2: Servants of the Crossed Arrows Read Online Free PDF Page A

supposed he would have been either angered or worried to receive another threat in place of gratitude. As was, he found it somehow funny.
    He was struck   with the delirious idea that Pivan only knew how to communicate via threats and John wondered if Pivan would have asked someone out in the same manner.
    If you don’t go out with me, I’ll hunt you down to the ends of the shattered earth.
    John smiled.
    “Do you think I’m joking?” Pivan demanded.
    “No,” John murmured, “I’m moved by your commitment to the relationship.”
    Pivan looked deeply confused by this and for a moment John thought that he had responded in the wrong language. But his words had all been Basawar. Then he realized that Pivan was the kind of man who didn’t know how to deal with humor.
    “His leg’s badly hurt. The bones will need to be set,” John said, to give Pivan a solid crisis to respond to.
    “I’ll take him.” Pivan reached over and very carefully lifted Alidas into his arms.
    “Come,” Pivan called to John, as he carried Alidas to his waiting mount. “We are expected in Amura’taye.”
     

Chapter Twelve
     
    The ride into the walled city, Amura’taye, at the foot of Rathal’pesha passed in delirious waves of exhaustion and sudden bursts of fevered wakefulness. John clung to the back of a rider. He watched the terraced farmlands and herds of heavy-coated sheep blur by. The women working the fields in their rough wool dresses seemed familiar to him. When they passed through the huge gates of a second wall, John suddenly thought he had been here before.
    Then he remembered that he had dreamed of these narrow city streets. He had smelled the thick smoky cooking fires. He knew that there would be crowds of men in the streets, a few of them riding dull gray bicycles.
    The sound of little bells chiming from street vendors was new. And for the first time, he noticed that stone bridges arched over some streets, connecting the upper stories of massive stone buildings. Armed men looked down from the bridges.
    As they continued traveling, John drifted in and out of consciousness. One moment he thought that all the buildings on the road looked rundown, brick tenements and shops with cracked doors. Dark, cramped alleys seemed to wind aimlessly between structures. Filthy goats and half-dressed children ran through the streets. Some of the older children ran alongside the riders, begging for coins. The riders ignored them and their tahldi swung their sharp horns if any child came too close.
    John felt his head droop and his eyes close for what seemed only a matter of seconds. When he looked up, he noticed that the buildings lining the cobbled road were large, more ornate, and often surrounded by gleaming walls of latticed stonework.
    Through the gaps in the walls John caught glimpses of painted doors depicting pastoral scenes and waterspouts shaped like birds or fish rising from tiled roofs.
    When they stopped at last, it was before a large two-story building with a green-tiled roof and carvings of flowers bursting across the polished wooden doors. A motif of crossed arrows repeated all across the stone walls surrounding the main building, its vast courtyard, and the outlying buildings.
    John almost fell off the tahldi; he was so tired and sore. He blindly allowed a man to lead him to a narrow room on the first floor. There were no windows or decorations in the room, only a small bed but that was all that mattered to John.
    Later he woke long enough to devour a hot, nearly flavorless, broth. Pivan asked him about his sister and brother-in–law.
    “Loshai iff Behr.” John gave their Basawar names and roughly described where they could be found. They would know to claim that they had come from the isolated western region of Shun’sira to pray at the foot of Rathal’pesha. Ravishan had practiced the words with them all in case any shepherds or hunters came across them.
    John fought to keep his eyes open as he spoke to Pivan.
    “I