Chapter 219: Empty Spear

They came over the last ridge with the Suns still asleep behind the horizon.

The caravan stopped in a dry gully, half a mile short of the faction’s camp.

The mules stamped and blew as the drivers climbed down and began to unhitch in the quiet, making it obvious that they had done this many times before now, without any hesitation.

Malik stayed in the wagon and watched the others work.

Nobody told him what to do.

Rather, nobody looked at him much at all.

A one-armed man in a rag was part of the cargo, as far as they were concerned, and he was glad of it.

The broad-shouldered Guard from the cave slid the false bottom out of the nearest wagon.

Swords lay inside in neat rows, wrapped in oiled cloth. The young officer beside him took them one at a time and passed them down the line, his hands now steady.

He had slept.

Malik had heard him snoring through the wall of the cave.

"The scouts are back..."

Safira was walking towards them before the murmur.

There were three scouts, crouched in a ring around her, each speaking in a low voice.

Malik drifted closer with a waterskin in his hand, as if he had been sent to fill it.

"Ninety men, my lady..."

The first one spoke.

"It was a hundred and fifty at the last strike. We were only a few men; without you, I’m sure we can kill many more of them this time."

"Where are they camped?"

"In the old riverbed, a mile east. High banks on both sides. There’s one way in from the road and one way out through the wadi."

"Watch?"

"Four at the road, six on the north bank. They change at sunrise. The south bank has nobody; they think the cliff is enough."

Safira nodded slowly.

"And the hostage?"

The second scout shifted his feet.

"She’s in the middle, my lady. Tied to a tent pole, even her hands and feet are chained. She still doesn’t move much."

Safira’s mouth tightened.

"Is she hurt?"

"Her feet from all that walking under the Suns. They didn’t heal her yet, and I couldn’t see more than that."

Malik lowered the waterskin.

He felt fire rise in his chest, but he laid his hand flat against his ribs and waited until it settled.

Something he repeated very often in the last day.

"There’s something else."

The third scout added on.

He hesitated, being the youngest, glancing at the older scouts as if hoping one of them would take the sentence from him.

"Go on, you can say it."

"T-There’s a big tent by the pole. Red cloth. There are two guards at the flap, even in the daytime. We heard them talking, and they keep a..."

He stopped.

"They keep a ’trophy’ inside."

The air changed.

Nobody said the word.

It sat there between them in the cold gray light, and the gully was suddenly very quiet.

The Guard’s hand had stopped on the hilt of a sword. The officer was staring at the ground.

All of the others present showed similar reactions.

Safira’s was the most subtle yet hardest to look at.

Her face went pale.

The color left it slowly, from the forehead down.

Thin lips of a pink color began to tremble.

"They have his head, don’t they?"

It was barely a whisper.

Malik stood very still.

’My head.’

He held the thought, because it was an odd one.

Right, he had been wearing the head in question for many odd years.

He was fairly sure it was still attached, yes, yes, he was certain.

Lifting his good hand, he touched his jaw behind the rag, and found it exactly where he had left it.

So what was in that tent?

An illusion? A body they had stolen from the field? Something worse, something that IT had stitched together out of the wreckage and left on the hill to be found? He did not know.

Malik could feel nothing from the camp at this distance, only a faint place with no Rukh in it.

It was not a comfortable feeling.

He kept it to himself.

"We will not let them keep it..."

Safira’s voice came back before her mind did.

"We take Huda first. Then, if we can... if it’s true, we take him home."

That was her promise to him.

Malik had to look away.

...

The plan was simple.

Safira drew it in the dirt with the point of a knife, and the cohort gathered around her in a tight ring.

Twenty-two of them: Faraja, Guard of the Fifth, soldiers, and a handful of quick-handed scouts.

They knelt in the gray light and listened without interrupting.

"Remember, as much as we want to, we do not fight them; we cannot afford to. A hundred deaths would leave a mark for them to follow, and that will cost us everyone. So we do not give them the chance to make it a fight."

She tapped the road.

"Wagons one and two go in through the checkpoint. Merchant papers, Layla’s seals, the usual cumin and complaints. They will want to inspect the load; let them, that is when we strike."

She tapped the north bank.

"Six archers on the ridge. Tariq’s team takes them quietly, before the watch changes. Make sure that none of them scream. If somebody screams, we have already lost."

She tapped the south bank, where the line ended in a smear.

"They have nobody on the south cliff, having decided it too steep for anyone interested in them to climb. A logical decision, but unfortunately for them, we are no mere stragglers."

They all nodded at those words.

"I will go with the second group. When the arrows are set loose, we go down the south bank, cut the pole, take Huda, and leave through the wadi before the first horn sounds. Three minutes, not four. If we are still there at four, we have done something wrong."

"And our strength?"

One of them asked.

"How much of it do we reveal?"

Safira thought about it for a moment.

"Only what we need to open the door."

She looked around the circle.

"If we burn too bright, the Order will see it. They are searching for light. We must look like a handful of ordinary raiders who got lucky."

She paused.

"Does everyone understand?"

Twenty-two heads nodded.

"Good."

She stood and wiped her palms on her trousers.

"Then we go before the Suns."

...

Malik was given the cargo.

It was the young officer who did it, a little awkwardly, with the look of a man handing a stranger a chore he did not want to hand over.

"You’re with the third wagon. You keep the mules calm, and you keep your head down, and if anything goes wrong, you drive back the way we came. Understand?"

"I understand."

"You don’t have to do anything else."

"I know."

"Good."

The young officer hesitated.

His eyes moved over the empty sleeve, and something like pity crossed his face.

"It’s a good job. Somebody has to do it."

"I will manage."

He nodded and walked off.

The Sultan of Devil’s Maw, who was just pitied by a nameless officer, climbed back onto the wagon seat, took the reins in his left hand, and made himself comfortable.

A mule snorted at him.

He looked at it for a while.

The mule looked back, unimpressed.

"Don’t worry, I’m going to do exactly as I’m told."

It was not an entirely honest sentence.

...

Malik watched the cohort divide.

Two wagons rolled out towards the road with their awnings flapping. The archers’ team slipped off along the northern ridge in single file, their cloaks the color of the rocks.

A third group went west, and Safira walked at the head of it with her braid swinging down her back.

She did not look at him as she passed.

He watched her go.

Then he turned his attention to the camp.

It lay at the bottom of a wide, dry riverbed, as the scout had said. The banks rose steep on both sides, a dozen feet of crumbling clay.

Tents stood in uneven rows between them, patched and sun-bleached, with red and yellow rags hanging limply from the poles.

Fires smoked low in the middle.

A few dozen horses were tethered in a line along the north bank, their heads drooping, barely awake.

At the center, a tall red tent stood by itself.

Two guards flanked its flap.

Beside it, a short post had been driven into the ground, with a figure sitting in the dirt at its base.

Malik’s grip tightened on the reins.

His little sister was small from this distance.

She wore what was left of a pink dress. Her hair had lost its shine and hung in dull ropes around her face, and her hands were bound before her in iron.

More iron circled her ankles.

She sat with her legs stretched out and her back against the post, exactly as the scout had said.

Her head was tilted slightly to one side.

She was staring at an empty spear.