Fox's Bride (8 page)

Chandur concentrated on his form. His jasper sword knocked two men off the ship, and they thudded into the sand. The other three were more cautious of his reach. Meanwhile, ten grapnels bit into the ship, then a score.

One man spat. “God thief!”

The spellsword had no time to consider what he meant by that.

City guards shimmied up from the camels. They carried bows slung over their shoulders, and Chandur dashed toward them in a sweep of red stone. He could not give them time to draw. He would have to kill them, and he hated the thought. One of the men he recognized, Djom, by his missing front teeth and pudgy, dimpled face.

As the spellsword rushed in, Djom's gap-toothed mouth opened in horror. “Fos!”

And from behind, Hiresha cried out. “Chandur, stop.”

Fosapam Chandur Lightened his weapon and yanked it back. Five guards pulled their bowstrings to a draw and aimed.

“Everyone, discontinue,” Hiresha said. “We surrender. Chandur, drop your sword. We're not murderers.”

He did as he was told. The jasper weapon crashed onto the planks, and he felt his insides lurch. He lost all sense of his fate.
What way to victory now?

Three men tackled Chandur. Djom was screaming at him. “Shit, Fos! Always knew you'd follow someone into shit, but didn't think—I mean, shit! Shit! Shit!”

“The enchantress bride, get her.”

“Where's the fennec?”

Two men seized the enchantress. “Where'd you stow the Golden Scoundrel?”

“What'd you do with him? You god-stealing siren!”

“I—I don't understand.” Hiresha pinched her eyes closed. “I refuse to marry an animal.”

“Rip this ship apart. Carefully.” A guard captain with medals of golden flies on his tunic waved his men toward the hold. “Which of you sorry louts is the captain?”

Djom's hands trembled as he showed Chandur a waxy roll of paper. “This is an order from the vizier. We're to arrest you for kidnapping the god's bride.”

Hiresha's voice was high and outraged. “He did no such thing. I take all responsibility and—”

“Shit, Fos! I'm going to have to lock you up, and—shit—there isn't going to be no good way out for you.” Djom wiped his pallid brow with his sleeve.

One man punched Chandur in the side and cackled. “Hear you'll be sleeping below bars. They'll let you out soon as it it's time for a few good rounds of scorpion stings.”

“Yeah,” another man said, “black scorpion, yellow scorpion, black, yellow, 'til you stop breathing. I always put my bets on the black.”

Chandur wished to reassure his friend Djom and Hiresha that such a grisly fate would not be his. An arm clamped around his throat and prevented his jaw from moving.

A sensation of oozing crept up Chandur's bowels, of burning and rot. He told himself it was not fear, not for himself. Chandur had his fate. He would live. No, he worried for Hiresha.

How will she get away,
he wondered,
with me in prison?

Hiresha was held by a guard who dug his arm into her ribs. She rode in front of him on top of a camel. The lurching stride rolled her insides and worsened the dry sickness of defeat. The sight below her of the spellsword horrified her, to see his hands trapped in a closeable block of wood, his feet tied together, and his arms roped at the elbows to two camels dragging him over the street.

Pilgrims and merchants cheered at the sight of the prisoner. “When'll be his time?”

A guard answered, “Two days, by deathstalker scorpion.”

Hiresha could not believe they would celebrate the death of a man with a full life ahead of him.
A man fit and strong and with a high degree of symmetry
.

Chandur had not shouted or struggled with the guards, and now he did no more than hold his head up to keep his face up from sliding over the street. His calmness disturbed Hiresha. Though she had told him to surrender, she wanted him to scream and shove, maybe even to curse her.
I failed them all.

She had not struggled either, but she could not have been expected to overpower one guard, let alone a score. Enchantresses created items of power. They never used them.

The guards led her between archways of palm trees on the royal plaza. When the camels trudged closer to the palace,
it loomed like a glass wave about to break over them with skull-crushing force.

A tight-mouthed scribe swaggered toward them carrying a scroll in a glass jar. “The vizier will now receive Elder Enchantress Hiresha and Fosapam Chandur.” He motioned to the spellsword. “Secure him, as he is guilty of kidnapping of the enchantress and theft of the Incarnate of the Golden Scoundrel.”

“This is ridiculous.” Hiresha pushed at the guard holding her, and he lowered her from the camel. “I won't pretend to know to what you're referring.”

Royal guards pulled Chandur to his feet. One lowered an axe at him, green and blue gemstones speckling a blade that fanned outward from the end of a pole. Hiresha held a hand over her mouth as the axe dipped between Chandur's legs to sever the ropes around his feet. They marched him into the Water Palace. Hiresha shuffled after them, hating how a wooden block encased his hands while she stood without fetters. It felt like a betrayal.
He'll be punished for me.

Noble guests milled about the palace's blue-tinted interior, much as they had the previous day. The carpets of flowers had been replaced with petals of blues and reds. The nobility parted before the tromp of the royal guards, who shoved Chandur to his knees before the most powerful man in the empire.

T
he vizier wore a simple skirt below a plain robe that lay open at the chest, both garments screaming humility. A false beard of blue porcelain pointed down to the writing table a scribe held before him. Leather tied about the vizier’s ears held the glazed goatee to his chin. Ink speckled his right hand while his left held the one concession to his high office, his opal and gilt staff.

Hiresha pushed her way to stand between him and the spellsword. “Vizier Ankhset, I did attempt to leave the city with Spellsword Chandur, yet we had nothing to do with whatever happened to the fennec.”

The vizier did not look up from his writing. He said, “The city would never imply that the god of fortune would be mistaken in his choice of bride. No such immunity extends to your spellsword. This is the writ for his execution by venom, to be performed in three days’ time.”

The spellsword did not flinch. Hiresha clawed her gloved fingers at the jewels stitched into their silk palms. She glared at the vizier, though he never bothered to notice. “I can vouch for Chandur,” she said. “Do not issue that order.”

The vizier ignored her and rolled a patterned cylinder over clay at the bottom of the scroll. His seal affixed, he passed it to a scribe who handled it with more care than a relic.

Hiresha stepped toward the scribe, knowing through her haze of weariness only that she had to destroy that edict before it killed Chandur. Two royal guards blocked her with the shafts of their polearms.

“The city,” the vizier said, “is willing to countermand the spellsword's sentence. If four conditions are satisfied.”

Her relief for Chandur came with a twisting sense of doom. “Four conditions?”

“Enchantress Hiresha will bequeath her Morimound estate and the entirety of her movable assets to the city.” The vizier handed another scroll to a scribe.

“Your sign here.” The scribe pressed a quill into her grasp.

“A family is living in that manor.” Hiresha's hand trembled as she thought of forcing the widow and her children out. She also assumed the empire would take Hiresha’s stores of jewels in the Academy, which amounted to most of what little she had accumulated in her life.

The vizier began writing again. “The monies are necessary restitution to the captains whose ships were destroyed today.”

“You can't blame me for that faulty pursuit.”

The vizier matched Hiresha's shout with a whisper. “Neither would I blame the priests their rashness in trying to recover the divine fennec, considering the city stands to lose an estimated fifty-seven hundred thousand ounces of silver per day the god is missing.”

One glance at Chandur firmed her resolve. She beckoned to Maid Janny, who gave the enchantress an ebony stick. Hiresha pricked her tongue with one end to prime its enchantment. Touching the other end to the scroll caused ink to flow outward into the circular design of a diamond uniquely faceted.

Hiresha flung the signing stick onto the glass floor.
I'll earn new gems,
she promised herself,
and live long enough to craft them.

“The Golden Scoundrel must be retrieved,” the vizier said, “before his scheduled procession tomorrow afternoon.”

“By tomorrow?” Her mind contorted around the idea of finding a fox that tiny in a city this large.

The vizier did not even look at his scribe when he handed the next papyrus. “An individual must be executed for absconding with the god. The masses will demand it. It is up to you to provide an alternative.”

Hiresha dared to hope she would find the fennec with whoever had stolen him.
That is three conditions.
She feared she already knew the last. “I assume the fourth condition is for me to…marry the fennec.”

The vizier's quill hesitated above a scroll. “That event was assumed.”

“And you want more from me? If you'd force me into a sarcophagus, be sure I'll have nothing good to say about you to my divine husband.”

“The Opal Mind may see fit to interpose on my behalf.” He brushed a quill feather below his eye and the likeness of a baboon in kohl paint, a sign of dedication to the goddess.

Hiresha fumed at him. She worshipped the Opal Mind, too, after a fashion.
“The Opal Mind was the greatest enchantress, and a human woman. She most decidedly lacked opposable toes.”

“She was also vizier and scribe who gained the essence of a wise animal upon ascent to divine death.” Gloss shimmered up and down the length of his false beard as he spoke. “They said you could have been as great.”

Hiresha took that as an invitation to plead her case. “Vizier Ankhset, my research discovers new curative enchantments every year. You mustn't allow the priests to wed me to a tomb.”

“Enchantress, you overestimate me. I am but another servant of the empire.”

“You have the influence to—”

“An empire whose merchants would panic if their god of fortune is lost, if his bride abandons him. Frightened merchants lead to weak trade. Weak trade leads to a weak empire, and a weak empire leads to invasion.” Stabbing his quill into the papyrus broke the feather. A scribe handed him a new one.

The enchantress was not ignorant to the implications. The bloodthirsty Dominion of the Sun would have invaded long ago if not for the barriers of the desert and the Sea of Fangs. She
squinted at the lords and ladies in the palace and found the Dominion’s ambassador by his winged-sun tattoo. He wore the familiar monotony of white linen, but his necklace of green feathers and jaguar teeth spoke to his homeland. The ambassador stood out of earshot yet still smirked at Hiresha as if he knew her every secret.

Despite the vizier’s claim, Hiresha believed she could serve her empire best by staying alive to craft enchantments. She worried her opinion would be moot with her own lands seemingly determined to sacrifice her.

She swallowed, feeling the chilling absence left by hope slipping away. The growing dread could not match her fatigue, and she listed to the left. She thought she saw Chandur try to stand to steady her, but a guard shoved him down.

Gasping back to near wakefulness, Hiresha found herself gazing past the vizier to the transparent wall. Through the curtain of flowing water, a pyramid swayed and rippled at the center of the city. An idea came to her. “The Opal Mind promised that her tomb would float, yet the pyramid has stayed remarkably land bound.”

“It is sacrilege to say the Opal Mind made a mistake.”

“If the fourth condition is to repair the enchantment, I'll require more than three days. You'll have to nullify the engagement.”

The vizier said, “The final condition involves a matter more pressing to Pharaoh and thus of supreme importance to the Oasis Empire.”

Three notes of melody pinged off the palace walls. Hiresha straightened at the chiming, and only as the pure sounds began to quiet their throbbing did she recognize them as laughter.

All conversations among the nobles died.
One lady lowered to her knees while mouthing a word Hiresha thought she recognized.
Pharaoh.

The scribe holding up the writing table cleared his throat and lifted another papyrus to the vizier. He rapped his staff on the crystal floor and read in a voice toneless and dry.

“Pharaoh Nephrynthian, She Who Sings Beauty for the Red Lotus, the Blessed of the Golden Scoundrel, the Honor of the Founder, Commander of the Army of a Thousand Stings...”

Lords and ladies threw themselves to the ground. Even the vizier knelt, still reciting.

“...Instrument of the Opal Mind, Ward of the Plumed God, Ruler of....”

Hiresha lowered a knee through the slit in her dress. Before she could bow, a girl ran to her and assaulted her with an embrace.

“You've come to cure my kitten!”

The closeness of that voice forced Hiresha to gasp. She could do no more than gawk at the girl who had trapped her in a delicate hug.

Rapture spread the girl's smile from ear to ear, her teeth isolated pegs in a gummy mouth. Her face was mainly lips and forehead, topped with a melon of a crown made of blue silk. A golden camel ornamented the crown, which dug into Hiresha's cheek once more before Pharaoh released her.

“Where's my kitten? Where's Sandy?”

Pharaoh clapped her hands with a splatting sound. Her fingers did not close together, and Hiresha thought there must be something malformed about them.

A servant hurled himself forward, sliding over the crystal tiles to lift a cat into Pharaoh's waiting arms. She twirled once, tipped close to falling, then combed that cat's fur with her stiff and twitching fingers. She hummed to her pet, and the strength of her voice pulsed in the air.

Only after the shivering tones subsided could Hiresha speak. “Do you lead me to believe that this girl is in charge of the greatest mercantile alliance the Lands of Loam have ever seen?”

“And ever heard!” Pharaoh's grin was engulfing. “I only rule on the important things, like what color flowers to use, the sound of happiness, and the sum of stars and hope!”

An inbred fluff-head on the throne,
Hiresha thought,
with a murderous vizier ruling the empire.
At least she could assume the vizier was efficient. The last pharaoh's corpulent body had never been found, and he had weighed more than a carriage.

The cat was thrust into Hiresha's arms. “My kittens keep turning into mummies! So much less cute. You have to help Sandy!”