Page 6 of The Witch who Trades with Death

Chapter Six

Khana blinked. Death and the shadowy spirit realm were gone. She was back in her physical body, a hand on Kokaatl’s stomach.

A glowing hand.

Khana stepped back and looked down at herself. The servant’s uniform covered most of her, but the parts of skin that were revealed – her hands, face, and ankles – glowed like a star. White and orange and indigo. Power surged through her veins, the likes of which she’d never felt before.

She tried to remember her life before the palace. She could recall what the Naatuun Desert looked like with its dunes and cacti and scorching sun. She knew the hazy details of Guma’s face and her execution. But she couldn’t remember the day she left the desert. Her parents must have packed her away in that carriage, right? Had they said anything to her before they did? Hugged her?

Khana didn’t know. She no longer remembered. The last thing she recalled was Guma’s blood on her father’s sword, and her mother muttering, “You should have told us as soon as you knew. We wouldn’t have had to go through this.”

Well. That was all she needed to remember.

She pulled the hood of her cloak over her face, knowing it wouldn’t do much to hide the glow. She’d be easy to spot until she was over the cliff – gods, was she really going to jump over a cliff ? This was a terrible idea.

She peeked out the door of the temple. Death had been right: the gates were heavily guarded, as were the walls. And this was just the servants’ side; it would be even worse elsewhere. There were at least a dozen guards between her and the garden. She’d have to move fast.

Lute on her back. Head-bag in hand. She sprinted out the door.

There was one factor of the excess aji she hadn’t considered: with all that extra strength in her legs, she was much faster than usual. The world blurred around her, a haze of gray sky and wooden buildings. She was halfway across the courtyard before the first guard yelled at her. At the lip of the garden by the time a team of them chased after her.

She ran across the grass. Past the fishpond and its stone art. Past the hedges and jasmines and lilies. Towards the gnarled tree with branches that grew over the hedge perimeter, hiding the edge of the cliff from view.

“She’s going to jump!” one of the guards gasped.

“Don’t do it!”

Khana squeezed her eyes shut, pumped her legs, and hurled herself forward.

The wind roared in her ears as gravity yanked her down. There was one second of dizzying fall. Two. Three.

She hit the ground with a thud .

A bed of grainy mud cradled her. Rough, gritty, and very fatal from such a height.

At least, it should have been.

Khana cracked an eye open and breathed deep. She pressed her fingers to her throat just to be sure she still had a heartbeat. She did, strong and rabbit-quick.

She was alive.

Curled on the ground, she stared at the rock wall above, convincing herself that she was in fact still breathing. Even without looking at her now plain, dark skin, she knew that she no longer had any excess aji. Her bones were tired.

The guards’ voices drifted down, barely audible over the sound of running water. She couldn’t make out what they were saying, but she didn’t need to. She stayed perfectly still, too terrified to move, hoping that they believed she was dead and would report that to Yamueto.

The voices soon left. Moving her head just enough to see the top of the cliff, she checked to make certain they were gone before scrambling to her feet. Mud clung to her clothes, and something twanged on her back.

Khana froze. My lute.

She scrambled out of her cloak, pulled off the strap keeping the lute to her back, and cried in anguish. It was completely destroyed, nothing but splinters and wires. She pressed the remainder of its neck to her forehead, the last of her tears falling on the shattered wood.

It was just a lute.

But it had gotten her through six years of torment.

Khana looked up, trying to blink the tears from her eyes. She didn’t have time to mourn.

She kissed its remaining fragments, set them on the ground and stood. A few feet away, the river lazily sawed through the bottom of the ravine. It was an uninspiring sight, this far down, somewhere between brown and gray, and the beach she’d landed on was just a strip of mud. Rock walls closed in around her.

She found the dress-bag a few paces away, bleeding on the sludge.

“Well, you’re not coming back anytime soon,” she grumbled. She tossed the whole mess in the water. Giving one last reluctant look at her destroyed lute, she washed the blood from her hands and headed for the docks.

Khana ran until she wheezed, then ran some more. Her body, not used to running or even walking for long distances, held her down. She ignored its cries for rest, for water, for food, and ran harder.

She slowed to a walk only when she reached other people; women washing laundry in the water, children playing as they bathed, a couple of men trying to fish. Khana’s breaths came deafeningly loud, and she walked on.

Soon, she reached the city proper. Boats and ships docked, fishermen shouted their wares, whores enticed men into their brothels. Khana let herself be carried by the crowd, into the city’s heart. Canals had been dug from the river and nearby lake, allowing small boats to pass through all parts of the city, ensuring that you were never more than a few feet away from an open body of water at any given time. Nobody died of thirst in Balasco, although most refrained from drinking straight out of the canals and river. Khana stopped by one of the numerous pumps and fountains in the city and stayed for so long quenching her thirst that she caused a small line of impatient civilians behind her. She ran off, muttering apologies as she wiped cool water from her chin.

She walked for so long she got dizzy and had to sit against the wall of a building, its wood wet from mud and water. She needed food. Money. A way out.

Once the dizziness subsided, she got back on her feet. There were a handful of beggars nearby with bowls out and eyes down. They probably knew where she could find a free meal, but she’d have to ask and hope they helped her. Hope they didn’t sense that something was wrong and turn her in. She couldn’t do it.

Her feet carried her away. Already she missed her lute. Her thoughts were much calmer and clearer after plucking the strings.

It took some wandering, but eventually she found what she was looking for: a thin, empty alley, barely big enough to hold a stray cat, but it was clean – throwing one’s waste in public was punishable by imprisonment since anything that got in the canals threatened to contaminate the intricate water supply.

Khana settled in the darkest corner and pulled out the jewelry she’d taken from Kokaatl’s corpse. Much of it was unusable. Too distinct, too expensive for an average civilian to own. She set those aside to toss into the canals. She used her stolen kitchen knife to pry out the emeralds, rubies, and topazes of the others, bending and warping the gold so it was snarled and unrecognizable, then rubbed dirt into them so they looked older than they were. A dealer might suspect they were stolen, but not from the palace. Khana worked until her back ached and eyes drooped.

Her mind wandered to her homeland. She would have liked to return; stroll around the sand dunes, rock boulders, and oasis that had defined her youth. See if any of her childhood friends were still alive. But she couldn’t. The Naatuun Desert was too far and would be the first place Yamueto would think to look. If she went even a mile east, she’d be found and caught.

She could go west, follow the river to the ocean. But if she tried to jump on one of the ships, she’d be caught. Last year a couple of concubines had tried the same, not knowing that ship-searches were one of the first things Yamueto did when hunting runaway wives. She’d have to walk to the ocean first, then proceed on ship.

But the river would be the second place Yamueto would look. It led to a walled city that protected the mouth from naval attacks and served as one of the first lines of defense for Balasco, as well as a major trade hub. It was too close, too obvious.

To the north, the empire stretched for over a thousand miles, gobbling up kingdoms like they were appetizers. But if she went south…

The immediate lands to the south had been conquered by Yamueto at least a generation ago. Beyond those borders was the free kingdom of Tlaphar, currently at war with the empire. They’d likely fall within a year.

But beyond Tlaphar lay the Simakhil Mountains, which served as the border between Tlaphar and the kingdom of Divaajin. Northern countries had been trying to conquer Divaajin for centuries and had failed because of those mountains and the country’s fierce soldiers – the Ghura, Sita had called them. A group of nomads subdued by the kingdom and put to use protecting the mountains.

Khana shivered. There wasn’t much more about Divaajin in the palace library. Just that they were a barbarous people who lived in frigid winters, ate raw meat, and slaughtered anyone who looked at them wrong.

All of that sounded preferable to going back to Yamueto.

If Khana could put them between her and the emperor, she’d be safe.

She looked at her wealth. Everything she owned in the world came down to the clothes she wore, a kitchen knife, and a handful of warped gold jewelry, all of it stolen. The sooner she traded her bounty for coins, the better.

She pulled herself to her feet and got to work.