Fox's Bride (11 page)

Chandur felt scorings on the cold stone, carvings to mark days or perhaps desperate scratching. The oubliette smelled of sand caked with old piss and less pleasant things. Voices trickled down from above, but no light made it so deep. Not enough to see more than smears in the blackness.

The sounds of a male speaking grew more distinct, and Chandur realized the man was talking to him.

“...name is Tethiel. Did she ever tell you about me?”

A shadow fell across the grate, leaving only flickers of light above him. Chandur had heard the man speaking with Hiresha. The voice sounded hollow but echoing, at least from this depth. Chandur brushed his arms, then legs, feeling as if hundreds of insects crawled over him.
This cell must be infested.

He said, “I don't know you.”

“And I count myself fortunate in that regard,” the man said. “Tell me, is it customary for a spellsword to kill himself? If he fails and the enchantress he was sworn to protect dies.”

Chandur leaned against a wall, thinking of Hiresha with no one to keep her safe. Janny was no warrior. The vizier and priests controlled the enchantress now. Chandur's arms twisted, the rope chafing his wrists. The bonds were too tight for him to loosen.

“If,” the voice continued, “this spellsword gets himself trapped in a privy pit while his elegant and intelligent mistress is married to an animal and, ah, asphyxiated?”

The man sounded as if he meant him no good, and Chandur decided not to speak to him. It felt as if fleas hopped from the wall onto Chandur’s neck and arms while lice assaulted his legs. He brushed himself off as best he could with bound hands.

“An oversight,” the man called Tethiel said high above him. “If I should perish, all my
children
within several miles of me would die. Of grief.”

Chandur measured his breathing. He had no reason to feel oppressed by the stone piled around him, to feel so helpless and trapped.
What're walls to a man with a bright fate?
He had to keep his focus.

The voice said, “I'll make an honorable man of you yet, Fosapam Chandur. I promise, you will not outlive Hiresha.”

The shadow above him left, and the grating lit as red bars. Chandur let out a sigh, telling himself the man had been a braggart and was not to be heeded. Even so, he did not care to think of such men pestering Hiresha. At the thought, Chandur realized he no longer felt so many bugs sneaking over his skin.

Chandur would have been content to wait for rescue, but Hiresha had ordered him to escape. He had only three days until his execution, by scorpion stings.

He gnawed at the ropes on his wrists. The cord tasted bitter with pitch.

The priests waved a stuffed fennec in front of a man wearing a white shawl and a black kilt. He sat on a stool too small for his size. Light from a smoking brazier played over the muscles of his chest and the gold beads in his ornate hair. He looked familiar, but Hiresha did not recognize him until she noticed the vulture mask propped on his knee.
The Royal Embalmer.

“Take another look at the stitching.” A priest flipped the stiff fennec upside down, and its ears betrayed its lifelessness by holding the same lowered position. “Do you recognize the work?”

The embalmer smirked down at the stuffed animal. “I did not do it, if that's what you're asking, but I wish I had.”

A priest's double chin turned into a triple as his mouth gaped. “This is sacrilege.”

“You must tell us more.” The priest kneaded the lifeless fennec. “The ritual is in three days.”

“If you think your fennec god has been murdered, look for his reincarnation in the kennel.” The Royal Embalmer rose from the stool to loom over the priests. “This has been most amusing, but now I will go.”

“But...but....” The priests spluttered and tugged at their blue robes.

“You will stay. A god has been stolen. Stop him!”

The guards stiffened but made no move to impede the embalmer. Hiresha was impressed that he would dare to speak so to the priests. She decided she had underestimated his influence in Pharaoh's court.

The embalmer's eyes burned into her, and he stopped beside her to whisper in his deep voice. “They will still sacrifice you. Come to me, and we'll escape together.”

He left behind the scents of salt, healthy sweat, and a twinge of decay. Looking over her shoulder, Hiresha pressed two fingers to her lips. Before she could accept any such offer, she needed to find the fox and thief to save Chandur.

Hiresha walked to the priests. “Even if the fennec stays lost,” she asked, “the ritual will proceed?”

“The god of fortune is soon found.”

The other priest ran a hand over the wrinkles below his bald pate. “According to the theologies of Ptahsud, the Golden Scoundrel's divine soul will return to the afterlife at the end of the year regardless.”

A priest padded her shoulder. “You'll go with him. Your spirit will not be lost to an eternity of wandering the Everlong Halls or swimming the Skeletal Sea.”

Promises of her own death hardly consoled Hiresha.

The sound of running footsteps slapped down the corridors. A guard bowed, holding a papyrus above his head.

A priest snatched it. More and more white appeared around his eyes as he read. He asked, “Where was this found?”

The guard ground his forehead into the stone floor. “Gods have mercy on this thrice-stung man!”

The priest passed the papyrus to his fellow. “Who gave this to you?”

“I—I don't know,” the guard said. “I found it rolled in my sash.”

The priest's jowls wobbled as he jerked his head up. “This is a ransom. For our god.”

For the Well-Greased Hands of the Priests of the Golden Scoundrel,

Your god's overfed belly puffs out when breathing. His left back paw twitches as he dreams of which mortals to bless and which to blight. Fifty-four emeralds in his collar. Seven whiskers on the right side, six on the left. No humanity between.

Count one gold coin for each god into a fist, one fist for each divine virtue into a stack, one stack for each season into a pile, one pile for each day in Gods Week into a chest, one chest for each pyramid. Deliver the chests tomorrow after sunrise, three hundred and seventy paces beyond the South Gate, where the two dunes meet.

Your god will be returned by noon. Your gold will not.

Hiresha squinted at the ransom note through eyes that burned from staying open too long in the parched air. The priests fumed. Two more guards arrived carrying identical notes, and none of them had seen who had slipped the scrolls into their clothing.

“This thief must have his bowels strung out,” one priest said.

“He is soon to be drowned in sand,” the other said.

“What shall we do, oh bride? How will the thief be caught?”

“I don't know, yet.” Hiresha plucked the third ransom note from the hands of a guard. “I suggest you begin collecting the ransom while I meditate.”

Hiresha plopped down on the stool and motioned to her maid. Janny held the enchantress' shoulder. Hiresha closed her eyes on the stifling prison with its soot-caked walls and opened them on the frosty brilliance of her dream laboratory.

“Assuming six virtues,” she said aloud, “and Gods Week is five days this year, the ransom is three thousand six hundred gold.”

Mirrors orbited her within the circular room. Dark stone walls, glowing baubles in shelves, and rainbows of jewels in mid air. Vapor misted from Hiresha's lips, though she did not shiver in the cold.

“No man could carry so much gold.” What people called gold coins were an alloy of metals, but even diluted, their weight was formidable. Tan coins cascaded in glittering drifts within a mirror while sand of a similar color flowed within another glass. “The thieves would need several camels or a ship.”

A third mirror enclosed her reflection, who was also examining a ransom note. She lifted a yellow glove sparkling with topazes to cup her chin. “We can't understand why anyone would kidnap so adorable a fox. Oh, wait, yes we can!”

Hiresha congratulated herself on having split her consciousness, dividing focus from distraction, so she could better know which thoughts to ignore. The enchantress gestured with her purple glove, and the papyri fluttered into the field of an adjacent mirror. There she scrutinized the letters. “The thief who wrote these is precise in pen stroke. Confident. Educated. Iconoclast.”

While brooding over those implications, Hiresha beckoned to an orange jewel. The citrine shot through the air into her grasp. While asleep, she could Attract matter toward her as easily as Maid Janny curling her finger in a “come-hither” gesture. The oval gem passed between her fingers as she thought, feeling out the hard surfaces of the facets.

The reflection sighed in her mirror. “That poor fennec. We hope they're treating him well.”

Hiresha paid her no attention. “I can enchant the gold to increase in weight after a set time. An Attraction spell could cause it to adhere to any nearby people.”

“A golden cage,” the reflection said.

“Depend on the greed of thieves.” Hiresha was drifting upward since she was weightless in the laboratory. Enchantresses could Lighten with ease, but she worried how long it would take her to place Burdening enchantments into the gold coins.
I'll have to sacrifice troves of dream jewels for that much power.

The reflection moved in a yellow shimmer of topazes. “With the thieves caught, we can save Fosapam.”

“Indeed.” A school of green garnets glittered as they drifted around Hiresha. “By completing the ritual, Chandur will be safe.”

“And what of yourself?” A third enchantress appeared in a mirror. She looked like a taller version of Hiresha at first glance, but no person alive could take but one look. Every facet of her face and proportion of her body achieved the same mathematical perfection as the masterful cuts of the purple sapphires arraying her gown. Her eyes shone violet. “You'll never let yourself die.”

Hiresha faced the piercing beauty of the intruder, to prove she could without flinching. This aspect had slipped into Hiresha's consciousness while working with the Lord of the Feast. Hiresha considered it a fair price for protecting Morimound, but now she was never alone, even in her dreams. It was bad enough that this Feaster entity had stolen her face and voice, but she also thieved her ideas. Hiresha had considered changing the color of her own eyes. She suspected the violet-eyed Feaster could peer straight into her mind and rummage her thoughts.

The lush, purple lips within the glass spiked upward in a destroying smile. The Feaster started to speak again, but Hiresha closed her eyes on her and ended the dream.

The next morning, Hiresha tried to stay awake atop the city wall. Beside her sedan chair, the aged priest paced, and the other drank cup after cup of camel milk, belching between. Close by, the gatehouse pylon was a pair of rectangular foothills of stone glazed blue. To the east, the sun crested the mountain of a pyramid in a red slant.

A caravan of guards departed the city gates, the open double doors inlaid with the likeness of an oasis surrounded by hieroglyphs. The five caravan camels each carried a chest of gold. Armored men walked in front of them, reins in hand, while a scribe counted out the paces. The flanks of the beasts swayed side to side as they trudged onto the sands.

“They're going over that dune,” a priest said. “It'll block our view.”

“No matter,” Hiresha said. “The miscreants will escape with the gold. After you have the fennec, you'll send out riders to find them.”

“And the gold will trap the thieves?”

“Effectively, yes.”

The guards returned to the gates, their camels trotting faster with their loads left behind. Hiresha folded her hands over her lap. A priest cupped his fingers to the side of his face to block the sun, while the desert turned from red to gold in the morning light. Guards rose to their tiptoes looking out, hands clamped on their sword hilts.

Beside Hiresha, Maid Janny said, “Who're that lot?”

Hundreds of camels swarmed over dunes. Women with soiled skirts ran between them, along with children laughing and racing each other, and men slouched forward in determined speed. The throng crested another sandy rise, saw the chests, and began whooping.

The guards stared slack jawed. The priests were speechless.

Hiresha tripped on her dress on her way out of the sedan chair. Fits of shock wracked her past wakefulness to a lucidity of embarrassment and disbelief. She clutched the side of one massive crown of the pharaoh statues that served as the crenellations for the wall.

“They,” a priest stammered, “there’re thousands of thieves.”

“You are no fool,” the other priest said. “You'll see the thieves must've told all in Tent Town about the ransom.”

Cheers rose over the dunes. People trooped into sight, hugging each other. Each held a coin up to the light, waving them at the city. Their shouts took on jeering tones.

“I would hazard a guess,” Hiresha said, “close to three thousand, six hundred individuals.”

A guard spat over the wall. “Cursed salt scrapers!”

Hiresha slid her gaze to the east, the direction the throng had come. The tents of the slums cluttered the dunes to the south of Queen Sting's Pyramid. Hiresha and Chandur had sailed past the hide-skin tents yesterday, but she would never have anticipated the thieves would give away a god's ransom, would tell the poor folk where to find the gold.

Neither could she believe any other explanation more likely. The few guards who had known about the ransom the day before would not have betrayed their own city and priests to give away gold meant to rescue their god. That left only herself—
Please don't let them suspect me—
and the paradox that the thieves who had stolen the fennec had turned up their noses on a metal fortune.
 

I was outwitted, and Chandur might die because of it
. Her vision whitened to a blur, and she felt faint.

A priest flicked his fingers from his bald scalp toward the crowd on the dune. “Arrest them. Arrest them all.”

The guards baulked. “They'd mob us.”

“Must be every salt digger and his whelps out there.”

“And a few Bright Palms. Never know what they'll do.”

Several figures stood out in the boisterous crowd by their calm aspect. None jumped or held up coins. Each wore a shield with a stylized figure of a lone man. Hiresha found it fitting that Bright Palms would witness the humiliation of herself and the city with their dispassionate gazes. They disapproved of wealth and would enjoy seeing it divided among the poor. That was, if their magic allowed them to feel anything. It did not.

“I....” Hiresha's dry throat sucked the sound from her words. “Maid Janny.”

The woman in the grey dress ladled the enchantress some water. Then she could talk.

“I'll double the gold, of any who'll speak to me.” She motioned the maid to give the guards coins. “Hurry out the gates, offer to any willing.”

None of the salt miners proved eager to follow the guards through the gatehouse. Two even took the coins then ran off. Neither would the priests allow Hiresha to leave the city. “They'll savage you in that gown. They're animals.”

“They are people,” Hiresha said. “People left to cling to existence at the edge of a desert city. You pay them in water for their salt, do you not?”