The Torch - Passing
Jan. 7th, 2011 07:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hwrnmnbsolThis is the first of a multi-part story that I will be posting on Fridays. There will be seven parts total. It's a fantasy story.
Emerald Station lay on the Trade Road, the last waypost before Beth Shamon. It was a small, dingy town – a few clusters of unpainted rickety wooden buildings, with nothing much of interest to attract a tourist. The town existed to serve the caravans that ran to and from the prosperous nations and cities to the north; it had several liveries and wheelwrights, inns and hostels, a general store, a farspeaker, and that was about it.
But the caravans weren’t coming any more the way they used to. People spoke of a poor economic climate in Beth Shamon, or sometimes talked about the effects of the war in the north. Nobody ever spoke about the notion, generally accepted as fact, that the Emperor was deranged, and that this might have something to do with the entire region’s slow, agonizing crawl into poverty and misery. Nobody ever said it, but most people thought it.
Because the caravans weren’t coming as often, Emerald Station was drying up and blowing away. Half the businesses were closed. Many of the houses were boarded up; of these, quite a few had already been cannibalized for firewood. The few people left were idle, unhappy and increasingly short on food. To make matters worse, it had been raining for two weeks straight, and the entire town had turned into a giant rutted mud-pit.
There was a bit of canopy hanging over the front face of the last remaining livery, and a few of the locals were taking advantage of it. Four men were packed like sardines onto the dry portion of the deck that overlooked the Trade Road, edging around slightly when the wind shifted to avoid the sideways rain. There were two other men on the porch as well, getting soaked; they were plainly drunks and likely ex-sailors, hunched over in their voluminous outer garments of oiled sailcloth and slumped against the wall, and nobody paid them much notice. There were just too many drunks around for any one of them to register.
The four dry men were noteworthy. First, they had the alertness of people who have a purpose in life. Second, they were armed. Not well armed, but something is better than nothing. They had long metal bars of uncertain provenance, and each of them had a small stock of stones laid in nearby. They had no armor (an almost impossible luxury in these difficult times) but they wore several layers of mud-spattered clothing, and one had the thick leather apron of a butcher’s boy. All had knives stuck in their belts. They were, in brief, as ready for trouble as a short-on-resources collection of rabble can be.
One of the men spat something orange and grimy out into the rain. “She ain’t comin’,” he grunted.
“Oh, she’ll be comin’,” replied his neighbor, a great strapping fellow with a floppy leather hat. “I guarantee it.”
“She gotta come this way,” agreed a third, the butcher’s boy. “Ain’t no other way t’go.”
“Junior Bishop, you don’t know that,” retorted Orange-chew. “She coulda come down the Big Hull Road. She could be in Beth Shamon right now, and us here like idjits.” There was a general chorus of disagreement from the other three.
“You know that it can’t be Big Hull, fool,” sneered the one on the end, who had a fleshy growth that took up most of the left half of his face. “They got the plague in Big Hull. Ain’t nobody running down from Big Hull. Not unless they keel over a spell later.”
Butcher-boy nodded. “That’s right, and it can’t be Chimney Rock neither, on account that Bully askt the farspeaker, and they ain’t seen no runners in Chimney Rock.”
“I got ears and can hear,” grumbled Orange-chew. “But them madder wimmens is tricky. She might have gone crost country. Or she might of snuck through. Shoot, Bully, they might of paid off them farspeakers.”
Bully, the leather hat wearer, looked disgusted. “Nobody’s paid off no farspeakers,” he hooted. “And she ain’t gone crost country, not in this weather. And she ain’t snuck through, not with that there torch. No sir. There’s but one way into Beth Shamon, and that’s on the Trade Road.” He slapped Orange-chew on the knee.
“You just got the itchy hiney,” Bully chortled. “Don’t you fret. Set a spell and keep them eyes open. She’ll be along, and it’ll be here, and it’ll be today.”
One the drunks turned his face up into the rain. “I sure hope I get to see a whuppin’ today,” he slurred. His companion said nothing.
The men settled back to wait. Bully was right – it had to be that day. The Imperial Games were going to start in Beth Shamon in twenty four hours. By tradition dating back thousands of years, a kindling of the Eternal Flame at Mhorkhor had to be run down from the mountains to the west all the way to the Arena at Beth Shamon, where the Imperial Fire’s lighting would signal the Games’ official beginning. There could be no delaying matters. The flame must be run down to Beth Shamon, in public, immediately. Or else.
In better times, the running of the flame was a source of pride. People would line the streets to watch the Empire’s best runners make the long, difficult trek, and they would cheer as the torch went past. Beth Shamon, City of Shrines, would burst at the seams during the games as people flooded into town to watch the spectacles in the Arena. Of course, that was then. That was when people believed in the Empire, and loved its Emperor. That was before he went mad.
The running of the flame was no longer a source of pride. To many it was a symbol of the dominance of a tyrant, showing his power by running his torch through their little scattered towns. Then, three years ago, there was the Massacre at Mutton Hill. The Emperor’s Sentarian Guard wiped out an entire community for no reason. The news ignited passions all across the country. There would be armed revolt, were it not for the fact that the towns were too poor to fight, and the emperor had few troops to fight against. But the games fell every four years, and the towns began to look forward to the running of a vestige of oppressive power through their streets.
The Emperor, though mad, wasn’t stupid. He knew he wanted his torch to get through, and he knew he wasn’t going to get any volunteers to run it. So he did what he always did any time he had a dirty job: he gave it to the Alizarin Sisterhood, the Rose Madder Corps. Eternally sworn to his service, that small tribe of foreign mercenaries remained one of the last loyal instruments the Emperor could count upon.
Run the torch to Beth Shamon, he commanded, or die trying. The Sisterhood obeyed.
**
Peering out into the rain, Bully squinted. Butcher-boy caught his expression and followed his gaze. “Izzat it?” he asked nobody in particular.
The others leaned forward on the weathered bench. There was a spot of brightness in the dingy grey void hanging above the Trade Road. As the men watched it, it bobbed and jounced.
“S’gotta be it,” said Orange-chew.
“Didn’t I tell ya?” said Bully, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Oh man, I’m gonna whack a madder woman!” crowed Butcher Boy.
“*We’re* gonna whack a madder woman,” corrected Face-Growth.
“Excuse me,” whispered one of the drunks to the other in a velvety contralto. A powerful, sinewy hand emerged from that drunk’s voluminous sleeve. It grasped the other fellow’s oilcloth rain-kit by the scruff of the neck, and a well-placed knee levered under his buttocks; with an easy shift of weight, the surprised drunkard rolled completely off the porch and into the puddles of the street. The four armed men were looking the other way and saw nothing.
The light, by now, was clearly jogging up and down. There was a darker shape next to it, but no clear outlines could be seen through the driving rain.
“Bet I could hit her with a rock from here,” said Butcher-Boy.
“Yer a numbskull,” growled Bully. “Let ‘er get up nice and close, and then we’ll all jump ‘er.”
“I hear them madder women are tough in a close fight though,” said Face-Growth uneasily.
“Dang it, it’s only one dern woman,” chided Orange-chew. “Just get ready.”
The remaining drunk straightened up and shucked the oilcloths. This was no inebriated ex-sailor. It was a woman, tall and lean, but with the bunched major muscles of a gymnast. Her face was long and her dark eyes were serious. She wore trousers and a smock of grey cloth, with fitted boots caked with mud. A protective red harness crossed her body securing numerous pouches, pockets and a scabbard over her left shoulder. Her hair was long but coiled tightly inside a light skullcap. She regarded the four men with interest.
The men were still oblivious to the woman behind them. “Now here’s the plan,” Bully hissed.
The woman measured off two long strides along the porch and leaped feet-first, her body twisting horizontally, and both of her boots caught the edge of the mens’ bench. It was both a good kick and a weak bench; all the legs sheared off at once, tumbling all four men to the ground. Orange-Chew, perilously close to the edge of the porch, landed in the mud of the street. The woman did some sort of trick with knees and hips as she landed; she was on her feet almost instantly.
“Son of a…” screamed Bully, getting to his knees.
“I think I cut myself!” said Butcher-Boy. One of the knives in his belt had poked through his shirt, and there was a little blood there.
Face-growth scooped up his metal bar before standing up. As he rose, the woman kicked him squarely in the face, pivoted to leg-sweep him back to the ground, and dropped to one knee to punch him hard in the breadbasket. The man curled reflexively into a ball and didn’t move.
“You sneaky asshole, I’m gonna give you what fer!” shouted Bully, charging past Butcher-Boy to rush the woman with his club raised. Timing things in her head, the woman side-kicked the post holding up the canopy on her end of the porch and then rolled out the other side. The structure collapsed onto Bully, knocking him to the ground with a few hundred pounds of wood and sailcloth on top of him.
Orange-chew had picked himself up out of the mud, recovered his club, and edged along the outside of the porch. Now he stood over the fallen drunkard, who was still plaintively trying to get himself out of the deep mud, and leaned over the porch floor to take a swipe at the woman’s ankles. She cart-wheeled out of the way, then leaped straight up and brought her feet down with all her weight on one of the boards of the porch. Nails popped and the other end of the board leaped up off the deck, smacking into the jaw of Orange-chew. He dropped out of sight, landing on the unfortunate sot and further complicating his plans for getting out of the gutter.
Butcher-Boy held his club in front of him uncertainly; with his other hand he held his bloody side. He did not look at all happy. The woman took pity on him.
“Kid,” she said, “never bring a club to a swordfight.”
“But,” he stammered, “you ain’t drawn your sword.”
“Nope,” she admitted. “Should I?”
“Nope.” Butcher-Boy thought about what excuses he might have for sticking around and came up empty. In a moment the woman was the only person left on the porch.
The torch came into view. It was an elaborate affair, made of bronze with iron fittings, and with flutings and ironmongery that served no non-decorative purpose. The flame itself burned high, proud and red despite the torrential downpour, and there was no smoke, but the occasional flare of sparks roiled out of its center and shot up into the heavens. The middle of the flame was a dancing formless void, tinged faintly with magenta.
The torch-bearer was a small woman, dressed similarly to the woman on the porch, with straw-colored hair tied back in a severe bun. She ran well, but there was a hitch in her stride. She jogged up to the porch, then grimaced as she drew up short in the mud.
The taller woman smiled down at the torch-bearer. “Right on time, Nurya,” she complimented.
“Thank you, Commander Xandra,” replied the smaller woman. “One does one’s best.”
The torch flared. ONE COULD DO BETTER, it said, its voice seeming to fill the air instead of radiating from a point. FOR INSTANCE, ONE COULD GET ME OUT OF THE RAIN.
“Oho.” Xandra arched an eyebrow at the torch. “Our Kindling seems to be somewhat spoiled.”
“Well,” hedged Nurya and suppressing a smirk, “he has what I think of as a sense of entitlement.”
I AM A SCION OF THE ONE TRUE FLAME, protested the torch. I WAS BIRTHED BY THE UNDYING FIRE AND AT THE COMMAND OF HIS SEVERITY, THE EMPEROR. I AM UNIQUE AND PRECIOUS.
“I get the picture, Precious,” replied Xandra.
“I’ve named him ‘Ember’,” said Nurya. “Because he’s only a very little flame, after all.”
THE EMPEROR SHALL HEAR OF THIS HUMILIATION, pouted the torch.
“A fitting name,” smiled Xandra. “Hand him up here.”
As the torch changed hands, Ember flared higher. AND NOW ONLY THE ANCHOR LEG REMAINS, he said ceremonially.
“Yes,” agreed Xandra, then frowned. “And speaking of leg, you appear to be wounded.”
“It’s nothing.” Nurya limped up the porch stairs and lifted a legging to reveal a swath of bandaging. “Through-and-through wound. Somebody had a crossbow. Probably a veteran of the Wolf Wars. It got a little hairy in the upcountry.”
“Yeah,” said Xandra thoughtfully, looking in the direction of Beth Shamon. The rain was too heavy for the domes and spires of the City of Shrines to be seen. Nurya put her hand on Xandra’s shoulder.
“I’m glad it’s you on the anchor leg and not me,” she said. “There are a million people in that city, and almost all of them are going to want to tear you into pieces.”
“Thank you for the pep talk,” said Xandra drily. “But we knew this would be the hardest part. It’s the commander’s job to take this portion.”
“You want me to run with you?” asked Nurya. “Two swords might be better than one.”
Xandra shook her head. “Rest that leg,” she ordered. “Besides, I imagine I’ll have to go fast and stealthy from time to time, and that’s easier with one person than two. I have to carry the torch openly, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of beneficial conditions when everybody’s your enemy.”
“I know I don’t like you much!” inserted the muddy drunk, finally upright and sober enough to be peevish. Xandra and Nurya ignored him.
“What’s your plan?” asked Nurya.
“Do my duty. Be brave and strong. The rest will follow.” Xandra and Nurya embraced.
Then, without another look backward, Xandra vaulted off the porch and began to lope down the mud-logged road, the torch Ember held high in her hand. In very short order she was swallowed up by the rain.
A woman in simple green robes watched Xandra leave. She paused thoughtfully for a moment, not caring about the downpour, then turned and trudged up the road to the Farspeaker House. She entered, washed the mud off her bare feet, and parted a bead curtain to enter the farspeaker shrine. Lighting the incense and sinking into a lotus position, she entered a state of communion.
“Hear me, o my sisters and brothers,” she crooned to herself, “and I shall sing to you of a woman named Xandra….”
Emerald Station lay on the Trade Road, the last waypost before Beth Shamon. It was a small, dingy town – a few clusters of unpainted rickety wooden buildings, with nothing much of interest to attract a tourist. The town existed to serve the caravans that ran to and from the prosperous nations and cities to the north; it had several liveries and wheelwrights, inns and hostels, a general store, a farspeaker, and that was about it.
But the caravans weren’t coming any more the way they used to. People spoke of a poor economic climate in Beth Shamon, or sometimes talked about the effects of the war in the north. Nobody ever spoke about the notion, generally accepted as fact, that the Emperor was deranged, and that this might have something to do with the entire region’s slow, agonizing crawl into poverty and misery. Nobody ever said it, but most people thought it.
Because the caravans weren’t coming as often, Emerald Station was drying up and blowing away. Half the businesses were closed. Many of the houses were boarded up; of these, quite a few had already been cannibalized for firewood. The few people left were idle, unhappy and increasingly short on food. To make matters worse, it had been raining for two weeks straight, and the entire town had turned into a giant rutted mud-pit.
There was a bit of canopy hanging over the front face of the last remaining livery, and a few of the locals were taking advantage of it. Four men were packed like sardines onto the dry portion of the deck that overlooked the Trade Road, edging around slightly when the wind shifted to avoid the sideways rain. There were two other men on the porch as well, getting soaked; they were plainly drunks and likely ex-sailors, hunched over in their voluminous outer garments of oiled sailcloth and slumped against the wall, and nobody paid them much notice. There were just too many drunks around for any one of them to register.
The four dry men were noteworthy. First, they had the alertness of people who have a purpose in life. Second, they were armed. Not well armed, but something is better than nothing. They had long metal bars of uncertain provenance, and each of them had a small stock of stones laid in nearby. They had no armor (an almost impossible luxury in these difficult times) but they wore several layers of mud-spattered clothing, and one had the thick leather apron of a butcher’s boy. All had knives stuck in their belts. They were, in brief, as ready for trouble as a short-on-resources collection of rabble can be.
One of the men spat something orange and grimy out into the rain. “She ain’t comin’,” he grunted.
“Oh, she’ll be comin’,” replied his neighbor, a great strapping fellow with a floppy leather hat. “I guarantee it.”
“She gotta come this way,” agreed a third, the butcher’s boy. “Ain’t no other way t’go.”
“Junior Bishop, you don’t know that,” retorted Orange-chew. “She coulda come down the Big Hull Road. She could be in Beth Shamon right now, and us here like idjits.” There was a general chorus of disagreement from the other three.
“You know that it can’t be Big Hull, fool,” sneered the one on the end, who had a fleshy growth that took up most of the left half of his face. “They got the plague in Big Hull. Ain’t nobody running down from Big Hull. Not unless they keel over a spell later.”
Butcher-boy nodded. “That’s right, and it can’t be Chimney Rock neither, on account that Bully askt the farspeaker, and they ain’t seen no runners in Chimney Rock.”
“I got ears and can hear,” grumbled Orange-chew. “But them madder wimmens is tricky. She might have gone crost country. Or she might of snuck through. Shoot, Bully, they might of paid off them farspeakers.”
Bully, the leather hat wearer, looked disgusted. “Nobody’s paid off no farspeakers,” he hooted. “And she ain’t gone crost country, not in this weather. And she ain’t snuck through, not with that there torch. No sir. There’s but one way into Beth Shamon, and that’s on the Trade Road.” He slapped Orange-chew on the knee.
“You just got the itchy hiney,” Bully chortled. “Don’t you fret. Set a spell and keep them eyes open. She’ll be along, and it’ll be here, and it’ll be today.”
One the drunks turned his face up into the rain. “I sure hope I get to see a whuppin’ today,” he slurred. His companion said nothing.
The men settled back to wait. Bully was right – it had to be that day. The Imperial Games were going to start in Beth Shamon in twenty four hours. By tradition dating back thousands of years, a kindling of the Eternal Flame at Mhorkhor had to be run down from the mountains to the west all the way to the Arena at Beth Shamon, where the Imperial Fire’s lighting would signal the Games’ official beginning. There could be no delaying matters. The flame must be run down to Beth Shamon, in public, immediately. Or else.
In better times, the running of the flame was a source of pride. People would line the streets to watch the Empire’s best runners make the long, difficult trek, and they would cheer as the torch went past. Beth Shamon, City of Shrines, would burst at the seams during the games as people flooded into town to watch the spectacles in the Arena. Of course, that was then. That was when people believed in the Empire, and loved its Emperor. That was before he went mad.
The running of the flame was no longer a source of pride. To many it was a symbol of the dominance of a tyrant, showing his power by running his torch through their little scattered towns. Then, three years ago, there was the Massacre at Mutton Hill. The Emperor’s Sentarian Guard wiped out an entire community for no reason. The news ignited passions all across the country. There would be armed revolt, were it not for the fact that the towns were too poor to fight, and the emperor had few troops to fight against. But the games fell every four years, and the towns began to look forward to the running of a vestige of oppressive power through their streets.
The Emperor, though mad, wasn’t stupid. He knew he wanted his torch to get through, and he knew he wasn’t going to get any volunteers to run it. So he did what he always did any time he had a dirty job: he gave it to the Alizarin Sisterhood, the Rose Madder Corps. Eternally sworn to his service, that small tribe of foreign mercenaries remained one of the last loyal instruments the Emperor could count upon.
Run the torch to Beth Shamon, he commanded, or die trying. The Sisterhood obeyed.
**
Peering out into the rain, Bully squinted. Butcher-boy caught his expression and followed his gaze. “Izzat it?” he asked nobody in particular.
The others leaned forward on the weathered bench. There was a spot of brightness in the dingy grey void hanging above the Trade Road. As the men watched it, it bobbed and jounced.
“S’gotta be it,” said Orange-chew.
“Didn’t I tell ya?” said Bully, clapping him on the shoulder.
“Oh man, I’m gonna whack a madder woman!” crowed Butcher Boy.
“*We’re* gonna whack a madder woman,” corrected Face-Growth.
“Excuse me,” whispered one of the drunks to the other in a velvety contralto. A powerful, sinewy hand emerged from that drunk’s voluminous sleeve. It grasped the other fellow’s oilcloth rain-kit by the scruff of the neck, and a well-placed knee levered under his buttocks; with an easy shift of weight, the surprised drunkard rolled completely off the porch and into the puddles of the street. The four armed men were looking the other way and saw nothing.
The light, by now, was clearly jogging up and down. There was a darker shape next to it, but no clear outlines could be seen through the driving rain.
“Bet I could hit her with a rock from here,” said Butcher-Boy.
“Yer a numbskull,” growled Bully. “Let ‘er get up nice and close, and then we’ll all jump ‘er.”
“I hear them madder women are tough in a close fight though,” said Face-Growth uneasily.
“Dang it, it’s only one dern woman,” chided Orange-chew. “Just get ready.”
The remaining drunk straightened up and shucked the oilcloths. This was no inebriated ex-sailor. It was a woman, tall and lean, but with the bunched major muscles of a gymnast. Her face was long and her dark eyes were serious. She wore trousers and a smock of grey cloth, with fitted boots caked with mud. A protective red harness crossed her body securing numerous pouches, pockets and a scabbard over her left shoulder. Her hair was long but coiled tightly inside a light skullcap. She regarded the four men with interest.
The men were still oblivious to the woman behind them. “Now here’s the plan,” Bully hissed.
The woman measured off two long strides along the porch and leaped feet-first, her body twisting horizontally, and both of her boots caught the edge of the mens’ bench. It was both a good kick and a weak bench; all the legs sheared off at once, tumbling all four men to the ground. Orange-Chew, perilously close to the edge of the porch, landed in the mud of the street. The woman did some sort of trick with knees and hips as she landed; she was on her feet almost instantly.
“Son of a…” screamed Bully, getting to his knees.
“I think I cut myself!” said Butcher-Boy. One of the knives in his belt had poked through his shirt, and there was a little blood there.
Face-growth scooped up his metal bar before standing up. As he rose, the woman kicked him squarely in the face, pivoted to leg-sweep him back to the ground, and dropped to one knee to punch him hard in the breadbasket. The man curled reflexively into a ball and didn’t move.
“You sneaky asshole, I’m gonna give you what fer!” shouted Bully, charging past Butcher-Boy to rush the woman with his club raised. Timing things in her head, the woman side-kicked the post holding up the canopy on her end of the porch and then rolled out the other side. The structure collapsed onto Bully, knocking him to the ground with a few hundred pounds of wood and sailcloth on top of him.
Orange-chew had picked himself up out of the mud, recovered his club, and edged along the outside of the porch. Now he stood over the fallen drunkard, who was still plaintively trying to get himself out of the deep mud, and leaned over the porch floor to take a swipe at the woman’s ankles. She cart-wheeled out of the way, then leaped straight up and brought her feet down with all her weight on one of the boards of the porch. Nails popped and the other end of the board leaped up off the deck, smacking into the jaw of Orange-chew. He dropped out of sight, landing on the unfortunate sot and further complicating his plans for getting out of the gutter.
Butcher-Boy held his club in front of him uncertainly; with his other hand he held his bloody side. He did not look at all happy. The woman took pity on him.
“Kid,” she said, “never bring a club to a swordfight.”
“But,” he stammered, “you ain’t drawn your sword.”
“Nope,” she admitted. “Should I?”
“Nope.” Butcher-Boy thought about what excuses he might have for sticking around and came up empty. In a moment the woman was the only person left on the porch.
The torch came into view. It was an elaborate affair, made of bronze with iron fittings, and with flutings and ironmongery that served no non-decorative purpose. The flame itself burned high, proud and red despite the torrential downpour, and there was no smoke, but the occasional flare of sparks roiled out of its center and shot up into the heavens. The middle of the flame was a dancing formless void, tinged faintly with magenta.
The torch-bearer was a small woman, dressed similarly to the woman on the porch, with straw-colored hair tied back in a severe bun. She ran well, but there was a hitch in her stride. She jogged up to the porch, then grimaced as she drew up short in the mud.
The taller woman smiled down at the torch-bearer. “Right on time, Nurya,” she complimented.
“Thank you, Commander Xandra,” replied the smaller woman. “One does one’s best.”
The torch flared. ONE COULD DO BETTER, it said, its voice seeming to fill the air instead of radiating from a point. FOR INSTANCE, ONE COULD GET ME OUT OF THE RAIN.
“Oho.” Xandra arched an eyebrow at the torch. “Our Kindling seems to be somewhat spoiled.”
“Well,” hedged Nurya and suppressing a smirk, “he has what I think of as a sense of entitlement.”
I AM A SCION OF THE ONE TRUE FLAME, protested the torch. I WAS BIRTHED BY THE UNDYING FIRE AND AT THE COMMAND OF HIS SEVERITY, THE EMPEROR. I AM UNIQUE AND PRECIOUS.
“I get the picture, Precious,” replied Xandra.
“I’ve named him ‘Ember’,” said Nurya. “Because he’s only a very little flame, after all.”
THE EMPEROR SHALL HEAR OF THIS HUMILIATION, pouted the torch.
“A fitting name,” smiled Xandra. “Hand him up here.”
As the torch changed hands, Ember flared higher. AND NOW ONLY THE ANCHOR LEG REMAINS, he said ceremonially.
“Yes,” agreed Xandra, then frowned. “And speaking of leg, you appear to be wounded.”
“It’s nothing.” Nurya limped up the porch stairs and lifted a legging to reveal a swath of bandaging. “Through-and-through wound. Somebody had a crossbow. Probably a veteran of the Wolf Wars. It got a little hairy in the upcountry.”
“Yeah,” said Xandra thoughtfully, looking in the direction of Beth Shamon. The rain was too heavy for the domes and spires of the City of Shrines to be seen. Nurya put her hand on Xandra’s shoulder.
“I’m glad it’s you on the anchor leg and not me,” she said. “There are a million people in that city, and almost all of them are going to want to tear you into pieces.”
“Thank you for the pep talk,” said Xandra drily. “But we knew this would be the hardest part. It’s the commander’s job to take this portion.”
“You want me to run with you?” asked Nurya. “Two swords might be better than one.”
Xandra shook her head. “Rest that leg,” she ordered. “Besides, I imagine I’ll have to go fast and stealthy from time to time, and that’s easier with one person than two. I have to carry the torch openly, but there’s no reason not to take advantage of beneficial conditions when everybody’s your enemy.”
“I know I don’t like you much!” inserted the muddy drunk, finally upright and sober enough to be peevish. Xandra and Nurya ignored him.
“What’s your plan?” asked Nurya.
“Do my duty. Be brave and strong. The rest will follow.” Xandra and Nurya embraced.
Then, without another look backward, Xandra vaulted off the porch and began to lope down the mud-logged road, the torch Ember held high in her hand. In very short order she was swallowed up by the rain.
A woman in simple green robes watched Xandra leave. She paused thoughtfully for a moment, not caring about the downpour, then turned and trudged up the road to the Farspeaker House. She entered, washed the mud off her bare feet, and parted a bead curtain to enter the farspeaker shrine. Lighting the incense and sinking into a lotus position, she entered a state of communion.
“Hear me, o my sisters and brothers,” she crooned to herself, “and I shall sing to you of a woman named Xandra….”
