Lauren Haney - Face Turned Backward

The guard pointed toward an open door. “Through there!

The first room to the right.”

Bak dashed down a dark hallway, offering a hasty prayer to the lord Amon that he would soon lay hands on the man he sought. He found an open portal, spotted a mudbrick stairway rising to the second floor. A swath of light shone down from above, illuminating the steps. He raced upward, found himself in an open court so small that half its space was taken up by another stairway. He darted on up, burst out onto the roof, stopped. The heat rose in waves from the flat white surface, so bright it made his eyes water. The nearly square expanse was empty of life, the plaster too hot to walk on unshod, and the air reeked of fish. Some enterprising soul had cleaned dozens of perch and laid them out to dry. The surrounding rooftops were as hot and uninviting, as empty.

Laundry lay drying on one roof. Small dark objects, grapes he thought, dotted a sheet spread out on another.

Swerving around the fish, he raced across the roof to the corner and called down to the two old women. They had seen no armed man. Following the knee-high parapet along the back of the building, he ran to the far corner. From there, he could look down two intersecting streets. Except for a couple of brown puppies play-fighting and a group of spearmen coming through the fortress gate, both were empty.

He had to give the assailant credit; he could not have picked a better time of day, with the sun blinding hot and few men or women venturing out.

He zigzagged back across the roof, peering down into several small open courts that had once served as sources of light and air for the maze of rooms on the second floor. Long abandoned, they had entrapped over the years a thick blanket of sand dotted with broken pottery, bits of rotting wood, fallen plaster, and a variety of objects of no further use to anyone. In one court, he surprised a trio of rats nibbling at some unidentifiable object. In another, he set to flight a flock of swallows living in holes excavated in a decaying wall. In none did he find any means of descent from the roof, nor did he see any telltale footprints in the sand.

70 / Lauren Haney

By the time he reached the main courtyard, his confidence had begun to wane. The front of the building, above the entryway where the guard was posted, seemed an unlikely avenue of escape. Twice the size of the other courts, it had suffered a greater assault from the elements. A large section of wall had collapsed. As he hurried toward the opening, the roof felt springy beneath his feet, fragile and insubstantial, and he noticed a network of tiny cracks where the materials beneath had weakened, breaking the plaster. Slowing his pace, treading as lightly as his weight would allow, he approached with care.

As he knelt at the edge, something snapped beneath his feet and the roof settled with a short, sharp jolt that sent his heart into his throat. Stifling a nervous laugh, he looked down into the open court. Below he saw a mound of crumbling mudbricks sprinkled with sand and trash. A swath of sand had been pushed away on the near side and the bricks beneath were gouged and crushed. As if a heavy object had fallen on the mound. Or a man had jumped from above.

Cursing beneath his breath, Bak pushed himself off the roof. The fall was not great, his landing easy, but his feet slid out from under him and he skidded down the bricks on his backside-as the man before him had done. Standing up, brushing himself off, he looked around. A single set of footprints crossed the sand to an open portal on his right.

Passing through, he found himself in a long corridor, its walls broken on both sides by open doorways. He hurried from one to the next, finding no one inside. Bursting through the final portal, he skidded to a stop. A ladder stood in the middle of the room, its uppermost rungs protruding through a small, square opening to the roof. Off to the side, hidden in shadow, he spotted a bow almost as long as he was tall and an unadorned leather quiver filled with arrows.

He snapped out an oath. Only a man confident that he would escape would leave behind his weapon. A man clever enough to abandon a weapon that would draw attention to himself.

Though he knew the effort was wasted, he climbed the ladder and looked outside. As expected, the expanse of white plaster stretched out before him, with no man in sight. While he had been wasting time going from room to room, his quarry had made his escape.

As much as he hated to admit it, he had been outsmarted.

Thoroughly disgusted, he picked up the bow and quiver and looked them over. They were standard army issue, no different than hundreds of other weapons stored in the armory and carried by the archers of Buhen. They could not have been more commonplace.

“He breathed his last in my arms.” The sentry, kneeling beside Mahu’s body, stared at his bloody hands. “Why am I moved? I’ve seen men die before, men I knew well cut down on the field of battle.”

Bak looked at the dead man, slain without warning and for no good reason. Mahu lay flat on his back, as the sentry had left him. One arm rested by his side. The other was folded over his breast, held there by the arrows that had stolen his life. His skin looked waxen, his tan too dark, his bared belly, seldom exposed to the sun, too light. Rivulets of scarlet had flowed from his wounds to congeal on the stones beneath him.

“Did he speak before he died?”

“He said…” The sentry stood up and placed his hands behind him, as he if could no longer bear the sight of them.

“He tried more than once and each time the blood came, snuffing out his words. Somehow, on the brink of death, he found the strength. He said, ‘I’ve done no wrong.’”

Bak muttered an oath. He was saddened by Mahu’s death, and angry. What kind of vile criminal would lie in wait to take a man’s life? A man destined to die anyway unless proven innocent of the crime for which he had been accused?

What snake would slay a man with a policeman walking beside him, taking him into custody for that very crime?

“I’ll do what I can,” he heard himself say, repeating the promise he had made while Mahu still lived.

“Our task is to keep trade flowing, not stop it altogether.”

Commandant Thuty strode from his armchair to the door, paused, stared out at a courtyard he probably did not see.

At last he slapped the wall hard with the flat of his hand, pivoted. “All right, Lieutenant, I’ll issue an order at first light.

All ships and caravans will remain in Buhen and Kor until Mahu’s death has been resolved.” With a low growl of vexa-tion, he stalked back to his chair and dropped into it. “I trust you’ll lay hands on the one who slew him before all trading and shipping comes to a standstill.”

Bak took care to keep his voice neutral, his promise realistic. “I’ll do my best, sir.”

“Your best.” Thuty gave him a long, speculative scowl. “I’d not stop traffic crossing the frontier if I thought you’d fail.”

“Yes, sir.” Bak did not know which was worse: the commandant’s reprimands, whether deserved or not, or his refus-al to accept the possibility of failure.

As if satisfied he had made his point, Thuty leaned back in the chair and plucked his drinking bowl from the table beside him. The rich, heavy odor of roasting lamb wafted through the door, tantalizing Bak with the promise of an evening meal he would not share.

As soon as he had sent Mahu’s body to the house of death, he had hastened to the commandant’s residence. He had found Thuty in his private reception room, reading the day’s

dispatches from the other fortresses along the Belly of Stones.

The room, located on the second floor where the commandant’s family was quartered, was private in name only. Over and above the fact that Thuty conducted far more business here than in his office, his household-a wife, a concubine, a half dozen children, and as many servants-had a tendency to fill any available space.