They continued along the highway now descended back onto that largely featureless plain, Havec alone with his thoughts. He found himself wondering just how hard it was going to be to fit in back home. He wasn’t about to tell anyone how he’d passed the last six years, but he realized now that he didn’t have to discuss his story in detail for people to grasp that he had changed. As a boy, he had been bookish, respectful, inclined to be quiet especially in a crowd. He had loved to go hunting with his father, but that was as martial as he got. In other words, he had been nothing like himself. And what about Kebbal, could you tell from the outside it was there?
First, he reminded himself, we make someone suffer for selling us to the bonding-broker. Then, we can worry about everything else.
A Crash Course in the Necromantic Arts
Two days after their brush with the siren, they came upon something Havec had never seen before: a city. Perched at the height of the last approach as the sun set, they gazed down upon it while they argued their next move. Havec gave the conversation only half his mind, too invested in admiring the view. The settlement below them was vast, sitting in the lap of a broad river valley. Between here and there, the gently-sloping land was covered in a checkerboard of farmland, the plants still small at this season so the soil beneath was everywhere visible amidst the new green shoots. He caught the occasional flash of dying daylight off the river, a slow silty flow in no rush to reach the sea.
The city was a mosaic of sepia, broken intermittently by a tree’s green head. There must be banners flying the Empire’s colors, but he couldn’t make them out from here. It was surprisingly quiet, even accounting for the distance, and he didn’t understand why there weren’t more people on the road. “Why are there no people? Is there a curfew?”
“Dareh is mostly deserted, it has been for hundreds of years.” The barely-patient way she said it made him suspect she had already said it more than once.
“But it’s…” Right there, large as life.
“Most of that,” she gestured down into the valley, “is empty. The people left, but houses don’t fit in a cart.”
“They had to leave them behind. But why?”
Qanath scratched at her shoulder, frowning at the horizon thoughtfully. “Something happened, I can’t remember what. Something to do with money, it always is. Taxes got too high, crops failed. There was a big boom elsewhere.”
“You don’t mean this has happened before?”
“You were commenting on how empty the Old Country is. Nizerh managed to hold on because there are still people and resources here and it’s the fastest way to get those people and resources to busier places.” She was silent for a moment, then added, “It’s filling back up. The Old Country. Fa says there’s been over-fishing in Lake Plestine and troubles on the border in Ay. There are always troubles on the border with Ay, but anyway.”
Havec shrugged, unsure how to articulate the nature of his surprise.
“So?” she demanded, impatient with the conversation. “I want to sleep in a bed and eat a hot meal.”
“Me too. Can your sorcery turn my hair dark red and darken my skin by several shades?”
She gave him a look before slinging her bag off her shoulder. She knelt over it, rummaging, and when she stood up again, she handed him something. Havec turned it about in his hands, examining the broad-brimmed, floppy hat of dark blue felt. “You jest.”
“Are you seriously going to demand we sleep rough when we don’t have to because you’re afraid of looking frumpy?”
Choosing to answer with action, he put the hat on. Then he spread his arms. “Just another Tabbi?”
Qanath snorted. “It hides your hair, anyway.”
They set off down the hill without further debate as the sun sank into the west. Havec mostly had his eyes on the approaching city, but he did glance at the girl beside him once or twice. He was wondering if he was jealous of her; he had been bookish as a child, back before the world turned upside down. It was strange to remember, recollections of another person he could scarcely envision who had little in common with the him he was now.
Spring was only just transitioning from tentative promise to fact, and the sun still set relatively early, bringing immediate darkness. Night was settling upon Tabbaqera as they finally drew near to the gates, and brought with it an unpleasant surprise: standing within the pools of freshly-kindled lamplight, soldiers were revealed. It was hard to imagine why they would be standing motionless at the entrance to the city if they weren’t keeping guard.
He slowed down when he noticed them but didn’t obey his instinct to turn on his heel and flee. Nothing short of walking up to those soldiers and spitting on them was more likely to catch their attention and earn their distrust than running. He and Qanath weren’t the only people on the road anymore, not this close; the foot traffic was still sparse, but they were no longer alone. He had the sense that he was mostly looking at farmers going home after a day in the fields. So far as he could tell, the soldiers at the gates barely glanced at them.
His shoulders remained stiff with wariness as they drew closer, but he didn’t argue again that they should cut through the wilderness and regain the road on the city’s other side. It was less the evidence that the gate-wardens were lackadaisical than it was a desire to get a closer look at the gates themselves. He was beginning to get a sense of the size of the walls, and it was awe-inspiring.
He bowed his head as they passed between the handful of uniformed people holding spears and looking bored, casting down his foreign eyes. He was almost certain he saw someone’s head turn to follow him, as if they had noted the pallor of his visible skin or thought to wonder what he needed so many weapons for. Until that moment, it hadn’t occurred to him that they might have laws about going armed. Either weapons weren’t a privilege restricted to the worthy here or these were abysmal gate-guards, because no one made a move to stop him as he passed through.
He picked his head back up the moment they were in. Not in the city: in the walls. What he had been thinking of as a door was more on the order of a tunnel, a few torches casting light and blackened patches onto the enclosing mudbrick face. He tipped his head back, gauging the height of the ceiling. The smooth arch, far enough above the torches to remain in shadow, was so tall he could have stood on his own shoulders.
The instant they passed back into the night, Havec turned around. The walls around this city were brown brick, ugly and dull, but the sheer size of them defied derisive judgment. They had endured, it was there in every weathered inch of them. That was all they had needed to prove.
When he turned around, he found Qanath watching him, chafing her hands together as if she were less certain about this scheme of hers than she had led him to believe. He wanted to look around a bit now they were here, but it was dark already. “Food?”
“I don’t know where to go.”
“Well, we could stand here all night.”
“You’re such a jerk!”
“Low-hanging fruit,” he muttered, shrugging his pack up on his shoulders and setting off into town. It was a strange place, the ways well-lit as befitted an urban center, yet even now they were within its embrace, weirdly quiet. It looked as if the people who had lingered after the exodus lived in a tight cluster around the one still-functioning gate. Although they rattled around in the city, they could have founded a decent-sized town.
Snatches of conversation and the odors of cooking food tantalized them. Havec led the way, casting back and forth down every intersection because they didn’t have a better plan. The buildings were small and mostly humble, brown stone or brown brick. Twice, though, they passed through intersections graced by monuments, one a two-story stele covered in verdigrised copper script, the other a bulky, bear-like figure standing on its hind legs holding a spear. The buildings were packed shoulder-to-shoulder, separated by the rare ally and even less often by a bed of flowers or vegetable patch. The streets were sparsely peopled, and at all times he was conscious of the deserted city beyond, its stillness and ominous quiet leaning like a weight on the mind.
“Here.”
The girl had pulled him to a halt before a building, large and solid, its shutters closed. When the door opened to release someone into the night, a wave of sound washed out in his wake. Laughter and the clink of pottery lapped around them before the door swung shut, but both of them hesitated.
Standing here feeling anxious wasn’t going to fill their stomachs, so Havec slung his bag onto the street and crouched over it. He groped all the way to the bottom before his fingers closed around his purse. Digging a handful of coins out at random, he passed them over to the girl. “I’m starving. Buy as much food as you can carry.”
“Havec…”
“Look.” He took a step closer and lowered his voice. “I made it past the guards with no questions, but that room is going to be way better lit. If we sit in there for twenty minutes eating, that’s twenty minutes people have to notice I don’t fit in.”
Qanath rolled her eyes impatiently. “And if they don’t have food I can carry away?”
He couldn’t imagine why they wouldn’t. “Do what you can.”
Uttering another gusty sigh to make it clear to him how little liking she had for this plan, she did at last take the coins and vanish through the door. Seizing up her abandoned bag, Havec moved to the opposite side of the street and leaned against a wall. He straightened a moment later, snapping his fingers because he couldn’t remain still. She would be fine, she wasn’t doing anything perilous or illegal; the entire point was that he would attract attention at even so mundane a chore and she wouldn’t. He still felt as if he had sent her into a trap in his place: a little bit a coward, a little bit a traitor.
