The Past The Fire
It was not realized at the time that the Arike cavalry was much feared by the southern legions.
They made a strange whooping cry before attacking, not always from the direction in which they were advancing from, and the Hierarchs’ people learned to fear it.
The Arike had always prided themselves on the fact that their ancestors had ceased warring with each other because they were in danger of wiping out their own cities.
It is not known how many outside the Arik believed this until they saw them sweep down on a legion and leave it a field of corpses for their horses to eat.
—Account by an Ilveri scholar, traveling with Prince-heir Hiranan
Kai lifted a hand to make the Saredi signal for hidden enemy ahead. Somewhere behind the rise of the next hill and its scarred rocky slope, a booted foot had slipped on gravel.
Behind him, he heard Salatel slide almost soundlessly out of her saddle. The knee-high grass muffled the footsteps of Arsha and Telare and the clawed, padded feet of their horses. It was barely after dawn in the grassy hills of the Northern Arik and they were hunting an expositor.
Kai slipped off his own horse and dropped the reins.
The animal made a quiet huff but didn’t try to bite him.
Arike horses were omnivores, though they could subsist on grasses and grains; it was relatively easy to teach them to be quiet and stand still on command, since that was how they stalked mice and lizards.
Kai moved forward, placing each foot carefully.
He was barefoot so he could feel the rocks through the grass, and he had tucked one side of his long skirt up through his belt.
Nirana and Hartel were further back, watching the stretch of road the expositor had been foolish enough to try to make for.
Cerala currently limped down that road, leading her horse, pretending to be injured prey for an expositor desperate to leave this area quickly.
He doesn’t know how stupid he would have to be to want that horse, Nirana had said earlier, leaning away as the beast in question tried to bite her head. We should let it eat him.
Kai edged around the steep side of the hill without starting any small avalanches of dirt and pebbles.
This was one wall of a small defile, and the grass was full of sediment carried by a little seasonal stream that ran down from a spring further upslope somewhere.
Ahead, where the defile opened up, the dusty stone of the road stretched across the more even ground heading toward the next clump of low hills.
Cerala limped slowly into Kai’s view, making her apparently painful way along with her disgruntled horse.
Between Kai and the road was the expositor.
He was a tall, muscled figure, dark hair bound up in an elaborate bun and dressed in the southern style of clothing, very like what Arike men wore, but the long shirt went down nearly to his knees and the skirt barely reached past it.
Bright threads in the weaving caught the sun, even under the dust and bloodstains.
The expositor had stopped where the trickle of the stream hit a half-buried boulder, entirely focused on Cerala.
Then his right hand moved, fingers bending in a way that looked painful, unnatural.
He was building a design for an intention.
Kai couldn’t approach quietly down the streambed—not and reach him before he set the intention loose. But it wasn’t like Kai’s fighting technique relied on subtlety. He crouched and leapt.
He landed halfway down the slope at the water’s gravelly edge.
As the startled expositor swung around and in reflex threw the intention, Kai dropped and slid down the muddy stream bed.
The intention went over his head in a cloud of concentrated malice.
Kai catapulted upright and threw himself forward.
He hit the expositor’s midsection and they both flew downslope.
They struck the rocks to the side of the stream, Kai on top.
The expositor shoved and punched at Kai’s head, almost knocking him sideways.
Kai was lean where this man was bulky, but fighting fair had never been part of the plan.
Kai ducked, wrenched the expositor’s collar down until his knuckles brushed bare skin, and drew out his life.
The man made a strangled cry and sagged. Kai pressed his forearm to the expositor’s throat and pinned the flailing hand that wasn’t twisted under his knee. The expositor gaped up at him, shocked and offended even through terror. He gagged, throat working as he tried to speak.
Bashasa was always trying to pound into everyone’s brains that if it was possible to get information before killing a high-ranking Hierarchs’ dog, then get it. Kai eased up enough on the man’s windpipe for him to be able to speak.
“Demon,” the expositor gasped out. “How dare you— Let me up, I command you— Who allowed you—”
Kai sneered, trying to look like one of the captive, subjugated demons who fought for the Hierarchs. He had never managed to see any yet; if there were any in this region, they weren’t sent out with the legionary patrols. He said, “Clumsy on someone’s part, to let me loose. Guess who it was?”
The man’s eyes narrowed. “Is Vartasias your master? Did he send you after me?”
This was the first time Kai had managed to get another expositor’s name, and it was even more intriguing that it was one apparently associated with captive demons. “I wouldn’t be a very obedient demon if I revealed all my master’s secrets,” Kai stalled while trying to think of what else to say.
“Is he at Dashar now? What does he want of me?”
Dashar was a fort near Descar-arik on the coast. “Are there demons at Dashar?” Kai knew it was a mistake as soon as the words came out, but it was too late.
“You weren’t sent…” The man’s face went on a whole journey through outrage, horror, disgust. “The dross have their own demons.” He said it in realization, not as if he was talking to Kai. “How do they control you, tell me—”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Kai tried.
The expositor’s expression turned cunning. “I can be a valuable prisoner. Take me to your masters, they’ll surely reward you.”
If only that were possible. Expositors were just too dangerous to keep alive.
“Maybe, if you tell me what that intention does.” But Kai felt the stir of another intention forming.
He huffed out an annoyed breath. He couldn’t afford to let the expositor set an intention on him, no matter how much information the man might have.
“I’ll just have to figure it out for myself.
” And he drained the rest of the man’s life.
The body sank into a desiccated husk, and Kai clambered to his feet, trying not to slip on the wet rock.
At least he hadn’t landed in the stream, which might have made the fight more difficult.
Though with the underearth still closed to him, it was hard to tell.
Salatel was at the top of the defile now.
She said encouragingly, “Did he say anything, Fourth Prince?”
“A little, he gave me a name.” Kai wasn’t pleased with his effort. He should have been able to prolong the conversation but subterfuge wasn’t something that came naturally to him. “Don’t come down yet, there’s an intention here somewhere.”
She signaled that she understood and retreated back to gather the others.
Kai searched for the intention, stepping back and forth over the stream and slipping on the slick mud along the shallow bank.
He found it sunk deep in the grass just above where his first leap had taken him.
Invisible to mortal eyes, it looked to Kai like a word in a language he didn’t understand, written in sunlight melted over the green stalks.
He poked it a little, but he would have to unravel the design to understand what it did, and that took time.
He lifted it carefully and set it on his chest for safekeeping, along with the four others he was saving from the battle last night.
“You can come down now,” he said, and Salatel and the others started the awkward climb to join him.
Arsha and Telare went ahead to join Cerala, stepping matter-of-factly past the corpse.
They were well used to Kai’s method of fighting now; he wasn’t sure how much they had been appalled by it, since the first time they saw it he had been killing Cantenios, an expositor who would have murdered all of them.
However they felt, they had never objected.
Kai and Salatel searched the corpse while Nirana and Hartel kept watch further up the hill. There would be scatters of lost legionaries out here too, survivors of the running battle that had started in the south toward Seidel-arik.
After the evacuation of Benais-arik, Bashasa had been luring the legionaries to places where he wasn’t, making them split and exhaust their forces in this part of the Arik, setting traps where he could.
This battle had been aimed at distracting the Seidel-arik legionary garrison and allowing the artisan guilds in the city to smuggle out refugees and supplies.
Kai dug through the pockets in the expositor’s richly embroidered coat, tossing things to Salatel to look at more closely once he was sure they were safe for her to touch.
“No maps, no letters,” he concluded, pushing to his feet.
He stretched his back with a wince. Until he had ended up in this body, he had no idea how much being even ten or so years older affected mortals.
This was probably part of the reason Bashasa drank.
“I wonder how much they’re trusted with valuable information,” Salatel said, dusting her hands as she stood. “I think the expositors they send out on patrols are not much prized.”