Date: 2012-01-17T13:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Fiction; Erotic; MM; Gay adult romance
Description: It's night at a remote caravanserai on the spice road, where the wyldlands stretch in every direction, barbarous, dangerous. The desert chieftains have come in, lured by the glamour and guile of a traveling company -- a troupe of acrobats and conjurers, dancers and wrestlers. And of the richest attractions is a young fire juggler from Gupar. His name is Tai Emreth, and if he performs tonight, he'll be walking into the most terrible danger. Alak Zhar is in the great yurt, and the Zhar has a nasty reputation for reaching out and stealing whatever, whoever, he wants. But tonight's performance is

DreamCraft

Shadow and Flame

Mel Keegan

More gay fantasy fiction from Mel Keegan

Breakheart

Legends: The Fall of the Atlantean Empire

The Lords of Harbendane

The Swordsman

Umbriel (with Jayne DeMarco)

SHADOW AND FLAME

© 2011 by Mel Keegan

ISBN 978-0-9872328-3-0

All rights Reserved

This book is a work of fiction. Any similarity between
real persons or other characters, alive or dead, is
strictly coincidental.

First ebook edition, DreamCraft 2012.

Cover by Jade

No part of this publication may be reproduced
or used in any manner whatsoever, including
but not limited to lending, uploading and copying,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.

DreamCraft Multimedia

Box 270, Brighton 5048, South Australia

Shadow and Flame

Mel Keegan

The dancers were catching their breath in the cold behind the great yurt, but Tai Emreth ignored them. The Wenurian girl was singing now – the blind girl with the high, sweet voice, who had been sold along with the harper. They belonged to the company, body and soul. Past midnight, they warmed the sheets of some lord who fancied them; by day they worked in the encampment, mending the company’s tents and harness. And when the stars were ablaze and the wyld chieftains came in from the hinterland to gamble and drink and lounge in the silk-hung yurt, they made music that sometimes even stilled the dice and caused the mountain lords to forget their wine for a moment.

Tai Emreth envied them their skill, but not their captivity. Even the dancers belonged to the company – Hal Khouris had bought them as a lot, along with a dozen camels, two dozen mules, and a wagon overburdened with wine casks. They had grown too old for the work, Tai thought, casting a glance at them now.

Not one of them was under thirty years, in a profession where limberness and youth were gold and time was the enemy. The blind girl was less than twenty, and the harper not much more. Time was on their side; they would remain with the company for many years yet, traveling the great highway from west to east, season by season, while the dancers could expect to go back to market soon, and would find themselves laboring in some field, some temple. Tai was older then the girl, younger than the dancers –

And unlike any of them, he was free.

He traveled with Hal Khouris’s company because it was headed west, and west was where he needed to be. His brother was in Pragend, with a new forge, a new wife, a use for a spare pair of hands. And Barso Wahl was back east in Gupar – Wahl, with the hot, dark eyes that smoldered on Tai, and the Omir’s warrant for his arrest brandished in his hand like a weapon.

If ever he returned, a deep, dark hole in the lower basements under the city waited for Tai. Three days later it would be a scant half hour facing a magistrate, before the deed of his life was handed to Barso Wahl, in payment for a crime Tai had never even heard of before the warrant was posted.

One morning, when the sun was scarcely on the rooftops of the old city, he read his own name on the bill, tacked to a pole in the marketplace. His mouth fell open as he saw how he was supposed to have stolen a ruby the size of a hen’s egg, and maimed a guard in the house of Barso Wahl to obtain it.

In Gupar, where Tai was bred and born, Barso Wahl’s voice was second only to the law of the Omir himself. And Tai Emreth was well known as a wastrel, a young scallywag who had tangled too many sheets, drunk too many jugs, lost too much on the noses of too many horses for his reputation to be worth a moment’s consideration. He had stolen a ruby and crippled a guard? People found it easy to believe.

The truth was, Tai had tangled the sheets of Barso Wahl’s eldest son, and Wahl might have been furious about the decadence taking place beneath his own roof – but this was far from the demon that drove Wahl, and Tai knew it. When he met the merchant’s eyes it was lust he saw there, good, old-fashioned desire that blazed in Wahl while those eyes stripped Tai bare to the skin and ate him alive.

When the sun set on the same day when the warrant was posted, Tai was thirty miles west, with sore feet and a heart filled with resentment. He had walked the first ten miles, before he met a mule driver and cadged a ride with the offer of work.

A week later, he was snaking on his belly through the tall grasses on the ridge line where the Omirate of Utreness became the Princedom of Sedesh, and while the guards were searching the mule train he slithered into the bosom of a camel caravan headed out to trade along the spice road.

A month later, he was in Ilgeshar when he heard a voice calling across the caravanserai, in the gold light of stuttering torches, and the smoky air from a hundred fires. It was Hal Khouris, whose company had made camp on the northern side of the ancient grounds.

“Come all, come all, come see the greatest troupe that ever displayed the most remarkable talents of beguilement and beauty since the days of Calliope,” he called, and Tai was not the only one who answered. By then, he had earned a modest purse, and the cost of an evening’s beguilement was reasonable enough.

“Come see feats of such magic and mystery, you’ll return home with tales your kin will never believe,” Hal invited. “See acts of delicious debauchery and boundless beauty, which will haunt forever the dreams of all who witness them … for just three tanari, three little coins dropped into the jade bowl held clasped to the breast of the lovely Maritza, who stands at the very gateway to the realm of wonder.”

Maritza was a black-haired, olive-skinned gypsana woman from the hills far east of Pragend. Her eyes were rimmed in kohl, and her fingers were heavy with every kind of jewel Tai knew, and some he did not. She was not nearly as lovely as Hal Khouris believed, and she was almost old enough to be Tai’s mother. But she was the kindest of all the gypsana, the traveling showfolk, and he soon came to care for her, and to understand why Hal was too enthralled with her to even notice that youth had passed her by, and time was not being entirely charitable toward her.

The same Hal who would sell the dancers in an instant when they ceased to entertain the lords of the wyld, was moist-eyed with affection when he spoke of Maritza, and he laid his head on the silk of her pillow most nights. She cared for the dancers, and tended the hurts of the company’s courtesans, whose time with the wyldsmen was sometimes far from gentle.

Between the entertainments – when the boy who charmed the cobra was dining, when the blind girl and her harper were brewing mint tea, and the dancers were still limbering up, against the music of tambourines and flutes, Hal would weave stories of the wicked places the company had been, and the depraved places toward which they were bound.

They were going, he said, to Pragend, at the furthest reach of the spice road, where the great marble and ivory spires of the old city rose above the tents and yurts of the gypsana who wintered there before once again heading east, home to Gupar and Murmesh and, beyond, to the timeless lands of ancient Zunguo.

Dawn had still been gold and rose in the east, the morning after Tai had paid his three tanari and watched the show, when he hunkered down at the cookfire where Maritza was making griddle cakes while Hal Khouris yawned awake. He stood in the entrance to the tent where they slept, scratching his ribs, picking his teeth, not even noticing Tai at first.

“I’m heading west,” Tai said to Maritza as she ladled coffee into a bone mug and handed it to him. It was too hot, too bitter, but he had begun to develop a taste for it. “If I could travel with the company, I’d be grateful.”

“What can you do?” Maritza asked in her thick accent. Her words were thickened and slurred with the tongue of the Albrezim tribe. She wore the tiny gold coin ornaments of her people in the lobes of her ears, and their bright silks wound around her head.

“What can I do?” Tai had echoed, not understanding.

“Hal won’t let you travel with the company, only join the company,” she said easily, as if it happened every day. “What can you do?”

“To entertain?”

“Do you dance, or sing, or conjure tricks? Do you tumble, or play the viol, or walk on your hands?” Her eyes glittered with amusement. “Do you tell fortunes, or make the best goat curry in the wyld?”

“Well … I can do this,” Tai said thoughtfully as he got up from the hearth and fetched a pair of torches from an upturned barrel. He shrugged out of his coat, and balanced the torches between his hands, felt out the weight of them, before he held them to the fire, set the alight. They blazed up fiercely, he felt the heat on his skin, but the morning was sharply cold, and he welcomed it.

The skill was second nature to him – learned long ago, when he spent a whole summer as the companion and playmate of a fool from the court of the Omir himself. Tall, slender Yakob, with the hundred tattoos coiling about his lissome body and the great amber baubles depending from his nipples, was the Omir’s favorite that year. He could do no wrong, and he would juggle almost every night, for a shower of gold and silver bits which rang on the marble flagstones at his feet. For months, he juggled batons and balls, chalices and daggers, fruit and flaming torches; and he taught the skill to Tai, with relish.

Tai was gifted. From being very young, he had lived on his wits and his looks, moving from tavern to boudoir, hostel to gambling house, always able to turn his hand to some skill in return for lodging or dinner or favors. He could ride a warhorse, perform the dance-like sword rituals, rig a tent, harness a camel, pleasure a begum or a zhar … and juggle fire as if he had been doing it all his life.

Maritza was enchanted, and even Hal Khouris laughed and applauded. He gave Tai a piece of paper, written in some script Tai could not read, which promised him the shelter and protection of the company, all the way to Pragend – and back, if he wanted it. But for Tai the way back led only to a warrant for his arrest, a dungeon, a magistrate, and ten years of sweating and heaving under Barso Wahl, whose eyes were as full of lust as his heart was filled with deceit.

More than halfway to Pragend, the Khouris company wandered into the caravanserai at Murkul while sunset was simmering like a cauldron on the great western horizon. The world could have been a platter, it was so flat, and the sky was a vast, inverted bowl above it. Tai had never seen, never even imagined such places – nor the people who lived here. In Gupar, he had thought of Barso Wahl as a savage, and of the Omir, Perel al Essey, ebn Raizal, as a barbarian.

In the west, just one week’s march beyond the Eshal Mountains, he learned what those words really meant.

Out here, men herded sheep, stank of horses, looked like old leather, and their swordsteel was brighter, sharper, than the Omir of Gupar would have believed possible. West of the Eshals, in lands like Gush and Ropar and Enjerway, boys danced in silk and jewels for the entertainment of the gnarled old women in whose hands lay the power of clan and tribe. Young men were sold by the score at market by their own chieftains, for any lord of the wyld took a dozen or more virgin maidens to bed, sired the next generation of his people from his own loins, and boys were largely worthless – until a war was brewing and the army wanted them.

It was a hundred years since full-blown war had broken out between the tribes of the hinterland territories which were strung out along the spice road like pearls on a necklace, from Zunguo in the distant east to Distambool and, at last, Pragend in the west. Six generations of young men had been birthed only to discover themselves surplus to the requirements of their people. Hundreds, perhaps thousands – the youngest ten years old, the eldest in their nineties – were gelded and tattooed, sold into the householdings of the chieftains, zhars and begums, from east to west, and away into the uncharted north and the ancient, wicked south – realms Tai Emreth knew only as names painted on the map.

The dancers whom Hal had bought just weeks before, and who were still catching their breath, cooling down, in the chill air behind the big yurt, were among those surplus young men. As striplings they had been gelded, marketed, bound to their employer for ten or twenty years, while the proceeds from the sale were divided between the chieftain who sired them and the concubine who birthed them. The deed to their lives and liberty had changed hands over and over, and was now stashed with Hal’s documents, like Tai’s own contract.

From within the yurt came the high, fluting voice of the blind girl and the deep, sonorous notes of the harp. Listening, Tai stretched his limbs, rotated his shoulders, loosened his elbows, and juggled with the three torches. They were unlit as yet, cold and smelling strongly of tar.

Six men from the Banqal – brothers, tall and long-limbed, slender, with the limberness and balance of acrobats – leaned on one another’s shoulders and watched him with casual curiosity. It was the youngest of the Alqadih brothers who said in a thick Wahdi accent,

“You crazy, Guparman.”

“Crazy?” Tai echoed, but he knew exactly what Kamal meant, and if he was honest with himself for a moment, he felt a tingle the length of his spine, as if someone had drizzled ice water down his collar.

“Crazy, like dumb old begum, too blind to see danger,” Kamal scoffed.

For a split second Tai’s hands faltered. He missed one of the torches and lunged for it, scrambling to recover. If they had been lit, he would have been burned, and a cold sweat sprang out across his skin as the singer swooped up to an impossible high note. He stepped back, took a deep breath and began again.

“You scared, Guparman,” Kamal’s eldest brother, Raman, sneered.

“He got right to be scared,” Kamal said darkly, and nodded into the yurt. “You didn’t see?”

“I saw.” Raman stepped out of the shadows, into the shaft of light which fell from the open drapes. “Alak Zhar is here tonight.” His face wore many fine tattoos, blue-green, coiling around his cheeks, eyes, mouth, like tiny serpents. His brows were fine, dark, raised in question as he came closer to Tai. “You didn’t see?”

“Of course I saw.” Resolutely, Tai worked at the torches, getting his timing back. It was all about instinct. The more you thought about it, the harder it was to handle the torches, especially when they were lit.

“And you no care?” Kamal was disbelieving. “Sheeyid,” he swore, “you want to be vanishing into the night? You be under the hood, over the horse, disappear into the wyld and wake up gelded, branded and chained!”

Tai had heard the stories, and even now part of him did not want to believe, while the greater part knew the truth. Alak Zhar was notorious. He was the High Chief of nine lands, ruling over his daughters’ husbands as overlord and master; his domain stretched over every horizon – the spice road ran for five days to pass from his eastern border to the west. On his own tribal lands, at the city of Murkul-zahd, he lived in a granite fortress with three brothers, his birth mother, thirty wives, forty concubines, over two hundred offspring – and five hundred soldiers.

The legends of Alak Zhar swore that Murkul-zahd was impregnable … that the beautiful, the valuable, the extraordinary, vanished within those walls, never to be seen again. The same legends swore Alak Zhar was a predator and thief, who stole whatever and whomever he desired … wives, sons, it made no difference.

“You crazy,” Kamal repeated. “You going to go out there, in front Alak Zhar hisself, do what you do …?” He rolled his eyes. “Then you pray to your heathen gods, for the Zhar be too drunk, too tired, to see?”

Heathen gods? Tai finished his routine, caught the torches and set them aside. In Gupar, the people looked on the barbarians of the west as savages, godless, soulless, even witless. The gods of Gupar were housed in ivory palaces, their likenesses carved in jade and marble. For a coin anyone could buy a candle, light a stick of joss, have a priest write out prayers and messages for the dead, and burn them in the sacred fires, so the smoke would carry the prayers to heaven.

Out here, the gods dwelt in the sky; their faces had never been seen, but their voices were heard in the wind. Their kisses were tasted in dreams, and when a maiden fell pregnant without any dalliance to account for it, it was said to be a son or daughter of Shuz or Eremes or Persed who grew in her womb. Such a magickal child – almost always born on or near the solstice of winter – would be honored lifelong, for they were usually gifted with the power to heal, or to glimpse into the future, predict the storm and the tide of battle.

The singer had begun the Lay of Iskandir, which Tai knew was her last song. After she finished, the harper would play a traditional shepherd’s song from Belqaria … and then Hal would introduce the juggler.

It was Hal who had told Tai, not two hours before: “Take care, boy … you know whose face I saw? I see his soldiers coming in, and I know the big black horses. You’ve heard the name of Alak Zhar?”

Oh, Tai had heard it. He had heard it often enough to doubt the veracity of the tales told of the man, but Maritza was anxious. She leaned closer to Tai – close enough for his head to fill with the jasmine and sandalwood of her perfume – and said against his ear, with a jingling of charms of trinkets on her browband,

“Not tonight, boy. Let tonight be for others, while Alak Zhar is here.”

But the presence of the lord on his yurt made Hal edgy. His talk was always big, when he stood on a barrel in the marketplace and touted his company as the best in the world. He wanted, needed, the best when the great lords came in. Disappointing them could be dire. It could be lethal.

He produced a fat gold coin, brandished it beneath Tai’s nose. “For you, boy, if you perform.”

That one coin was worth more than the rest of Tai’s purse combined. It was the price of a fine horse, a set of riding leathers, and provisions for a month’s ride. It would set Tai Emreth free of the company, for the work of a matter of minutes. If he performed before Alak Zhar, come dawn he could buy the best animal in Murkul, and be in Pragend in three weeks, months ahead of Hal’s company, which was meandering there at an infuriating pace.

He wanted that coin. He wanted his freedom. Never in his life had Tai worked for a single employer for so long. It was five months since he had packed a bag, thrown it over his shoulder and run away from Gupar as if the devil were behind him – and in a way, he was. Almost all of that time, he had danced to Hal’s tune, rigged tents by day, juggled knives and dishes and fire by night, for the delight of Hal’s audience, and he had tangled sheets here and there when the fancy took him, or the price was right.

He had been chafing at the routine for many weeks now, and the lure of that gold coin was terrible. Freedom was a single night away, if only he could find the courage to strut before Alak Zhar, and trust the gods to protect him.

Courage, or foolishness?

“He crazy,” Raman Alqadih said scornfully, and turned his back on Tai. “Maybe he want to wake up in Murkul-zahd, ball-less, arse-branded, heavy with chains? Maybe he want to be down under Alak Zhar, mouth full, belly full, till the Zhar get tired of him and throw him to the begum?”

Was Tai crazy? He wanted the gold coin more than he had ever wanted anything, while a small, wise voice in the back of his mind said, Only wait, only serve the company, and you’ll be in your brother’s house, safe, before the stars of the winter solstice are bright.

Months more of routine, of bowing before the master in the morning, rigging tents and grooming mules…

A matter of minutes, strutting in the lamplight and juggling fire for the amusement of an oaf who was probably too witless with ale by now to even notice.

The singer lapsed into silence and the harper took up the shepherd’s song. It was a lilting, plaintive tune, a lament for some lost love. It lasted a bare three minutes, and then Hal would be out there before the wyld ones – first to spin a few fanciful tales of the wickedness he had seen in the east, and then to announce the amazing skills of a boy from Gupar, in whose hands fire behaved like a performing monkey.

The Alqadih brothers were drifting away, cloaked now, against the chill. Tai was sweating, both with the exertion of the routines he had completed to prepare for his performance and with the healthy fear that had haunted him since Maritza spoke to him. If she believed Alak Zhar was a demon in human skin, Tai could believe her while he would doubt a hundred others.

But he had told Hal he would perform. He had given his word, and Maritza had the gold coin – she was keeping it for him, until he was done, and then he could pack his things, walk away from the company and find the horse trader, Mahadali, whose animals were the finest east of Pragend.

The stars glittered, almost mocking him as he dropped the loose, striped linen trousers and let the cold night air caress him. He was naked, but for a little pouch on a fine chain girdling his hips, and a pair of the flimsiest sandals, strapped to his knees. Around his neck was a high collar, shimmering like flakes of gold, and his hair was roped back with scarlet ribbons which contrasted the black, and amber baubles, matching the ornaments banded to his wrists and biceps.

The costume was daring by the standards of Gupar and Murmesh. In Zunguo, he would have been hustled into exile for lascivious behavior – save at the court of the Imperatrix herself, where he would have been showered with rose petals before being carried off to the private quarters, to service the most glorious women in the realm. In Pragend the costume would have won him a cell under the citadel, where he would molder while priests said prayers for the salvation of a soul so corrupt, he must be in league with demons.

Here in the wyld, the costume was teasing, seductive, and his black haired, brown eyed, brown skinned looks were exotic, in a land where the lords were blue eyed, red haired, and often ghost-pale. He was still slender, whippy as an acrobat, where the lords were thick with muscle and swiftly grew stiff in the spine and joints with the rigors of the warrior code they followed.

The danger was very real, and Tai’s throat constructed. He swallowed hard, and had turned his eyes to the stars, about to petition his heathen gods for protection when a shadow moved into the blue darkness behind the yurt. His heart jumped into his mouth and a pulse hammered in his temple.

“Who is it?” He heard the falter in his voice, and cursed himself. “I said, who is it, damnit, who’s there?” He stooped to the cloak he had dropped before he began his practice routines. “I’m warning you – I have a sword, and I know damn’ well how to use it!”

A rich chuckle issued from the darkness and the shape moved out into the light. Tai saw a voluminous blue cloak, trimmed in copper, a raised hood, a black glove thrust out, clasped around the hilt of the sword the man wore at his left side.

“Easy,” the stranger said, coming closer, and he teased back the hood, far enough to show his face. “I’m not here to do you harm. Rather, to warn you. There’s danger for you tonight, if you persist in this.” He gestured at Tai’s near nakedness. “This is rash. It’s foolish.”

“It’s my job, and it’s profitable,” Tai added, intent on the man’s face and making out strong features, a hawklike nose, piercing dark eyes, though he could not tell the color. His most striking features were his brows, which were arched, challenging, critical. Tai wondered if he were being judged, and he met the man’s eyes defiantly. “Hal Khouris pays me well, and this is the last night I’ll perform.”

“It well may be,” the man mused, “at least in public. I’ve no doubt you’d perform a great many times … for a somewhat smaller audience.” He looked Tai up and down with obvious amusement. “Has no one told you about Alak Zhar?”

Tai groaned. “They told me.” He saw the glint of a big hoop earring in the man’s left ear, smelt the hint of cedar about him, heard the sound of the far west in his voice. He was tall, even measured against the lords of Murkul, who towered over the folk from Gupar and the omirates closer to Zunguo. “Who are you?”

“A traveler,” the stranger told him, as if determined to be inscrutable.

“Your name?” Tai lifted his chin. “How shall I trust you, if I don’t even know your name?”

“I know yours,” he said, as if Tai had made a joke. “I’ve been watching you for a week now.”

“I haven’t seen you in the audience.”

The man’s eyes widened, and laughed. “And who said I’d been watching you from the benches inside Hal Khouris’s great yurt?” Again, the rich chuckle. “You can call me Giero. Have they told you how beautiful you are?”

In fact, Tai had heard this many times, but he had never believed a syllable of it. The words were cheap, and had usually been spoken in places, times, when they were calculated to lure him into an embrace. He wrinkled his nose. “They’ve told me – and usually to my cost. It’s always said by people wanting something from me … usually the gift of me.”

“How astute, for one so young,” Giero allowed. “And now, since you have the gift of such astuteness, you can do yourself a favor.”

“What favor?” Tai was listening to the last strains of the harper’s music. In a minute more, Hal would be out there, spinning an unlikely tale about having vanquished an evil, barbarian queen to save a nubile young man with eyes like a doe and a body like paradise incarnate. Such were the stories he wove, of ancient cities, haunted ruins, savage rites, before he introduced the next performer. His own gift was that of the storyteller, and in his way he was quite a performer. “I asked, what favor?” Tai demanded, listening to the quaver in his own voice.

“Run to your master while there’s still time, and tell him you’ve thought better of your rashness,” Giero advised. “Have him bring on the old knife thrower instead, or the woman who dances with the snake.”

“My master,” Tai echoed. “I’ll have no man as my master. If you’ve watched me for a week, you should know that’s the very reason I’ll perform tonight.”

Giero’s wide shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug. “Do as you please, but in a week, a month, a year, when you’ve had Alak Zhar as your master for long enough to know every freckle on his skin and every curse he’ll grunt before he spends himself inside your sore, aching body – on that night, remember what you were told, and who told it to you.”

With a flourish, he tossed the cloak back over one shoulder and Tai saw a dark green vest laced over the deep rose silk of his shirt, tight gray britches and high boots of some soft black leather, buckled across the instep. It was the style of the far west, the cities that clung to the shores of the long, narrow Tamar Sea. Tai had heard amazing stories of those cities, had seen paintings of their splendor, and all at once he longed to beg Giero to tell who he was, where he was from, what he knew.

But Giero was stepping back into the shadows, and with a mocking chivalry he dropped a bow before Tai. “Perform if you must, Tai Emreth, ne’er-do-well from the Omirate of Gupar, but be wise. Keep your wits about you, open the eyes in the back of your head, and trust no one, nothing, before you’re well away from Murkul-zahd, with the wind at your back and the hills of Distambool in plain sight ahead.”

Distambool was a great mountain of quarried granite and carved marble on the very edge of the wyld. In the west, scholars said civilization ended at those hills, and the skirmishing never ended, as lords like Alak Zhar and his brothers pushed, probed, trying to force back the scarlet-plumed border guards and gain an extra mile or ten of the spice road.

“Wait,” Tai called. “Don’t leave. Look, I’ll only be a few minutes – wait, will you, Giero? When I’m done, I’ll buy you coffee and ale, and you can tell me about where you come from.” His eyes widened, trying to follow Giero’s shape, as the big man melded back into the shadows as if he were part of them. “Don’t go,” Tai shouted after him. “I’ve always wanted to see those cities – take a boat and sail the Tamar coasts.”

“Be wise,” Giero’s voice whispered out of the coagulated darkness, moments after he had become invisible. “Remember your wits, and forget how to trust.”

And then he was gone, leaving Tai trembling slightly in the cold night air. He was cooling down rapidly and would have the stretch and limber up again soon, if Hal did not hurry through his storytelling. The singer and harpist were out of the lamplight now, probably back at Maritza’s hearth, where she would pour liquorice tea and they would watch the stars until the lords reeled drunkenly out of the yurt and returned to the wyld.

Hal Khouris’s voice was lilting, sensual, as he addressed the gathering. He was telling the story of how he followed the legend of a she-demon with breasts like melons and a penchant for turning men to stone at a glance of her vast emerald eyes … and how the she-demon was seduced by a beautiful young man who had been born blind, and was thus immune to the curse of her eyes. The story was a good one, and given substance by the houri, Armand and one of the wrestlers, Mikhail – she with her skin tinted green, he with his eyes blindfolded and his massive, bronze-skinned body glistening with oil  – who wrangled like desperate lovers at Hal’s feet while the saga was told.

But it was not a long story, and as Hal stepped out of the light of the eight brass lamps, Tai had better be ready to take his place. The great yurt was crowded tonight. Alak Zhar went nowhere without a band of his most trusted elite, and they had been picking up courtesans, cousins and friends across the whole caravanserai. Their horses were tethered on the north side of the yurt, and six big guards squatted at two fires, keeping watch. As if, Tai thought, Alak Zhar himself trusted nobody and nothing – as if he knew he had a thousand enemies for every ally he had ever made.

“And so,” Hal was saying, “I returned home with empty pockets … I left the demon and her blind lover where I found them, in a cave filled with the petrified forms of hundreds of warriors who had gone before me. I ended the adventure enriched only by the memories of the she-demon writhing in my arms, the splendid melons of her breasts crushed hard against my chest … which was nothing, I promise you, against the bliss I have been pledging you this night!

“His name is Tai of Gupar, and you must have heard of him. A lad with a body like paradise unveiled, the face of a marble saint, and the skill of a fire sprite. The magic in his hands will astonish you, as the grace of his form and the beauty of his face will seduce you to ecstasy.”

The words were typical of Hal’s gift for terrible overstatement, and Tai only grimaced as he listened to them. As Hal entered the introduction, he tucked the torches under his arm and made his way in under the heavy leather flap. He collected his props from the barrelheads just inside – three hoops, three balls, three daggers. Hal was coming toward him as he hung the hoops over his left wrist and took the rest of the props between his hands.

The green-painted, naked and petulant Armand waited on the edge of the lamplight to assist him. She was always petulant, as if life had done her some unforgivable insult, when in fact it had given her a measure of freedom she did not seem to respect. She was barren, unable to conceive a child. Five fruitless years in the marriage bed of a rich merchant from Nahor, and she was free to leave with her youth and vigor intact. Before a year was out, she was drowning in debt and arrested by her creditors. Hal Khouris bought her as an indentured dancer. He paid off the creditors, settled the fines. In three more years, Armand would once again be free, and Tai had wondered how long it would take her to get into trouble next time.

“Be careful, for the love of Sahd,” Hal whispered as he approached from the lamplit area. “There’s thirty of them, the lord and all his captains – they’re drinking but not yet drunk enough, and they’re surly.”

“And they don’t want Armand?” Tai demanded.

“Three of them contested for the pleasure of her night,” Hal muttered, “as soon as the entertainments have ended here.”

“So that’s why she wears the petulant face tonight.” Tai tossed the hoops and balls to her. “Hal … don’t be far away.”

“I won’t be,” he said doubtfully. “But there’s not much I can do to deter them. All I can do is bargain with them for a better price, and give it to you in the morning.”

“If there is anything left to be scraped off the ground in the morning,” Armand spat. She held out her hands for the daggers. “Alak Zhar looks to be stalking, and I thank my father’s old gods he has no appetite for the likes of me! And as for that boor, Ephraim – he’ll be so besotted with me by morning, the Zhar will laugh in his big, fat face.”

Two braziers flickered to left and right, and the musicians had struck up a sensual tune from the east, something that would not have been out of place in the markets of Gupar itself. A flute, a hand drum and a zither carried the shifting, pulsing melody as Tai gathered his courage to go out and perform as he had sworn he would.

The Zhar was sitting in the midst of his captains and lieutenants. He could see the man from the short passage of woven leathers that led out to the back of the yurt. And Alak Zhar was already watching for this ‘paradise unveiled’ which Hal had promised. Tai picked up the balls and beckoned Armand. “Keep well back.”

“Like you tell me every single time,” she moaned.

“Like you’ll remember, if you’re not reminded?” Tai flicked a glance at her and then pasted a smile onto his face and stepped out into the lights.

Hal was as good as his word, and lingered on the very fringe of the light cast by three enormous brass lanterns which were strung from the rigging overhead. The yurt was big, wide, but not so large that thirty of the Zhar’s men did not leave it feeling full, cramped, airless. They smelt of the horses they rode, the oil that slicked their swords, the leathers and sheepskins they wore. Several wolfhounds lolled at their feet, panting in the heat of the braziers; a dozen helmets had been cast aside; a dozen wine jars were already empty and abandoned.

In the heart of the gathering was Alak Zhar himself, and while Tai arranged his props he permitted himself one long, hard look at the man. He was big, like the rest, wide in the shoulders, with long legs thrust out into the light. His hands were draped over his knees, heavy with rings, scarred from the practice field, and his eyes were hooded, wreathed in shadows.

Danger, threat, the promise of as much malice as sensuality, clung to him like an aura, but Tai had not expected him to be so handsome. He was still quite young, with a face full of angles, a heavy jaw balanced by a large nose, and the clan marks tattooed around his cheekbones only enhanced his looks. His hair was dark red, shaggy, braided on the left, with little copper and ivory weights bound into it, and it lay heavily on the shoulders of a sheepskin jacket that gaped open to display his breast. His arms were bare, thick with muscle, banded by a warrior’s bracelets, and these were gold, as befitted a High Chief.

Those hooded eyes were fixed on Tai, and of a sudden Tai felt more naked, more exposed, than he ever had before. He dropped a bow before Alak Zhar and held his hand out to Armand for the balls, with which he would begin, but his heart was in his throat, a pulse beating fast and hard in his ears.

Juggling was not an uncommon skill, but doing it well was rare. Tai always started with the simplest things, just three balls tumbling between his hands as he posed, turned, and flaunted his body. Armand stood to one side, holding the hoops, and when Tai was done posing he turned toward her, which was her cue to toss the hoops to him, one by one.

Keenly aware of Alak Zhar’s eyes on him, Tai caught each hoop and added it to the swarm of objects rotating over his head. Controlling three balls and three hoops at once was much more difficult, and he worked hard, sweating heavily in the lamplight as he worked them.

Twice, he almost lost his concentration as the Zhar shifted in the big, carved chair Hal had provided for him. Twice, he recovered control before anyone other than, perhaps, Armand knew he had nearly lost it. He regained his rhythm and balance neatly and was good enough to strike an arch-backed pose.

The wyldsmen stamped and shouted as he tossed hoops and balls back to Armand, and once again dropped a bow before Alak Zhar. The Zhar had rested both elbows on his knees and was leaning forward into the light. Tai saw the gleam of gold in his ears, and his eyes were pale blue, like the sky as it cleared after a storm. He did not clap or stamp or shout, but remained fixed on Tai, as if he could physically taste him, though five yards of space lay between them.

The stare was unnerving, and Tai’s hands shook a little as he held out the right, to take the daggers from Armand. Hal was still there, standing in the shadows, but his face was a mask of dread as he looked about among the wyldsmen.

Tai cursed beneath his breath as he caught the daggers one by one, and displayed them, showed the captains from Murkul-zahd that they were real, steel, sharp. They could kill, if they were placed correctly, and they could certainly kill Tai, if he mishandled them and let them fall into his flesh.

Several swords were half-drawn as he displayed the daggers, but the Zhar moved not a muscle. Even his hands remained relaxed, and his only movement was a faint smile playing at one side of his mouth. Tai kept his distance and concentrated on the daggers with every bit of resolve he possessed.

They were heavy, but they were absolutely identical, and as soon as he had them spinning, they almost balanced themselves, leaving him free to strut and pose. When the audience was drunk, enthusiastic and friendly, the poses he struck might be lewd indeed, but tonight he was reserved, so modest that, any other night, Hal would have been gesturing insistently for him to add some spice, ‘liven it up,’ turn his back on the rabble and waggle his bare rump.

These wyldsmen needed no encouragement, and Tai was not about to give them any. He performed well inside of his abilities, and little about his posing would have upset an elderly begum with her eye on eternity and her ears full of the droning of priests. Still, Alak Zhar remained so intent on him that Tai felt as if the man had dropped a chain around his neck and might yank it at any moment.

He gritted his teeth as he finished with the daggers, and once again bowed. Armand took them from him and handed them to Hal. From the tail of his eye, Tai saw them speak, but what they said was lost in the shouting and stamping as the Zhar’s lieutenants showed their appreciation.

The woman was back moments later, flaunting her body foolishly, as if it were the only skill she possessed.  Tai would have told her to take care, but she had already fetched the three torches, and the head of the first was in the brazier to Tai’s right.

Now, Alak Zhar sat back heavily in the big carved chair. His face passed back into shadow, but his legs were thrust into the light, and Tai’s eyes were drawn to the crotch of the dark blue britches. The fabric was stretched taut, and Alak Zhar saw no reason to disguise his excitement, as if it were further applause.

Cursing softly, Tai caught the first of the three torches. It was blazing strongly as his hand curved around it, and he settled himself into the balance, ready to find the rhythm, the beat, and be done with this. The last time, he told himself. No more, after this.  Never again!

The second torch fit into his hand, and before the third was tossed to him the first was in the air. It was all about rhythm, timing. They had to spin at exactly the right speed, the right height, so that the butt would always land in his hand, ready to be spun again. The fire only made it look harder, more dangerous. In fact, it was no more difficult than juggling batons, and only an error made it hazardous.

He stood braced, feet apart, concentrating on the torches, trying to put Alak Zhar out of his mind and keep him out of it, and he was unaware of Armand coming in for the end of the performance until she was right behind him.

When the audience was thoroughly inebriated, enchanted by the spectacle, and sociable, it would end with a roar of mirth as Armand came in stealthily, wickedly unhooked the chain from around his hips and whipped off the pouch he wore, leaving him naked save for a lot of jewelry, and so busy juggling fire, protecting his modesty was out of the question. She would pretend to hoot with laughter, and wink at the drunkards, while Tai let the idiots look their fill. He was well made, and he knew it. Physical beauty had always been his trump card.

But not tonight, not here, not in front of Alak Zhar, who was neither drunk nor friendly. He was a predator, a hunter, and Tai had known since he walked out here, he was the prey. “Armand,” he whispered hoarsely, “no! Armand – don’t!”

Did she not hear? Or was it just that she did not care? Tai caught his breath as he felt her unhook the chain, and an instant later he felt the brush of air on his nethers, knew he was naked as a babe while she preened, giggled at the joke she had played. Anger raced through him, but he was trapped by the performance. All he could do was step back, and back again, closer to Hal Khouris, as if Hal could offer some kind of protection.

He was supposed to finish the routine on the very fringe of the audience – close enough that, once or twice, he had been petted by some admirer who might offer a string of coarse pearls, or a hand-beaten copper ornament, for the privilege. Tonight it was Armand posing almost at the feet of the Zhar, as if she had no concept of the danger, while Tai finished the performance with a flourish.

He dropped the torches into the pail of sand that was waiting for them, spread his arms wide and bowed so low, his forehead was on his knees. And then he took three calculated steps further back, until he was out of the direct light of the lamps – and ran.

Hal was calling his name, but Tai did not care to hear. All he wanted was the big gold coin, which Maritza was holding for him, and then he would blend into the night like a black fox. His trousers and cloak were exactly where he had left them, but he did not wait to dress. He slung the cloak about his shoulders, hugged it about himself, more for warmth than for modesty, and headed off, away from the yurt, in the direction of Maritza’s tent.

She was sitting on a rug-strewn bench, painted gold by the firelight and wreathed in sweet joss, and cradled in her scarlet-nailed hands was a great glass ball. She gazed into it as if it held her entranced, but before Tai could speak she said,

“You’re running away?”

“As fast and as far as I can,” Tai said breathlessly as he scrambled into the trousers.

She looked up over the glass ball at him. “You don’t think you’ll be safer, with the protection of the company?”

“Protection?” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, back toward the yurt. “You didn’t see the face on Alak Zhar! And Hal couldn’t keep Armand out of some wyldsman’s bed, so how’s he supposed to keep me from being the Zhar’s amusement for the night?”

“You’d be lucky if it were a night only,” Maritza said shrewdly. She gestured with the glass ball. “I’ve seen things.”

He knew she had the gift, the sight. Back in Gupar they called it govannon, the ability to see through the cracks between spaces and catch a glimpse of the future, like peering into another room. He did not dismiss her talent lightly. “What things?”

“Stay with the company,” she counseled, and would say no more.

“I prefer to vanish,” Tai said honestly. “I’m going to my tent, I’ll grab my things, and the next you’ll see of me, I’ll be sitting in the audience when you perform in Pragend!”

The woman sighed, shrugged, teased her cloak a little closer as the night wind whisked across the caravanserai. “Do as you will, boy.” She dropped the glass ball into the lap of her skirts and fetched out the purse she wore thronged to her girdle. From it, she drew the big gold coin, and held it out in the firelight. “I wish you luck … and I wish you joy,” she added cryptically. “The second rides upon the first.”

For a moment he wondered what she was talking about, and then he took the coin and palmed it, wrapped his fingers tightly about it. It was freedom, hard and warming in his hand. He gave Maritza a quick grin. “I’ll see you in Pragend. I’ll bring my brother and his family.”

“I hope so,” she said thoughtfully, and did not return his smile.

Brass horns bellowed from the yurt, telling Tai that Hal had introduced the knife thrower. Saloman was so old, so wizened, he looked as if he had grown as part of a tree before he was carved off and set in motion, but the rheumy blue eyes were still sharp, and the skill in his hands was astonishing. Saloman had been a freeman till debt sent him to the magistrate as surely as Armand had found herself there. Hal Khouris paid his debts, bought his contract, and for five more years, if Saloman lived so long, he would perform with the company in the evening and hunt hares and ptarmigan for the stew pot in the afternoon.

The wyldsmen roared their approval as the old man nailed target after target. The high point of his performance was the underarm throw which neatly whisked the eagle feathers off the rings in the nipples of a Hemelite woman with a back that arched like a bow and breasts like a great feather pillows. The feat would divert Alak Zhar, and if Tai could move quickly enough, he could be gone while Saloman and the woman were taking their bows and retreating to the shadows to let the wrestlers come in.

As they exited, Mikhail would be back in the lamplight, naked save for the collars around his throat and genitals. They were both the signs of his slave status – he had been born a slave, in Uruma, and was resigned to the life, though he hoped to earn his freedom eventually. With him would be Andras, the big Cusska – born a freeman and collared as a twenty-year slave when he was caught stealing in the marketplace of Yurkutz.

The horns were blaring again, signaling the end of Saloman’s time in the lamplight, as Tai pelted through the blue darkness toward the line of tents where the thirty members of the company camped. The mules and camels were tethered beyond, and a half dozen fires burned between the tents. Food was cooking, but he had no belly for it. There was space in his mind for one thing – escape.

He shared a tent with Mikhail, but the wrestler was in it so seldom, it was like having a tent to himself. Mikhail was bronze and thick with muscle, with lustrous blue-black hair and a chiseled, handsome face. He was often chosen by the better heeled members of Hal’s audience, and when the company was not performing he would be in Armand’s bed, or sometimes Andras’s.

Tonight, he would be performing privately for some wyldsman, and it might even be the same Murkul-zahd lieutenant who had bought Armand’s hours from midnight to dawn. Tai gave the wrestler a single thought as he dove into the tent, and then he was grabbing up his things, stuffing them into the same battered leather rucksack he had carried out of Gupar, a lifetime ago.

He worked in the light of the fire right outside the tent, and he was buckling the bag down over his clothes and keepsakes when a large body blocked the light. He thought it could only be Mikhail, returning to fetch some item before he went to meet Alak Zhar’s man, and a stinging curse was on his lips as he spun around.

But the shape in the tent flap was clad in polished leathers, white sheepskins. The man’s head wore a bright steel helmet with a scarlet hackle – and he was not alone. Another was a pace behind him, and the second was armed. The firelight gleamed, red and gold, on the pair of short swords, and Tai’s heart first skipped a beat and then hammered at his ribs.

He took a deep breath and bellowed at the top of his lungs. “Hal! Maritza – get Hal! Mikhail –?”

“Save your breath.” The man who had first blocked the light had a thick, barbarous accent, but he spoke the lingua franca of the spice road fluently. He was too swarthy to be of Alak Zhar’s clan or tribe, and he had the look of a mercenary, one of the ronin, who traced their ancestry to every tribe and no tribe, and grew rich, hiring their swords to any lord who needed them. This one was burly with muscle; his face was square-jawed, his nose broken, his skull shaved smooth and polished.

“Maritza! For gods’ sakes, Maritza!” Tai yelled as he dragged the knives out of his pack. They were puny beside the ripple-bladed short swords, and as he plucked them out of the rucksack the mercenary drew a broadsword from the scabbard at his left side. Tai’s mouth dried. He could die here so easily, and no one would ever know who had killed him, though they might suspect, and also guess why. “Alak Zhar sent you,” he rasped as the mercenary took a step forward into the tent.

“Sent us to get you,” the man said in that coarse accent. He was close enough now for Tai to smell the sharp odor of the sheepskins, the oil on the sword, the pungent scents of the man’s body. “You are wanted, Gupar boy. Be good … put down the knives, and you live.”

“Kill me,” Tai guessed, “and Alak Zhar will have you flogged bloody.”

The mercenary’s teeth bared in a wolfish grin. “Alak Zhar saw you with the daggers. He knows how dangerous you could be.” He took a half-step closer. “Put down the knives, puppy, and live.”

“And vanish,” Tai scoffed. He backed off a step, eyes on the swords. Fighting would be pathetically futile, and he was hunting for any way out. His feet longed just to run. Could he dive past the men, slither by them and melt into the darkness? The chances of his making it were slim, and his palms were sweat slick on the knives. He had one chance, and it lay behind him, not ahead. “What does Alak Zhar what with me? A night? I can give him a night.” His voice was taut. “But dawn rises and I – I walk away.”

“This is not for you to say,” the mercenary said tersely. He cast a half glance over his shoulder at his companion, who was like enough to Alak Zhar to be his cousin. He beckoned the man with a sharp nod, and Tai knew, time was up.

He shifted his grip on the knives and took his weight on the balls of his feet, ready to pivot like a dancer and dive headlong toward the canvas at the rear of the tent. His one chance lay in cutting it cleanly, splitting it wide enough at the first slash for him to be able to launch himself through the rent and come up cleanly, out of the reach of the thugs. He gave himself one chance in three of making it out, and he whispered a prayer to any god who might be listening.

Perhaps one of them was, for in the instant before Tai could spin and dive at the canvas with the knives outstretched like the tusks of a boar, a third shape moved in the flap of the tent. Without so much as a murmur of surprise, the fair, red-haired mercenary sagged at the knees and sprawled at the feet of a figure who seemed more shadow than man. His face was masked inside a raised hood, his hands gloved, his body enveloped in a blue cloak that blurred the lies of his body, made him difficult to see.

Did the swarthy, broken-nosed brigand even suspect the man was there? Tai doubted he had the time, but he watched, wide eyed, and this time he saw the stranger’s hands move, glimpsed the weapons in them, and how they struck.

Not knives – nothing so crude. Each black-gloved hand held a long needle, like the needles old women in Gupar used to work the tapestries, and like the ones used by saddlers to make and mend heavy leathers. The stranger’s left hand moved so fast, it was almost a blur. The needle jabbed cleanly, just once, into the left side of the mercenary’s neck, just above the line of the big sheepskin collar.

Like his companion, he sagged without even a sound. He pitched onto his face on the rugs, right at Tai’s feet, while Tai’s heart seemed to stand still in his chest and then beat like the wings of a little bird.

He gazed stupidly at the thugs while the blue-cloaked man slid the pair of needles away into a pouch on his left wrist. “Grab you pack, you idiot,” Giero’s voice said from the depths of the hood. “You must get out while you can. You think Alak Zhar won’t send more brutes to see what became of these, when you don’t appear like magic? Move!”

The voice galvanized Tai. He did not need to be told a second time. He thrust his knives back into the rucksack, dragged it onto his shoulder and blinked up onto Giero’s masked face. “Are – are they dead?”

“No. But in the morning, they’ll wish they were,” Giero told him with a bass sound of humor. “Killing them would only make trouble for Hal Khouris, bring down the wrath of the Zhar on him.  No, by day’s end tomorrow these two will drag their sorry carcasses back to the fortress of Murkul-zahd, and if they’re very lucky, Alak Zhar will only have them flogged with the barbed whip for their incompetence.” He stood aside to let Tai leave the tent ahead of him. “That way – to your right. Beyond the camel lines, beyond the well. Go!”

So Tai hurried away from the tents and animals belonging to Hal Khouris. He was shaking, head to foot, and happy to quicken his pace. He ran the distance to the well before he turned back to Giero for directions.

Giero had taken off the mask. His eyes were wide in the blue starlight, and he pointed off at right angles to the caravanserai and the road. “You see the washaway? Three trees, an outcrop of boulders –?”

“I see them.” Tai cast out into the darkness. “Why don’t you camp in the caravanserai, like everyone else?”

“Because I’m not like everyone else,” Giero told him tartly. “I’ve no desire for these people to know where I’m camped, or to recognize my face.”

“Yet you’ve shown it to me.” Tai slowed as his feet hit the soft sand, and Giero caught him up, walked beside him, taller, broader,  enfolded in the cloak, which was caught up by the night wind and tossed back, letting Tai see the powerful body it half concealed.

“You would have preferred me to let Alak Zhar have his way?” Giero demanded. “You wouldn’t have seen daylight again for years – if ever. The High Chief isn’t well known for letting captives walk out of the fortress. No one knows what becomes of them, when he’s done with them, but there’s rumors, if you chose to listen. They say some of the pretty ones are sold in the north, cities like Yurkutz, where people with the look of the Guparmen and the Hemelites are exotic enough to be valuable even when they’re past their best. When they’ve been broken. Used up,” he added pointedly.

Tai shivered and plowed on through soft sand that was still warm while the night air had grown chill indeed. The outcropping of great sandstone boulders was further than it looked, but he kept moving. Doggedly, he kept pace with the longer-legged Giero until he glimpsed the camp on the lee side of the rocks.

A small fire burned there; a big black horse with four white stockings was dozing, rugged against the cold, beside a low tent where sticks of lavender joss burned to keep out the scorpions which were a nuisance along most of the spice road.

As they came into the less of the outcrop, Tai saw that from the caravanserai not a glimmer of light would be seen in the night, and the tent was too low to be visible over the line of the rocks. He might have protested that footsteps in the sand would betray their passage, but when he turned back he saw that the wind, which never ceased to blow over the flatlands, from the hills east of Pragend to the lush, forested slopes of Gupar itself, had already erased them.

A shove between his shoulders sent him into the tent. Tai dumped the rucksack just inside and hunched up to enter, since it was only chest-high to him, at its tallest point. A lamp burned very low, and he turned the little brass knob to increase the light as Giero crawled in behind him.

Out of the wind, it was surprisingly warm. The tent reeked of lavender, but every structure along the road smelt the same, and Tai had long ago ceased to notice the scent. He shuffled to the back, and watched as Giero shucked off his cloak, folded it on his own pack, and sat down, cross legged, on the deep green carpet that formed the floor.

The lamp cast weird shadows around his face, and for the first time Tai studied it closely. The big, hawkish nose, the gold hoop in his ear, the heavy, arched brows, gave him a rakish look, almost like one of the mercenaries. But Giero was handsome, and his voice, his accent, belonged to the west. Tai had heard it before, from traders who hailed from the cities that clung to the shores of the Tamar Sea, wandering north and south, following the ancient trade routes of their ancestors.

In the lamplight, he saw that Giero’s eyes were green, and when he smiled, gold flashed among his teeth. He was pulling off his gloves, and Tai saw hands like a musician, with long, expressive fingers. Yet Giero’s body was hard with muscle, and he was limber, Tai saw, as flexible as any of the Alqadih brothers.

“I haven’t said thank you,” Tai whispered, and he felt the heat flush quickly in his cheeks as the dark green eyes looked him over critically.

“You’re welcome,” Giero said with glib amusement as he set his gloves aside. “Get some food into you and get warm. Then … if you should feel disposed to thank me properly, I’d say you were very welcome indeed.”

The heat in Tai’s cheeks doubled. “And if I said the words would have to suffice?”

Giero only shrugged. “Then I’d have to woo you into changing your mind, which would take a day or three.” He considered Tai with a mock frown. “Life is short, tomorrow’s far from certain. The night is young, and neither of us is too old to be forgiven for the occasional … impulse.”

He was darkly seductive, and Tai felt the tug of simple, healthy lust. But his heart had slowed a little and he was thinking properly again, beginning to make sense of what he had seen in the tent. His eyes narrowed on the westerner. “Who are you? You’re from the Tamar shores, aren’t you? Your voice says so – the way your tongue slithers around our language, and the way you put words together.”

“I would rather slither my tongue around … other items,” Giero growled as his eyes moved down across Tai’s bare chest to his lap, where the linen trousers had little substance. “But you’re right, of course. I’m from Fierneza, The City of Archers.”

“The City of Archers,” Tai echoed, seduced again by the sound of it. “Why do they call it that?”

“Because for a thousand years the best bows have been made there, and the people of Fierneza will take a shot at anything that moves,” Giero said in arid tones. “Occasionally they’ll even bring something down. Shooting is a national pastime in the princedom of Alcedo. Everybody does it.”

“And you?” Tai tugged his cloak a little closer as he began to cool.

“I was always good,” Giero said with a hint of smugness. His eyes lingered on Tai’s body. “At a great many things.”

“And you dislike knives.”

Giero lifted one brow at him. “Why do you say that?”

Tai gestured back in the direction of Hal Khouris’s company. “Anyone else would have thrust a dirk between the ribs of those thugs.”

“Now, where’s the finesse in sticking a knife in a man’s back?” Giero demanded. “Where’s the honor in it? And besides, it would be stupid to kill them, unless you actually want old Khouris to be cut from ear to ear in the morning.”

“Those weapons,” Tai began. “Were they needles? Or darts? I never saw anything like them. Are they the weapons of Alcedo?”

“You ask too many questions.” Giero turned away and tugged his pack closer. “Are you hungry?”

“They were needles,” Tai insisted. “That’s not an ordinary weapon. Is it? You jammed them right into the necks of those thugs – but that wouldn’t make them fall down like you’d sawn them off at the ankles!”

Now Giero turned back to him, eyes wide, dark, serious. “Ask no more, boy.”

“Why not?” Tai knew the sound of warning when he heard it, but curiosity was like an unscratchable itch. He leaned closer to Giero. “You probably saved my life! Why can’t you tell me about a – a couple of saddler’s needles?”

“Because they’re not saddler’s needles,” Giero said tersely, “and you already know the answer to what you’re asking. It’s not the needles … it’s what they’re tipped with.”

“A quick poison,” Tai whispered.

“A drug.” Giero had unlaced his pack, and produced a few leaves of flat bread, a hunk of salted meat, a flask of syrup. He pushed the food at Tai. “Eat.”

But Tai was not hungry. Fear had a way of chasing the appetite clean out of a man’s belly; so did lust, and curiosity ran them a close third. He tore a piece off the bread, ignored the meat, and drizzled on a little syrup. His eyes never left Giero’s face, watching the way the light fell about his features, glittered in his eyes, shone on the gold earring as he unbuckled his belt and set it, and his sword, aside.

He moved differently. Tai had spent months among dancers, acrobats, wrestlers, even warriors and houris who would not have disgraced the court of the Omir of Utreness. Giero was none of these. He was like some combination of them, with the limberness, strength, grace, skill and seduction of them all, rolled into one.

And all at once, Tai knew. “You’re an assassin.” He swallowed hard. “Aren’t you?”

Again, Giero turned those wide, dark eyes on him. “And, if I am?”

“It’s a trade that’s feared from Distambool to Zunguo,” Tai whispered.

“Only the guilty need fear it,” Giero said tersely. “If you’re innocent, why should you even notice that the brotherhood exists? And if you’ve been wronged, injured, robbed, insulted, well, you’ll be looking to the brotherhood to buy reparation.” He gave Tai an odd look, bright eyed and hard. “Justice.”

“An assassin,” Tai whispered, listening to the pulse beating in his ears.

“Would it do me any good to deny it?” Giero was tearing bread, cutting meat, and sandwiched them together. “You’d only leave this place in the firm belief that I was a liar as well as an assassin.” He sank his teeth into the food and chewed thoughtfully. “It bothers you.”

Tai shook himself hard. “Surprises me,” he allowed. “Not that I’m not grateful, mind you.”

“And rightly so.” Giero nodded in the direction of Hal Khouris’s great yurt, where by now Alak Zhar would certainly be dispatching more men to find the first. “The Zhar’s bastards will search every tent in the next hour, and I leave those bodies lying where they are, they’ll be found. At first glance, they’d appear dead, but the drug doesn’t fake death. It only makes a man sleep deeply, it doesn’t make him cold as ice, or slow his heart. The Zhar’s men would soon see, they’re far from dead … which they’ll come to rue tomorrow! Meanwhile, I need to get back there quickly and take care of them, so Hal Khouris doesn’t pay a high price for your freedom.”

“Take care of them? How?” Tai demanded.

“None of your concern. You,” Giero added, “have your life, your liberty and your honor. You wouldn’t have hung onto any of those for long.”

He was right, and Tai had the grace to duck his head. “I was a fool. People warned me, but I thought I could earn the coin and get out fast enough to be safe.”

The assassin shrugged generously. “You almost made it. If you’d planned ahead, you’d have been out and running. You needed to pack with an hour to spare, and stash your rucksack in the dark, well beyond the caravanserai. Then, grab your coin and bolt into the night so fast, no one knew where you had gone, not even Hal and Maritza.”

“I … oh.” He was right again, and this time Tai flushed with embarrassment rather than fear or desire. “I wasn’t thinking.”

“No.” Giero chewed slowly. “You weren’t.”

“It’s a good thing you were here,” Tai added.

“Yes.” Giero’s eyes glittered with amusement, and his brows arched like the wings of a diving hawk. “It was.”

He was being mocked, but only gently. Tai looked at the food, which was making his fingers sticky as the syrup melted in the warmth of his hand. “Why are you here?”

“That would be my business.”

“If you’ve been watching for days,” Tai reasoned, “you’ve been at the caravanserai since Hal camped us here.”

“My private business.”

“Are you headed east or west?” At last Tai stuffed his mouth with the bread and syrup.

Giero produced a flask from his pack and pulled the stopper. “It’s nothing to do with you.”

“Or is this it?” Tai asked through the mouthful of bread. “You’ve been camped here at the caravanserai all along, waiting for…”

“Leave it alone,” Giero warned.

“Waiting,” Tai wondered, “like a spider in its web, for someone to come to you?”

“You’re a complete fool, aren’t you?” Giero’s voice dropped, bass and rough.

“Someone in the company?” Tai’s heart skipped as his mind raced through the whole troupe, from Hal on down to the lowliest camel driver.

“Even an idiot knows when enough is enough.” Giero took a swig from the flask, restoppered it, and tossed it into Tai’s hands.

“There’s no one in the company who’d warrant an assassination contract. I know them all. I’m the only freeman – the rest are all born slaves, or sentences slaves, or indentured to service for debt or some petty crime.” Tai took a drink, expecting wine and discovering water instead. It had the slightly brackish taste of the local well water. “So you weren’t waiting for Hal’s troupe to camp here.”

He handed back the flask, and Giero drank again. “You’re like the moth and the flame.”

“Waiting for someone else,” Tai reasoned.

“The flame lures you, but it’ll burn you just the same.” Giero was done eating, and wiped his hands on a cloth from his pack.

“Still waiting?” Tai chewed mechanically, not even tasting the bread. Giero was darkly compelling, handsome, strong, with the fine hands of the artist and the hard physique of the hunter. His voice fascinated Tai, with the luscious accent and overtones of the far west. “Are you still waiting?”

“Why would I be waiting?” Giero demanded acidly as he relaced his pack and pushed it out of the way.

“Waiting for your quarry,” Tai said breathlessly.

“At a caravanserai in the middle of nowhere?” Giero demanded.

“Well – here you are,” Tai reasoned.

“I could be traveling the road.” Giero’s eyes gleamed in the lamplight.

“You could.” Tai watched the man move, saw the way his limbs flexed and stretched, with ultimate precision. “But you’re not. Are you?”

One of those beautiful hands reached over for the sword Giero had set aside when he settled to eat. He drew the long, curved blade halfway out of the scabbard and tested the edge on the sole of his boot. “Get some sleep.”

He was on his knees then, rising to his feet, and Tai was surprised again. “You’re going to ‘take care’ of those bastards?”

“Just as I told you, lest Hal Khouris pay the Zhar’s price.” Giero paused to look at him, and then, not quite on an impulse, leaned over and set his mouth on Tai’s.

The kiss was at first experimental, but it deepened quickly, and Tai groaned as he found the assassin’s tongue in his mouth. Giero stole the breath right out of his lungs, left him faintly dizzy, while his whole body caught alight. Giero’s right hand splayed across his chest, finding the little nub of his right nipple and teasing it with a sure knowledge that should have been illegal.

Tai whooped for air as his mouth was released, and then swore as Giero’s teeth closed on the lobe of his right ear instead, and bit gently while his hand dove southward, into the nest of Tai’s groin. It knew what it was looking for – palmed the shaft and brought it up hard so fast, Tai had no chance to protest.

Lust ignited faster than he would have believed, but no sooner had Giero touched off the blaze than he was gone again. He picked up his gloves on the way to the tent’s low opening, and turned back for just a moment to study Tai. The dark sensuality eclipsed anything Tai had ever seen, even on the spice road, which had the reputation of being the wickedest place in the world.

“Get some sleep,” Giero said, quiet, calm, wise, while Tai’s mind was spinning and every nerve ending seemed to have come alive. “You’re going to need it.”

Then he was out through the tent flap, and when it had closed behind him he took a moment to weight it down with fist-sized boulders, against the wind, which was coursing across the flatlands with its usual energy.

Tai might have followed him, but the boulders told him clearly to stay inside. The little fire was smoldering low now, and he heard Giero add a few sticks of kindling to it, and a piece of wood, before he called softly to the horse. In moments he had swung a saddle onto the animal, and Tai heard muffled hoof beats as Giero made his way out into the night.

With him gone, the loudest sound was the wind, and the high, sharp cries of the kites and buzzards that hunted all along the spice road. Tai sat in the middle of the tent, hugging the cloak about himself, and listening. The furthest sound was a drunken caterwauling from the caravanserai; the closest was the slither of a lizard or a snake in the rocks right outside the tent. And always, the slap of canvas above his head, reminding him that the wind never fell, and that the dust devils could spring out of nowhere and bury the whole road, swamp the wells, erase every landmark.

“Assassin,” he whispered, still half disbelieving what he knew of Giero. “You’re here to kill someone?” Questions battered at his mind, trying to get out. Had Giero taken the commission in Fierneza, or Naprona, or one of the other cities whose names enchanted Tai – had he come east beyond Distambool on a mission of vengeance?

Was his quarry at the caravanserai tonight? Tai swallowed hard, trying not to imagine Giero with the needles in both hands right then, slipping through the shadows as if he were one of them, and stealing the life out of a man’s body with one little prick that would leave a mark so tiny, who would ever even notice it?

Had the quarry come in with Alak Zhar? Damnit – was the quarry Alak Zhar? Tai’s eyes widened, and he was halfway to his feet before he stopped himself. His head spun with imaginings, but of one thing he was certain. Giero did not need any help, nor any advice out of the lips of a juggler from Gupar!

He sank back onto the rug and grabbed for the cushions and blankets which were heaped at the end of the tent. The canvas flapped harder as the wind picked up strength, and he listened intently. If he had been a cat, his ears would have turned toward the caravanserai and pricked up, though he curled up in the rugs and tried to rest.

Nothing. Not so much as a raised voice, much less the clamor of a fight. Tai knew what a fight sounded like well enough, after he was watched the city guard in Armenar take on a pack of bandits out of the south marches. Heavy swords did not tap or clatter, they chimed like bells; and men did not die quietly.

His heart beat at his ribs as time rushed by. Minutes became an hour – he needed no timepiece to know how long it had been since Giero saddled the horse and headed back to the caravanserai, and he began to fret in earnest. “Get some sleep,” he muttered, punching the pillow as if it were his mortal enemy. “I’m going to need it!”

The fire was almost out when he heard the muffled sound of hooves in the sand, and he sat up, watching the soft-edged shadow cross the tent canvas. Giero tended the fire, unsaddled, rugged, fed and tethered the horse before he lifted the boulders off the tent flap. They were undisturbed, so he would know that for once in his young life, Tai had done as he was told.

They moved now, tossed or kicked aside, before the flap opened, admitting a gust of chill air and the silhouette of the assassin. Giero had let down his hood, and his hair was wind-tousled. The hawk’s wing sweep of his brows seemed to mock Tai for doing as he was told, but his mouth was curved in a half smile.

“Ah, you missed me,” he teased.

“You were gone so long, I worried,” Tai said defensively. “You could have been killed.”

“One with my skill?” Giero unhooked his cloak and let it drop. “You don’t know much about me, Tai Emreth of Gupar.”

“And I never will, if you don’t tell me!” Tai sat back to watch as the man settled himself and adjusted the lamp. “You’re from Fierneza, the City of Archers … you’re an assassin. Probably one of the Brotherhood of the Black Rose.”

For the first time Giero’s eyes sharpened with what could have been genuine annoyance. “Them? The Black Rose aren’t assassins. They’re common murderers. They’ll let any man’s blood, if the price is right. They care little if he’s a priest or a brigand.” His lips compressed as he nailed Tai with a glare. “You take me for a murderer? Would a murderer have warned you about Alak Zhar, much less come between you and the Zhar’s thugs?”

“Probably not,” Tai admitted.

“Probably –?” Giero echoed as he tugged his pack closer and unlaced it. He was looking for food, and a scrap of leather.

He had something in his left hand, and Tai was trying to see what it was as he said, “A murderer could certainly keep me out of the Zhar’s hands, if he wanted to get his own talons into me.”

“True enough.” Giero had found the bit of soft leather he wanted. It was the color and texture of cured rabbit skin, and he opened it wide, about to wrap something in it for safekeeping.

“What is that?” Tai leaned closer.

“Like everything else about me, it’s none of your business,” Giero warned.

But Tai had seen the object now. “It’s a – a portrait.”

Giero sighed and sat back. He opened his palm to display a little cameo portrait, framed in yellow ivory. The tiny painting was exquisite, and Tai leaned closer, bringing the lamp to the right angle to see it. It had been painted with a brush so fine, he had never seen its like before. Certainly, Gupar had no such artwork. In Gupar, paintings were the size of walls and statues were taller than houses.

The portrait was of a young woman with red curly hair and a fair complexion. She was smiling, laughing, and holding a yellow rose against her cheek. “She’s pretty,” Tai observed carefully. “Who is she?”

“She’s beautiful,” Giero corrected, “and her name is Triana Bordiano. She’s the youngest daughter of the Duke of Naprona. This portrait was painted when she was sixteen years old – a little less than three years ago, almost the last time she was seen. She was sent to school in Distambool, studying music, poetry, philosophy and languages, which is seemly for young ladies of good family in the west. She and a group of other young halfwits went riding in the hills, late in the afternoon. A sudden storm drove them to find shelter, and none of them was seen for over a week. Two of the six came limping out of the hills, telling a tale of woe.”

“Bandits?” Tai guessed. “They’re a plague, one end of the spice road to the other.”

“This was the story told by the survivors.” Giero had sobered, and was studying the cameo thoughtfully. “Triana was by far the most beautiful of the group, and there’s no question that her father is the wealthiest. The Bordiano household first thought she must have been stolen for ransom, and they were ready to pay any price. Triana was the last chick on the nest, you see. They all spoiled her, adored her. The survivors described a bandit chieftain called Corso. You might have heard his name.”

But Tai’s head shook. “This is my first journey into the west. I know the brigands from the miles back, toward Gupar, but the road ahead is still a mystery to me. Didn’t the girl’s father send an envoy to this bandit, Corso?”

“Of course he did. He sent one of his sons, the warrior, Antonos, and a column of one hundred cavalry. They rode right into Corso’s hills and put out the word that they were ready to pay a high price for the return of the girl.” Giero sighed heavily. “Corso himself came to meet Antonos under a blue flag of truce, but it was already days too late.”

“She was dead?” Tai asked, hushed.

“She was sold,” Giero told him in bald terms. “Corso is just another brigand. He had no idea who he’d caught – certainly no idea the daughter of the Duke of Naprona was studying in Distambool. He just knew he had caught a very beautiful young woman who was going to be worth a fortune in the east. So he sold Triana, and two others who survived the raid, to a dealer who goes by the name of Al Ghojan.”

“And this Al Ghojan was headed east down the spice road.”

“Yes. Antonos offered Corso a great deal of money for more information, but the fact is, Corso knew no more. So Antonos,” Giero went on as he carefully wrapped the cameo in the leather and buried it deep in his pack, “took two of his best swordhands and headed down the spice road after his sister. Not with a whole cohort of cavalry, you understand. Just the three of them, riding into lands where their faces were unknown, and they could pass as soldiers of fortune.”

“Mercenaries.” Tai whistled.

“Mercenaries.” Giero was busy with the food again, slicing meat and packing a piece of bread. “They found their way to Murkul-zahd, following this tip and that snippet of information.” He gestured over his shoulder, into the north. “Antonos is still there, and one of the two men he took with him. The third, he sent back to Naprona with the message ... they’d found Triana. They know exactly where she is. They just can’t do one damn’ thing about it.”

Tai’s heart squeezed. “And you can?”

“And … I can.” Giero chewed thoughtfully. “Seven years, I’ve been a trustee of the society known as the Shadow. If you’ve heard of the Black Rose, you should know about the Shadow.”

But Tai’s head only shook once more. “I haven’t heard a whisper of them. But that’s a good thing, isn’t it? A secret society that’s remained so secret, nobody’s even heard of them. What’s the point of having a secret society everybody knows about?”

At last Giero smiled, chuckled. “Again, that’s a very astute observation. You’re right, young Guparman.” He reached over and plucked a strand of hair from Tai’s face. “Duke Leo had employed my brothers for decades, so what else was he to do? He sent a messenger to my master, Claudio Luicianovo, and they sent a rider to fetch me. Why me?” He indulged himself in a faintly smug expression. “I’m the best. A day later, I was on the road, headed east.” He spread his arms. “And here we are.”

“Then, you’ve met Antonos here, at the caravanserai.” Tai whistled softly.

“He was there in the yurt tonight. He watched you juggle, but you’d have been so preoccupied with Alak Zhar, you wouldn’t have noticed him.” The situation seemed to amuse Giero.

And the truth dawned on Tai. “This Antonos, the Duke’s son – he’s riding with Alak Zhar, isn’t he? He got himself hired on with the bastard.”

“Soon after he found his way to Murkul, he bragged, boasted, started a couple of fights with the Zhar’s more brainless lieutenants … got himself hired as a mercenary, which won him his way into the fortress.” Giero’s brows rose in the familiar arch, critical, disdainful, disapproving. “It was a ridiculously dangerous adventure, as I told him to his face, not one hour ago, when he was helping me take care of the thugs who came for you. And being on the inside of Murkul-zahd didn’t mean Antonos was going to get even close to Triana.”

“But at least he found out where she is,” Tai mused. “He must have tracked the dealer, got the information out of him, of who he’d sold the women to.”

“He did. He found Al Ghojan himself, and paid a great deal of money for the information that the women had been sold to Alak Zhar.” Giero leaned down on one elbow and ate slowly while his eyes traveled Tai from the tangle of his hair to the gold paint on his toenails, which more than any other feature marked him out as a Guparman.

The further east one traveled, the more ostentatious cosmetics became. Beyond the Shinai River, where the humidity soared and for five months in the year, around monsoon time, foot rot was a constant companion. Wealthy people abhorred feet – anyone’s feet – and they painted their toe nails, dyed the soles with henna, tattooed vines and flowers around the ankles. Giero was smiling wryly over Tai’s feet now, and for the oddest reason, Tai felt himself blushing. His ankles were tattooed with tiny red roses and his nails were gold, even though he had never personally suffered the foot rot.

“Where I come from,” Giero said, chuckling, “it’s the women who paint their feet and go about half naked, with their breasts and buttocks adorned with paint and jewelry.”

“Where you come from,” Tai snorted, “the people fancy themselves as archers and will take a shot at anything that moves – and miss!”

“Even the women fancy themselves as archers, the ones with the painted feet and the bosoms with the big, rouged nipples,” Giero agreed.

Tai groaned as the man smiled. It was the most seductive smile he had ever seen, eclipsing even the professional courtesans who would have tempted a saint, let alone a priest, in the cool, dim marble corridors of the places back in the omirates.

“Who are you?” he demanded. “You’re an assassin, from the Society of the Shadow, and you come from Fierneza. But who are you?”

Again, Giero chuckled. “I’m just what you’ve said. My name is Ruggiero Sylvan Delamarino, born in the fair city of Fierneza, but we went to Naprona when I was seven years old. My father was a captain in the service of Duke Leo Bordiano, until he was killed in a duel when I was twelve. My mother was a lady at court, who indulged in a few too many affairs. My father fought for his honor, which was a damned fool thing to be doing, because he had been cuckolded, and a great many times! When he was killed, my mother was struck down by a terrible fit of conscience. She went to Cabria to become a nun in the service of Beleron, the patron god of healing, and I –? I was handed off from one uncle to another, shuffled between the aunts, half educated, wholly neglected, until I fell into bad ways, and very bad company.”

The story was delicious, and Tai was hanging on every word. When Giero seemed reluctant to say more he prompted, “What bad company? Drinking and gambling, whoring and smoking weeds?”

“No!” Giero angled an admonishing glance at him. “I’ve no liking for weeds and strong liquor. They dull the senses, and all that’ll get you is dead. Rapidly. As for whoring and gambling … I had enough of those while I was being shuffled from uncle to aunt to uncle. My mother wasn’t much more than a harlot, if the stories they tell of her are true. And they are! My vice was fighting. My father taught me well when I was young, and I became very good. Well, good enough to win almost any fight I picked in the taverns and gaming houses on the eastern shores of the Tamar!

“In the end, the night came when I was almost killed … cut about, with a hole in my shoulder, so close to my lung, I thought I was dead for sure. I passed out in a gutter, and when I came to the Shadow had me. They healed me, and I’ve owed them a debt ever since. A debt,” he added, “that I’ve been repaying ever since. So there you have it … my vice and my virtue are the same. The martial skills. I’ve no time for the wyrd smoke, wine and gambling.”

“And you’ve no respect for harlots,” Tai guessed.

Giero only shrugged. “On the contrary. They have their place, but my bedchamber is not it. I’ve never had to buy companionship.” His eyes were on Tai’s legs now, which were clad in the flimsy linen pants and sprawled across the rug. “Besides, I’m … choosy.” He reached over and drew a caress from Tai’s left ankle to his hip. “Very choosy.”

The caress seemed to leave a trail of tingling in its wake, and Tai’s body responded without a moment of hesitation. He captured Giero’s hand before it could stray any further, and held it tightly. “You’re going into Murkul-zahd.”

“That’s what Duke Leo is paying me to do.” Giero moved closer. “That’s the other reason I went back into the caravanserai, as well as to take care of those thugs. I’d already arranged to meet Antonos, after the company was done and the Zhar was bedded down, drunk and happy, with some of Hal Khouris’s houris. Antonos had fresh information for me.” He leaned over and took the lobe of Tai’s left ear between his teeth once more. His breath whispered in the aural channel, making Tai’s hair stand on end. “After this, I won’t go near Antonos. I won’t even look at him, supposing we meet face to face in the courtyard right outside the Zhar’s apartments. I don’t know him, he doesn’t know me. But I have the picture … so I’ll know which woman I’m stealing out of there. There are dozens in the zanan house, and all beautiful.”

“Dangerous,” Tai warned.

“Extremely,” Giero agreed as he feathered his lips across Tai’s cheek, in search of his mouth.

“You’ll need help,” Tai began.

“I don’t.” Giero drew back, an instant before he would have silenced Tai with a kiss. “My job is to get that fool of a girl out of the most secure part of the fortress, put her on a horse and get her back to Distambool. Her father can send a carriage for her, and a nurse, and a maidservant. She’ll be home by year’s end.”

“But you can’t go into Murkul-zahd alone,” Tai protested.

Giero made dismissive gestures. “It’s the only way I would go in. Saddle me with a partner, and I’ll be dead in an hour. You think assassins work in twos or threes, or squads? Never, and why? Because you can’t watch out for someone else, and watch your own back at the same time.”

“The Black Rose people work in teams,” Tai began.

But Giero’s dark head shook emphatically. “Only when the intention is mayhem, robbery, murder, troublemaking. They’re a pack of brigands, as I’ve already told you. Oh, they’ll assassinate anyone you care to name, so long as you can pay the asking price. They’ll do it without finesse, or art, or skill. And if you asked them to go into Murkul-zahd and steal out a prisoner … well, they’d certainly take your money – and then vanish with it, because not one among them would have the slightest idea how to get into the Zhar’s zanan house, and then out again, with the right girl.”

“And you do?” Tai demanded.

Giero ignored or avoided the question. He rose up on his knees and flicked open the buttons on the dark green vest. It slipped back off his shoulders, and he pulled the laces of the rose silk shirt so that it gaped open to display a chest as smooth as Tai’s own. He was paler than Tai, with plum brown nipples; his shoulders were wider and his chest much more muscular. Where Tai was built like an acrobat, Giero was made like a warrior, and the difference was stunning.

The silk floated off him, leaving him bare to the line of his hips, and Tai’s hands itched to touch, to explore. Giero pulled the ribbon from his hair and shook is out, teased his fingers through it, which left it in a dark copper cloud around his shoulders. Tai smelt herbs from his hair, and the faintest trace of scent from his skin, and when Giero held out one hand in invitation, he took it.

He had no idea what to expect from Giero, but he had seen the best and worst of men and women, for almost two thousand miles. Giero’s fingers clenched into his hair to draw back his head, exposing the long line of his throat, and Tai held his breath as moist lips slid a long caress from the corner of his mouth to the hollow between his collar bones. His hands spanned Giero’s narrow waist, and his nostrils flared as they filled with the subtle scents of the man – cedar and heather, and something else, something that was entirely male, entirely Ruggiero Delamarino.

The laces closing Giero’s trousers were done in a different pattern from anything Tai had seen before, or he would have had them open in moments. They defied him, and he swore breathlessly while Giero nuzzled along his neck and laughed softly. So Tai surrendered the attempt at making sense of the ridiculous Fiernezan laces and, instead, delved into the warm folds at Giero’s lap, feeling him out through the dark fabric.

A hissing moan rewarded him, and Tai allowed himself a smug smile. He knew what men liked, and men never changed, no matter where one found them. He drew back to look into Giero’s face, and saw an expression of lazy desire. “I’d devour you whole,” he said, slurred and breathless, “if your laces were more civilized.”

“Civilized?” Giero echoed, and caught him by the shoulders, dumped him onto the rug. His mouth closed over Tai’s, hard, hungry, for a long moment, leaving Tai dizzy before he slid down and began to graze across his chest and belly. “I’ll show you civilized, you little barbarian,” he growled against Tai’s skin, and left a line of nipping kisses there, along the line of his ribs.

They were sure to raise tiny bruises, and Tai would wear them like trophies. He was holding his breath as Giero slipped the knot at the waist of his pants, and he lifted his hips to help as they tugged off. Chill air prickled his skin, brought him up harder, faster even than Giero’s hand, which closed about him and began to play.

So Giero also knew what men liked. Tai’s eyes closed and his head fell back as he abandoned himself to complete hedonism. His hands clenched into the rug and he groaned as he felt Giero move over him, hotter, heavier, with the iron-hard throb of a shaft that was almost as thick as Tai’s wrist. Eyes open to slits in the lamplight, Tai watched it, measured it, and wanted it with a kind of avarice he had not felt in years. Or ever.

Part of his mind was trying to slam on the brakes, as if he were trying to slow down the race of a carriage that was running out of control. A voice in the back of his head whispered, over and over, He’ll be gone in the morning! And with a swallowed curse Tai thought, So will I!

He might never see Ruggiero Delamarino again, and the thought only made him want the man more, against any advice he had ever heard. His arms wound around Giero’s neck, and before Giero could drop his head and claim the prize, he urged the Fiernezan to move up, lie where Tai’s long legs could wrap around him and hold him tight.

“Don’t get too comfortable,” Giero warned, and stooped to kiss him.

“No?” Tai’s mouth was full of his tongue for long moments. “Why not?”

“Because you’re going to be up on your knees,” Giero informed him.

“You think so?” Tai was almost inclined to argue, since Giero’s smug self confidence stung a little, especially since he was so right in everything he assumed he knew about Tai.

“I do.” Giero settled on him, let Tai carry most of his weight.

It pressed the breath out of his lungs, but he was not about to protest, since Giero was humping and rubbing, and the friction of skin against skin was too delicious, velvet smooth and slick with the salt tears of his own erection and Giero’s. Tai knotted his hands into the copper hair, holding him there, and let Giero do all the work until the man’s breathing was heavy and his back was running with sweat.

And then Giero rolled off him, slumped onto the rug at his side and said in a breathless rasp, “Your turn, little barbarian.”

Tai pounced. If he would never see Giero again – if the morning sent them in different directions, and Mother Fate never saw fit to let their paths cross again – then Tai had a debt to repay, and Giero had already made it known which coin he wished to be paid in. Pleasure was a universal currency, acceptable in any city, any territory. Tai would give him something by which to remember the juggler from Gupar. In twenty years, Giero would recall the Guparman he had saved from the Zhar’s scavengers, and he would have forgotten nothing of the night that followed.

There were tricks from Zunguo, sensual magicks from Utreness and Sedam – the arts of the bedchamber often made their way to the rich, sodded old omirates in the form of pillow books. Professional courtesans charged a gold coin, or a whole purse, to teach the lascivious arts; men sent their sons to be educated – or young wives, who had been over-protected by zealous parents, and came to the marriage bed in ignorance.

For Tai, the arts of the bedchamber were learned on long, hot nights in the summer when came of age and was noticed in the markets. Lovely youths of whatever gender were invited to court – boys, girls, eunuchs. In the omirates, there was no discrimination. Only a few rules were set and kept. First, the court physician examined each newcomer, for the court might not have been pure, but it was healthy, and determined to stay that way. Actual virgins were cosseted, treated like little white doves and showered with gifts; and the innocent (as well as the merely ignorant) were sent to the courtesans, to be educated before they were introduced to a court that could be decadent indeed.

Long summer nights, Tai Emreth spent discovering the depths of his own sensuality – finding the darker side of himself, recognizing it, making peace with it. A woman called Imarna, a man by the name of Eugenio, and a tall, slender eunuch from Zunguo, whose unpronounceable name meant Singing Jade, stretched him gently – and not so gently – on the rack of his own desire and taught him everything.

Those secrets, he lavished on Giero now, and although he knew the assassin was older, far more experienced in the arts of war and death, he knew in minutes, Giero had never had a courtesan from Gupar to bed. The look of surprise on his face was worth a hundred tanari. The whimpers, as Tai played him like an instrument, were worth a thousand.

Perhaps Giero had assumed he would have the whole evening his own way, but he soon relinquished the puppetmaster’s control. Then it was Tai’s turn to be smug as he turned him, pressed there, scratched here, buried his fingers, gripped or bit or licked a wet path from one nerve ending to the next and then breathed across it to fetch Giero up in helpless gooseflesh.

He was like an iron bar with urgency, but Tai was not about to let him off the leash – not yet. Because, smug or not, Giero was right. Tai did want to be up on his knees, spitted like a lamb over the hearth. He tortured Giero until lesser men would have been begging, sobbing, and at last even Giero Delamarino caught his head between shaking hands to stop him.

“Your turn,” Tai whispered, a little hoarse, a little rasping, since he was trembling with effort and desire.

“A moment,” Giero begged.

“One moment only,” Tai told him, withdrawing his fingers from the dark, hot places where they had been turning, pressing, until Giero was at the place where pleasure and pain began to blur, and he could bear no more. Tai leaned down over him, returning to his chest, where the pebbles of his nipples were swollen, rucked, likely a little sore with the artistry they had experienced. He licked there to sooth, bit gently to tease, and Giero growled like a panther, reviving quickly.

“I’m not even going to ask where you learned all that,” he panted.

“Ask, and I’ll tell you,” Tai whispered. “It’s no secret.”

“You could be an emperor’s whore.” Giero swallowed hard.

“I’m nobody’s whore,” Tai said curtly.

“Courtesan … houri. An omir’s favorite concubine,” Giero allowed. “Do the omirs have favorite concubines in Gupar?”

“They do. Of course they do.” Tai closed his eyes as Giero’s hands charted his face, mapped the lines of his features, his throat, his shoulders.

“And were you one of them?”

“Me? No.” Tai let himself be maneuvered now, over onto his belly, with a cushion thrust under him. “But one of the apprentices of a merchant prince of Offir bowed before me in the market, and said I’d been noticed. His master had seen me, and would I like to come to court?”

“Offir?” Giero was rummaging in his pack.

Tai never saw what he brought out, but he felt it … cool, slick, soft, thick, moist, fragrant. It drizzled between his cheeks, preparing him, making him groan in sheer pleasure. “Mmm. One of the towns east of Gupar, where the road snakes off into the desert on its way to Zunguo.”

And then he could not speak anymore. The words were ripped out of his head as Giero’s fingers followed the sweet oil, and he took his weight on knees and elbows, wanting it all.

Giero had recovered enough to make him wait for it. He toyed and teased, and at the last it was Tai who might have begged for what he needed. He clenched his teeth hard, determined not to implore – knowing that Giero himself had been strung out on the edge for so long, he could have little left in reserve.

Then, there it was – without warning, the big, thick plunge of him, filling Tai, stretching him, challenging, till he wondered how his body would do what was asked of it. The men of Gupar and Zunguo were not nearly so demanding. Giero was the first man from the west of Distambool Tai had ever had, and the difference wrung little cries of dismay from him, whimpers that would have sounded more fitting on the lips of a virgin.

“I’m hurting you.” Giero seemed to be speaking through clenched teeth.

“Yes,” Tai gasped, not about to lie.

“Will I stop?” Giero groaned.

But Tai knew how this worked. “You’re not so naïve in the arts of love! Harder, assassin … as if you’re thrusting the javelin into the heart of a man. Harder!”

And Giero had learned enough of Tai to know that the younger man knew wiles and guile he himself had never imagined. He took him at his word, and thrust almost vengefully.

A howl left Tai’s throat, and then another – but the second was not a sound of pain. Discomfort exploded into pleasure, and he pushed up onto his hands to brace himself as the ride began. He knew he had driven Giero long and hard, and he prayed, now, that he would have enough left to go the distance.

He need not have worried. Giero Delamarino had the assassin’s training. The Shadow would not have released him into the world’s dangerous places without the physical strength, the sheer power, to survive and prevail in situations that would have destroyed the ordinary man.

The same training that kept him alive in the assassin’s trade – and which would take him into Alak Zhar’s zanan house and bring him out safely – kept Giero rampant until Tai began to spend; and then Giero let himself go, let the sublime madness overwhelm him.

Pleasure erupted along every nerve Tai possessed. Colors burst behind his closed eyelids, and he heard himself wailing in the elongated moments when thinking was impossible and he could not even have remembered his own name. Giero went down on him, heavy on his back and welcome there, and they collapsed on the rug, exhausted, mocking each other with a rueful grin, a wry chuckle.

Tai might have wanted to talk – to hold onto the night, since he might never see Giero again, but the exhaustion went clean through to his bone marrow, and his eyes were closing even before Giero was done with the wet rag and the scented oils.

Clean enough, warm enough, he crawled into the older man’s embrace, put his head on Giero’s chest, and was asleep before he could mutter a coherent word. He would never have believed that sleep would lap over his head as if he were going down in a lake of dark water, but the next he knew, Giero was shaking him awake, and the canvas fluttering a few feet from his face was light. Dawn had not yet broken, but the sun was not much more than an hour away.

“Time to be moving,” Giero was saying against his ear, kissing him there. “It’s going to be good traveling weather, and after last night, I expect Hal Khouris will want to get the company on the road. He won’t want to stay here, where Alak Zhar will be sober by noon, and angry. And you,” he added as he threw back the rugs and unweighted the tent flap, “would be safest if you stayed with the company.”

Tai answered with a grunt as he pulled and stretched every joint and limb, and yawned. The chill air of early morning prickled his skin, but the triangle of sky framed in the open tent flap was clear. It had that odd color between blue and mauve and gold, which told him the sun would be up soon, there would not be a cloud before noon, and the heat would come up fast. If Hal wanted to get on the road today, it would be a morning of sweating and swearing, with the company packing fast and the camel drivers cursing over their animals.

“It’s weeks to Pragend, at the speed of the caravan,” he muttered as he scrambled into his pants and ducked outside.

The hearth was out, the horse was looking at Giero, wanting his breakfast. Giero paused only to go around to the other side of the tent, turn his back on Tai and the wind – and more probably the wind – and make water, and then he was back with the saddlebags, and a mix of oats and bran and dried fruit. He emptied a skin of water into the pail and, with the horse fed, he turned his attention to the hearth.

“It would be a faster ride through to Pragend on your own,” he admitted at last, “but it’s a thousand times more dangerous.”

“I’ve made it this far on my own,” Tai protested.

“And your journey would have ended last night.” Giero looked up at him out of wide, dark eyes that showed a little green in the new daylight. “Stay with the company.”

It sounded like a command, and Tai’s brows popped up. He crossed his arms over his bare chest as the breeze prickled. “I’m a freeman – I’ll do as I choose.”

“Will you, now?” Giero sounded amused. “I’d like to see how you’ll do as you please, when some wyldsman like the Zhar has a collar on your neck and a quirt dancing all over your delicious little arse. You’ll soon do as you’re bid, not as you choose. Or, what you choose and what you’re bid will very quickly become the same thing! And then where will you be?”

He was rebuilding the fire as he spoke. Tai watched the long-fingered hands, remembered what they had done to him, and his thinking was none too clear. “Where will I be?”

“In a mess of your own making, with nobody to drag you right back out this time,” Giero scoffed as he leaned down and blew on the new fire to encourage it. He added a handful of wood shavings and a few sticks. “I’ll be a little while behind you, and I’ll be busy. The whole reason I’m here is Triana Bordiano. Getting her out of Murkul-zahd is one thing. Getting her back to Distambool is another. She’s been a prisoner for some time, and she might not be in prime traveling condition.”

“Hurt?” Tai wondered.

“Perhaps.” Giero stood and dusted off his hands. “Or very, very pregnant. Have you thought of that?”

Tai’s eyes widened. The idea had never occurred to him. “How would you get her out of there, if she’s round as a melon and a few weeks off birthing the Zhar’s brat?”

“I wouldn’t, because I can’t,” Giero said darkly as he slung a small kettle over the fire. “And I’ve told this to Antonos. If I get into the zanan house and find her in that condition … well, she stays right where she is till she’s been delivered, and recovered! After that, it’s even money if she’ll go without her child, or if she never wants to see the infant ever again.” He shrugged. “I’ve seen battlefield mothers go both ways, and you can never guess.”

“Damn,” Tai whispered.

“Damn, indeed.” Giero was unlacing a saddlebag, and from it produced a pack of flatbread and a piece of salt meat. He carved off four slices and slapped them on a small black iron skillet before he looked up and gave Tai a rueful grin. “I’ll get in there, and I’ll talk to her … she travels now, or she travels later. One way or another, I’ll have her back in Distambool, and her father can send a carriage for her. Then …”

“Then?” Tai dropped to one knee in the sharp sand by the fire, and held his hands to the flames while his eyes remained on Giero, drinking him in, in the firelight and the wan illumination of the pre-dawn sky.

Amusement made Giero’s eyes glitter. “Then I get paid, and for this job, Duke Leo is paying me handsomely indeed. I’ll be on my way home. By way,” he added, “of the Distambool and Pragend highway, which is the best road.”

The sense of what he had said jolted through Tai as if Giero had physically slapped him. “Then, if I were in Pragend –?”

“If you get yourself there safely,” Giero affirmed, “I’d come looking for you. I told you, I’ve had my eye on you for days, liking what I’ve been seeing. But there’s a long, dangerous road ahead of you. Bandits and skin traders like Al Ghojan and Corso are everywhere, and the further west you ride, the more likely you are to run right into them, because you’re getting closer to the rich, wicked old cities where they do the best business.”

“I have the price of a good horse,” Tai said wistfully. “I could go through like the wind.”

“You might.” Giero hunted through his saddlebags for a pair of black enamel cups and a caddy that matched them. He dropped three pinches of green leaf tea into the kettle and set out the cups. “Or you might ride into heavy weather, or a sandstorm, or an ambush. The horse might come down sick or lame, or suffer a fall. You might eat or drink something that turns your body inside out and leaves you ill and weak, or the horse can rear and dance at a mountain hare bolting across the road, and you can fall and break a limb. There’s a hundred ways to come to grief on the road, and every one of them leaves you prey to the likes of Corso.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, northwards. “The end of the road, for you, would be some fortress like Murkul-zahd … and I would never even know where to start looking for you.”

“I … oh.” Tai subsided into silence, preoccupied with Giero’s face, and the smooth satin of his skin, for he knew the feel of that skin, the responsiveness of his nerves. Memories of the night possessed him. He wanted that again – wanted it fiercely.

Giero shrugged. “It’s commonplace out here. People disappear, most often the young and lovely. Like yourself. A handful sometimes show up again ten years later, or more – they’ll come wandering out of the wyldlands with tales of having served in the zanan houses of brigands like Alak Zhar. Most,” he added, “are never seen again. Like Triana. There’s no way she would ever find her way out of Murkul-zahd on her own.” He leaned over, where wisps of smoke from the edges of the fire wrinkled Tai’s nose and smarted his eyes, and he said against Tai’s ear, “Stay with Hal and his company. Come safely to Pragend. Yes?”

He was persuasive, even when he was not flicking his tongue into Tai’s aural channel, and when his teeth were not tugging the lobe of Tai’s ear, which sent darts of excitement into his nethers. “I suppose I could stay with Hal,” he admitted.

“You could,” Giero whispered, amused.

“I’d have to perform, to earn my supper,” Tai warned.

“Of course. Just be careful who you perform for,” Giero chuckled. “And when Hal or Maritza tells you a predator like Corso or Al Ghojan is in the grand yurt, well, you don’t perform! That,” he said curtly, leaning away now to see to the tea and food, “was stupid.”

He was right, and Tai heaved a long sigh. “It’s weeks.”

“Safe weeks.” Giero gestured northwards again. “By gods, you know where I’m going to be! I’ll wheedle my may into Murkul-zahd, and steal into the zanan house … I’ll find Triana and see what condition she’s in. For all I know, I could be camped out along the road here for months, waiting for her to be in any fit condition to ride – and when I head east, it’ll be with a woman not long recovered from childbirth, with a wailing child strapped to her back!” He actually chuckled. “You want to stay here, and help to change napkins, and learn how to milk a goat and feed an infant?”

Tai had the common sense to feign a shudder. “All right! I’ll stay with the company, and the next time they tell me some bastard like Alak Zhar’s come in for the show, I’ll come down with gripes in the belly. I’ll head for the latrine and stay there till it’s all over.” He shared Giero’s humor. “Good enough?”

“Good enough.” Giero lifted the kettle off the fire, but before he poured, he caught Tai in a firm embrace. “Be safe.”

“I will,” Tai said, muffled against his shoulder. “And I’ll be fretted for you! My sweet gods, you’ll be in Murkul-zahd – worse, you’ll be sneaking into the zanan! Your head could be on a spike over the gates.”

“It’s possible,” Giero said indifferently.

“It doesn’t bother you?” Tai demanded.

The tea splashed into the two cups, and the meat began to sizzle and spit. “It’s also possible that Hedros, God of Fire, will decide in the night to wreak havoc on the wyldlands, and tear the ground apart with chasms and volcanoes that blacken the sky and kill every blade of grass for a hundred miles.” Giero shook the pan and tossed the meat. “Of the two possibilities – my head being spiked over the gates of Murkul-zahd, or Hedros reducing the spice road to a pile of ashes … the chances of Hedros running amok are far higher.” He looked sidelong at Tai, and winked.

Confounded, aggravated, amused, fascinated, seduced, Tai gaped at him. “You’re the most arrogant son of a bitch I ever met.”

The assassin clearly took it as a compliment, and dropped a flamboyant bow before Tai before he dug a pair of brass platters out of the saddlebag. He tore the bread, and produced a little pot of green chutney and a silver spoon. “Don’t waste your nights fretting about me.”

But Tai knew he would. He would be anxious until he saw the big black horse coming up the lane outside his brother’s forge. Until he was hauled into the nearest corner of privacy, and Giero’s arms crushed the breath out of his lungs.

“Eat,” Giero challenged, and shook the meat onto the plates. “You’ve a hard morning’s work ahead of you.”

“Breaking camp,” Tai said resignedly. “It’s Hal’s rule, for the slaves and indentured and free alike. If you want dinner, you work up a sweat.”

“It’s a fair rule,” Giero judged.

“But I have a gold coin in my purse,” Tai said smugly, “and if I’m not going to buy a horse and leave this place like the wind, I can watch the rest of them sweat and toil, and then buy my dinner at the stalls, where they’ll be frying onions and boiling sausages.” He bit a chunk out of the meat and chewed with satisfaction. “I can buy a bracelet, one of those with the big green stones. And a silk robe, so thin and sheer, you can almost see right through it.” He gave Giero a sultry look. “Something for you to dream about, while you’re camped out here. Something to bring you to Pragend as fast as you can get the woman to Distambool and send for Duke Leo’s people.”

“How could I resist?” Giero said dutifully. “Mind you, I’ll insist you wear it for me – and the bracelet. And nothing else. And then I’ll take the robe from you and show you, you’re not the only one who’s ever read a pillow book from Zunguo!”

Tai laughed and thrust out his hand. “You have a deal.”

“I’m glad to hear it.” Giero shook the hand, and then kissed the open palm. “Now, shut up and eat your breakfast. The sun’ll be up in half an hour, and I want to make damn’ sure Alak Zhar’s cutthroats have gone before I turn my back on you.”

“I’m not a child, I don’t need a nurse!” Tai protested.

“And Alak Zhar is not a charitable man. He’s been denied what he wanted, and he’ll be furious, as soon as he sobers up! He’ll go back to Murkul-zahd, execute his prisoners, flog his slaves, and even his own kin are going to be tiptoeing around him for days.” Giero looked Tai up and down critically. “You’ve caused a lot of trouble.”

“I …” Tai hesitated. “He’s going to kill people because of me?” A terrible surge of guilt hit him squarely in the face.

“Probably.” Giero sighed, and shrugged. “His prisoners are down to die anyway. Better to do it sooner than later, and escape the rats and the open drains in Murkul-zahd’s dungeons.” He reached out, touched Tai’s face with surprising gentleness. “No one who was taken to Murkul-zahd as a captive walks out of there, and if you give them more trouble than they reckon you’re worth, they’ll lose you in the lower levels for as long as it takes for you to realize how lucky you’d be, to be clean and fed and sprawled on satin pillows for the Zhar’s pleasure.” He finished eating in a few bites, drank the tea to the dregs, and handed mug and plate to Tai. “Take care of those, and go get your things while I saddle up.”

Without a word, Tai scrubbed out the mugs and plates with a handful of sand, and returned them to the saddlebag. Giero was not about to break camp here, not before he knew he was on his way to Murkul-zahd, and the tent was still standing, the bedroll still set out, when he was done saddling the horse.

The caravanserai was not as distant as Tai had thought the night before. It was just on the extreme range of his ears, and this morning it was quiet. He heard a whisper of its usual morning clamor, and saw the smoke of the dung cookfires as he pulled the rucksack up onto his shoulders. Giero had mounted up, and hauled Tai up onto the horse, behind him. Tai’s arms closed around the bigger, stronger, warmer body, and held on.

The outcrop of redstone boulders was one of many in a bleak landscape that was scoured by the winds and baked by the sun. Few trees grew along the spice road, and the occasional stand of them always meant a spring, or a waterhole. Caravanserais grew up at the springs, but they could be thirty miles apart, and between them the wyld was unforgiving, dangerous.

Quiet in the morning air, they came quickly up on the camp, and Giero reined back a good way out to watch for some minutes, and listen. Tai leaned out to see around him. Now, he could hear the sounds of industry, a blacksmith’s hammer, the cooks yelling and bickering as they conjured breakfast, the squeal of some unfortunate animal that was fated to be part of it.

He heard nothing to suggest trouble, and Giero took the horse directly to the tents where Hal Khouris’s company slept. Hal himself was still asleep, but Maritza was up and busy. She was grinding baked roots for a fresh brew while the big red kettle boiled, and as Tai slid down from the back of Giero’s horse, she greeted him with a sly smile.

“So, there you are. I wondered what became of you.” Her dark eyes flickered to Giero, and she nodded. “Master Delamarino.”

“You know him?” Tai was surprised. He dumped his rucksack at Maritza’s side.

“I know him. Hal knows him. He’s been here since we arrived.” Maritza returned to the grinding. “Is it Hal you’re wanting?”

Giero squatted by the hearth. “Was there trouble, after –?”

She cackled like a broody hen. “After you put down the bastards and stole the prize out from under them?” She gave him a lewd wink. “After you left, Hal and I took the pair of them, poured wine down their necks, doused ’em in perfume, stripped ’em naked and dumped ’em in the houris’ yurt. When they wake up, they’ll assume they were drunk and well bedded. Of course, they’ll have to explain to the Zhar why they let themselves get so distracted when they were sent to fetch the lad.”

“Alak will flog them to tatters,” Giero observed.

“Which is much less than they deserve,” she said tartly.

“And Alak himself?” Giero shot a glance at Tai.

“Was plied with wine and smoke, and entertained by the Hemelite woman, and Mikhail. He was reeling drunk when they hoisted him onto a horse and the rode away, long after midnight.” Maritza pouted. “He was happy enough at the time, but he’ll be mad when his head clears.”

“You need to be gone by then.” Giero stood and glanced around the caravanserai.

Tai had already seen that the camel drivers were checking harness, and several of the tents were down. As Maritza spoke, two more dropped and were rolled, thronged, and carried away to the wagons, all with astonishing speed.

“We’ll be gone in an hour or two,” Maritza assured Giero, “and as for Alak Zhar – the Hemelite made sure there was enough napras in his wine for him to be muddle-headed till the sun is past the zenith headed well down.”

Napras was a mushroom, Tai knew; it flourished in wet caves in the southwest, in the monsoon months. It was dangerous, and it was costly. Maritza knew to the last grain how to handle it, and he knew without even asking, it was she who had doctored the wine the Hemelite woman had given to Alak Zhar.

They could have killed him with it just as easily. Tai shared a wry look with Giero. All the assassin’s guile, he thought, all the courage and danger, and yet a couple of crafty women could have done in a moment what the assassin would risk everything to accomplish. Tai did not know whether to laugh or be outraged, but when he looked at Giero he saw the same rueful humor in his eyes, not very well masked.

“You see?” Giero dropped an arm over his shoulders and drew him aside. “Don’t place too much value on the work done by the likes of us. The truth is, Alak Zhar could have met a very unpleasant end in the wee small hours of the morning, at the same time you were on your knees and howling in delight. And the beauty of napras is, his own kin, his own men, would have assumed his heart had given out in the throes of drunken passion.”

As he spoke they were walking along the line of tents, back toward Tai’s, which they had left not much before midnight. Giero chuckled, but the humor was short lived, and soon enough he sobered. Tai was quick to catch onto the shift in his mood.

“This is it, isn’t it? This is goodbye.”

“It has to be.” Giero held his face between gentle palms. “You’ll make your way to Pragend, safe with the company, and you’ll be there when I deliver the woman into the care of her father’s trustees. Then I’ll make my own way to Pragend, which is on the road back to the Tamar Sea…”

“And in the spring, you’ll show me the cities in the west,” Tai insisted.

“If you like.” Giero leaned forward and kissed his forehead. “Where will you be? So I don’t have a great chore, finding you.”

Tai gestured vaguely along the spice road. “Do you know Pragend at all? I’ve never been there, but my brother wrote to me three times, describing it. There are great marble gates at the cardinal points. The east gate is golden marble, and inside there’s a traders’ market, and opposite, a little street called Smith’s Way. My brother has his forge there.” He looked up into Giero’s face, just as the sun crossed the line of the hills. “I’ll wait for you.”

“You’d better,” Giero said softly, gruffly, “or I’ll come and find you, and if you make me hunt for you –”

“It’ll be a tanned backside, and you’ll tie me to one of the bedposts with silken cord,” Tai guessed.

“Well, I could to that,” Giero mused. “I was going to say, I won’t give you the gifts I’ll have bought for you, along the road.”

“Oh.” Tai felt warmth flooding his face. He seized Giero’s hand, brought it to his lips and kissed the fingers. “Just bring yourself there – safely. That’s the only gift I want. I’ll fret till I see you.”

“I know you will.” Giero cocked his head at Tai and smiled, an expression of some intrigue. “I’ve never had anyone fret for me before. Not since my father threw his life away and my mother went to take holy orders. After that, I don’t believe anyone ever cared if I lived of died.”

“Well, I do,” Tai said loudly.

“And it’s a little odd, knowing you do.” Giero tousled Tai’s hair and fended him off. “I need to go back and break camp. I’ll move on, just a few miles, and come around to Murkul-zahd in a great circle. Then it’ll be –”

What he was about to say, Tai would never know. A shout of warning ripped across the camp, but it was almost too late, and Giero cursed acidly – cursed himself as well as Tai. Tai heard him mutter, “Shaidas, I’m getting slow! See what you’ve done to me, boy?”

Tai was about to protest that he had not done anything, but he knew better. He had distracted Giero, and it was more than enough to get them both killed. Four figures had sprung out of the low, sandy hillocks on the north side of the caravanserai. The grove of dusty olive and fig trees clustered about the well, and camels, mules and horses were tethered there, in what would soon be the only shade for miles.

They four men hurled themselves into the alley of tents, scattering dogs, chickens, children, and the new sun shone dazzlingly on the upturned blades of the zaimiter swords – the great curved blades, so heavy, Tai could barely lift one of them.

“Get back, get out of the way, and stay out!” Giero barked over the sound of Maritza yelling for Hal.

“Hal! Hal, get out here – Hal, quickly, now! Hal!” She was bellowing over her shoulder in the direction of the tent she shared with the company’s master, and she had drawn both the daggers she wore concealed at left and right of her belt.

They were curved like dragon’s fangs, and though they were smaller than a sword, they could be more deadly, for those blades were honed like razors and dipped in the venom of the cave toad. Even Maritza handled them with infinite care, and any man who valued his life would go nowhere near her when they were out of the sheath. A single nick meant death.

The four who were hurtling across the caravanserai were Alak Zhar’s thugs, and probably friends of kinsmen of the two who were going to be punished when the Zhar sobered up enough to be told they had fallen into the arms of the company’s courtesans, instead of fetching the fire juggler as they had been told to. They came out of nowhere, and Tai could only guess they had been lying low, just outside the caravanserai, waiting to see if he showed his face again, and with whom. Did they hope to curry favor with the Zhar by delivering the juggler – or to sweeten his temper and spare their brothers the whip? Tai could not guess, and had no time to speculate as he hurried out of Giero’s way and watched him draw the sword, left-handed.

On his left forearm was a broad band carrying at least a dozen of the long needles he had used the night before; on his right thigh was a strap carrying four fine, slender throwing knives. Rather than drawing a dirk to partner the sword, which was the way most westerners chose to fight, Giero produced one of the knives and held it by the tip of the blade, balanced perfectly to throw it.

But the target had to be close, and Tai was not even breathing as Giero waited, waited, until the first of the brigands was in range. He was a big man, shaven-skulled, with a weight of ironmongery pierced into his ears and old blue tattoos on arms and chest. He wore knotted sheepskins and green leather, and he seemed not to even notice that Giero was armed.  The knife skewered the left side of his neck and he went down hard, tumbling and cartwheeling with his own momentum.

A roar of rage issued from an older man who was similar enough to be the first’s brother, and Giero’s fingers went for another knife in the split second while he would have the chance to take another shot. But the range was not so good now, and his aim was off – only a fraction, but enough to lodge the knife in the man’s shoulder. The wound would slow him up, but it was not a killing wound, and now Tai watched Giero shift the sword into his right hand and draw the dirk with his left.

This was more what Tai had expected, as Giero dropped into the classic swordsman’s stance. His weapon was a sabara, very fine, more than likely hand-made to fit Giero’s own hand, height and strength. Tai smelt the faintest trace of oil from the blade, and it gleamed in the sun. He was breathless with excitement and fear – he had never expected to see Giero fight, and he knew it was an honor. The Shadow were so secretive, they surely never showed their skills by daylight and in the open.

“Tai!” It was Hal Khouris, calling from the tent. “Tai, get back here, make yourself scarce, boy, while you can!”

But Tai wanted to watch Giero fight, and he lingered, watching with wide eyes as the Fiernezaman showed what he was worth. His trade might have been the stealth and skill of the assassin, but he was quite the swordsman. Tai had never seen better. Giero moved like a dancer, too fast for Tai to see every move. The tip of the sabara drew first blood on the cheek of one of the Zhar’s cutthroats, and then sketched a long, wet line down the arm of the one who had just pulled the throwing knife out of the meat of his shoulder. The fourth man was hanging back, circling around, but Tai was too intent on the three-handed duel to notice him.

Hal was still shouting at him, and Maritza’s higher voice cut clean across the camp, but Tai was not listening to them. He saw Giero make a crescent-shaped cut around the jaw of one of his opponents, and blood frothed and spat out of the wound. The man sagged to his knees, dropped his sword and held both hands to his throat, but the wound was too deep, too swift-flowing, and even his voice gurgled. His eyes were wide, wild – he knew he was about to face his gods and give account of the life he had lived.

The third of the brigands merely kicked him out of the way to get a clear cut at Giero, while the last continued to hang back and wheel around the fringe of the fight. Tai was so intent on the flurry of blows blocked and answered by the sabara that moved like lightning in Giero’s hand, he was oblivious to the one who circled like a wolf.

He should have seen the whurpul in the man’s hand, should have seen him whirling it around, ready to toss it. Cattle drovers used the whurpul to bring down animals in the field, and bounty hunters used the same strip of flexible leather with the weighted ends to bring down fugitives, perhaps indentured laborers who tried to outrun their contracts.

The whurpul was far kinder than an arrow or a club in the back, but Tai still went down hard, with both legs suddenly snared together, and he yelled a curse as he hit the ground. Shouting Giero’s name would only distract him again, and likely get him killed. Tai rolled over and over, struggling with the whurpul, trying to kick it off his legs, but the harder he pulled and kicked, the tighter it seemed to become. The weights were lead balls, thronged into the ends of the straps, and they were hopelessly tangled before he got his fingers to them.

From the tail of his eye he glimpsed Hal, and Maritza holding him back, and then a shape moved in front of the new sun and Tai looked up, one hand raised to protect his eyes. The fourth of the brigands – the circling wolf – loomed over him with a zaimiter in a right fist the size of a boulder. Without even glancing at the whurpul, much less untangling it, the man caught Tai by the shoulder and hoisted him to his feet.

Tai caught his breath, but before he could mouth a curse he felt the hard edge of the sword, cold across his gullet. The wyldsman had hauled him back against his chest, and his nose was full of the smell of damp sheepskin and stale sweat.

“Drop it!” The man’s voice was a rasp, as if half a lifetime of cheap wine and smoking weeds had scorched his gullet to cinders. “I said, drop it, or I’ll take the juggler’s carcass back to Alak Zhar, and he’ll be after you with every hunter in Murkul!”

The threat was very real. The edge of the sword had already broken Tai’s skin, and his body shook with terror as he watched Giero grasp any thin opportunity to spin around and take in the scene behind him. The look on his face was a blend of anger, dread and outrage. He dove a half dozen paces away from the opponent who was still coming after him with a blizzard of rough, ill-timed, windmilling cuts, any of which would have taken the head off his shoulders.

The space gave him the chance to turn around, take in the situation, and he swore lividly. “Let one more drop of the lad’s blood,” he snarled, “and you’ll pay for it with your own – all of it!”

“You think so?” The brigand pulled Tai closer. His breath reeked of beer and onions. “Drop the sabara, and maybe you live. Maybe the Zhar will have a use for you.”

Giero was trapped, and he must have known it as surely as Tai knew. A crowd was gathering, but no one was about to interfere. Everyone in the caravanserai knew Alak Zhar’s thugs on sight, and a hand raised against them might as well have been raised against the Zhar himself. Vengeance would be quick and brutal. Hal and Maritza stood at the head of their whole company, while camel handlers, mule drivers, riggers and laborers from right across the encampment gathered to watch.

No one spared any love for the wyldsmen, but Tai did not imagine for a moment that Giero would find any help. He stood between Tai and the fourth of the group, sword and dagger still raised – and if he dropped them, Tai knew, the instant he surrendered, he would be beaten bloody. Anger seethed in his belly, for a moment eclipsing the terror, and he gathered his breath to shout.

“Take the bastard! Kill him, and then come gut this one like a fish!”

The arm across his chest tightened, crushing the air from his lungs, and the sword pressed a little harder, smarting against his throat. The bastard wrenched him around. “You fancy your chances, westlander? Two on one, and we’re the good ones. You already put down the trash.”

The sabara was moving again, fending off a volley of hard cuts, too fast for Tai to even see them. Giero was out of options, and they both knew it. Hal could do nothing to help him without incurring the wrath of Alak Zhar, and as for Tai, the most be could do was arch his head away from the blade and close both hands on the forearm that bound him, trying to take as much of his weight as he could, lest he suffocate.

“Take him!” He rasped at Giero. “Cut him down, then take this one – doesn’t matter about me!” And in that insane moment, Tai believed every syllable.

Giero was so far out of options, he might have been stretched between four horses. He froze with a face like a granite mask. Tai realized he had never been caught in a situation he could not slither out of, and his heart pounded as he tried to read Giero’s face, and failed.

And then the assassin threw down the sabara, and stood with his hands held well out from his body, fingers spread to show themselves empty, head bowed in tacit surrender. Tai’s blood ran cold as ice water as he watched the fourth brigand come stalking in while Tai himself was hustled forward, carried bodily, until Giero could see him.

The green eyes angled up and fixed on the line of bright new blood running from the wound on Tai’s neck. Giero’s lips tightened as he saw, but he stood like a statue as his sabara was snatched up and thrown it well away, far out of his reach. With a string of blistering curses, the Zhar’s thug tore the knives, darts and needles out of the straps and bands on his forearms, thighs and calves and flung them after the sword.

Even then, Tai guessed that Giero was probably armed, but he offered no resistance when the cutthroat slammed a fist into his middle, and another into the side of his head. He went down, curling into a defensive ball before the first kick was aimed, and Tai watched with a groan as Giero rode it on his hip. His fingers dug into the sinews of the forearm that held him like a vice. His nails were wet with blood while Giero rode a second kick.

The third never landed, though it was aimed. An arrow, as long as a man’s arm and fletched with red feathers, lodged squarely between the brigand’s big shoulders. Before Tai had even properly registered the first,  a second arrow impacted not a hand’s span away, and both would have pierced to the heart. He did not see the arrow that killed the man who held him, but he felt the impact as surely as if the shaft had hit his own back. Shock and surprise jolted through the Zhar’s man, the forearm across Tai’s chest tightened painfully for a moment, crushing his lungs, and then released.

On raw instinct, Tai leapt away, hugging his chest and fingering his throat. He spun to watch as his captor toppled to his knees and clawed uselessly for the arrow that was lodged in the top of his back. He never got a hand to it before two more red-feathered shafts picked him up and tossed him into the dirt. It all happened so quickly, Tai stood looking on stupidly, too dazed to react.

In fact, Giero gathered his wits first. He was on his feet before Tai’s captor had slumped face-down, and Tai blinked as he watched Giero peer into the dazzle of the morning sun, in the direction from which the arrows had come. Still holding his throat, Tai turned to follow the line of his eyes.

The figure jogging toward them out of the east cast long shadows. He was fair haired, dressed in leathers and chain mail, and a red cape whipped in the morning wind. As he drew closer, Tai saw a strong-boned face, not handsome but immediately compelling, with wide eyes, prominent cheekbones and a high brow. He wore a green bandana to hold down hair that was as long as many a girl’s, and he was shaking his head ruefully over Giero as he jogged to a halt.

“You’re lucky,” he said wryly, in an accent very like Giero’s. “Last night, when the Zhar went to the courtesans’ yurt, I saw these scum hunker down in the hillock there, beyond the well. They had a good view of the whole caravanserai. I knew they were only waiting for the lad to return, and it was a safe guess that you’d run right into them sooner or later. If I’d quit the camp, or gone with a houri ten minutes earlier –”

“We’d both be dead or wishing we were,” Giero finished. He held out his right hand, and the fair man clasped it.

He was tall, Tai saw, a fraction over Giero’s height, and his hands were big, battered, scarred. The bow was a work of art, carved in three kinds of wood, one embedded in the other, so that the weapon was many times more powerful than a bow made of any single wood. The arts of bow making were well known in the east, and especially in the City of Archers.

Moving gingerly, Giero felt along his ribs and around his hips. He seemed to discover a number of bruises, but no serious damage, and he was smiling faintly as he said, “Tai Emreth, fire juggler from the city of Gupar in the Omirate of Perel al Essey … Antonos Bordiano, third son of Duke Leo.”

“Third son, and so far from inheriting any stick of the furniture, much less the bricks and mortar, that I’m quite at liberty to mess around out here, trying to get my stupid little sister out of a purgatory of her own making.” Antonos offered his hand to Tai. “I watched you last night. You were very good. In fact, you had the Zhar slavering, which is always amusing to see However … not the wisest thing to do.”

“So I was told.” Tai wiped his palm on his trousers, leaving a bloody smear there, before he took Antonos’s hand. “Forgive me, I seem to be bleeding. Giero told me, I’ve made a lot of trouble for a lot of people. I didn’t think … there was a gold coin in it for me, and I saw no further.”

Antonos only shrugged. “There’s always trouble. This is the Kesh, the hinterland – full of brigands, and half the time they’re at war with each other. In the months I’ve been here, we’ve fought the Red Wind, the Spawn of Shudra and the Mushti, one brigand clan trying to scythe through another, to win their territory. Murkul-zahd has almost fallen twice.” His face darkened and he looked gravely at Giero. “If we want to get Triana out of there,” he said grimly, “it has to be soon. Everything I’m hearing at the fortress tells me, Alak Zhar’s made so many enemies, Murkul-zahd is going to come under the hammers of an alliance of them. There’s chieftains out there who hate each other, but they’re stand together for just long enough to see Murkul-zahd overrun. And when it goes down, the city, the slaves, eunuchs, captives, concubines – all of them will be prizes of new masters.” He glanced sidelong at Tai. “And as for the lieutenants, like myself?”

“You’ll be cut down in the fighting,” Giero said acidly, “and if you have the temerity to survive, you can expect to be executed, or hunted for sport, in the early days after Murkul-zahd has turned into a great pile of spoils to be bickered over.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder, west, up the spice road, which arrowed away into the desert. “Get out while you can, Antonos.”

“I will.” Antonos dropped a hand on his shoulder. “Just as soon as I’ve seen you bring out Triana.”

“Speaking of whom,” Giero added, “I should have asked last night, but I was … preoccupied and in too much of a hurry. Being attached is very bad for my profession. It makes the memory threadbare as an old quilt.”

“I noticed.” Antonos was studying Tai, appraising him as if he were on an auction block in the marketplace. “Will you take a shrewd word of advice, Ruggiero?”

“I might,” Giero allowed, as if he knew exactly what Antonos was going to say.

“If you’re going to let attachments get in the way of your work, let this be the last assignment you take. Take the fortune my father is paying you for this, and get out of the business before I’m hanging roses on your grave marker.”

“The thought,” Giero said with rueful amusement as he fingered his ribs, “occurred to me.” He gave Tai a crooked grin, and one green eye winked. “Antonos, have you seen Triana lately?”

“A few weeks ago, standing on the balcony above the market square.” Antonos sighed. “She’s alive, at least.”

“You saw her clearly?”

“Clearly enough.” Antonos lifted one brow at him. “You’re asking if she’s healthy – healthy enough to get on a horse?”

“And not heavily pregnant, or recently delivered,” Giero added.

But Antonos’s fair head shook. “I’ve caught sight of her a dozen times in the last six months. She hasn’t been pregnant, and if she is at this moment, it’s too early to tell. She didn’t see me this time, but on other occasions she’s recognized me. Once, she was about to wave and I signaled, no, don’t. Don’t let them know she has a kinsman in the city. She was pale and thin, last time I set eyes on her, and she looks miserable as any cavern in the netherworld, but she’s in one piece.”

Giero was satisfied. “Then, she’ll be ready to run.”

“Eager,” Antonos corrected. “The question is, what’s to be done with these four dead bodies, and the two who’re still sleeping off the napras?”

“Let the living sleep it off and wake among the company’s courtesans,” Giero said slowly, “and as for the dead …” He turned aside and beckoned Hal Khouris, who had edged close enough to be listening to their conversation. Maritza was a cautious pace behind him, content to watch. “Hal?” Giero motioned them both closer.

The company’s master gestured at the big wagons, which were even then being loaded with the tents, all of which had been dropped and rolled. “Sling the bodies on the wagons,” Hal said darkly. “We’ll take them twenty miles into the west and bury them there. It’ll be a year before Alak Zhar stumbles over their bones, and I’ll strip them of anything that might ever tell who they were. Besides, from what you say, Murkul-zahd could have gone down to an alliance of its enemies before it happens.”

“Good enough.” Giero was massaging his belly and hip, which had taken the worst of the blows. “Maritza, will you see to Tai? He’s bleeding.”

She unwound a gaudy gypsana scarf from her girdle, and Tai held up his chin while she tied it about his gullet, snugly enough to staunch the blood, though it restricted his breathing a little. “Will you be leaving us this morning, then?” she asked.

“It seems I’ll be staying,” Tai said, rasping against the pressure of the scarf. “If Hal will have me.”

Hal gave him an odd, even affectionate look. “A fire juggler with an arse like a ripe peach is good for business. And it’s pleasant to have a freeman in the great yurt.” He clapped his hands, calling for the camel drivers. “Yaphet, Idris, load up this garbage. I want to be out of here in an hour – less!”

“And Alak Zhar?” Giero wondered.

Hal gestured north of the spice road. “He whored and drank and argued until the small hours of the morning. Alcibai was well up in the northwest, which made it three of the morning, when he hauled himself onto a horse, and all of his men who could stand went home with him.”

“All –? Then there are more still in camp?” Giero asked sharply.

But Maritza shook her head. “Only the two who came for Tai last night. The rest rode out with the Zhar, and the four who stayed behind were in the hillocks there, as Lord Antonos said, waiting their chance.” She gave the bodies a look of disdain as they were carried away. “Lord Antonos, do you wish to retrieve your arrows? Some might still be good.”

“I’ll do that.” Antonos regarded Giero critically. “You should rest for a day or two before you go into Murkul-zahd.”

“Three or four,” Giero corrected. “It’s a long time since I’ve taken a good kicking.”

“You’re hurt?” Antonos’s humor dwindled.

But Giero fended him off. “Bruised. And my pride is bruised worst of all! I’ve never before let myself be distracted by some attachment. It’s not a mistake I’ll make again, and I daresay I’ll mend.” He gave Antonos a solid push. “You’d best get back to the fortress, before you’re missed.”

“Oh, I’ll have been missed,” Antonos said bleakly. “I intend to tell them I was humping a houri or three, and I know nothing of the four scum who died here tonight … though I did see the pair of bastards who went after the lad. I watched them answer the siren-song of a threesome of courtesans, a girl, a boy and a lissome eunuch with eyes like a doe and astonishing legs. The all vanished into a tent, and that was the last I saw of them.” He snorted with acid humor. “If those two have any sense, they’ll get on their horses and ride east, and see if the Red Wind will have them, because if they return to Murkul-zahd, they’ll be feeding the kites and ants before nightfall.” He gave the caravanserai a glare. “I’ve been watching for long enough to know there’s no more of the Zhar’s men around, but I’ll go and make sure these four didn’t leave anything in the hillocks. Anything that would lead their cronies back to the company, and bring them after you.”

The bodies were already concealed on the big wagon that carried the tents and water barrels. Those barrels were full, and six camels already stood in the traces, heads low, drowsing as the sun climbed. Tai knew the routine all too well. The company would be gone in much less than an hour.

As Antonos headed away, he turned to Giero, wanting to hold him, and be held. He was sure the wound on his throat had stopped bleeding, but it was sharply sore. Maritza would salve it – like many gypsana, she knew the unguents and herbals which cured, as well as those that killed.

Giero peeled down the scarf and looked closely at it, but he seemed unconcerned. Tai could have told him, it was only skin deep, just a nuisance. He doubted it would scar, and if it did, he would wear the mark like a trophy.

“Now listen to me,” Giero was saying, when Tai just wanted to hold him, kiss him, because it would be a long time indeed until he watched the Shadow ride through the east gate by the Smith’s Way. “I said, listen to me,” Giero insisted, knowing Tai was not paying much attention to anything he said.

“I’m listening,” Tai said dutifully. “You’re going to tell me to be careful, and not to do stupid things between here and Pragend.”

“I’m going to tell you,” Giero corrected, “to lie low, and ask Maritza who’s in the great yurt before you strip to your skin and prance about in the lamplight! There’ll be a dozen more like Alak Zhar between here and Distambool, and if you don’t slap your hand on your heart and swear to me that you’ll be more careful, well, I’ll fret for you. I’ll be distracted. And you know what happens to somebody in my line of work when we get distracted.”

“You live on your wits, and you die on the lack of them,” Tai sighed. “All right, I promise. See? My hand’s on my heart.” He had put his left palm on his breast, and now he leaned back to show Giero.

The gesture did not seem to do much to impress Giero. He glanced aside at Hal and Maritza, who were watching, and he beckoned Hal with a nod. “A gold coin for you, in Pragend, Master Khouris, if you keep this little idiot out of harm’s way.”

Hal dropped a flourishing bow before him, such as he would have performed before a distinguished audience. “And when can we expect to see you in Pragend, Master Delamarino?”

“A month, perhaps two, after you get there yourself,” Giero guessed. “I’ll need a few weeks to be accepted in Murkul-zahd and then worm my way into the Zhar’s zanan house… then another couple of weeks to work out how to get Triana Bordiano out of there. An hour after that, I’ll be on the spice road right behind you, and riding as fast as the lady can handle – which won’t be so fast, if I know the ladies of Duke Leo’s court. They prefer to sit in a carriage, because it’s more dignified than bouncing up and down on a saddle. They don’t have much familiarity with horses at the best of times … and this one’s been a prisoner of the Zhar for a long time, which means she’ll have done a lot of riding, but not of horses, if you take my meaning.”

“Then, we’ll see you in Pragend, before the monsoon.” Hal said thoughtfully. He dropped an arm around Maritza. “We’ll be wintering over there before we start back on the road east, as we always do.” He hesitated, frowned. “Would you consider a proposition from me?”

“It depends.” Giero was investigating his hip, prodding it and wincing. Tai guessed it would soon be every shade, from purple to green. “What kind of proposition?”

“This road.” Hal gave the spice road a hard look. “It’s not the safest of places to be, but it’s where I do business. It’s occurring to me that I need guards. Which means recruiting them, training, controlling them, commanding them. These are not things I can do myself. I work with dancers, jugglers, acrobats, not fighting men.”

“And you’re wondering if I’d join your company as the captain of your guards.” Giero chuckled. “I might, for the fun of it. But I’ve a proposition for you, Master Khouris, one that would put gold in your purse instead of taking it out.”

The offer obviously intrigued Hal. His brow creased and he leaned closer. “I’m listening.”

“After the winter,” Giero suggested, “don’t take the company east again. Bring them west to the cities on the Tamar Sea. Show them the jugglers and acrobats, wrestlers and roughriders, conjurers and fakirs. We’ve all heard of the thrills of the wyld, but my people rarely make their way east of Distambool and Pragend. The Tamar cities are old, sodded and lazy, but they’re stinking rich. Interested?”

“Of course I’m interested,” Hal mused, “but we’re a ragtag company, we’ve none of the glamour, the silks and satins and baubles. We do well enough on the road, but your dukes and princes will be looking for more polish and glitter than we possess.”

But Giero shook his head and chuckled. “Come to the Tamar with all your polished steel and tanned leather,” he advised. “Bring the wyld to the city, offer them a taste of the wicked east as they’ve heard of it but never seen it. Give them chainmail and tattoos, naked, oiled dancers and wrestlers, snake charmers and … fire jugglers.” He looked down into Tai’s face. “Dukes and princes will pay handsomely for a thrill that doesn’t involve them being in any personal danger.”

“Ah.” Hal rubbed his palms together. “This is something to think on, Master Delamarino!” He offered his hand, and Giero clasped it. “I’ll keep the lad safe, and I’ll see you in Pragend.”

“You will. And thank you.” Giero gave Hal a smile, and steered Tai away into the scant privacy of the space between two laden wagons.

Nowhere was really private, and if Tai had hoped for a chance to be intimate, he was going to be disappointed. Giero was limping a little on the hip that had taken the kicks, his belly was clearly sore, and a bruise had begun to darken on his cheekbone, where the Zhar’s man had slammed a fist into the side of his head. He was likely in no condition to be intimate, even if he was in the mood. Tai breathed a sigh, and when the man’s arms enfolded him, he took the embrace gladly.

The kiss was as deep and searching as any they had shared last night. Giero’s tongue was restless in his mouth, his hands clenched into Tai’s hair, and when they separated to breathe, he set his lips against Tai’s ear and said, “Damnit, lad, there’s no more time.”

The camp was wrenching apart even as he spoke. The first wagons were heading out already – the cooks’ vehicle and the two coaches accommodating the houris, led by the scouts who went ahead to arrange for the space for a company the size of Hal’s to camp. The riggers had folded in and tied down the great yurt, on its vast, ponderous wagon. A team of twelve big camels was already in harness.

It never took long to break camp, even when the company was inclined to dawdle. This morning, even the lowliest slave was motivated to get up and run. The cooks and scouts were always the first ones to be away, but Tai had never seen the courtesans up and busy so early. He gave a thought to Armand, wondered if she were standing up this morning, or sitting in a warm bath, being rubbed down with fragrant oils, and cradling a cup of Maritza’s powerful bitter herbs.

“There’s no more time,” he groaned, and wound his arms around Giero’s neck to hold him a moment longer. “You keep safe! I don’t care about this – this Triana Bordiano, who was stupid enough to go riding in the hills with a bunch of other witless girls from her poetry class!”

“Maybe you don’t, but her family cares a great deal about her,” Giero reasoned, “and they’re paying me well to do what I do.”

“Yes, but …” Tai was so frustrated, words failed him. He hunted for Giero’s mouth and kissed him again instead. “You’re sure about this? About going into Murkul-zahd?”

“If I weren’t, I wouldn’t go,” Giero told him. “I don’t have any kind of deathwish! It’s a job, Tai. I’m a Shadow, just as you found yourself juggling fire and strutting in front of an audience, near naked! We do what we do. And some of us,” he added, “get very well paid.”

“So do I,” Tai muttered darkly. He gave Giero a hug that must have punished his bruised bones. His hands were everywhere for a long, elongated moment, and then he gave the bigger man a solid shove, resolutely pushing him away. “I have to go.”

“I know.” Giero wore an amused, resigned face, and cocked his ear to Antonos’s voice, which was calling his name. “All you have to do is show some patience. Wait for me.”

“You know I will.” Tai felt his eyes beginning to prickle as he stepped away, back into the morning sun.

“Keep faith with me,” Giero said gruffly.

“You doubt me already?” Tai lifted his chin. “Faithless one! You want me to swear that there’ll be no other lovers, nobody warming my sheets, till you can warm them yourself?”

“If I asked you to say that, you would?” Giero favored him with the familiar crooked smile which almost mocked, but not quite.

Tai groaned. “Of course I would! I’d swear it, and mean it, and keep the oath. In fact – consider it sworn!” He plucked at the wrap on his neck and fidgeted. “Antonos wants you. Not as much as I want you, but … you’d better see to business while you have the time.”

“All right.” Giero held out his hand. “Then, this is goodbye, Tai Emreth. Until Pragend.” He caught Tai’s fingers, kissed them fleetingly and let them go.

Then he turned toward Antonos Bordiano, and Tai watched him stride away, limping just a little. He fell into step with his countryman, and they talked for several minutes while Antonos pointed here and there, and passed Giero a handful of oddments. A belt, a purse, a cape – items that would have put a hunting party on the spice road right behind the company, if they had been found in the hillocks.

Now there was nothing to connect the vanished men to Hal Khouris’s people, and the two fools who would soon be waking up with the courtesans would remember nothing, while they nursed a pair of sore, aching heads. Those who knew said there was nothing quite so agonizing as a napras hangover. Tai was inclined to believe them.

The long whips cracked alongside the camels, the drivers shouted at them, and the wagon carrying the great yurt creaked and groaned as it began to move. The sun was climbing, hot on Tai’s back as he watched the camels haul the load westward. The tents were all down now. Maritza had rolled everything she and Hal possessed into four big leather packs, long familiar to Tai, and it was the job of the Alqadih brothers, the acrobats, to load the tight-thronged bundles with their own belongings and those of Armand and Mikhail.

Giero and Antonos were standing near the wide, blackened firepits, which had been allowed to burn out and were now cold, abandoned, waiting for the next camel train or trading caravan to come up the spice road. It would be along in the afternoon, Tai knew, headed east or west with goods and chattels, travelers or entertainers, or, like Hal Khouris’s company, a mix of all of these.

As he watched, Giero grasped Antonos’s shoulder. They clasped wrists for a moment and parted, and Giero whistled for his horse. The big, black animal had been eating at the communal troughs and trotted toward him now, still chewing. Giero swung up into the saddle – a little more stiff and slow than Tai remembered. He was definitely feeling those blows, and he would stay close to camp, sleep, stretch, massage the bruises.

And then he would follow Antonos to Murkul-zahd, and earn the fat fee Duke Leo Bordiano was paying him. For the second time in ten minutes, Tai breathed a long sigh, and watched as Giero and Antonos left the caravanserai. Antonos walked into the wide brown hinterland, northeast of the road – the wyld itself – where he would have tethered his horse. Giero turned his own horse in the opposite direction, and Tai watched him until he was out of sight.

For several moments he longed for the rude comfort of the tent, the rugs and cushions, and Ruggiero Delamarino’s body, hard and hot against him in the night. And then he thought forward, to the day when he would watch that tall black horse come in through the golden marble gates to the east of Pragend. From what his brother had written, you could see the gates from the doorway to the forge on Smith’s Way. Then it would be a room at the best inn, and a reunion to be remembered lifelong.

Would Hal take the company west to the Tamar – show off their steel and leather, rather than trying to cover the roughness of the wyldsman with silk and velvet? Giero could be right. Offering a taste of the barbarian excitements of the spice road could be worth a small fortune in the wicked old cities that had long ago grown soft-bellied and indolent.

People there might pay well to watch a fire juggler barely clad in body paint, feathers and scraps of chainmail. The possibilities were inspiring, and Tai dwelt on them until Maritza’s voice spoke, close behind him. He turned toward her, and she repeated,

“I said, come with me and let me see to your wound before you get something in it, and it festers,” she repeated. “I’ve put your rucksack in the coach.”

Without waiting for him, she strode away to the tail of the old black vehicle. Hal was up on his red chestnut mare, just waiting for the last of the company’s stragglers to come to order, and Tai realized, he almost was the last. Maritza’s eyes sparkled with amusement as he stepped up into the coach behind her, and let her take the scarf from his neck.

“Trust him,” she said simply. “I see things. You know how I am.” She touched her forehead. “I know things.”

“About Giero?” He lifted his chin so she could wash the wound with a smarting spirit from a little silver flask. “What do you know?”

“That he’s the best,” she told him without hesitation. “And more than this … he’s lucky. He’s always been lucky, one way and another.”

Tai could have argued that – what manner of luck was it, to have one’s father killed in a senseless duel, one’s mother vanish into a nunnery, and be passed from hand to hand like a pair of hand-me-down boots? But Giero would have agreed with Maritza. If he had been coddled and fostered, his life would have been very different. He would never have been recruited by the Shadow … never have met a young man from Gupar, who juggled fire and got himself into more trouble than he could rightly get himself out of. Luck was all a matter of perspective.

“You’ll see him again,” Maritza assured him. “When the wind blows hard and cold out of the north, and you can feel the thin edge of winter on it. He’ll be there.”

“You know this?” Tai insisted.

Her eyes glittered, but she was not mocking as she slathered his neck in a thick, sticky unguent. “I do.”

“Then, I’ll wait,” he said, settling down in the deep sheepskins of the seat opposite, while she put the big cork stopper back into the jar and thrust the medicines back into her carpetbag.

The driver shouted at the camels; the long whips cracked, and Hal brought his horse up alongside the carriage’s windows. He looked in and gave Tai a faint smile, curious, thoughtful. He gave Maritza his hand for a moment and then was gone, heading up the length of the column to talk to the drivers of the great yurt. It creaked and groaned like a ship in a storm as the wagon rolled through the rucks and potholes of the spice road. Tai leaned out of the window on both elbows, daydreaming as the wyld went by, and thought of Pragend, and fall, when the wind began to smell of winter and he would spend his days watching for travelers at the east gate.

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http://www.dream-craft.com/melkeegan/lords-of-harbendane.html

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http://www.dream-craft.com/claudiadante/riding-shotgun.html

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DreamCraft Edition: 2011

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Format: PDF epub, Kindle

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http://www.dream-craft.com/jaynedemarco/coming-out-in-coopers-crossing.html

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DreamCraft Edition: 2011

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Format: PDF, epub, Kindle

Price: $5.99
http://www.dream-craft.com/lindahines/mock-suns.html