Kings of Morning Read Free Page A

clay added to the heat within. It was always lamplit night here, in the base of the tell. Higher up within the massive structure, stone-lined shafts were cut into the mound and admitted the light of Bel, but this was a subterranean labyrinth. No Honai here; the Great King’s elite did not soil themselves with the streaming stink of the Slave-City, but instead hufsan guards in leather cuirasses stood in pairs at intervals, bronze scimitars on their hips and steel-flecked whips in their hands. In these worn, endless corridors of flagged stone, tens of thousands toiled unceasingly in the Great King’s service, living out their lives and breeding and dying in the flame-flickered world that had been constructed by their own forbears millennia before.
    Once, Kurun had feared the bottom tiers of the Slave City. This was where he had been introduced to servitude, and he vividly remembered the first time he had seen the sun cut off, and had felt his young head fill with the reek of the place. A world of caverns, it had seemed to him; a succession of nightmares. But he had been very lucky, sold up-city almost at once. He had not remained down here long enough to shun sunlight, as many slaves did. Hundreds of the Slave City’s inhabitants could no longer bear the light of Bel in their eyes. They had been made into creatures of the dark, and needed no lamp to see their way within it.
    But it was not a place to wander aimlessly. There were forgotten tunnels here, old antechambers and ancient passageways which had been bricked up and forgotten as the daily concourse changed its routes, like a river shifting its bed over centuries. Parts of the Slave City had been neglected and disused for generations, and it was said that renegade slaves had made a warped life in these abandoned districts, renouncing their servitude, and they preyed upon the unwary with bestial, unimaginable appetites.
    So the kitchen slaves liked to say, gathered in their quarters with the day’s work done, or drunk on palm wine in times of festival. One of the Undercooks who was Kurun’s friend, fat, lubricious Borr, liked to tell of the time he had become lost in the lower levels as a youngster, and had seen them, the dark-dwellers. They had skin white as maggots, he said, and eyes as large as eggs.
    An immensely wide passage ascended ahead, the incline steep, one half stepped, the other a ramp which slaves pushed handcarts up, sweat streaming off their backs. They toiled naked, hufsan from the highlands who bore the mark of the King, not as a tattoo on their shoulders but as a brand upon their faces. At their rear, one of their own race flicked a tongue of leather at their calves, and barked at them in common Asurian, the gutter-language of the Empire, leavening the tirade with some hufsan profanity from his own mountains. The slaves strained harder. In the handcart were baskets of Oskus clams, as big as Kurun’s fist, and the massive silver sheen of river catfish, their mouths still opening and closing as they struggled, drowning in the fetid air.
    Beside them was the flip side of the coin; gangs of more hufsan , rolling empty carts on the down-road before them, tugging on ropes to slow the clanking vehicles and keep them within bounds. They winked and nodded and exchanged ribaldries with their colleagues who were still ascending, and the guards raised whips at one another in salute.
    Kurun felt inside his sash for the tiny, oilcloth-wrapped parcel that had occasioned his foray into the sun. Auroc the kitchen-master had entrusted him with the errand, only the second time he had ever done so, and it would not do to lose the thing now, so close to home.
    Up, up, always up, the steep passageway becoming a sinuous thing, an immense hollow coil of stone within the ziggurat with passageways opening off on both sides, people joining and leaving it as they went their way about the Slave-City. This was the Silima , the Serpent Road, the main artery in the body of the