Auroc finally collected himself. He glared down upon Kurun, in despair and sudden fury. ‘You stupid little fool. I was trying to help you. You would have risen under me, Kurun. We would have served under the sun together. Now you have killed us both.’
‘Not him. Me,’ Rakhsar said, and he thrust the scimitar into the kitchen-master’s throat.
The tall Kefre stood there, eyes wide, hands flapping like wounded birds. His knees began to bend but the sword-blade held him upright. Blood gurgled out of his neck, the rent in his flesh widening around the steel of the scimitar. Then he sank, still upright, and slowly slid off the blade to collapse like a boneless heap of rags on the ground. Under him, the black pool opened out like the quickened blossoming of a flower.
Rakhsar stepped back from it to save his shoes. He wiped clean his blade on the kitchen-master’s robe, then turned to Kurun with a face like an ivory mask. ‘You had better be right, boy, or I will make an end of you less neat than this.’
Kurun’s tongue seemed frozen to the roof of his mouth. He squirmed, but the giant Ushau held him fast. Roshana was still looking at him, something desperate in her face now.
‘Kurun,’ she said gently. ‘Now you must tell us where to go.’
They trod the narrow corridors of the slave-city, mazing their way through the intestines of the ziggurat. They drew stares wherever they went; it was impossible to disguise the high-born nature of Rakhsar and Roshana. It was in their eyes, in their clothes, in the very way they walked. Resourceful though the twins might be, they had no real experience of life below the summit, and took it as no more than their due when the lesser inhabitants of the undercity drew back to let them pass, staring open-mouthed.
Kurun was in the lead, still clasped in the arms of the ebony giant. He muttered directions to Ushau, picked a convoluted path towards the less inhabited regions of the undercity. In doing so, he steered close to the cliff of his knowledge of the place, taking the company down little-used tunnels and passageways. As they descended, so they began to hear through the very stone the rhythmic thump of the waterwheels far below, upon which thousands toiled to water the gardens of the Great King. The sound was like the ceaseless beat of some enormous heart.
Here, the denizens of the dark ways were even more wary than those above, darting into shadows and side-alleys as the company passed. Rakhsar had drawn his sword again, and his eyes gleamed with a light of their own. His sister took his free hand, and the twins proceeded thus while the two other servants brought up the rear, bent under travel-bags, and as wide-eyed as owls in the hot deepening darkness.
‘Here,’ Kurun said at last. He squeezed shut his eyes a second, fighting a wash of nausea. He felt wetness on the backs of his thighs, and dared not speculate on it.
They were in a wider space, an arched passageway so low that Ushau’s head scraped the ceiling. Beyond there was more light, torches burning, a heat slightly less heavy, and the sense of moving air. There was noise also, the rattle of iron wheel-rims on stone, the braying of mules, and the clink of masonry. Many voices rose and fell, not the sea-rush of an aimless crowd, but the purposeful give and take of people at work.
‘This is the stone-cutters’ valley,’ Kurun said. ‘We are at the level of the streets now. If we go through here, there is a gateway which is always open in daylight, and then we are outside.’
‘It must be near dawn by now,’ Rakhsar said, wiping his face.
‘They will sound the chime when the sun rises,’ Kurun told him tiredly. ‘That’s when the shift changes. That would be the best time to try for the outside.’
He was fading away. The torchlight seemed to be circling a loom of widening shadow. His face was gripped by strong fingers, and shaken.
‘Stay with us, boy. When we stand under the sun, you can sleep all you want.’
‘He is bleeding, master,’ Ushau said.
‘Set him down.’ Roshana’s voice, quick and sharp.
Kurun was laid down on the stone. They opened his legs and peeled the soaked chiton from his thighs. He cried out, but the scream was smothered by Ushau’s huge palm, and the other held him down while Rakhsar and Roshana examined him. Rakhsar’s upper lip peeled back from his teeth. ‘Bel in his heaven, what a mess.’
‘Maidek,’ Roshana said, ‘Can you do something?’
The skull-lean Kefre knelt beside them. He looked Kurun’s injuries over with some interest, like a man at a market-stall.
‘They closed the wound with fire, mistress, but missed part of it. I would bind the boy’s legs together for now. He will need to be sewn up, but I cannot do that here. I need — ’
A brass clang rattled through the air, as though some titan had dropped a metal pot out of the sky. Rakhsar stood up. ‘Your butchery can wait, Maidek,’ he said. ‘That’ll be the chime the boy spoke of. Ushau, clamp him tight.’
The light grew, grey and cool across the massive chamber ahead. It revealed gangs of hufsan, who were now straightening from their labour upon orderly rows of squared stone, heaps of rubble. A swarm of talk rose. Suddenly the place seemed crowded, as more apron-clad hufsan trooped in from outside, and from stairways and ramps leading down from the dark bulk of the ziggurat above. The tall gateway loomed beyond, brightening moment by moment. There was an inrush of cooler air that brought the dust of the stoneworkers with it to grit their teeth, and something else. The mingled stinks of the world beyond, the promiscuous perfume of the city itself.
‘The boy was right,’ Roshana said. ‘That is the light of the dawn.’
‘Up. Move,’ Rakhsar snapped. ‘Follow me.’
He had sheathed his sword, but kept his hand on the hilt as they trailed through the work-gangs, gathering rock-dust, the sweat and toil of the slave-city pressing in on them with the milling crowds of workers. The fresh, cool air of the city beyond drew them on, filling their lungs. Rakhsar uttered a strangled laugh as they stepped out of the ziggurat, into the morning cacophony that was Ashur, and looked around themselves like an island of idle fools in a sea of busy people.
‘I smell grilled frog,’ Rakhsar said to his sister, grinning. The sweat lay like pearl beads on his forehead. ‘What say you we treat ourselves to one, and then find a place to lay our heads for a while?’
He strode off, and the rest trailed after him like the tail of a kite. Ushau looked down on Kurun and tapped a knuckle against the boy’s chest.
‘You are a good little fellow,’ he said. Then he held Kurun close, and followed his master, and they were lost in the coursing torrent of faces, bodies, flapping feet and waving hands that was the Imperial City, while behind them the ziggurats were lit up, level by level, by the burgeoning light of the dawn.
SIX
Ashurnan felt the palanquin move under him, with the stately pace of the elephant that bore it. He drew back the fine weave of the curtains to look up the road ahead, and once again his fist clenched involuntarily as he took in the line of wagons, pack-animals, cavalry and marching men that stretched to the bright, dust-hazed horizon.
Dust in his beard. Dust in his shoes. Dust in the very food he ate. Asuria itself was impregnating every part of him; his own country, the heart of empire, the place his ancestors had walked and ruled for years beyond count.
His father Anurman, whom some named the Great, had deigned to speak to him of the empire once. One did not rule it, any more than a mariner dictated every movement of a ship at sea. One steered it. And sometimes, it took patience to get it back on course when the waves were in your teeth.
I am older now than my father was when he died, Ashurnan thought. I have ruled longer than he did. I have fought fewer wars, but those in which I have taken part have been greater than any he ever saw. Does that make me a better king than my father, or a lesser?
Once again, his thoughts travelled back down the dusty pasangs of the Royal Road, to his capital.
