The sun was low in the sky and a cool wind had sprung up by the time Rustan tethered his camel near an animal enclosure on the outskirts of Jethwa. Tents sprouted everywhere on the barren fields surrounding the village; he was stunned by the sheer number of soldiers and camp followers the Taus had gained. Many hundreds, he decided. Close to two thousand.
His journey to Jethwa had taken a little less than a week. He had retrieved Basil in Igiziyar, then left him in Yartan in the care of a camel herder, with instructions to bring him to Kashgar with the next caravan. He had not gone to the camp of Khur; it would have added days to his travel time, and every hour he wasted surely brought his teacher closer to death. But in Yartan he had sent a missive to Barkav, using a simple code he had been taught, outlining what he had learned from the Seeing Stone. From Yartan he had Transported to Kashgar, then to the Deccan Hub, and from there to Jhelmil, a small town at the northeastern edge of the Thar Desert, where he had rented a camel.
Now he was there, at the threshold of the Tau camp. One wrong move would get him killed, or worse.
Men and women gathered around small fires, some cooking the evening meal, others bent over swords and bows, repairing or polishing their weapons. There was little talk and less laughter. Faces were surly and closed. No one gave him a second glance as he walked between the cookfires. He wondered how many had joined the Taus of their own free will, and how many had done so at gunpoint.
Something hard jabbed Rustan’s back, and he winced. A tall, burly man stood behind him, a wooden staff in his hands. “Who are you?” the man demanded.
So much for his hope that he would be dismissed as just another camp follower. But Rustan had his story ready—a story that might grant him access to the dark weapons forge, as well as allow him to find Ishtul.
“Aruth, at your service,” he said, with a small bow. “I’ve come all the way from the village Munger. I heard Jethwa needs smiths. I apprenticed for a year at the Munger forge, and I was hoping to find work.”
The man leaned on his staff and frowned. “Work there is, and plenty of it. But why did you leave your own village?”
Rustan tried to look bashful. “Doesn’t pay well and . . . there’s this girl, see. I need something put by if I want to ask her father for her hand. I’ve heard he wants three camels and ten goats as her bride price.”
“Do you have references?” asked another guard, a heavyset man with a scar on his face who had strolled up to join the first.
Rustan hung his head. “No. I ran away from old Wahid, didn’t I? He would cut off his fingers before giving me a reference. But I do good work; just give me a chance.”
The first man grinned, showing rows of broken yellow teeth. “You’d better be good if you want to survive here.”
“What’s the pay like?” asked Rustan.
The second guard laughed. “Tell him, Dastug.”
“He’ll find out soon enough.”
Rustan allowed a worried expression to cross his face as he was led by the two guards beyond the chaos of the tents to the mud walls of the village. Inside, he felt elated. He was being taken into the heart of enemy territory by the enemy themselves. He would soon be able to find where Ishtul was being kept. He hadn’t been able to sense the elder yet, but that could be because Kai Tau had taken away his blade. Or maybe Ishtul was not in Jethwa at all. Rustan did not allow himself to consider the worst possibility.
The guards took him to a shed where their captain, a lean, sour-faced man called Cemed, questioned him before telling him the rules:
“You get three meals and a place to sleep. You start tomorrow at dawn. The metal we work with is precious; make a mistake, and you will pay for it with your skin.”
Rustan opened his mouth to ask about wages, but closed it again at Cemed’s expression. This was not a man to be trifled with. He followed one of the guards to the hut he would share with the other workers. No one was around, and he flung himself down in a corner to rest until the others returned. He was bone-tired, not so much from the journey, hard though it had been, but from the strain of deception. And now he would have to pass himself off as an apprentice smith.
He tried to calm himself enough to sleep, but his nerves thrummed with anxiety and fear—both for himself and for Ishtul. Rustan knew nothing of working with metal. But he hadn’t been able to think of a better way to get into Jethwa. How long before his ignorance was discovered? Perhaps he could glean some information from the other apprentices. He didn’t dare delve too closely into anyone’s mind; Kai Tau would sense the use of invasive Mental Arts.
At dusk his fellow workers returned to the hut, grimy and sullen. There were six of them, two quite massively built, and Rustan wondered how they would all fit into the hut at night.
They were a grim lot and resisted his attempts to draw them into conversation. They hung up their overalls and trooped out in silence, presumably for the evening meal. Rustan followed them to a queue at one of the cookfires outside the village, his stomach rumbling—a reminder that he had eaten nothing since morning. When it was his turn, the dour-faced server slapped a heap of flat green beans and potatoes on a hard round of millet bread and handed it to him.
Rustan stared at the small serving and thought with longing of the simple, wholesome meals the monks had prepared. But the food they had packed for him was long gone.
“Not very lavish with the helping sizes, are they?” he remarked, squatting down beside his fellow workers on the ground. No one answered. They were busy wolfing down their share of the food. Rustan took a bite, and immediately his mouth was on fire. The green beans must be half-full of chilies. He made himself swallow it, though. He’d stick out like a fountain in a desert if he was the only one not eating the meager, unappetizing fare.
After the meal, they drank and washed up at a communal pump. On the way back to the hut, Rustan tried to draw them out again, but to no avail. At last, one man called Tej, older than the rest, snapped, “Shut your mouth. You’ll know soon enough what it’s like here.” At that Rustan subsided into silence.
The next morning, Tej was the one who woke him, prodding him with his foot. Rustan groaned as he staggered out along with the others. From the way everyone obeyed him in silence, he guessed that Tej was the master smith.
They had a drink at the pump, and Tej distributed some dry millet bread that could be swallowed only with the help of water. Thus began a long, grueling day.
The smithy was located at the east end of the village, and Rustan felt a jolt of recognition as they approached it. It was identical to the one he had glimpsed in the Seeing Stone. The dark weapons forge.
They entered a large stone structure with a roof and a chimney for letting out smoke. One side of it must have been open once to reduce the risk of fire, but a wall had been built, blocking it from curious eyes.
The air was hot and tasted of metal, and flames roared behind a black furnace, blazing red against the dim, smoky air. Tej ordered Rustan to work the bellows—a simple enough task, but after three hours his arms ached intensely, and he thought he would pass out from the heat of the furnace and the never-ending clang of hammer on anvil.
He tried to make out what the others were doing, but nothing gave the place the appearance of anything but an ordinary smithy.
They broke at noon for a meal. Rustan stumbled out with the others, sweating and panting. The sun shone fierce and bright, but it was positively cool after the infernal interior of the workshop. He began to understand why the rest of them didn’t talk much.
The food was as sharp and spicy as the previous evening. He tried to swallow it quickly without tasting, but it was hopeless. His mouth still burned.
They went back to work after their meal. All the while, Rustan strained himself to the utmost, trying to sense if Ishtul was nearby without revealing himself. He caught odd thoughts now and then and saw disturbing visions that made no sense. In one of them, Kai Tau sat on a throne of skulls, wrapped in a bloodred cloak, his face in shadows, men and women prostrating themselves before him. But the skulls were alive; they moaned and twisted beneath Kai Tau, gazed at Rustan out of their hollow sockets, and whispered: Help us, Marksman. Set us free.
People had been killed in Jethwa. The entire village council had been hung on the branches of an old khajri tree for the vultures to feast on. This too the Seeing Stone had shown him. Rustan could barely control his fury. He would have to make his move soon; there was no way he could stay here for much longer without betraying his presence.
In the afternoon, a powerfully built man with iron gray hair and a chin beard entered the workshop, accompanied by guards armed with kalashiks. Everyone except Tej continued to work. Tej wiped his hands on his apron, stepped forward and bowed. “Oleg-dan,” he said, placing his hand on his heart.
One of Kai Tau’s captains. Rustan dropped his gaze and continued to work the bellows. His heart thudded. In the moment that he had looked at Oleg, he had caught a vision: Ishtul’s swollen face, smeared with blood. But his eyes were gone. What did this mean? Where was his teacher?
Oleg spoke to Tej, and from the corner of his eye Rustan saw him give the smith a sheaf of parchments. There followed a low-voiced consultation that he couldn’t hear above the noise of the workshop. Oleg left as abruptly as he had come, and Tej spent the good part of an hour studying the parchments that the outlaw captain had left with him.
Rustan’s eyes burned from the smoke and the heat. His stomach roiled with anxiety. Finding Ishtul was his primary concern. But the parchments had to be important too.
That night, when the hut was still and silent except for heavy breathing and the occasional snore, Rustan rose and padded toward the rug where Tej lay. The smith had shoved the parchments beneath him. But he was asleep now and would not know if Rustan took them.
Gently, ever so gently, Rustan slid his hand beneath the rug. Just as his fingers brushed the papers, an arm shot up and gripped him by the elbow. Tej’s eyes glared at him in the moonlight. His mouth opened to give a warning shout.
Rustan brought down his other hand sideways in Chopping the Tree, and Tej’s head lolled back, the whites of his eyes showing. Hopefully, he would be out for a while.
Everyone else was still asleep, oblivious to the drama playing out in their midst. Rustan withdrew the bundle of parchments from below the rug and straightened them out. It was too dark to see what was written on them.
Keeping his head down, he crept to the window, where the moonlight filtered in, and studied the parchments. There were six of them, covered in dense, spidery writing and diagrams. Some of them looked like the insides of a kalashik. Others were of things he could not recognize: strange shapes, bits and pieces of metal, globes filled with odd parts. They had just one thing in common. They were all machines designed to kill.
Sweat beaded his forehead. This was beyond him. He needed to get this to Barkav and Astinsai right away. But first, he would do some damage.
Rustan tucked the sheets into his belt and stole out the door. He flattened himself against the wall and scanned his surroundings. Nothing stirred except the wind.
He ran to the smithy, staying in the shadows, blending into the night. He did not have Barkav’s ability with camouflage, but he could make himself unobtrusive. No one challenged him; not one of the sleepy guards lounging outside the council hut or in the village square gave him a second look.
It took him three minutes to start the fire. It blazed in the hearth with a vengeful light. He took a smouldering log and tossed it on the wood heap in one corner of the smithy. It caught, and the fire came into its own, taking on life. Rustan laughed as he tossed burning pieces of wood everywhere, even as his eyes watered from the smoke. This was what he had wanted to do from the first moment he saw this hellish place.
He ducked out of the doorway just as it came splintering down with a satisfying crash. Guards were running up to the burning smithy now, shouting. Rustan edged past them, concealing himself behind huts, trees, the council house. At the village wall he paused and looked behind him.
Flames engulfed the smithy. Smoke roiled skyward. People were shouting for water to put out the fire.
Water. In the desert. That was a joke. There would be no putting out this fire. It would burn the building to ashes before it died. Happily for the people of Jethwa, there were no huts near enough the smithy to share its fate.
Time to find Ishtul. In the chaos of the fire, no one would notice him. He walked in the shadows cast by the crumbling mud wall, delving lightly into the minds of the men and women who ran past him. But he found no sign of the elder—no one who was tasked with the care of a special prisoner, no memory of a Marksman’s blade.
Halfway around the village was a wooden gate, and there Rustan stopped and doubled over, gasping as a sudden pain pierced him.
They dragged him out from this gate. But not all of him.
The pain grew until it was unbearable. Rustan ran and ran but he could not escape it, and finally he stopped and forced himself to see what had happened to his teacher. And he wept because he was too late.