Black Spice (Book 3) Read online

  BLACK SPICE

  James R. Sanford

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2014 by James R. Sanford

  All Rights Reserved

  No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means without written permission from the author. This e-book has been published without Digital Rights Management software installed, so that it may be read on personal devices.

  To Bill, for tolerating my madness for so long.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER 1: The Skin That Walks

  CHAPTER 2: Soth Garo

  CHAPTER 3: Cardamom and Smoke

  CHAPTER 4: Princes and Pathways

  CHAPTER 5: Black Spice

  CHAPTER 6: Seahorse

  CHAPTER 7: Conferences and Confidences

  CHAPTER 8: Two Voyages

  CHAPTER 9: Two Monsters

  CHAPTER 10: In the Den of Evil

  CHAPTER 11: Full Moon

  CHAPTER 12: A Trail of Spice

  CHAPTER 13: No Man is an Army

  CHAPTER 14: Ulendi Aku

  CHAPTER 15: Crosscurrent

  CHAPTER 16: An Incomplete Puzzle

  CHAPTER 17: Home

  THE SOUTHEAST

  CHAPTER 1: The Skin That Walks

  Prince Mahai of the Onakai woke in the night to the sound of his mother screaming. He ran across the inner courtyard to his parents’ sleep house, his big feet thumping a drumbeat on the wooden walkway. All around the sleep house a ground fog had begun to thicken. The netting at the entry had been torn away. His mother crouched in one corner, shakily mumbling a prayer, looking at a solid white human shape rising from his father’s sleeping mat, a curling mist hanging in the air where it passed.

  “It was all over him,” his mother cried. “It covered him like a skin.”

  Mahai crossed to the rack where his father’s war club lay. The entity turned slowly as he hefted the weapon. It did have the look of a skin, wrinkled and creased in the right places, with hollow eyes and an empty mouth, as if there were nothing inside.

  The edge of the club bristled with shark’s teeth, and Mahai swung with all his weight. It would have taken the head off any normal man, but the club bounced back like it had struck stone. The skin casually backhanded him as it walked out. Mahai caught the blow on his shoulder, the force of it spinning him into the wall, and suddenly he was very cold, a stabbing pain where he had been struck.

  His mother knelt over his father’s body. “He’s dead,” she sobbed. “It killed him.” She laid her hand across his cheek, pulling it back in shock and turning to her son. “What is this?”

  Mahai touched him. He was colder and harder than any dead man should be. Though Mahai had never seen it, the Onakai still told tales of a time when frozen water fell from the sky. He looked at his mother, searching for the word.

  “Ice?”

  CHAPTER 2: Soth Garo

  Kyric sat in the shade on the outskirts of Tiah, the capital, and the only large town in the Tialucca nation. He held a wet cloth to his forehead and watched Ellec choose a new mast from among the seasoned poles lying in the lumberyard. Most of them were for roof supports and were too small, but a few of them were stout enough to serve as a new mast for Calico. Birds were clan totems to the Tialuccans, and they erected tall poles along the shoreline, each one topped with a massive carving of a bird head, all looking out to sea.

  Lerica did a double take as she walked by, stopping in front of him. “Did you fall on your face during practice? Certainly Aiyan wouldn’t hit you so hard.”

  Kyric smiled thinly. “In a sense he did. He’s teaching me a new weird that he calls the gait of the wind. You try to run full speed with your eyes closed and not trip or hit anything. It’s kind of fun when you’re in the flat field.”

  “Let me guess. You tried to do it in the forest.”

  “He told me to. And I was on a pretty good run, only I ducked just a moment too late.”

  Ellec called her over to him then, and she walked away saying, “See you at the king’s house for afternoon coffee.”

  She had adopted a different air in the week since they had landed on Mokkala. She had become more . . . distracted, or contemplative, or something like that — certainly less passionate than she had been at sea. Sure, she was tired from the endless work, but there was something more serious with her than her duties.

  On top of that, they slept apart a few nights ago because of Riankatta, and he had another disturbing dream. He had been lost in a labyrinth, and someone had been looking for him. He couldn’t shake a bad feeling about who it had been.

  Calico had run aground only eight miles up the coast from Tiah, and some younger guys in outrigger canoes came paddling up to meet them that afternoon. They used a form of Cor’el that was different and hard to decipher, but Ellec managed to hold a simple conversation with them. They came back the next day with more canoes and plenty of strong fellows. Pallan dropped the anchor a few hundred paces astern, ran the cable through a block, and at high tide they all heaved but still couldn’t budge the ship. In the end, Ellec went to King Tonah, showed him how to make coffee — the Tialuccans had nothing like it — and made a deal for transportation and warehouse space along with the promise of trade. They used the Tialuccans’ biggest canoes to move everything but the ship’s cat from Calico to the town. It took a couple of dozen trips, but they finally floated her.

  So far, Mokkala wasn’t what he had expected. When Calico had limped around the headland on one sail and they sighted it, Ellec said that Tiah looked like a Baskillian colony without the Baskillians. The wide, airy houses with roofs covered in clay tiles, the graveled streets, the public rock gardens shaded by trees that had been trimmed in ornate patterns — they had all seen it before in paintings of Baskillia.

  Tiah sat on the north side of a deep inlet, with a beach at the far end. At the southern tip of the beach, an enormous outcropping of stone, perhaps an eighth of a mile across, rose from the coast to dominate the skyline. Strangely, a wide dock jutted out from the harbor below the town, sitting empty while the shore to either side lay dotted with canoes resting in storage racks, as if the Tialuccans expected the spice galleons to return at any time.

  The royal family, the chiefs, the priests and priestesses, and anyone who could be considered educated spoke passable Baskillian. Ellec spoke it moderately well, but Kyric’s was better and Aiyan used him as a translator when speaking to King Tonah and his court.

  The royals lived better, but not immensely better than the average Tialuccan family. Nor did they dress much different, the king in the same open vest and wraparound kilt that the other men wore, and the queen in the typical long, sleeveless dress. Aiyan liked this. He said that it spoke well of the character of these people. Those who lived in the town were craftsmen, but most Tialuccans were farmers. Everyone made their own cloth, even the royals, and they dyed them in reds and yellows.

  None of the farmers grew spice plants. They didn’t need to. A few miles inland across the coastal plain a forested mountain ridge rose sharply, and on its slopes grew wild cardamom, far more than the whole of Mokkala could use. All they had to do was go and pick it.

  Cardamom was woven into their lives at every fold. The little green pods were crushed into their food, and ground in with their medicine. It was mixed into the incense they burned in their ceremonies. And although King Tonah had ample amounts of all the six spices of Mokkala, it was the Tialucca’s own that he chose to stir into his coffee.

  In the earl
y afternoons, when the daily rains came, King Tonah had begun hosting a coffee hour for his court, and Aiyan was always invited. They gathered in Tonah’s receiving room — you could hardly call it a throne room. It was sparsely furnished with mats and low tables that were more like trays. A small potted tree stood in each corner. Kyric had yet to see a chair anywhere in Tiah. The bamboo-covered floor was raised three fingers higher at the end of the chamber, where the king sat near a window, and that was the only separation he made from his guests. Aiyan and Tonah would spar daily in a contest of questions about each other’s people, while Ubtarune, the high priest, sat listening in his cape of bird feathers.

  Today Kyric and Aiyan would meet the visitors who had arrived yesterday evening, a chief and a sorcerer from the nearby Bantuan nation. Kyric had got a glimpse of them that morning. He figured that they must be a poorer people. With their simple yellow tunics and buckskin leggings, and wide straw hats made in the Baskillian style, he would never have known that they were Bantuan elders. Unlike the Tialuccans, they didn’t wear rings or bracelets or bangles, only a small medicine bag around their necks. And they brought dogs — slender short-haired hounds that looked like they could lope along for hours. The Bantuan were a herding people. They kept cattle in the lower vales, and in the high valleys they herded agile long-haired sheep native to the island. They never went anywhere without their dogs.

  They sat on rattan mats listening to the rain while the aroma of coffee filled the room. Kyric gazed at the ceiling. It was covered with paintings of colorful, almost mythic looking birds. Only the topmost leaders of the clan were there — Tonah and his wife Opela, Ubtarune and his cousin Ilara, the elder priestess, and an old bald man named Saloi, who wore a pair of shorts that looked like pajamas with the legs rolled up past the knees. His title was Spice Master, whatever that was. The Bantuan sorcerer was called Birjen. Naran was the name of the chief, and Tonah spoke to him.

  “You are welcome here. Please say what is on your mind.”

  Kyric liked King Tonah. He had a broad face that seemed carved in stone. He wrapped himself in dignity, but not the prideful sort, and he was more interested in hearing your opinion than giving his. His feathered crown sat on a pillow next to him, but he never put it on.

  “Envoys from the Silasese have come to us,” said Naran. He looked directly at Aiyan. “They say a man has come from across the sea and made himself ruler of the Hariji. He has laid a powerful magic on King Irogi and his advisors, and they treat him as the son of a god. A Silasese priestess has read the sign of evil in the stars. In their tongue they call him Soth Garo, the white warrior, because his skin has no color. They say he is preparing the Hariji for war, and that he will bring death to every nation of Mokkala.”

  Tonah waited for Kyric to translate for Aiyan. Then Ellec and Lerica came in, shaking the rain off. Ellec bowed to the room. “I’m sorry that we are late.”

  Tonah smiled. Ellec was his favorite person these days. “You are welcome.”

  When he introduced the Bantuans, they rose to their feet. Birjen walked right up to Ellec and Lerica, looking them up and down. Kyric wasn’t sure, but he seemed to be smelling them.

  A look of revulsion slowly spread across his face. His mouth puckered in disgust and Kyric thought he was going to spit on King Tonah’s floor.

  “Cat people,” he said. He looked to Tonah in appeal. He was obviously surprised that the king would even let them in his house.

  “They are welcome,” Tonah said firmly. “Sit now, or else go be with your dogs.”

  When they all had sat, Tonah turned to Chief Naran.

  “We have heard a tale like this from the Manutu, who heard it from the Onakai. I sent my son Caleem to the south with our best hunters to find the truth of it. He has been gone a fortnight, so I expect his return any day now. Please stay with us until then, so you may hear what he has learned.”

  There were some muffled shouts outside. The rain had stopped. One of Tonah’s nephews came skidding to a stop at the entry.

  “Prince Mahai is here,” he said between breaths. “I think something bad has happened.”

  “Bring him here at once,” said Tonah, “and find shelter and refreshment for his men.”

  The nephew looked at his uncle for a moment. “There’s only one man with him.”

  Mahai walked in then, wet and muddy and barefoot, with bandages on his chest and arms. He was a large and heavy man, bigger than Aiyan, but he moved with practiced grace. And he may have jiggled with some extra fat as he knelt before King Tonah, but he was mostly slabs of muscle.

  He looked at everyone at the room in turn, then at Tonah.

  “The Onakai nation has been destroyed,” he said. “And my father is dead.”

  He had a gentle face, and a gentle baritone voice. He wasn’t any older than Kyric.

  No one spoke. No one moved. Mahai continued.

  “We heard all kinds of rumors. A warrior of ashen face who carries with him a strange mist. His bodyguard of death worshipers who carry the arms of war. We heard that he forced King Irogi to drink his blood and thus enslaved him, that the priests of the Hariji had abandoned their totems in favor of this ashen one, and that he had enraged the Hariji hunters against us and made them ready for war. But we heard all of this too late.

  “We had only half a day’s warning of their attack. My father had been murdered the night before, and our chiefs were forced to meet and elect a war leader. This slowed us, and only half our warriors had gathered in Kai’no when the Hariji charged from the forest.

  “They fought like madmen, and it seemed to me that their whole nation had gone insane. They did not fight in the usual manner, as when land or honor is disputed. They fought to wipe us out, in a killing frenzy that did not stop. They killed the wounded where they had fallen. They killed women who got in the way. And they had no fear.”

  He paused for a moment. “There was this one. I had broken his arm and knocked his spear away. He was backed up against a storehouse. I was angry. I kicked him in the knee so he couldn’t run, and then I brought my war club down on his head. I was looking into his eyes at the last moment. He wasn’t afraid.”

  Kyric looked at Aiyan even as he translated this, and when he met his eye he saw an affirmation there. His stomach went hollow. Soth Garo was a Knight of the Dragon’s Blood, and had forced them all to drink from his vein.

  Gently, Tonah asked Mahai, “How did your father die?”

  “This ashen one, he possesses a demon.”

  Kyric held up his hand. “Sorry. I don’t think I heard you correctly. Did you mean to say that he is possessed by a demon?”

  Mahai took a long look at him. It felt like a look of recognition. “No, I do not. It is as I said. The demon is possessed by him. It is a skin that walks, and it is cold as the darkness that lies beyond. It covered my father and he was turned to ice.”

  Aiyan sat fully upright at this news, but held his tongue.

  Saloi spoke up. “Perhaps he only means to recover the Hariji lands that were lost when the Onakai families split away.”

  “Do not think this,” Mahai said.

  “Agreed,” said Ellec. “Men like this do not stop unless you stop them.”

  “We must gather our clans,” Naran said to Tonah. “I will not wait for Prince Caleem. Whatever this evil one’s intention, we must make war upon him for what he has already done. It will take the better part of a month, but I will assemble the dog warriors of the Bantuan and bring them here to join forces with the Tialucca.”

  “You are only one chief,” Birjen said to him.

  “I will make them listen. I will see it done.”

  “Then let it be so,” said Tonah. “I will raise the spears of the Tialucca. Let all the clans meet here before the next full moon.” To Mahai he said, “Are the Manutu assembling their hunters?”

  “Yes, but you know that they are scattered across the forest as the Bantuan are scattered across the valleys.”

  Tonah looked at N
aran. “When you return with your warriors, we should go south together and join them as soon as we can.”

  Birjen made a grumbling sound. “The Manutu have very few hunters, unless you count those who hunt fruit and nuts in the forest. No, the monkey people will be of little use. The Silasese would be the better choice. They number even less than the Bantuan, but they are strong in spirit. Their sorcerers have power over wind and waves, and as warriors, their women are fierce as their men. We should join forces with them.”

  Naran shook his head. Without his straw hat his hair was wild and shaggy. “Everything could change by the time we gather men and dogs and get back here. We might have to decide all over again. Let’s wait until then.”

  Aiyan made a seated bow. “I have a question for Prince Mahai,” he said himself in his pidgin Baskillian. “How bad did you hurt them? Could they fight again right now?”

  Mahai seemed to understand. “The Hariji are pig hunters. The Onakai are warriors. They were three times our number, yet we killed more of them than they did of us.”

  Aiyan nodded. “So he’s lost maybe one-third of his army,” he said aside to Kyric. “If he doesn’t have enough prisoners to bring it back to full strength, he’ll have to look elsewhere, and if he plans to give his blood to every one of them, and I think he will, then that will give us time. He can no more afford to lose his blood than we can ours.”

  “Then you think he is a Knight of the Dragon’s Blood?”

  “I feel strongly that it is so.”

  Though he spoke in Avic, Kyric lowered his voice so that Ellec and Lerica couldn’t hear. “If they all take his blood . . . with so many worshiping him, with a whole army willing to fight to the death for him — gods Aiyan, he could soon be unstoppable.”

  “They can always be stopped,” Aiyan said. “I will end this with one stroke if I can get within sword’s reach of him. But that won’t be easy.”