Chapter 58
“Fadhra,” he shouted, hammering on her door. Water soaked his clothes and boots, pooled at his feet. He had not taken time to dry before tossing on clean clothes. Only the brachal, strangely smooth, was dry against his skin. “Fadhra, wake up.”
The door opened. Fadhra peered out at him. “What?”
“The mill,” Abass said. “Where is it? Exactly? I have to go now.”
She shook her head. “What’s going on? The sun’s still out.”
“The mill,” Abass said. “Please.”
“It’ll take too long to explain. I’ll show you.”
The door shut, and a dozen heartbeats later opened again. She stepped out dressed in clean black clothes, the faint bulge of the brachal visible under her shirt.
“Do you have dew?” she asked.
Abass tugged at the pouch tied to his belt.
“Let’s go,” Fadhra said.
She ran from the house. Abass followed, slowing only long enough to shut the front door, and then leap into the air behind her. To his left, the sun hung half-hidden by the trees that ran to the horizon. Thick bands of crimson and purple stained the sky, fading to blue, and then black. Below Abass, people thronged the streets of Khi’ilan. Stout, sweating merchants, whose heavy purses would have lasted Abass and Scribe a pair of weeks, and laborers who would carry no more money than a silver mirri, or perhaps a handful of the tiny copper qazan. Women dressed in silks from Istbya or the fine wool of Cenarbasi, and with coin to match. When he saw them below, many of them pointing up and shouting as he flew overhead, Abass saw the men and women who had been his marks for year after hard year. But now, in the blood-orange evening, he saw the victims of the harvests. Like Isola.
Fadhra led him north and west. The sunset stained the murals, warping the color schemes of the city below, twisting the beauty of the carefully planned blocks of aesthetic appeal. Everywhere Abass looked he saw that crimson glare, except where shadows hung. Blood and death, everywhere. Twice he saw street harvests in process below him, the harvest passion tugging at him as he flew overhead. They added fuel to the fire of his anger. The dagger behind his belt seemed too simple, too painless for Qatal and for everyone like him. Men and women who had grown fat on the lifeblood of others, poured into the land and into the gods-made-flesh. Into the Renewed.
As they passed the cobblestone ring of the Way of Ash, the city fell away behind them. Fertile farms, always growing, spread out away from the city, given life by the High Harvest. Their progress was slower here; they landed most often in the fields, trampling crops, and every jump took slightly longer in the thick soil. Then they reached the edge of the forest, thick, full of undergrowth. Fadhra led him west a few miles before they saw the first signs of felling, and, a few miles beyond that, the mill.
It was a complex of finely built wooden buildings, rather than a single edifice. Abass landed in the soft earth near a cleared path. The force of his fall drove him almost ankle deep into the ground. Fadhra landed a few feet away, on the path itself.
No lights shone in any of the windows, although broken branches, still green with life, littered the paths where carelessly trimmed logs had been dragged to the mill. People had been here working recently. In the last day or two. Rage boiled up inside Abass, and the dew fueled it, until Abass could barely draw breath. She had to be here; that bastard had been hiding her all this time.
“I’ll check the outbuildings,” Fadhra said. Her voice was still flat and cold. The sound of it pulled Abass back from his anger for a moment.
“Wait,” Abass said. He pulled himself free and walked over to her. Fadhra shifted as he drew near, as though she anticipated his touch and wanted to shy away. “Thank you for coming, but you should go now. I’ve put you in too much danger. You were right earlier; you have your own battles to fight. Maybe, if I find Isola tonight, I can help you the way you’ve helped me.”
Fadhra’s face twisted. He thought for a moment she might cry, but she just said, “Father take you, you stupid bastard. Just go check the main building, and I’ll search the rest. After this we’re done. Get that through your head.”
She leaped into the night air, vanishing into the purple-white sky of dew-light. Abass shook his head; her words fanned his anger. It roared now, a beast within him that needed to be released. Rage at being helpless, at the Pits, at Fadhra, it all merged together into a white heat. Abass jumped.
He landed easily at the front doors of the sawmill itself. Aside from the low ripple of the stream that ran alongside the mill, silence surrounded him, even to his dew-enhanced hearing. No birds, no insects. Only the water and the night. Abass drew back one arm and slammed it into the massive doors. They splintered inward, as though struck by a ram. The ruined fragments flapped on their hinges.
With the dew in him, Abass could see easily inside the mill. Doors lined the wall to the right, but most of the building appeared dedicated to a single, long room, where trimmed logs lay on an unmoving carriage. Still and silent as the Pits. Abass hurried forward, barely sparing the machinery a glance. Not until he passed a stack of boards twice his height did Abass see light coming from under one of the doors to his right.
He sprinted toward it, letting the dew propel him. Careless. Only long years of caution, of fear, of thieving, alerted him to the twin lengths of wire stretched between the next set of wooden supports. A trap. Abass leapt, trying to clear the wire. He passed over it, but his speed carried him forward, and he struck the wall hard. He felt his nose break against the wood, and pain drove thought from his mind as one finger bent back and snapped.
The force of his landing made him rebound, stumbling back, and this time the wire caught him, slicing into his calves and sending him falling to the floor. Abass let out a howl as he caught his breath. Pain wracked him so that he could do nothing but shout and roll on the floor, cradling his broken finger.
“Tair protect us,” someone said. “This is what Ayde was so worried about?”
“He was in the hold,” a thick, almost unintelligible voice said. “Where’s the other one?”
The dew helped to push the pain back. Abass heard a pop as his finger, aided by the dew, moved back into position; the pain flared, sending black spots dancing before his eyes, and then faded. He forced himself to listen.
He lay facing the entrance to the mill, and he could watch through eyes half-closed, without moving. Men in green robes and chain were filing into the sawmill. Eight. Ten. Twelve. They were different from the eses Abass had seen before. Then he realized what it was. None bore torches, but even in the darkness of the mill they moved quickly, easily. Most had two huge swords strapped over their backs—swords a normal man would need both hands just to wield one. And each man wore a brachal around his upper arm, the sleeve of both the chain and the robe cut away to leave the arm and brachal bare. Su-eses. The true force of the eses. The sarkomancers of the temple. And they were here for him. He had been betrayed.