.”
For a moment I thought the man dressed as an Auditor might refuse. I wondered if he knew who I was, or could ever guess. Maybe he did know, and simply wasn’t unset tled by the knowledge. He took the strips from my hand, stood, and turned.
In the shadows of the feed loft’s ground floor, the Djimbi woman bound the dragonmaster’s chest wound and helped him into the tunic Ghepp had provided, while I labored to shuck the cape and modified tunic I’d worn into Arena. My fractured ribs and battle-stiff limbs made the task a nasty challenge.
When I was done, the dragonmaster and I were escorted from the messenger byre. I carried the dowry-sword con cealed under my bitoo, and wore my cowl up—
not
for protection against the sun. The byre was located in the da ronpuis’ quarters, a stockade of blinding white stone build ings, each enclosing a courtyard that was linked to the next by a short viaduct. We passed several opulently gowned holy wardens en route, but with the Auditor at our side, and the dragonmaster and I moving in the stilted lurch of those recently injured, eyes slid over us as if we were invisible. No one wants to look upon the victims of Temple’s interroga tors. Why admit that Temple practiced torture?
Guarded gates swung open for us; we exited into a dusty market square dwarfed by the Clutch temple. The cobble stones of the market square shimmered in the midday heat. Djimbi rishi bearing bales upon their green-mottled backs crossed the square, moving slowly in the heat. Instead of bi toos, the women all wore strange garments of plum-colored cloth, ragged and worn, wrapped from bosom to thigh. They carried their babes not in cowls upon their shoulders—for they wore no cowls—but strapped their offspring length wise across their chests or backs in a sling. I was amazed by how much of their bodies the women exposed: shoulders, arms, legs, all completely bare.
“Walk south,” the would-be Auditor beside me said. “Ask directions if you need them.”
“We’ll need water,” I said. Beside me, the dragonmaster stared blankly at the caravansaries and tenements at the far end of the market square. We needed sleep as well as water, and not a long walk to an unknown reception by a strange clan.
The Auditor shrugged. “The Clutch is small; won’t take you long to get there.”
It took all day.
By dusk, the dragonmaster and I reached our destination. We’d been forced by heat, thirst, and exhaustion to rest in the meager shade of several abandoned huts throughout the afternoon, and though the distance we’d traveled had not been great—the central dome of the temple shimmered behind our backs, still visible across the grassy miles—the journey had seemed interminable.
As we staggered into the arbiyesku, seated men rose from the dusty ground. Women stopped scrubbing pots and plaiting grass fibers and nursing babes. Children ran to their mothers.
I gagged at the sweetish reek of the decaying dragon co coons stockpiled in the arbiyesku brick warehouse to our left, hastily drew a corner of my bitoo cowl across my nose. Pain knifed across my torso and I gasped and froze. Broken ribs dislike sudden movement.
The dragonmaster scowled as the arbiyesku gathered about us. Like all the other serfs I’d glimpsed thus far in Xxamer Zu, the clan members of the arbiyesku were bare foot and ribby. Most of them had the pitted teeth, canker sores, and black-stained lips and tongues of the rishi we’d passed en route through Clutch Xxamer Zu. The drag onmaster had muttered something about slii fruitstones, sucked to dull hunger.
I was hard put not to gape at the women’s mode of dress, too, nor at the variation amongst the color of their skin, for I’d never before come across so many folk in whose veins ran Djimbi blood. Under the crimson-streaked sky, some folk gleamed like polished mahogany, the weird whorls upon their skin the color of patina on old bronze. Others had an umber pigmentation mottled here and there by dull olive. Still others were chestnut, their piebald markings a cinereous green. Not a single rishi had skin the color of mine, that tan that’s referred to as fawn when describing bayen, but is called aosogi, poorly cured hide, when de scribing a rishi.
Nor did any before me possess the pure ivory tones of the Emperor.
A Djimbi woman with a magnificent bosom and a hid eous scar that ran along her left jawline stepped out of the crowd. Her skin was the color of wet cinnamon mottled with sage whorls, lighter toned than some of those around her, darker than others.
“I am Tansan,” she said. Her voice was bold, the direct ness of her gaze challenging. She was taller than me by at least a foot. “I’m waiting for bull wings to bless the herd of Xxamer Zu.”
I looked from her to the dragonmaster, from the dragonmaster to her. But as if it were normal for a woman to ex tend the ritual greeting to a stranger while in the presence of men, and as if the name she’d used to describe herself were a typical Malacarite one, the dragonmaster did little more than scowl more deeply.
“May your waiting end,” he snapped. “May bull wings hatch.” He gestured brusquely at me to produce the dowrysword, and as I withdrew it from a sleeve, he tersely intro duced himself and said we wanted to join their clan.
Eyes locked upon the significant value of the dowrysword. Children gaped at us. The old folk champed their toothless gums, eyes bright, and exchanged mutters. A Djimbi man carefully took the dowry-sword from my hands to examine it and was at once surrounded.
But the tall, lush-limbed woman before me—Tansan, she’d called herself—wore a wary look. “Why us? Why here? Who are you, that you carry such a dowry and ap pear at nightfall, aosogi-via?”
Her distrust and acuity irked. Her confidence and close ness irked even more. She was directing the question at me, too, and not the dragonmaster, which was unusual and an annoyance.
I tried to play the part of a demure claimed woman and looked to the dragonmaster for him to answer her.
“You’ll either take us or you won’t,” he snapped.“There’s more coin on that sword than you’ll have seen in a long time; we can always join a more reasonable clan.”
Tansan’s gaze flicked to him, then fell back on me. Her eyes were opaque. “Why us, aosogi-via?” she repeated quietly.
I fought to keep irritation from my face, not to stare her down. Not to visibly withdraw deeper into the shadows of my cowl. “I’ll be honest, yes?” I murmured. “My claimer has run afoul of some First-Class lordlings over the years, in Lireh; no one will look for us in this Clutch, in this clan. No one.”
Lireh was the harbor city of our coastal capital, Liru. It was as far from Xxamer Zu as any place in Malacar could be, both literally and figuratively.
“But why
this
Clutch and why
this
clan, aosogi-via?” Tansan repeated softly.
I felt my nostrils flare and I stifled the urge to clench my hands into fists. “Xxamer Zu is nothing but salt pans and drought,” I murmured. “All Malacarites know of it, and none with any choice would seek a life here;
that’s
why we chose this Clutch. And this clan? Because you’re far from bayen eyes. Nothing more. But there’ll be other clans on this Clutch’s outskirts; I think we’ll join one of those in stead, yes?”
I held out my hand for the dowry-sword, and the man who was holding it looked alarmed. There was a brief flurry of Djimbi dialogue amongst them; the dragonmas ter interjected several times, as their tongue was his own. Tansan’s face closed like an orchid in a deluge.
“You will stay,” an elderly man said, taking the dowrysword and clasping it against his forehead. “Your womb will be ours; our seed will be yours. You are arbiyesku now.”
At once the women of the arbiyesku pressed about me, the heat of their dusky skin tangible through my bitoo. Tansan still stood directly before me, immovable, so close that her proud, outthrust breasts brushed against my chest. I don’t like people standing that close, uninvited.
I studied her from within the haven of my cowl as the arbiyesku women murmured kinship greetings and pressed their palms to my womb in ritual welcome. Tansan looked a little over my age—twenty or so. Calm, thoughtful, and confident, she studied me with eyes fringed heavily with black lashes. Her lips were full and stained black like her kin’s, but free of the canker several others suffered. Her broad shoulders were very straight but rounded softly at the ends.
Suddenly she reached up to my cowl and pulled it back. “Let’s see you, hey-o.”
Murmurs and clucks as I was revealed.
I would have snapped my cowl back over my head if not limited in movement and speed by the pain of my frac tured ribs. Instead, I contented myself by openly glaring at Tansan. She ignored my hostility and continued to study me. I felt like a yearling being examined for purchase.
My neck bore a thick scar that ran from the left side of my cheek down to my collarbone, given me by a dragon’s tongue while in Dragonmaster Re’s stables. For the sake of unobstructed vision in Arena combat, I’d chopped my black hair short, as a young boy does. My eyes were heavily bloodshot, and the black of my pupils was marbled with white from past abuse of dragon venom. There wasn’t a square inch of my skin that wasn’t covered by bruises, welts, or oozing scrapes—wounds I’d received in Arena.
The warmth of Tansan’s chest, so close to mine, invaded my breasts and surged to my throat. The dragonmaster fol lowed a group of men to one of the arbiyesku huts to ex change ritual greetings in the privacy of a men’s domicile.
“You’ve had a debu life,” Tansan pronounced. Those about her accepted the observation with calm nods.
Debu. A derogatory Djimbi word for
cursed
. I’d heard my mother use it, in my youth.
I wanted to slap the certainty from Tansan’s face. Who was she—indecently dressed, in clothes so worn they were all but threadbare—to pronounce my life cursed? How dared she—surrounded by kin and kith, safe from the in sanity of Arena on this far-flung, impoverished Clutch— declare my life damned?
She turned on her heel, arms balanced at her sides, not a tense line in her body, and walked away. Someone touched my wrist: an old woman carrying a baby in a sling. The whorls on the old woman’s loam-brown skin were the color of damp hay, her eyes the color of snails. Her lips and tongue were black from slii stone.
“Come, yes, we’ll give you food, water.”
The women surrounding me showed the good grace not to remark upon my shambling gait. Ahead of us, Tansan walked erect and loose-hipped toward the wooden stairs of a long bamboo-beam-and-woven-jute structure on stilts: the women’s barracks. She walked with the same sultry flu idity as my sister, Waivia.
Tansan seated herself upon the stairs of the barracks, and the old woman with eyes the color of snails left my side to hand Tansan the babe in the sling.
“Sit here, sit,” another woman murmured to me. “Join us for evening meal. You are hungry and thirsty, yes?”
I stiffly lowered myself to the ground, failing utterly to hide the pain I suffered in the process. Several women crouched on their haunches around me, staring, their chil dren clustered beside them.
The old woman with eyes the color of snails returned to my side and crouched before me. She thumped her bony chest; the sound was the same as if she’d struck an unripe gourd. “I’m Fwipi. You?”
“I am the hatagin komikon’s wai roidan yin,” I murmured.
“No, not good, that. A name, a name.”
“That’s my name.”
“Gaaa! That’s just a title. You have no name?”
“Kazonvia.” Not exactly a lie, as I
was
the second girl to leave my mother’s womb.
Fwipi grimaced. “Your name is Secondgirl? Empty name, that. Emperor’s ways. You like his ways?”
How annoying, her question. How irritating, the growing crowd as the men who’d accompanied the dragonmaster into a mud-brick hut now joined the women sitting about me. I needed to lie down, couldn’t think clearly.
“The Emperor’s a despot,” I snapped. “He’s not worth my piss.”
Fwipi sucked in a breath. Several of those about her ex changed looks.
“People who say such things lose fingers, lose tongues,” Fwipi chided. “Endangers the lives of us all, such perfidy. Better to hold such thoughts close, hey-o.”
Several elders in the clan murmured agreement, and no more was said to me until two women carrying a plank piled with kadoob tubers raked fresh from embers weaved amongst us, offering food.
Instead of taking their place around the outskirts of seated men, the women and children of the arbiyesku sat side by side with them. Instead of waiting until the men had eaten their fill before touching the food, the women and children ate at the same time as they did. Irregular be havior. But I approved. I loathed the custom of women and children eating last.
Not that I ate. A stone-size kadoob tuber, charred and wizened, sat unheeded upon my lap while I stared, ex hausted and aching, at nothing in particular. Beside me, Fwipi exchanged a few words with an old man. They spoke in Djimbi.
Fwipi addressed me again, her pitted teeth flashing like speckled black beetles. “You watch only tomorrow. You’ve traveled far, hey-o, you’re tired. Watch only.”
The old man beside her nodded and beamed agreement, revealing gums as toothless as a newborn’s.
Fwipi placed a dry hand on my arm. Her eyes traveled to the dragonmaster, who was just joining us. “Don’t fear him now. You do as your clan sees fit. We’ll protect you, yes?”
She thought I’d been beaten by my claimer. I gritted my teeth and forced myself to act the grateful, submissive woman. “Thank you,” I murmured, eyes downcast.
The old man stirred. He was holding something toward me, dry, contorted, the color of bone. Maska root. He said something in Djimbi, and though I didn’t understand him, the meaning conveyed was plenty clear:
Eat.
“Thank you,” I repeated again, this time with sincere gratitude in my voice, and I took the precious root, swiftly peeled it with my teeth, and began chewing. It tasted like bile.
As those around me ate, children with potbellies and twiggy limbs slowly summoned the courage to draw nearer me. They gathered in a semicircle, openly curious. One of the children cleared her throat, a sloe-eyed girl about six years old, skin the color of a honey-drizzled cake and mot tled with small, very faint green whorls.
“What was your clan before this one?” she demanded.
“I belonged to the hatagin komikon, not a clan.” I was aware that everyone was listening to my reply.
“Is your claimer mad?”
I bit back a heated affirmative and replied with as much timidity as I could contrive: “He sometimes looks mad, sometimes acts mad. Perhaps he is mad?”