Dunedrifter Read online

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Battleslave

  About the Author

  Other works by the author

  Contents

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Battleslave

  About the Author

  Other works by the author

  Copyright 2018 Elisabeth Wheatley

  All Rights Reserved

  For Schnay

  The best writing buddy ever

  Chapter One

  “Gilsazi is gone.” Zula wasted no time with pleasantries, not that she ever did.

  The words slid through Talitha’s ears and spread a coldness through her entire body. “Gone?”

  “They were attacked on their way back from Ararat. Kasrei and the child are fine, but one of their guards was killed and two others wounded.”

  The two women perched on the catwalk overlooking the practice yards. Below, pairs of soldiers sparred while Naram waited with a wooden sword and a bloody mouth for Talitha’s return. Zula had appeared in the middle of their lesson—which had not been going well.

  “Gilsazi is dead?” Talitha’s words wavered.

  “He was carried off. It seems they want him for ransom, but we cannot be certain.”

  General Krispos watched their exchange with a grimace and slanted head, hands folded over the pommel of a practice sword. A year ago, Talitha would have never let him overhear this conversation.

  Talitha blinked at the wall twice. Her most trusted servant, her strongest supporter. Her grandfather had admonished her countless times for elevating a friend to such a crucial position. Now she saw why.

  “Where is Kasrei?”

  “In the archives with the baby. She’s distraught.”

  Talitha spun around. “Saorla!”

  “My lady?” The slender girl jumped.

  “Cancel the rest of my meetings for today. Tell Naram to get himself cleaned up. Meet me in the archives when you’re done.”

  Saorla’s eyes widened. “Yes, my lady.”

  “Krispos, send word for Shaza to join me in an hour.”

  The general nodded solemnly, eyes closing and inclining his head. Though Shaza had ended their dalliance months ago, the old man was still quite fond of the priest’s young son. Talitha didn’t know if it was tragic or touching.

  Talitha strode past the general a moment later. “Zula, back to your post. Zeroboam, accompany me.”

  A soldier with a scar slashed through the stubble on his cheek stepped up to her side. Zeroboam was one of Krispos’s men and Gilsazi had disapproved of Talitha’s recent trust of him, though Zula had been far more accepting. Nothing an ensaadi did ever had universal support—not even from friends.

  Zeroboam followed silently. He was a man of few words and that was one thing she liked about him.

  Gilsazi—her great tavrosi general—taken captive. Fear coursed through her veins at the thought of what might be happening to him even now. Hatred of his race coupled with hatred of his liege lady could only spell ruin. Her own brother had branded him with the royal seal of Ilios, a scar he carried to this day.

  Would he be found in pieces, hacked apart like a sacrificial bullock? For the sake of whoever had taken him, she hoped not.

  A courtier in bright white robes and a cloud of perfume came at her from the left. There was a smile, an over flattering greeting.

  Talitha smiled and nodded back without truly seeing who it was. Zeroboam stepped between them with perfect timing to explain the ensaadi had important business and whatever they wished to discuss would have to wait.

  It was one downside now that people knew she had secured her power—everyone wanted a piece of it.

  That happened several more times before Talitha reached the entrance to the magian’s archives. The doors were plated in bronze and stretched high above Talitha’s head. As a child, she had imagined this was what the entrance to the afterlife would look like.

  Zeroboam opened the door discreetly, without announcing her. He checked the inside, gesturing her ahead of him.

  Talitha had wondered how she would find Kasrei in the massive complex, but she need not have worried. Kasrei’s voice carried over the rows and rows of scrolls and tablets. Nothing was intelligible, but the magian’s sharp tone was unmistakable.

  “Do you think she would do anything violent?” It was Zeroboam’s first words to her since she’d asked for his company.

  “We’re safe,” Talitha said. “Furniture and pottery less so.”

  “Ensaadi.” Magister Enka greeted her with a visible sigh of relief. Enka was a middle-aged woman with silver bleaching her dark hair in symmetrical streaks. Her almond skin was flecked with sunspots that wrinkled around her eyes, especially when she was troubled. Today the sunspots were knotted and clenched. “Magister Kasrei is in the hall to the left.”

  Talitha made no comment as she took a sharp left, hands loose at her sides.

  A novice shooed a gaggle of round-faced initiates past, stumbling into a bow as he recognized the royal seal of the triple suns on her breastplate. Talitha forgot to incline her head until he was out of sight, too focused on Kasrei’s rising voice.

  “We’re wasting time! It took us hours to get here. Every moment we spend talking—when will that bitch get here?”

  “Magister—”

  “Don’t magister me! He’s her strongest supporter and she can’t even walk away from a sparring lesson to—there you are!” Kasrei marched to Talitha in an instant.

  The ensaadi braced herself, half-expecting Kasrei to swing a punch.

  “What took you so long? I’ve been here for a half hour and you finally decide to turn up? Gods know what could be happening right now and—”

  Talitha counted backwards from thirty while Kasrei vented. Frustration ground Talitha’s teeth together. She agreed there was little time, but now Kasrei was the one wasting it.

  Kasrei paused to take a breath.

  “The ensaadi came the moment she heard,” Zeroboam interjected levelly. “And you would do well to remember who is ensaadi.”

  Kasrei whirled on him. She opened her mouth to give him a piece of her mind next.

  “Who took him?” Talitha demanded, words coming out sharp as flint.

  “Jak’mor.” Kasrei raked a hand through her hair, something she had probably been doing for the past hour. “They rode under the boar. I thought they were done with me, but they must have…” She raked her hands through her hair again and then a third time. “I don’t know what…” Her voice broke in a shuddering breath.

  Kasrei had been magian and concubine to the previous ensaak. She had killed the ensaak and then the ensaak’s chief captain, Talos, years ago, but Jak’mor was a large city. There was no telling who might have held a grudge against the magian this long.

  “Tell me exactly what happened,” Talitha ordered. If Gilsazi had been taken, she didn’t want to consider what might be done to him any more than Kasrei did.

  “We were coming through the gorge overlooking Isha’s
Fist.” The Fist was an old lava flow to the east of Ararat, so named because the ground was knobbed and ridged like sinews and knuckles. “Riders appeared from nowhere. They had a magian who attacked Chinasa.” Kasrei reached for her baby, cradled gently in the arms of a freckled novice. “I protected her, but the magian was strong. He kept us pinned down for more than a minute before I was able to take him down. When I looked up…” Kasrei shook her head. “Gilsazi was dragged off with ropes around his wrists.” The magian took a shuddering breath. “I don’t even know if—”

  “He’s alive,” Talitha said flatly, as much for herself as Kasrei.

  Kasrei didn’t respond, tears sliding down her cheeks.

  Talitha smeared a hand over her face. “Did you see which way they were headed?” Though by now, Gilsazi’s captors could have doubled back and headed in any direction.

  “Northeast,” Kasrei answered, “they disappeared along the Finger.”

  Talitha inhaled a long breath.

  “These are the sigils we took off some of the dead.” A young lieutenant Talitha hadn’t noticed held out a trio of jangling medallions with part of a late owner’s warrior braid and two leather thongs still attached. The lieutenant’s hands were flecked in sand and dried blood. Talitha noted an angry bruise splotched up the back of his neck, split by a weeping cut.

  “What happened to your neck, soldier?”

  The lieutenant grimaced. “A whip, my ensaadi.”

  “A whip?” Talitha took a step closer. “Let me see.”

  The lieutenant obeyed, tilting his head to the side and partly turning his back.

  Talitha pushed aside the edges of his hair, stuck to his neck with sweat. The dark cut was framed with smaller scratches and something glinted from inside the wound. “There’s broken glass under your skin.” Probably obsidian. Not a Jak’morian’s weapon. “What’s your name, soldier?”

  “Persa, my ensaadi.” He swallowed again, his head turned away still.

  “What happened, Persa?”

  “It is much as the magister says, my lady. They came upon us from behind the rocks and a magian attacked her ladyship while foot soldiers surrounded the rest of us.”

  “And when they had the general, they left?”

  “Yes, my ensaadi.”

  Talitha’s heart sank. She surveyed the sigils in her hand. One was of a squat razor-backed creature, unmistakably a boar. The other two… “Did you get a good look at their colors?”

  “They carried none, my lady.”

  Talitha glanced to Kasrei. “None?”

  “I recognized the tokens they carried on their armor,” Kasrei answered stiffly.

  Talitha spun to the nearest acolyte. “Fetch me a stylus and wax tablet, the smallest one you have.”

  The acolyte spun and rushed away.

  “What is it?” Kasrei demanded.

  “I’ll let you know as soon as I do.” She cleared her throat. “If it was more than just Jak’mor…but they obviously wanted Gilsazi…” Talitha looked to her magian and friend. Kasrei was not the only one who could be hurt through Gilsazi.

  Talitha had grown up with Gilsazi. They’d met when they were only eight and ten. She’d taken him from her brother, five years her senior and ensaadi at the time. In time, Gilsazi had become the brother hers never was. He had dried her tears more than once, kept secrets, and stood beside her battle. She depended on him. Perhaps she depended on him too much.

  He was second only to Talitha, commanding entire legions. She had been warned about entrusting too much to him, but he was one of the few she could trust.

  “What else could it be?” Kasrei demanded. “You’ve done nothing to Jak’mor. Ilios has done nothing to Jak’mor.”

  Nothing that they know of.

  The novice returned and breathlessly handed Talitha the wax sheet and stylus she had requested. The ensaadi hastily scratched a few marks into the wax, making sure it was legible. Covering the wax tablet back in its oilskin cover, she returned it to the acolyte. “See this delivered to Chamberlain Shaza. Go.”

  “Shaza?” Kasrei stiffened.

  “Shaza.” Talitha wasn’t ready to have another argument here. “I must inform the ensaak what has happened before I can do anything.” She folded her arms across her chest.

  “That’s it, then? I am to wait?” Kasrei’s voice rose to a shrill pitch. Chinasa began to cry. Kasrei glanced sharply to her daughter, mother’s instincts outweighing grief for a moment.

  “Go home, Kasrei. See to your children. I will send for you.”

  “Yes, but when?” Kasrei demanded. “Gilsazi—”

  “I will do everything I can. Magister Enka!” Talitha shouted into the hallway. No response. Talitha pointed to the acolyte cradling Chinasa. “Give the magister back her child. Send for Magister Enka. Tell her I want her to see Magister Kasrei safely home.”

  “You cannot bustle me off like a petulant child!”

  Talitha inhaled ever so slowly through her nose. “Watch me.” Turning her back, she marched out of the channeling room, Zeroboam at her heels.

  Kasrei screamed, her voice cracking. But she took back the baby. And Talitha wasn’t listening at that point.

  “You allow her to speak to you like that?” Zeroboam asked when they were out of the magian’s archives.

  “I’m giving her grace for today.” Talitha could only hope rumors of it didn’t spread. If word got out she was permitting disrespect from those she had elevated, she would have no choice but to discipline the magian. “Help me find the ensaak.”

  Not that the old man was hard to find.

  Talitha found the ensaak in the counting house where he spent more and more time as the city grew ever richer under his rule. Only recently he had begun to hand some of the accounting duties over to Talitha. In truth, he had handed over the army far easier.

  The soldiers kept Ilios safe, but the water was what truly ruled. Without the water hauled up from the depths of the mines, there was no city to protect.

  The ensaak was in an unassuming tunic with sandals that wrapped up to his knees. The thick hairs on his legs and arms were as white as black, but he was lean and fit as an old lion.

  His hairline had begun to recede when Talitha had still been learning swordplay. Never a man to delay the inevitable, the ensaak had shaved his whole head in what still struck her as an act of defiance.

  A narrow scar marked the back of his scalp, standing out stark and obvious against his shaved head. Talitha had never heard exactly how he’d gotten it, but she often felt she was more familiar with her grandfather’s scar than his face.

  Inside the counting house were rows and rows of transaction records, detailing the sale, spillage, or use of every drop of water for the past forty years. The rows of scrolls rose toward the ceiling on a latticework of shelves with slaves rushing to and fro, dressed much like her grandfather. It had been his idea to begin tracking everything. Since he had ordered construction of the aqueduct system rather than having slaves haul water from the underground lakes, the city’s output had increased threefold.

  There were one thousand jars of water set to be delivered to the ensaak of Mardesh to the north in exchange for a thousand bolts of samite, two thousand stone weights in copper ore, two hundred olive seedlings, and a hundred fig seedlings. It was one of their largest transactions every year. The price had nearly doubled with Talitha securing the eastern trade routes five years ago—one of the few accomplishments her grandfather approved of.

  Great warrior, great ruler, and architect of Ilios’s Golden Age. That was the legacy Talitha had to live up to.

  “Ensaadi,” the ensaak said without looking up from the receipt before him. He heated his seal over a candle before pressing it into the wax at the bottom of the cuneiform tablet.

  “My lord,” Talitha bowed and Zeroboam with her.

  “How is the Lakeshan progressing?”

  Talitha would have preferred not to think of him at the moment. “Naram is young and impatient.”


  “And incompetent.” The ensaak passed the sealed scroll to a clerk who scurried away. “How that boy got your sister with child is a mystery to me. He’s a simpering weanling.” The ruler flattened his hands on his cypress desk, blinking at her.

  Esreth’s recent pregnancy had caused something of a stir. Everyone congratulated the young couple and the family to their faces, but there was concern behind their smiles. The old ensaak would not live forever and neither would Talitha. Worry over succession whispered through the city more every day.

  Talitha couldn’t shake the feeling that her grandfather blamed her for everything that boy did. Esreth had been the one to bed him. The ensaak himself had been the one to welcome Naram into the city. But Talitha’s lack of vigilance had been what allowed the couple’s bonding. She told herself that it was her fault every chance she got. Equal parts guilt and resentment warred in her chest.

  “I am trying to see he does not embarrass us.”

  “He’s already done that.” The ensaak skimmed over the next receipt before heating his seal again. “Try to stop the trend. How fares Shaza?”

  Talitha shifted uncomfortably. Since she had brought the priest’s son into her confidence and made him her chamberlain, rumors had flown like palm leaves in a sandstorm. “He serves me well. Grandfather, General Gilsazi has been captured.”

  The ensaak’s hands paused over the receipt just a moment too long. He passed the sealed document to his left. “What happened?”

  “He was taken by riders along the Fist. Kasrei, their child, and most their guards are fine. There were a handful of injuries and two warriors are dead.” Talitha spoke levelly as she could, fighting not to let her emotions get in the way. “Kasrei thinks it was Jak’mor.”

  “You don’t?” Despite her efforts, the ensaak caught her note of hesitation. He’d been reading people his whole life and had known Talitha for all of hers.

  “I think they were from Kilgal.” There was no point in trying to keep it a secret.

  “Dunedrifters, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “Hmm.”

  Talitha cleared her throat. She could face down entire armies without flinching, but this man…