Thirty-Nine Days: The Smuggler's Salve

Yuraq-illa dragged the big man by his armpits until her boots found dry shale thirty paces above the river shelf.

Her shoulders burned from the haul. The gorge-leech had taken her wool mantle with it into the undertow, and without the heavy weave, the subzero wind sliced clean through her lined hide vest. Every gust off the churning black water carried ice spray that froze into beads across her eyelashes.

She dropped Rumi-qa against the back wall of a shallow undercut where the limestone formed a natural windbreak. He didn't complain. He propped his back against the frozen stone, laid his ash poleaxe across his knees, and let his head rest back against the rock.

His right leg was stretched out on the gravel. From the mid-calf down, the bare flesh was the color of mutton fat, hard and glossy, marbled with dark purple veins frozen solid in the meat.

Yuraq-illa knelt in the gravel, drew her skinning knife, and pressed the flat of the cold blade hard against his big toe.

No blood pooled. No muscle flinched.

She tapped the point against the sole of his heel. It made a dry, wooden clicking sound, like iron striking seasoned oak.

"Three minutes more in that drift," she said, catching her breath, "and I’d be carving the whole foot off at the ankle with a camp saw."

Rumi-qa opened his eyes. His breathing was shallow, his left hand pressed tight against the tallow-soaked bandage over his ribs where the towline had bitten deep. "Is the bone cracked?"

"Bone doesn't rot. It’s the meat that dies," Yuraq-illa muttered. She wiped grit from her knife blade onto her thigh. "You threw your only hearth-stone into the river to squash an overgrown leech. Now you have no boots, no fire, and sixty miles of frozen scree between us and the valley road. You’re a tactical genius."

"The stone killed the beast," he said.

"The stone was your heat, soldier. On the black market in Pampa-alta, a live hearth-stone fetches four bags of parched grain and two brass knives. You drowned it for free."

She reached into the bottom of her leather kit-bag and pulled out a small earthenware pot, barely the size of a fist. The clay was sealed around the lip with hardened red pitch. She turned it over in her palm, her fingers lingering on the wax seal.

Rumi-qa looked at the pot. "Black-willow pitch."

"Mixed with mountain pepper and render from fat-tail sheep," she said, keeping her thumb over the seal. "The road wardens hang anyone caught carrying it north of the salt flats. It draws frost-burn out of the tendon without stripping the skin off the meat. Cost me three weeks of running copper wire past the turnpike gates."

"Break the seal," Rumi-qa said.

"Not yet." Yuraq-illa sat back on her heels, holding the jar just out of his reach. She kept her voice flat, the way she negotiated with skin-traders at the river crossings. "You’re an imperial vanguard deserter with two squadrons of the Seventh hunting your tracks. Kallpa-qa isn't burning whole ridges of pine for a man who stole five copper cobs from a payroll wagon. What is in that pouch at your belt?"

Rumi-qa looked at her. For two breaths, the only sound was the hollow boom of the river grinding broken floes against the limestone bank below.

"An order of succession," he said quietly.

"Whose?"

"The Emperor's." Rumi-qa reached into his tunic with stiff fingers, pulled out the lead-weighted leather cylinder he had cut from the dead patrol corporal, and tossed it into the gravel between them. "He froze to death on the Sun-Throne twelve days ago. There is no heir. The Council of Houses is moving their household levies toward the capital to take the seat before the celestial alignment."

Yuraq-illa picked up the cylinder. The royal seal was stamped deep into the hardened beeswax: the twin suns bound in spiked iron.

"A succession war happens every three generations," she said, though her thumb traced the jagged edges of the broken wax. "The houses kill each other in the plaza, the farmers pay twenty percent more barley, and the roads stay frozen. That doesn't explain Kallpa-qa."

"Look at the bottom clause," Rumi-qa said. "The wolves."

She unrolled the stiff parchment. Her eyes scanned the scribed imperial cipher, parsing the cold bureaucratic terms she had seen on toll-gate warrants.

"The tribute," she read aloud, her voice dropping. "Wolf-tithes quadrupled across the seven lower provinces. Effective immediately upon the setting of the winter moon."

She stopped. Her throat felt dry, tighter than the cold air warranted.

"The imperial braziers," Rumi-qa said, his voice hard as iron nails. "They tell the frontier villages the blood-tallow is a barrier. A holy ward to hold the Yana-wolves in the high peaks. It isn't a wall, Yuraq-illa. It is bait."

She stared at him. "The empire feeds the packs."

"The empire breeds the packs," Rumi-qa corrected. "They cull forty wagons of provincial convicts and unbonded laborers every winter to keep the beasts fed along the ridge lines. It keeps the villages trapped inside the garrison walls. A population that cannot walk the roads without imperial tallow cannot rebel, cannot trade outside the tax houses, and cannot run. Now the houses need five thousand wolf-skins to clear the high roads for their armies, and they intend to harvest every border settlement to get them."

Yuraq-illa looked down at the parchment in her hands. She thought of her brother’s village in the lower basin, of the three iron braziers that smoked day and night at the town gate, and the monthly levy of sick elders and stray orphans the wardens marched out into the timber at dusk.

She shoved the parchment back into the leather case and threw it onto his chest.

"They’re butchering us," she whispered.

"They've been butchering you for eighty years," Rumi-qa said. "Kallpa-qa knows I have the writ. If it reaches the southern garrisons before the forty days expire, the provincial levies will burn the toll stations instead of marching for the houses."

Yuraq-illa didn't answer right away. She picked up her skinning knife, wedged the point under the red pitch on the earthenware pot, and popped the seal with a sharp snap.

The reek of bitter willow sap and sulfur-grease filled the narrow undercut.

"Sit on your hands," she told him. "Hold onto the rock. If you jerk your leg, I’ll drop the jar, and we’ll both freeze out here."

She scooped a thick knot of black salve onto her palms and rubbed her hands together until the grease warmed and liquefied. Then she gripped Rumi-qa’s dead white heel with her left hand and pressed her greasy palm hard against the frozen instep.

Rumi-qa’s spine locked rigid against the stone. His jaw clamped shut with an audible click of teeth, his neck muscles standing out like braided cord, but not a sound escaped his lips.

Yuraq-illa worked the grease into the dead skin with brutal, rhythmic friction. She kneaded the black pitch along the stiff arches, dragging her thumbs hard over the frozen tendons to force the blood back into the collapsed vessels.

The flesh resisted at first, cold as river gravel, but the friction and the stinging pepper heat began to bite.

Under her thumbs, the waxy white tone broke. Ugly, mottled crimson bloomed across the arch of the foot, followed by the dull swelling of bruised muscle as thawed blood hammered into the damaged capillary beds. A faint, sickening steam rose from the greasy skin into the frigid air.

Rumi-qa’s fingers clawed into the shale behind him, crushing loose pebbles to dust. Sweat broke across his forehead, freezing into frost along his hairline.

"Nerve’s alive," Yuraq-illa said, her own breathing ragged as she smeared another scoop of pitch along his calf. "You’ll keep the foot. But you won't be sprinting across any ridges tonight."

She cut strips of oiled cured hide from her spare quiver lining, bound the greasy foot tightly, and wrapped it in layers of the tough leather. She tied the bundle with hemp twine, creating a makeshift moccasin that would keep the thaw-grease from leaking into the snow.

"You owe me two silver bars for the pot," she said, wiping her blackened hands on a rag. "Plus interest."

"Put it on the empire's tab," Rumi-qa rasped, his voice rough from holding back the pain.

Before she could pack her jar, a sharp, brassy note split the gorge.

The sound rolled down from the crags above—a harsh, two-tone blast that echoed off the basalt bluffs like the crack of an axe against green pine.

Yuraq-illa snatched her arbalest, her head snapping up toward the southern ridge.

High on the rim, three hundred paces above their shelter, loose shale cascaded down the chute in a pale grey plume. Through the drifting snow dust, two figures in dark vanguard mantles stood silhouetted against the winter sky, surveying the riverbanks below.

Kallpa-qa’s forward trackers had crossed the gorge.