Today
Amanda McCrina and Month9Books are revealing the cover and first chapter for BLOOD
ROAD which releases April 25, 2017! Check out the gorgeous cover and enter to
be one of the first readers to receive a eGalley!!
A
quick note from the author:
The
funny thing about historical fiction—or historical fantasy, in this case—is
that it often reveals more about the present than it does about the past. It
provides a lens through which we can understand and contextualize our own
experiences. BLOOD ROAD is a tribute to my love of Roman history, but it’s also
very much a product of its time. It’s a story about corruption and injustice
and empire and a young soldier who stands up and resists, and writing it gave
me the opportunity to ask hard questions about my own present and the part I
play.
BLOOD ROAD
Author: Amanda McCrina
Pub. Date: April 25, 2017
Publisher: Month9Books
Format: Paperback, eBook
Pages: 329
Find it:
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| Amazon | B&N
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Depository
Nineteen-year-old
Torien Risto has seen dissidents dealt with before. He knows the young local
girl who just knifed him will hang for assaulting an Imperial officer, unless he
can stop it.
Someone
inside the provincial government is kidnapping Imperial citizens and selling
them across the desert to the salt mines, silencing anyone who tries to
intervene. The girl’s brother is one of those who has been taken. Rejected by
the corrupt courts, she’s waging a personal war against the Empire.
Determined
to save her life, Torien sets out in search of answers on the Salt Road, the
ancient trade route running deep into the heart of a desert—territory claimed
by the hostile Mayaso tribe.
Now,
Torien is no longer sure where his own loyalty lies, or how far he will go to
break the cycle of tyranny, political bullying, and social injustice in an
empire that seals its borders in blood.
Excerpt
CHAPTER ONE
He
could see the sky in pieces between the tenements, bruised purple now with
dusk.
At
first he was glad for the darkness, because it meant they would be firing the
beacon in the lighthouse at the point. He leaned on his saddle-horns, craning
his neck to look down the narrow cross streets, trying to catch a glimpse of
the great light burning in the distance. By means of the lighthouse he could
reorient himself. But the cross streets twisted away into deep shadow between
the tenement blocks, and there was the irksome thought at the back of his mind
that if they had wandered so far into the city as not see the lighthouse, then
they had wandered so far as to be where Imperial control was more a matter of
theory than practice—at least at night.
Earlier,
when the young summer sun was glaring white in a blue- glaze sky and the air
under the awnings still and close and hot enough one could feel one’s skin
baking in it—the tenements shut out the harbor breeze—the streets had seethed
with people: sellers of figs and dates and pomegranates and honeyed almonds and
goats’ milk and flavored ices and sour wine; and potters and silversmiths and
leatherworkers and basket-weavers at their shopfronts; and housewives browsing
the market stalls; and slave girls with water in sloshing panniers over their
shoulders; and naked children playing sticks-andhoops along the foot-stones;
and now and then a mounted official in white linen, shouting and swearing until
the crowd shuffled aside to let him pass. Now in darkness they were alone in
the street. It was as though the rest of the city had died with the sun. The
air was dry and rapidly cooling, heavy with silence like a bated breath. He
would not mind the darkness if not for the silence. In a city such silence was
unnatural.
“Do
you suppose they’ll look for us?” Alluin said. “Or just wait until our bodies
turn up in an alley in a week or so?”
“I
imagine they’ll expend the effort for me, if they wouldn’t otherwise trouble
about you.”
“So
there is some benefit to your acquaintance, after all.”
“If
not for my acquaintance, you’d be just finishing the first course at the
officers’ dinner.”
It
had been his idea to explore the city. Alluin was city-born and indifferent—all
cities were the same when you got down to it; there came a point when unwashed
bodies and stray dogs and bad wine in dirty shops ceased to be as interesting
as bed. But he, Torien, still had 3 Blood Road a provincial awe of big
cities—an itching, impatient need to see and hear and know. He had been
determined not to idle away his time in Modigne behind the fort walls. True
that he and Alluin had no more than a smattering of bastardized Modigno between
them, and that Modigne was a rabbit’s warren of nameless, ancient streets,
built and overbuilt in incongruous layers—in daylight that had seemed far less
important than it did now. In daylight it had been enough to know he was an
officer of the Imperial army, and a Vareno nobleman, with sufficient coin on
his person for any foreseeable difficulty and a sword at his hip in the event
his coin should fail. It was remarkable how in darkness one saw things more
clearly.
Certain
things, anyway—other things than the way back to the fort or the direction of
the harbor light.
The
street, so narrow now that Alluin had to rein in his horse and fall in behind,
plunged into a honeycomb of tight-packed adobe huts, each no wider than the
span of Torien’s arms, joined to its neighbors by rickety wooden ladders
running an uneven line from flat rooftop to flat rooftop. He took the downward
slant for a good sign: he knew, from studying the maps on the wall of the
headquarters at the fort, that Modigne, built as it was along a volcanic
crater, went down to the ocean like the insides of a bowl, and so for the
street to be sloping downward meant it must be working its way however haphazardly
to the harbor.
He
leaned on the saddle-horns, lifting himself a little to see if he could pick
out the lighthouse below.
There
was a rustle on the rooftop above. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a
darker shadow take shape against the darkness. He recognized the glint of metal
in time to jerk around in his saddle, hauling on the reins as he turned. He
took the blade in the back of his left shoulder rather than in his throat.
He
had braced for it and did not slip from the saddle, though for a moment he
thought he might: his knees, pressed against the horse’s ribs, went as weak as
water. He lost the reins from his left hand. Above him, he heard very clearly
the patter of footsteps as the knifeman fled across the rooftop for the nearest
ladder. Just as clearly, he heard the thin cry and the muffled thump as the
knifeman lost his footing on the ladder and fell back to the roof.
Silence
followed.
Torien
brushed away Alluin’s hand and propped his right shoulder against the wall. He
nodded to the hut. “Bring him,” he said—calmly, though his heart was pounding.
“That fall won’t have killed him.”
He
saw Alluin’s face as a pale blur in the darkness. “Tor—”
“It’s
nothing. It’ll wait. Our friend won’t.”
In
truth, his knees were still trembling, and he was speaking through clenched
teeth because he knew if he unclenched them they would chatter. There was blood
seeping through his tunic and jerkin, and he was conscious, as he hadn’t been
at first, of the knife blade sunk to its hilt just beyond the cuff of his
shoulder. His body was revolting against the thought, sickness threatening in
the pit of his stomach.
Lamplight
blossomed inside the hut. Low voices filtered out through the reed curtain in
the doorway. Torien dipped his chin again, with effort. Alluin swore and swung
from his saddle and drew his sword. He pushed into the hut through the curtain,
and Torien heard him issuing orders in a clumsy hybrid of Modigno and
Vareno—heard the crash of pottery breaking, the scrape of wood dragging across
stone, a child’s whimper. A moment later, Alluin’s head and shoulders and sword
hand emerged above him from inside the hut. Alluin pushed himself up on his
hands from the opening, landing lightly on his feet on the roof. Picking up his
sword, he vanished beyond the roof edge.
Torien
leaned carefully back against the wall. He glanced down the street. There were
no other doorways lit, no other sound than the clatter of Alluin’s hobnailed
boots on the rooftop above. In Choiro, there would have been a crowd by now. Modigne
lay as still and silent as a plague city.
Alluin
reappeared at the roof edge. He had sheathed his sword. He was handling the
knifeman along by the shoulders—no, not a man, Torien thought, certainly a boy:
he came barely to Alluin’s chest. His arms and legs, silhouetted black against
the sky, were thin, stick-like things around which his tunic fluttered
shapelessly.
Torien
pushed up from the wall and gathered himself together and dismounted. The
ground was springy under his feet. He wavered for a moment as his heels
touched, swallowing back the sickness. There was a ringing in his ears. He
blinked in the sudden brightness of lamplight as Alluin flung aside the curtain
in the doorway and shoved the boy before him out into the street. Behind him
the hut’s occupants—a man and a woman and an assortment of half-dressed
children—gathered silently in the doorway to watch.
The
boy had stumbled and fallen in a heap of skinny limbs and wool rags. He caught
himself on his palms. He adjusted the cap on his head and sat back awkwardly,
keeping his knobby legs to the side. In the dim light, Torien could see enough
to know the left ankle was broken. There was blood dribbling from the boy’s
nose, and he was sucking breath low and softly through his teeth. His eyes darted
over Torien’s face, lingering for a moment at Torien’s shoulder. He looked
quickly to the ground. He was, Torien judged, eleven or perhaps twelve—not yet
old enough to face execution for an assault upon an Imperial soldier. He would
go to a slaver’s block instead. There would be an examination to determine the
guilt of his family.
He
caught Alluin’s eye and jerked his chin to the sullen family in the doorway.
“Wine if they have it. Water otherwise—and something passable for bandage
cloth.” The pain had started, and he was leaning into his horse’s shoulder for
balance.
The
woman in the doorway said something in Modigno. He recognized the word for
wine. He said, “What did she say?” Alluin’s Modigno was bad, but better than
his own.
“They
have wine, but it’s for a wedding,” Alluin said, “for her sister’s wedding—I
think.”
He
was irritated and impatient now. “Water, then. Tell them I’d have paid for
wine.”
Alluin
stood at his shoulder and unbuckled his cuirass while the woman went into the
hut. “Do you want to do this inside?” he said. His voice was quiet.
“Not
until I know he acted alone.” Torien nodded to the boy, who had sat motionless
all this while, studying the ground as though he were reading something written
there. “You. You speak Vareno?”
The
boy looked up incuriously into Torien’s face. He had determined not to speak:
Torien could see as much from the set of his mouth, the hollowness of his eyes.
His thin brown hands were clenched to fists on his lap.
From
the doorway, the man spoke up in rapid Modigno.
“He’s
reconsidered about the wine?” Torien said. The shoulder was hurting fiercely.
“He
says he knows her family,” Alluin said.
“Whose
family?” There was a moment’s silence in which he suddenly understood.
“A
girl,” he said, stupidly. “He says he knows her family and will tell us where
she lives,” Alluin said.
“Also,
he would appreciate very much his lord’s kindness if his lord would consider a
pittance in return for the service.”
The
girl flung up her head suddenly to spit at the man’s feet. The man seemed
embarrassed. He hunched his shoulders and looked at his hands. The woman came
out from the hut with a water jug and a cloth. She held them out to Alluin at
arm’s length, making a quick, nervous gesture with her hands. Alluin shook his
head. “Hold them. Quedas—hold them, you understand?”
“Give
them to me,” Torien said.
“Don’t
give them to him,” Alluin said. “He’ll drop them when I do this.”
He
jerked the knife from Torien’s shoulder. Torien folded to his knees. The street
swam around him. He heard Alluin’s voice as though it were carrying to him
underwater. He shook his head. Alluin was prying the cuirass from his shoulder
and tugging the jerkin down his arm. The night air through his blood-soaked
tunic was sharp and cold; he shivered. The girl’s eyes were on him. She was
watching with the same flat-eyed incuriosity. There was blood trickling over
her lips from her nose, but she made no move to wipe it away.
“Her
ankle,” Torien said. For some reason, her silence shamed him.
Far
above him Alluin said, patiently, “What?”
“Tie
up her ankle. And tell the Modigno he can show us where she lives, because I
don’t trust the word of a coward.”
****
The
Modigno walked ahead, self-consciously, shoulders still hunched in
embarrassment. Alluin followed on foot, leading his horse by the reins. The
girl huddled in his saddle with her hands outstretched to the horns, her face
buried in the horse’s mane, her bare legs dangling limp against the horse’s
belly. Torien rode at the rear. The street, which turned this way and that
through the honeycombed huts, ran steadily downhill all the while, and he knew
they must be close to the water because there was a stiff salt breeze rising to
his face. It cut through his soaked tunic like a knife. His fingers were numb
on the reins. He had knotted them in the horse’s mane to keep himself upright
in the saddle.
He
could have ordered the Modigno to show them instead to the harbor light, of
course, or to the fort itself, and they could have delivered the girl into the
prison on the hill, and very soon now he might have been enjoying the comfort
of his own quarters and a skin of wine to ease the pain in his shoulder—but it
might easily be a month before the girl’s case went to the governor, and he was
due to report at Tasso in a week, and he had too many questions of his own to
let it go like that.
Only
after they had gone on for near half an hour, the adobe huts having given way
to ramshackle wooden shanties and the street sunk in soft, rank mud, the air
heavy with the smell of brine and rotten fish, did it occur to him that most
likely the Modigno had no idea about the girl’s family and no idea where she
lived—had grasped for the chance to make a quick coin and come away with more
than he had bargained for, and was looking for the opportunity to dart down an
alley and vanish into the night.
He
had opened his mouth to say this to Alluin when the Modigno swung about
suddenly and said something in his own tongue, gesturing with his hands. The
shanty at his back was threesided, sheltered from the street by a tattered
sailcloth curtain, unlit.
“He
says it’s here,” Alluin said.
The
girl shifted in Alluin’s saddle. A shudder ran through her shoulders, but she
did not raise her head.
“Tell
him to lift the curtain,” Torien said. He was cold and aching and the Modigno
was a fool, but that was no reason to abandon caution.
The
Modigno lifted the curtain. The shanty was empty. There was a fire pit dug in
the bare-dirt floor, but the coals were dead.
The
Modigno spoke very quickly in his own tongue, his eyes going from Alluin to
Torien and back again.
“He
seems to think we think he’s lied,” Alluin said. “He wants us to ask the girl.”
“Tell
him the girl’s our concern.” Torien dismounted, cradling his left arm against
his stomach. He was too tired for anger. Anyway, it was pointless to threaten
reprisals: they would not find him again if they tried. He fumbled at his belt
and withdrew a bronze from his wallet. He flicked the coin in the Modigno’s direction.
“Bayas—go.”
The
Modigno dropped to his heels to dig out the coin from the mud. He made a
mockery of a bow as he straightened: it had occurred to him that they had been
essentially at his mercy. His shoulders were straight as he walked away back up
the street.
Alluin
pulled the girl down from his saddle by the waist and held her before him, as
easily as though she were made of straw. “I’ll have a look around. The harbor
can’t be far.”
“No.
We can spend the night here.”
“That
shoulder needs more than water, Tor, and sooner is better. Though I appreciate
your faith in my medical ability.”
“I
don’t like the idea of splitting up. It won’t do my shoulder any good if you
end up in the harbor with your throat cut. And I couldn’t drag myself back into
a saddle right now if I wanted to.”
Alluin
was silent, studying him. He had the girl’s shoulder in one hand, his reins in
the other. He let go the girl’s shoulder, reluctantly. “Adienta—inside,” he
said. And to Torien: “I’ll see to the horses.”
Weak
moonlight filtered through the roof of the shanty, which was nothing more than
a reed lattice tied down with leather strips. The girl sat down against the
left-hand wall, stretching her bad leg straight before her. She watched
silently and unmoving while Torien crouched on his heels at the fire pit and
searched one-handed through the ashes for salvageable tinder. By the time he
had built up a decent pile, and had found flint and iron to strike a light,
Alluin had ducked in from the street with a saddle on each arm.
“I’d
have done it if you’d waited,” he said. He deposited Torien’s saddle against
the right-hand wall and sat down with his own against the rear wall.
Torien
unbuckled his helmet and leaned his head back against the wall. He sat with the
helmet on his lap, his eyes closed. Beyond the crackling of the fire and the
rattling of the lattice in the salt breeze, the silence stretched vast and
hostile. “If you speak,” he said, “it goes better for you.” He opened his eyes
and looked at the girl across the fire pit. In the firelight, he could see the
details of her bony bronze face. She was older than he had thought at
first—older than he’d thought when he’d thought her a boy. It was possible she
was fifteen. The smallness of her limbs and the sunkenness of her cheeks made
it hard to tell. She was looking into the flame in silence, her eyes
halfclosed, her face magnificently blank, but he knew she had heard and had
taken his general meaning by the way her shoulders tightened against the wall.
“Tell me if there were others,” he said. “Tell me how many.”
When
she said nothing, he said to Alluin, “In Modigno. Tell her if she doesn’t
answer to us now, she’ll answer to the governor in court—she and her family.”
The
girl jerked her chin, suddenly. “No others,” she said. “I understand what you
say.” Her eyes came up to his. Her voice was low but hard. “I do it alone. No
family. The cobarte he lies when he brings you. No family. He says it because
he wants your coin.”
“Why did you do it?”
She
turned her face back to the fire.
“Answer
me,” Torien said.
“I go
to the slavers anyway,” she said. “It doesn’t matter if I answer you.”
“Possibly
you’ll go to the slavers. Possibly they’ll decide you’re old enough to face
execution. My word means a great deal, either way.”
“I do
not care,” she said.
“My
word can spare you an examination.”
“I do
not care.”
He
glanced over to Alluin, who shrugged very slightly against the wall. Torien
could sense his discomfort in his silence. He looked back at the girl. “Speak
now and I’ll listen,” he said. “Come tomorrow in the city prison, it’ll be too
late.”
She
said nothing. He saw there was no use in it. He said to Alluin, “We’d better
set a watch.”
“I’ll
watch,” Alluin said. He seemed thankful for something to do.
“I’ll
take it over in a few hours,” Torien said. “Wake me if you need to.”
He
did not sleep. He lay against his saddle, carefully still on account of the
shoulder, watching the sky through the cracks in the lattice and waiting for
sleep to come, but his mind was moving on and on through the streets of
Modigne, and in the silence he was restless. At length, he got up. The fire had
died to embers. Across the room, the girl was huddled shapeless in the
darkness. He could not tell if she was asleep. He went over to the doorway,
where Alluin sat cross-legged against the corner post. “You sleep,” he said. “I
can’t.”
“Your
shoulder?” Alluin’s voice was tight. “You should have let me go for help, Tor.”
“It’s
fine. It’s just that I can’t sleep and you might as well.”
“Next
time you’ll listen to me. Next time when I say I can see enough of Modigne from
the fort walls, and you say—”
“You
talk like you’re the one who took the knife.”
“That’s
the difference between us,” Alluin said. “I don’t have to take a knife in my
back before I recognize a bad idea.”
Torien
sat with his back against the post, his sword unsheathed across his lap.
Through the gap between the post and the curtain, he could see the horses and
the moonlit street beyond. He watched a cat come noiselessly down the street.
It saw him as it approached the shanty, and it paused and watched him and went
on again when it decided he was no threat. Behind him, in the shanty, Alluin
was breathing long and steadily in his sleep. It was perhaps midnight or a
little past. He heard a noise like a muffled laugh or a cough, and he started,
fingers seizing instinctively on his sword grip. At his movement, the noise
stopped. Across the room, the girl was struggling to hold herself still against
the wall. Her shoulders shook with trapped sobs.
He
pulled himself up to his feet, supporting himself on the sword. He crossed the
room to her. She heard him approaching and drew herself stiffly up, but she did
not raise her head. He knelt beside her. In the moonlight through the lattice,
he could see the tear streaks on her cheeks. Leaning on the sword, he said,
quietly, “Tell me why you did it.”
Another
tremor ran through her shoulders. She bit her lip. Alluin’s untroubled
breathing was loud in the silence.
“Give
me the truth and I may be able to help you.”
She
shook her head, once, sharply, her eyes squeezed shut. “You lie. I know you
lie.”
“I
don’t lie.”
“All
Vareni lie. I know this.”
“Maybe.
But I’m Cesino blood through my father’s line.”
“Then
to your people you are a traitor.”
She
said it flatly, without interest, as though it were as obvious as the weather,
and he understood the absurdity of trying to explain to her, in that moment,
how one could feel loyalty to homeland and to empire without hypocrisy. He
said, instead, “I’m trying to help you.”
“Why
do you want to help me?”
“I
care to see proper justice done.”
“I
know your justice.” She lifted her face to his, finally. Her voice was thick
with anger and tears. “I know what you mean when you say justice. You take
Mahlan when he does nothing wrong. I know what you mean by justice.”
The
curtain rustled in a draft of cold salt breeze. Torien was on his feet and
spinning to the doorway in one motion, his sword ready in his hand. Behind him,
Alluin sat bolt upright, flinging aside his cloak. He drew his sword and
scrambled up, his back to the wall. The figure in the doorway stood frozen at
Torien’s sword point. For a moment, there was silence in the shanty. Then
Torien jerked his chin over his shoulder and said, “Sit—slowly. Linta.”
He
kept his blade leveled at the newcomer’s throat while the newcomer slid down
beside the girl. He said to Alluin, “Light.”
Alluin
dropped to his knees at the fire pit. There was another stretch of silence while
he coaxed a flame from the spent tinder. In the moonlight, Torien could see the
newcomer’s arms tight around the girl’s shoulders, head bowed against the
girl’s head. He lowered his sword. After a moment’s consideration, he sheathed
it. He turned on his heel and went to the curtain and looked out into the
street. It lay empty and silent as before. The horses stood tethered at the
post. He drew the curtain shut. There was a tightness in him that had nothing
to do with the wound.
Feeble
light sprang over the shanty walls.
“It
won’t last long,” Alluin said.
“Use
this.” With one booted foot, Torien prodded the bundle of sticks that the
newcomer had let drop in the doorway. The girl watched him over the newcomer’s
shoulder. Her face was set as hard as stone, but he saw the flicker of fear in
her eyes. He crouched on his heels, facing her, the fire pit at his back. “No
family? So it’s not only Vareni who lie.”
The
girl said nothing. The newcomer straightened slowly against the wall and looked
at him. He saw the girl’s face in near-exact duplicate, but duplicated as it
would be in twenty years’ time: bronze skin prematurely lined, lips cracked by
the sun, dark eyes sunken with hunger and hardship and grief. There was neither
fear nor defiance in the woman’s face, but rather a resignation which shook
him. “I give you what you want. Do not ask it of the girl.”
“You
can give me satisfactory answers. Otherwise the girl goes before an Imperial
court for sedition and attempted murder.”
The
woman looked at the girl, the girl at the floor. Neither spoke, but in the
firelight Torien watched the color drain from the woman’s face.
“Dependent
upon her age, the penalty is enslavement or death, so I advise you to consider
your answers carefully. Who is Mahlan?”
The
woman was silent. The girl raised her eyes briefly from the floor.
“Silence
does your daughter no good,” Torien said.
“My
son. He is my son—Mahlan.” Her mouth contorted as though the name pained her.
“Where
is he?”
“They
take him,” the woman said. She swallowed. “This spring when the harbor open
they come and take him.”
“Who?”
She
said nothing. Her fingers were tight around the girl’s arms. They were bony
fingers, bent and blunted from work, the knuckles swollen, the nails split. The
backs of her brown hands were traced over with lines like dry leather.
“Vareni?”
Torien said. “Answer me.”
The
woman closed her eyes. “Of the jente.”
He
did not know the word. He darted a glance to Alluin, who was sitting and
watching from the other side of the fire pit. “One of the crime lords,” Alluin
said, quietly.
Torien
said to the woman, “This jente took your son?”
“When
the harbor open, they take him.”
He
supposed in her mind and in the girl’s the Imperial governing authorities were
partially culpable in that they had not stopped it; and he supposed he had made
more accessible a target than the jente for the girl’s retribution. It was a
stupid reason to be knifed in the street, and a stupider reason to be executed.
He was irritated. “You should have gone to the governor. He might have
explained to you the difference between justice and vengeance before the girl
need hang for it.”
“I go
to your courts.” The woman flung up her head. “I am a citizen. My daughter she
is a citizen. My son he is a citizen. I go to your courts for justice. They say
to me I have no case, and they tell me if I am not silent then they will
silence me. Always it is the same. Always you pretend you do not see, because
the jente he pays you not to see. I know what is justice and what is not
justice. What you hang my daughter for it is not justice, and you know this
too.”
“How
many others besides your son?” There was a moment’s silence. He could sense
Alluin frozen behind him across the fire pit. He said, “You say always like
it’s common practice. How many others?”
The
woman drew up a little. Her eyes were flat, her mouth tight. She thought he was
mocking her. “There are hundreds the jente take. You know—”
“I
know nothing. I’ve been two days in Modigne, and despite the fact I just took a
knife in my shoulder, I hope to be shipboard and gone tomorrow.” He kneaded his
temples with his fingertips. “So the jente takes them—why? As slaves?”
“He
sells them into the salt mines in Tasso. I hear it from the sailors.”
“And
you say the governor knows and does nothing.”
Anger
flashed across the sun-cracked face. “I say because I know. We tell him what
happens. We tell him the jente he takes us to be slaves in the mines. We ask
his protection. ‘We are citizens,’ we say. ‘Help us against the jente.’ But the
ones who speak out he gives their name to the jente, and the jente he kills
them or he takes them to the ships. I have seen this. The jente he kills us in
the street, and your governor and your courts and your garrison they do
nothing.”
“Every
ship coming into or going out from an Imperial port is inspected—slave ships
more closely than the rest. Every manifest is reviewed, every cargo taxed. So
many kidnapped citizens would hardly escape notice. It would take more than the
governor turning a blind eye. At the least, it would mean the city guard, and
the harbor master and his agents, and the harbor master at Tasso, and every
level of the administration at the mines. This jente can’t have bought them
all.”
“The
city guard always they belong to the jentes,” the woman said. “Anyway, the
jente he doesn’t use the slave ships. I see it myself. In the night they put
the slaves on trade ships—hundreds of slaves into hidden holds. In the day they
fill the ships with jugs of wine, jugs of oil. That is what the harbor master
sees. They put water in some of the jugs so it doesn’t show on the manifests
that they carry water for the slaves. I don’t know about the mines.”
Torien
was silent. The girl was looking at him over the woman’s shoulder—unblinking,
contemptuous, as though she were daring him to call it a lie. Alluin sat
motionless behind him, waiting for him to speak, because in the end the
decision was his alone, but he knew Alluin’s thoughts like his own, and he knew
Alluin, too, was thinking of the empty streets outside the shanty and the
silence like a bated breath—fear hanging over the city like a plague.
He
rocked back on his heels and got to his feet. The shanty spun as he stood.
“This is what will happen. In the morning, I take ship for Tasso. You’ll go
with me down to the harbor, and you’ll show me the jente’s ships, and I’ll
investigate crew and cargo for myself. If I find nothing to convince me of this
slaving business, then I’ll leave it for the governor’s court to decide your
fate. Otherwise I’ll do what I can from Tasso to see this thing ended and those
responsible made to pay for it—Modigno and Vareno alike. In any case, I swear
to you I’ll see justice done. If you’ve told me the truth, you’ve nothing to
fear by that.”
The
woman’s fingers were tight on the girl’s arms. “I tell you the truth,” she
said. Her voice was low and hard, and in it he heard what she left unsaid: that
she knew the value of Vareno oaths just as she knew the value of Vareno
justice. The truth made no difference to whim.
He
ground out the fire under one boot heel. “I’ll take the watch,” he said to
Alluin. It was perhaps four hours to dawn, and he knew he would not sleep.
Amanda McCrina has studied in Italy, taught English in
Japan, and currently tutors Latin in Atlanta, Georgia. She received her BA in
History from the University of West Georgia, and is now pursuing her MA. She
writes stories that incorporate her love of history, languages, and world
travel. She drinks far too much coffee and dreams of one day having a winning
fantasy-hockey season.
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