The Thousand Names Read Free Page B

“Mother, I don’t understand. What did she mean, ‘the names’? Our names?”
    “It is not necessary for you to understand, child,” the old woman said. “Put the business from your mind, and tell me what occurred on the council.”
    Jaffa remembered Khtoba’s sarcastic aside at the prospect of Vordanai sorcery, and wondered if the general would be quite so flippant had he been in attendance here. Would a cannonball kill Mother? Jaffa, looking at her frail, wrapped form, decided that he thought not.
    He cleared his throat and began, summarizing the talk and giving his impressions. The old woman listened attentively, interrupting only once, when Jaffa was speaking of Yatchik-dan-Rahksa.
    “He said nothing of Feor?” she asked.
    Jaffa shook his head. “No, Mother. She must still be a prisoner, or else . . .”
    “She is not dead,” the old woman said. “I would have felt her passing. No, they hold her still. Go on.”
    When he had finished, there was a long silence. The old woman’s hands, loose ends of the wraps fluttering, were never still. They sat in her lap, fingers entangled like eels, tugging here and there at the bindings as though they pained her.
    “An
abh-naathem
,” she said. “There is a warning there, though that puffed-up fool Khtoba and the upstarts who usurp the names of angels are too deaf to hear. The Desoltai remember the old magics.”
    Jaffa remained silent. It was not his place to offer an opinion.
    “Child,” the old woman said, “I want the truth from you, now, not what you think will please me.”
    “Yes, Mother.” Jaffa bowed his head.
    “Will the Vordanai retake the city?”
    He looked up, taken aback. “Mother—I am no soldier. I cannot—”
    “As best you can tell,” she said, her ragged voice almost gentle. “Is it possible?”
    Another pause.
    “The Redeemers have assembled a vast host,” Jaffa said, thinking aloud. “But they are poorly trained, and armed only with faith. Khtoba’s Auxiliaries are better, but . . .”
    There was a smile in the old woman’s voice. “You distrust Khtoba.”
    “The man would sell his own mother for a thimbleful of power,” Jaffa said. “As for the Steel Ghost and his Desoltai, they will do as they see fit, and who can say what that will be?” He shrugged. “If I were the Vordanai captain, I would not attempt it. But if the gods smile on him and frown on us—yes, it is possible.”
    The old woman nodded thoughtfully.
    “I will give you a message to carry,” she said. “You must conceal it from Khtoba and the Council, of course. But I think it is time that I met this Steel Ghost.”

Part One

Chapter One
    WINTER
     
    F our soldiers sat atop the ancient sandstone walls of a fortress on the sun-blasted Khandarai coast.
    That they were soldiers was apparent only by the muskets that leaned against the parapet, as they had long ago discarded anything resembling a uniform. They wore trousers that, on close inspection, might once have been a deep royal blue, but the relentless sun had faded them to a pale lavender. Their jackets, piled in a heap near the ladder, were of a variety of cuts, colors, and origins, and had been repaired so often they were more patch than original fabric.
    They lounged, with that unique, lazy insolence that only soldiers of long experience can affect, and watched the shore to the south, where something in the nature of a spectacle was unfolding. The bay was full of ships, broad-beamed, clumsy-looking transports with furled sails, wallowing visibly even in the mild sea. Out beyond them was a pair of frigates, narrow and sharklike by comparison, their muddy red Borelgai pennants snapping in the wind as though to taunt the Vordanai on the shore.
    If it was a taunt, it was lost on the men on the walls, whose attention was elsewhere. The deep-drafted transports didn’t dare approach the shore too closely, so the water between them and the rocky beach was aswarm with small craft, a motley collection