Blood on Bronze (Blood on Bronze Book 1) Read Free

himself to continue crawling, feeling for the bridge.
    Whatever it was,
it had fingers, long and lifelessly cold. They brushed his heel, and then
vanished again. He continued to crawl forward, and heard not a sound. Something
moved though, in the darkness. Arjun could feel the slightest shift in the air,
as if something moved forward past him, and then stopped.
    It ran a chill
hand along his shoulder, found the sword on his back, and recoiled suddenly at
the touch of the bronze weapon. Still, it made no sound. Arjun’s nerves were
near their breaking point. He wanted more than anything to reach for his sword,
but whatever it was, it could see him clearly, and could react as soon as he
made any move, better and faster than he could blind in the dark.
    Where was that
bridge?
     

 
    2.
The Tale of Sunlit Youth
     
     
    A few weeks
earlier, and a lifetime away…
    Swarming crowds
carried on their business in the great plaza of Zakran. The immense white and
gold ziggurat of Ar-Galesh, god of the sun, loomed past the buildings to the
north. To the east were the stalls of the grand bazaar.
    Folk of a dozen
nations filled the plaza. Men with oiled and plaited beards and women with
black plaited hair from Sarsa, the cities of the league of Kasim, or Zakran
itself brushed shoulders with dark, shaven-headed G’abudim from across the sea
to the southwest. Purple-clad seafarers from the great western isle of Kratis,
their eyes lined heavily with kohl, walked with slaves carrying baskets of
shells and pearls. Men of Siraxis or its many rival city-states in the far
northwest stood out with their spiral-patterned clothes and pale skin.
    Folk other than
human went about their business as well in this most cosmopolitan of all
cities. Dwarves with their glimmering gold-bronze skin and red beards like
flame, huge lumbering Ogres with tusked mouths and hairless chins, apelike
Garks, a few of the hairy and hoofed wild folk from the plains of Ruun, far
inland, and even some of the tall slender serpent people from Tarai, southeast
beyond Sarsa, crossed paths as if they did so every day.
    In Zakran, they
in fact might.
    On the south
side of the plaza were covered porticos, facing north. The deep space behind
the lotus-carved pillars offered shade even in the intense light of spring in
Zakran. In a part of that shade, a group of young men and women, most though
not all in rich garb, sat cross-legged on the ground on mats facing an old man
in a plain woolen kilt, sitting on a low stool.
    Among the young
men was one of medium height, broad shouldered and strong. He had dark eyes
with heavy lashes and hair that fell in loose black rings to his chin. His
bronze skin marked his descent from the Hayyidi people native to Zakran, Kasim,
and the countries nearby. Like most young unmarried men, he was clean shaven. 
Typical for Zakran, he wore a knee-length kilt and sandals, with a thin cloak
to ward off the sun, but no shirt or tunic. However, his kilt and cloak were of
fine material in purple and black, and he wore bright-polished bands of bronze
on his arms, bracers on his wrists, a heavy gorget on his neck, and bronze rings
in his ears. An ornate bronze sword suspended from a belt of discs of the same.
This appearance of opulent luxuriousness was countered by the severity of his
expression, as he listened intently to the teacher, taking notes on clay
tablets.
    “And since Sinin
dra Dekkuru has chosen to place his attention elsewhere…” said the teacher,
gesturing towards a young man in a gold-bedecked green kilt who was himself
watching a pair of lightly clad young women with baskets balanced on their
heads, “I turn this question to Arjun dra Artashad.”
    The matter was a
complex one, involving an understanding of the respective theological doctrines
of Ar-Galesh and of Se’emat the Guardian of the Dead, and of some difficult
geometrical calculations. Arjun had been paying attention, and turning the
problem over in his mind as it unfolded. He