Forging the Sword (The Farsala Trilogy) Read online

  FORGING THE SWORD

  The Farsala Trilogy

  Book 3

  FORGING THE SWORD

  HILARI BELL

  Read the Farsala Trilogy

  Fall of a Kingdom

  Rise of a Hero

  Forging the Sword

  Published by Simon & Schuster

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS

  An imprint of Simon & Schuster Children’s Publishing Division

  1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10020

  This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real locales are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2006 by Hilari Bell

  Map on pages viii-ix drawn by Russ Charpentier

  All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

  SIMON & SCHUSTER BOOKS FOR YOUNG READERS is a trademark of Simon & Schuster, Inc.

  Book design by Greg Stadnyk

  The text for this book is set in Cochin.

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2

  CIP data for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-689-85416-3

  eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-0737-9

  www.SimonandSchuster.com

  This book is dedicated to my A-team: my excellent agent, Irene Kraas, and my extraordinary editor, Julia Richardson. Without both these women, the book you’re looking at would never have existed.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ALL OF MY BOOKS owe a huge debt to my writers’ groups, the Denver Science Fiction Writers Guild, and the Wild Women Writers of the West. I would also like to offer my deep thanks to Simon Tasker of Simon & Schuster. If you’re reading this book now, there’s a good chance that it’s because of him—whether you know it or not. And finally, thanks to my family for their support—always.

  FORGING THE SWORD

  WHEN THE HRUM INVADED FARSALA, destroying the deghan army that defended it, they rejoiced. They thought, as victors will, that the gods favored them, and that they always would. Perhaps it was that arrogant assumption that angered Azura. Perhaps it was something else about the Hrum that displeased him. Who can claim to know the mind of a god?

  But displeased Azura must have been, for the spirit of the ancient champion Sorahb was reborn into the body of a deghan youth, who raised an army of peasants to resist their Hrum conquerors. Then Azura sent to Sorahb three tests—not tests of courage, which any brute may have, but tests of his divine farr, his worthiness to rule as well as to command.

  Sorahb passed these tests, and learned from them too. He resolved to not only lead his peasant army, but to work with them, and with others, too, that he might find new ways to defeat the Hrum, since the deghans’ ways had failed. Yes, Sorahb had passed Azura’s tests and won the god’s favor.

  But the tests that the Hrum would set him were still to come.

  CHAPTER ONE

  KAVI

  IT WON’T WORK,” said Hama, looking down the road that ran through the rolling foothills. “It’s too complicated.”

  “No, it’s not.” Kavi spoke absently, for most of his attention was fixed on the empty road as well—or, more exactly, on the bend in the road where the Hrum soldiers should be appearing before long. “As soon as the siege towers are in front of us, Commander Jiaan and his luna … his troops will ride in for a brief raid and draw off most of the Hrum guards. Then our archers will pepper the towers with fire arrows and they’ll all go up in smoke. Dead simple.”

  “And if it’s not,” said the lady Soraya’s icy voice behind him, “then you will be. Dead, that is.”

  Kavi grimaced, but he didn’t bother to look back at her, though Hama cast her an uneasy glance. What Flame-begotten whim had possessed him to agree to work with Soraya and Jiaan, who had plainly stated their intention of killing him if anything went wrong—and, once the Hrum were gone, of killing him even if everything went right! He must have been mad. Not to agree, for that was the only way they’d have let him live past the moment, but it was truly crazy for him to be seriously intending to help them.

  He peered through the screen of gold and brown leaves that protected the archers from sight and stifled a sigh. He knew why he’d agreed—and it wasn’t just because that was the only way they’d let him live. He needed their help to defeat the Hrum as badly as they needed his. He couldn’t even blame them for their desire to kill him, since he had, even if indirectly, contributed to the loss of the battle that had resulted in their father’s death.

  Their relationship was a strange one, to Kavi’s way of thinking. Both of them knew they were brother and sister, but Kavi had never heard either of them acknowledge it aloud. Jiaan called his half sister “Lady,” as if he were still a page in his father’s household, and the lady referred to her bastard half brother as if he were a servant. Yet they were perfectly united in their determination to free Farsala from the Hrum, and in their desire to kill him. Kavi understood that desire, though that didn’t mean he intended to lie down and let them cut his throat when the time came—and it made dealing with them on a day-to-day basis a major pain in the ass!

  “He had to go and arrange for the paint,” Hama told the lady Soraya indignantly. “You sent him!”

  They’d had no choice but to send him, and Kavi had taken a grim pleasure in how much it had galled the suspicious pair to let him out of their sight—not just for a few marks, either. It had taken him several weeks to arrange for an accelerant to be mixed in with the three barrels of imperial scarlet paint a Hrum officer had ordered, in the town nearest to the hidden camp where the siege towers were being built.

  It was Hama who had brought word to Kavi that the peasants who supported the resistance had finally located the Hrum’s construction site. Brought word to Kavi, for though Jiaan commanded the army, it was Kavi who had formed the peasant resistance. Kavi the peddler, who had visited their small villages for years, selling them knives and ironmongery, was the one they trusted.

  So it had to be Kavi who went to convince the lads who were mixing the paint that they should change their formula a bit. And to arrange a faked burglary of the Hrum supply depot where the paint was stored, so that when the siege towers went up like tinder, the blame would fall on the anonymous burglars and not the paint mixer. He’d also arranged for the peasants who farmed the fields along the shortest road to Mazad to send him warning when the Hrum brought their towers along, which was how they all came to be sitting here on this sunny autumn morning.

  He’d understood Soraya and Jiaan’s reluctance to let him go off on his own. He’d scoffed at their vague threat to use Hama as a hostage; no matter how much they hated him, neither of them would harm a sixteen-year-old girl just to get him back. He’d even felt a bit smug over their astonishment when he’d turned up again of his own free will, mission accomplished, and the plan—his plan!—ready to run.

  It hadn’t occurred to him that they would respond by placing the lady Soraya and two loyal men from Jiaan’s army behind him, with orders to kill him instantly if anything should even start to go wrong.

  And no plan wad that good.

  He wished Hama hadn’t insisted on staying to see how it worked out, even after she’d heard how he had worked with the Hrum to destroy the deghan army. She hadn’t entirely forgiven him herself—or she’d have been arguing a lot more with the lady-bitch behind him—but at least she understood why he’d done it. He only hoped her
mother would feel the—

  “They’re coming!” Hama hissed.

  Kavi had already seen the first rank of Hrum soldiers marching around the bend in the road. They were only five abreast on this narrow track, but their scarlet cloaks were almost as bright as their helmets and breastplates in the sunshine. A mounted soldier passed the troop, cantering up the road, his head turning back and forth as he looked for signs of ambush.

  The archers, under the lady Soraya’s direction, had chosen their clothing to match the colors of the autumn leaves and dying grass, and she’d made Kavi change his clothes twice before she’d been satisfied. At least his hair wasn’t a problem, peasant-brown and curly, like Hama’s and most of the archers’, as well. The straight black hair—short, since Kavi had cut it—that showed Soraya’s deghan blood was concealed by a rough cap that went with the rough boy’s clothes she wore, so the lot of them blended nicely into the brush of the hillside. It must have been something the Suud tribesmen taught her, Kavi thought, for deghans hunted from horseback, in silks and jewels, with a great deal of noise.

  Crouching motionless in the brush, he could almost feel her stillness behind him.

  The scout rode past without so much as a twitch that would reveal he’d seen anything. Then he reached some invisible limit, turned his horse, and trotted back, paying even less attention on the return trip.

  Kavi frowned. Why weren’t the Hrum sending men out to check the sides of the road? One rider wasn’t enough to trip an ambush, and though the Hrum’s overconfidence sometimes led them into folly, he’d have thought they’d take more care with a cargo as valuable as the siege towers. Towers it had taken them almost two months to build, and which would probably give them victory over the city of Mazad. A victory their commander needed desperately.

  The main unit of the towers’ guards had marched around the bend by now, more than a hundred of them, and Kavi could see the four-ox hitch that pulled the long wagon that held the first length of the tower. The towers were being shipped in two sections, the peasants had told him: the long, upper halves on one set of wagons, and the thicker bases on another—four wagons in all. Only the framework had been assembled; the boards that would clad them were stacked in the wagons under the nest of beams. Yes, he could see the scarlet-painted lattice now, and beside it …

  Kavi felt the blood drain from his face, leaving it numb and cold, even as the lady-bitch behind him hissed a curse.

  On both sides of the tower’s skeleton walked a line of slaves, each with one wrist shackled to a bolt driven deep into the hard wood—shackled with a very short chain. If the towers burned, the slaves would too. They couldn’t—

  “Arzhang and Gudarz take you, you treacherous beast!” The hissing whisper was softer than the sound of her knife being drawn from its sheath.

  “You think I’m responsible for this?” Kavi glared at her, too insulted to be afraid—though judging by the fury in her face, he should be. “Only a deghan would be after guarding property with … with a wall of lives! No peasant would ever do such a thing.”

  Arzhang, the djinn of treacherous ambition, and Gudarz, the djinn of cruelty, were deghan inventions—and it seemed to Kavi as if they possessed every deghan who’d ever been born!

  “Those are Hrum, not deghans,” she whispered fiercely.

  “Sometimes there’s no difference,” said Kavi, turning back to survey the column.

  His neck prickled. But when you came down to it, a deghass was more likely to stab you face to face than in the back—more fool she. Several long seconds passed and nothing sliced into his flesh. Kavi relaxed slightly and returned his attention to the towers.

  All four wagons had come around the bend by now, each one with its living shield tethered to its side and a line of Hrum soldiers marching beside it. Yet another troop brought up the rear.

  Jiaan’s attack would draw off the soldiers, perhaps even more soldiers than they’d expected, since the Hrum could leave the vulnerable slaves to guard their precious cargo. Could the Farsalans carry the towers off into the hills and free the slaves at leisure? No, the hills were too steep, too choked in brush, and the towers would be too heavy. They’d chosen this place because an unburdened man could make his escape more easily than an armored soldier marching in formation. Carrying the towers they wouldn’t get ten yards. Drive the oxen down the road? Oxen couldn’t run for long, not laden as these were. They wouldn’t make it far enough. Which only left—

  “We have to destroy these towers,” said the lady softly. “If they get through, Mazad will fall. And Mazad is our only hope.”

  Kavi turned to face her, but his bitter words about deghan willingness to burn peasants alive were checked by the despairing misery in her expression. Besides, many of the slaves chained to those towers likely were deghans, for more of the deghans had resisted outright than peasants had. They might even be poor fools from some other land entirely—but whoever they were, Kavi couldn’t let them be roasted alive.

  “Let me go,” he said rapidly.

  The towers were approaching their position. Jiaan would attack soon. Or would he abandon the plan? No, curse him, he would go ahead with it, sticking Kavi and Soraya with the task of freeing the slaves. Being chased by the Hrum was easy compared to that.

  “Let me go. I was a smith once. I can pick locks. I’ll set them free, then you can signal the archers to fire.”

  “No,” said Soraya flatly. “I’m not letting you out of my sight. Not after this. I ought to kill you now. And besides, you could never free them in time.”

  “Then I’ll go too,” said Hama. “I can pick locks faster than he can.”

  Kavi opened his mouth to protest and then shut it. He had taught Hama to pick locks himself, training her to be a burglar. This was far more dangerous than anything he’d ever dreamed of getting her into, but she really was faster than he was with his scarred right hand.

  “No,” said the lady again. But there were tears in her eyes.

  “Can you give the order to fire if they’re not free?” Kavi demanded. Giving that order was her job.

  Her gaze turned to the towers creaking down the road behind the oxen. “They’re barbarians,” she whispered. “Worse than barbarians! The Suud would never do this!”

  “They’re not barbarians,” said Kavi slowly. “At least, not most of them. This is—”

  The first section of siege tower was now in front of them, and, right on time, Kavi heard the snap of bowstrings. From the lower rise on the other side of the road came a flight of arrows—headed not for the helpless slaves, but for the Hrum troops who marched at the head of the column.

  Kavi had heard tales of the speed with which the Hrum could raise their shields into formation, but he hadn’t really believed them. Oh, in battle, when they were ready for the command, perhaps—but marching down the road with no reason to expect attack?

  The moment the strings snapped, half the Hrum soldiers began lifting their large rectangular shields—some even got them up and angled in the right direction. But for all their training and discipline the Hrum were only human, and some of them didn’t move swiftly enough.

  The arrows pelted down, thudding into shields and rattling off armor, but a few of them found flesh, and Kavi bit his lip as several men screamed in pain. He’d spent time in the Hrum camps—first spying for them, later spying on them. They weren’t bad men, for the most part; most were guilty of nothing but serving the empire into which they’d been born.

  He was almost glad when, in the handful of seconds before the next flock of arrows swooped down, they rallied their ranks and got all their shields above their heads, positioned so precisely that no more arrows got through—though one man somewhere in the tightly packed formation was still screaming.

  “They’re not barbarians,” Kavi repeated. “Except maybe a few. This is Governor Garren’s work, trying to force us to be as barbaric as he is.”

  Commander Jiaan’s mounted archers were streaming down the road now, b
ut instead of charging, they stopped just inside bow range and began firing arrows at the Hrum’s front rank.

  The lady Soraya had moved up beside Kavi, and now she snorted softly. He supposed their horsemanship was a bit ragged. Even as he watched, one man slipped in the saddle and nearly fell off—he would have fallen if he hadn’t dropped his bow and clutched the saddle’s cantle. But until the deghan army had been crushed at the Sendar Wall, these archers had been foot soldiers, most of whom had never sat on a saddle before, much less fired a bow from one in battle. And if their horsemanship left something to be desired, their aim was dead on target, their arrows pounding into the shields of the first line of Hrum troops.

  But the thundering approach of the horses had given the Hrum the warning they needed—there were no chinks in that wall of shields. As Kavi watched, the men under the carefully constructed shell started down the road toward the horsemen, and the troop that had followed the column was already moving into the hills to drive off the first set of archers.

  Arrow fire from the hillside ceased as the archers proved themselves sensible men and fled. But as Kavi knew, their orders were to run, and on the swift horses that awaited them they’d soon catch up with their companions on the road. Young Commander Jiaan was surprisingly good at this kind of thing.

  The mounted archers got off two more ragged volleys before Commander Jiaan’s voice rang out, “Retreat! Retreat! Rally on Sorahb and flee!”

  Kavi had to smile. Jiaan himself had been called Sorahb—who else could be leading the army, after all?—and Kavi had said, as he raised the countryside to resist the Hrum, that he worked for the legendary champion. As far as he could tell, every lad who stole a Hrum mule or broke the supports out from under a bridge before a Hrum troop marched over it was claiming the name Sorahb.

  But Governor Garren, commander of the conquest of Farsala, had succumbed to the myth. “Sorahb” now had a price of three hundred gold centirus on his head—so that name was guaranteed to get the Hrum’s attention.