A Time of Ghosts Read online

  Just the slightest chance…that was all she asked, just the slenderest of opportunities to escape and return to Lyand, to take revenge for the defilement of her body.

  Shigarra was short and fat, swathed in princely silk with a flowing band of Lyandian cotton around his cropped, fair hair. He might have been from Xandrone, or from Kahrsaam. He was not a eunuch, which was unusual for a slave-master.

  The other slavers were of more obvious extraction, mostly southern, although a mulatto—take from Sly, probably as a child—rode with them and used his three-pronged whip with almost childish enjoyment. Mostly they were wrapped round in black, skin-tight clothes, high boots on their muscular legs, wide sashes tied around their portly waists, above their weapon-slings. All but the slave-master carried straight, narrow-bladed swords of Vartha’an extraction, slung, for the moment, from the pommels of their saddles. Their eyes were narrow and tired as if they hated life. But this was all the life they would know, or ever be offered. If they rejected it they might find themselves on the wrong side of a twenty-link chain, bound for the game pits in Yr.

  As the shuffling column moved further south, across the rolling hills, sometimes ankle deep in soft sand, so envious and angry eyes watched them.

  At the head of the train, Shigarra passed between high rocks and glanced around as if he sensed eyes upon him, but he saw nothing. The carts of metal goods rolled and rattled behind him, and the moaning complaints of the slaves drifted up into the hot air. He stopped between the rocks and drank lengthily from his canteen of cool water, wiping his lips on the silken magnificence of his robe’s sleeve. He laughed to think of the commission he would take on this price train: thirteen warriors, and two virgin girls. This was the best bunch of slaves he had acquired for over a year.

  He didn’t know it, for the moment, but somewhere in the rocks around him an arrow was nocked and the string drawn tense against the springy wood of the bow; an eye sighted along the arrow’s shaft, and Shigarra’s fat neck was the target.

  But Shigarra rode on abruptly, and the tension in the bow relaxed.

  In the same way that a carrion bird senses the final breath of a dying animal on the rocks below, Karmana sensed that help was near. In the same way that a Xand can smell water when still ten kli from the water-hole, so Karmana, with her northern tribal instincts, smelled the warriors who crouched in the rocks beside the slave-train, following it stealthily, biding their time.

  The girl smiled, shook back her sweat-soaked black hair so she might watch the rocks with unrestricted vision. Her smile was half of pleasure, and half of resignation. As likely as not the invisible men who waited to spring would be bandits or barbarians who would see the slaves as things to be killed or enjoyed while they sorted through the metalware on the cards. But there was always the hope that they would be rescued by more compassionate men…there was always that slim, that distant hope.

  The slavehounds sensed the trackers too. They yelped and howled, strained at their metal leashes, pawing the air until they were dragged forward by the impatient slavers who led them. The dogs had been noisy all journey, and in that simple fact lay the slavers’ slender hope, for Shigarra ignored the warning signs and rode slowly on.

  As she walked, her legs aching now, her feet blistered with the heat of the rocks and sand and punctured by the spiky grass, so Karmana watched the hiding places on each side, not seeing the men who darted between them, not hearing them, but knowing they were there. As a desert rat knows when the sand snake is watching it, and runs for its life, so Karmana knew that this train was destined to travel no more than half a kli before it was dissolved.

  Ahead of them, blurred and rippling in the head haze she could see a narrow passage between high, crystalline rocks.

  If she were free she would strike this sorry band there. She would have men ready to kill the rock-riders (already galloping ahead of the train) who would check the rocks for safety. Her men would change robes quickly, and from the indistinct heights they would beckon the slave train on, southwards through the channel, towards steel and whip, and the baying pleasure of the crowds.

  And then she would strike!

  Perhaps she made a noise of ecstasy as she imagined their escape. A whispered voice urged her quiet and she turned her head to see who had spoken.

  The tall, white-haired warrior walked there, his moon-steel eyes watching her intently, warningly. Karmana shivered beneath that gaze, and turned away from him, but his image remained before her eyes: lean, yet strong, a man of immense power. His body was scarred, his pale skin raised in thin white lines that traced across his flesh like cracks in him—he was a man who had known the proximity of death a thousand times and by skill, and strength, had survived it.

  His instincts were as sharp as the girl’s. He too had sense the men in the rocks.

  Karmana turned again and made a scant acknowledgement to him. As the slave group approached the high rocks she found her heart beating hard and fast. The rock-riders appeared distantly and waved Shigarra on. Karmana squinted and concentrated on the figures, but it was impossible to tell whether they were the same men who had ridden off moments before.

  She could smell the excitement on the air…her own, perhaps, and all the steel-eyed man’s behind her, and perhaps the excitement of all the men and women who were chained with her, for all of them probably knew, in their own alien ways, that salvation was at hand. All knew that they had a brief chance for escape, even if the raiders turned out to be bandits more interested in the riches the train carried than in doing favours for the slaves.

  A tense silence fell about the group as they started to walk between the rocks. The slavehounds howled and whined, but perhaps sensed the pointlessness of their warning, and a few of them began to cower as they walked, fearing the death that they could already smell.

  They had gone no more than forty paces into the coolness of the narrow way when Shigarra held up his hand and called a halt. He looked up to where the rock-riders were still waving at him, indicating that all was well. Karmana looked too, and though she could not be sure, this time she imagined there was something about the men above them that spoke not of Lyand, but of the right sort of treachery.

  “We shall rest here for just a while,” called Shigarra.

  Karmana should have known. He would not pass shade when the slaves were so tired. It would make the rest all the more valuable to take it in the cool.

  The slaves sat on the ground in a rough circle so they might talk among themselves. They were given water but no food by the slavers who walked around them, grinning. The slavehounds howled but were shouted into silence and given strips of dried meat to chew.

  Shigarrra did not smile as he watched his captives from a distance. His gaze lingered on the women, a hateful gaze that stripped them and assessed them for their physical beauty. He was a grossly fat man, and malice streaked his face like sweat. Karmana, studying him closely, noticed that he wore his sabre in a strange way, with the blade curved forwards; she suddenly realised what this meant, for it was a telling way to wear a sword of that nature. Few warriors considered themselves sufficiently skilled with weapons that they could brag the fact in this peculiar way adopted by the Sons of Lorn. Karmana, her eyes and mind alive for every detail, had never been to Lorn in the east, but the storytellers of her own lands had often spoken of the desert kings, and the tribes that swept from place to place in the kingdom, destroying all infiltrators they might meet. Shigarra, she now realised, was an outcast from that society, and not from Xandrone or Kahrsaam at all. She suspected that his girth and shortness had caused his ejection from the fiercely proud desert tribes. No doubt he had been welcomed by Lyand, for the City States welcomed all useful things that were given freely.

  Shigarra walked among the resting slaves and stood close to Karmana, looking around him.

  “Which is the woman who was known by the Weaponmaster in Lyand? Which is she? Answer or you shall all know mutilation here and now!”

  Hi
s voice gave lie to his coolness; he was wretched and breathless with the desire for flesh.

  The threat of mutilation was abhorrent to the slaves, and taken very seriously. Only the naïve would not know that some mutilation did not affect the price of a slave, for such a punishment was too useful to be allowed to be damaging.

  As he spoke, the slave-master looked about him, his dark eyes intense with anticipation and growing anger.

  No slave made a sound.

  Shigarra drew his sabre and rested it lightly against chained hands of one of the men near him. “Which is she?” he repeated.

  The slave stared at the blade for a second, and then lifted terrified eyes to the slave-master. “Not my hands…please…”

  Karmana was astonished. Was this man so intense in his lust that he would not only mutilate but make worthless a male slave? A finger she had expected to fall, but hands? It made little sense.

  There was a sound like wind. Shigarra had moved just slightly, the blade tossed between his hands and passed around his back, sweeping to the front again in an instant, its cutting edge glistening red.

  The slave screamed, staggered to his feet and stared insanely at the blood spurting from the stumps of his writs. The chains slipped from where his hands had held them, and a moment later he was dragged away by two slavers and quickly put to death.

  A momentary shadow passed across Shigarra’s fat face as if he sensed the recklessness of the waste; then he turned back to the slaves and rested his blade against a second man.

  Karmana started with discomfort as she recognized the man with eyes like moon-steel, he who had quietened her earlier. His composure dissolved in an instant to be replaced by raw panic. He glanced just briefly at Karmana, then looked away, looked down. His pale skin went even paler and beneath his strange clothing Karmana could see he was shaking.

  For that, my friend, I shall save your life.

  Though it repelled her to do so, Karmana rose to her feet.

  “It was I.”

  The slave-master turned to stare at her, then grinned and sheathed his sabre. He walked to her, licking his red painted lips and pulled apart the folds of his robe.

  “Excellent,” he said. “Beautiful as well as—on the evidence—passionate.”

  With a single motion he tore Karmana’s shift from her body, looked at her full breasts and narrow waist.

  “Get on your knees,” he said. “I believe in entertaining everyone, even slaves.”

  He laughed loudly as Karmana, anxious only to remain alive, dropped to her knees and felt Shigarra’s fingers entangle themselves in her hair, pulling her face on to his body.

  His eyes closed and his gasps were of pure pleasure. Karmana tried to think of anything but what she was doing, but a bitter resentment rose in her, like a sap in young tree, and she grew angry, knowing that she would have to kill this man.

  She was above to move, to bite him far harder than he expected and slaughter him in the instant of his agony, when Shigarra made a strange noise. Warm wetness splashed down Karmana’s back and she released the slave-master, leaned back and looked up…

  * * *

  The arrow had struck him through the neck, bursting from his throat in a spray of red, but lodging there, its wide-bladed head dripping gore. Shigarra tried to scream, but the wind tube from his lungs was severed and he fell across Karmana, a threshing, gurgling figure in ballooning silk robes. His final spasmodic action, as Karmana squirmed from under him, was to snap the broad stone blade of the arrow from its dark polished shaft. His fingers clenched on the crude weapon as he died in agony, drowning on his own body fluids as they poured into his lungs and clotted.

  The slaves shouted and lay down on the ground. Karmana yelled her triumph, but prudently dropped to a crouch among her comrades. She watched as figures leapt from the rocks, or rode on snorting horses to block both entrances to the gorge.

  The Lyand slavers drew their cruelly sharp swords and used them first to cut free the slavehounds, which leapt as so many dark shapes at the raiders and were soon cut down. Steel clashed with steel, then, and life ended with a shriek, and a spume of blood from the spouting tubes exposed across the width of a headless neck. Bodies hit the desert and crimson stained the yellow. Horses reared and screeched, and some tripped, legs tangled in the spilled entrails of their riders.

  It was over swiftly. The prone slaves rose to stare up at their new masters.

  Seven riders there were, three of them women, four of them men. They sat easily across the broad backs of their mounts, and rested bloodstained weapons across the saddle, learning forward to catch their breaths and smile at the silent men and woman before them.

  Karmana called out, quickly, taking the initiative. “We thank you for that. But now what are your intentions? Are we still slaves?”

  One of the skirmishers laughed. He was dark skinned and unshaven, his long black hair hanging lank and greasy about his neck, tied back from his face with a green headband. By his creased and war-beaten leather armour Karman recognized him as being from her own part of the world…but from which tribe did he come?

  “Slaves to revenge, if you wish,” he called back to her. He was aware of her nudity, and his eyes roved appreciatively along her body. He had not sensed a fellow countrywoman in her as yet. “But not slaves to powerful men, not now, nor ever again.”

  Carrion birds settled on the rocks, gazed hungrily at the scattered corpses, then cast uneasy glances at the throng of living humans. Their cries were piercing and unsettling.

  The dark haired man dismounted and came towards Karmana. He carried and unusual implement, two blades joined close to the tips; with these he cut easily through the chains that bound her. When she was free, massaging her wrists gratefully, he began to cut the chains from the others.

  “I am Silver,” he said as he walked along the lines of slaves. “I was a slave once, just like you. We all were,” he waved the tool towards the other riders who grinned in acknowledgement. “In turn we owe our freedom to a fine warrior, a fine woman…” He winked at the man whose bonds he cut. The man grinned.

  “You are led by a woman?” said Karmana, intrigued. “By what name?”

  Silver smiled, peered up into the bright sky above the rocky passage. All eyes followed his.

  “There! Look!”

  Above them a great black bird spiraled about the blue, riding the rising winds, soaring and twisting in a luxury of ease. “What sort of a bird would you say that was?”

  “A raven?” said Karmana, squinting against the brightness. “Though its beak is unusual, the bird is more raven than any other.”

  “And Raven is the name of our leader,” said Silver. “A golden-haired warrior who bides her time, riding the vortices of wind and rain and war and peace, bides her time until the time is right, and then she strikes! Like the black-feathered raven yonder, who is her guardian. Black and gold, my friends, united into deadly steel.”

  “I’ve heard of this Raven,” said Karmana. “They say she rides with a warlock, and between them they are virtually invincible. They say she was once a slave, as we were slaves. I would give much to fight with her, to follow her…”

  Silver slapped her on the shoulder. “Well said my tall and dark-eyed friend. To follow her, to fight with her, you must needs give your life, for that is what she asks. But while you live, you will live as a free woman. A fine bargain, I would have thought, for a woman such as you who has once, if only once, demonstrated such weakness as allowing herself to be taken prisoner.”

  Irritated by being reminded of that fact, Karmana said, “It shall never happen again, this I swear by the Seven Tribes! If your Raven will take me into her band I shall fight until fate decides I drop.”

  Silver was staring at her closely, recognising her origins for the first time and not, apparently, pleased with what he sensed. “You are from the Tribes of Dubthag, in the far north?”

  Karmana smiled and affirmed. She glanced at Silver’s clothes again, notice
d the bronze-trimmed black wood sword and a shadow passed across her face. She met his gaze again, but said nothing.

  Silver turned to the pale-skinned man who stood watching him. He appraised the man’s appearance, stared into the moon-steel eyes and wilted beneath the steady gaze. “Here’s a man,” he said, “whose eyes are as sharp and cutting as his sword. You have the bearing of a warrior, but not the muscle. Nevertheless you would be welcome to ride with us.”

  The strange man shook his head slowly. He said nothing and the silence made Silver uncomfortable.

  Silver asked him, “How are you known?”

  “As Moonshadow,” said the man. “My real name may not be spoken at the moment.”

  “Moonshadow,” echoed Silver, turning from the man. He seemed uneasy. “A good name for a strange man. A strange name. A strong name.”

  Karmana said, “Where is Raven? Did she fight with you?”

  “Indeed she did,” said Silver, brightening from his momentary shadow. “She it was who dispatched the slave-master with the first arrow shot. She is chasing horses that bolted…Raven?” he called, his voice echoing in the still place.

  “Here!” came the answering voice, and the other riders eased their horses to one side as a figure on horseback approached along the narrow gorge, leading two stray steeds by their reins. As the woman rode nearer so a ripple of excitement passed through the slaves, an excitement that grew as they were able to more clearly regard this warrior called Raven.

  She had tied back her hair with a circlet of platinum, as bright in the sun as the gleam in her pale eyes. Her sword hung naked from slings, not in its sheath, and the dark blood on its blade told of the part she had played in the short and bitter massacre. When she swung herself from the leather saddle, and stood smiling and regarding the rescued slaves, the men who returned her gaze could not help their speechless admiration of this full-breasted, magnificent woman. Some of them knelt before her, others dropped their eyes as if they insulted her by their open lust. Karmana regarded Raven coolly, but with envy, for only a beautiful woman can fully appreciate the great beauty of another.