Chapter 4
For the last six months, every single morning, Inquisition Witch Hunter Javed would sit on a rock, high above the main trade road south of the Capitol, eating his breakfast and watching.
His mask—the leering, fanged face of the Law—had been left behind when he had been given this assignment, but he didn’t need a mask to hide who he really was, for Javed was a man of many faces. Everyone in Shabdkosh believed he was merely another merchant of Great House Zarger, with just enough status to avoid the shakedowns of jealous warriors, but not important enough to be of interest to the local arbiters and their political machinations. So no one paid attention to Javed as he plotted murder and counted wagons.
Every day he watched for a specific trading company. When he saw them, he counted the wagons until he got to the fifth one. That was the wagon which would be carrying his orders from the Inquisitor’s Dome. Merchant caravans always flew banners advertising their wares. He didn’t care about the words, just the colors. Usually there was nothing new, just green, yellow, yellow. Sometimes it was blue, red, blue, which meant he needed to walk up the road a bit to check for a coded note left beneath a specific rock.
This was a common method of passing messages among the secretive witch hunters. It made him idly wonder what they’d ever do with an obligation who was color blind? That could lead to some hilarious miscommunications.
This morning the slowly lumbering wagon bore three flags: yellow, red, yellow.
About damned time.
Javed left his breakfast unfinished on his favorite rock and climbed down the hill, excited to fulfill his mission. His house had obligated him to the Inquisition because he was a handsome, likable sort, easily trusted by others, but also an excellent liar untroubled by conscience. He was perfect for assignments like this. Javed began to whistle a happy tune as he walked. He only needed to go slightly out of his way to scratch a symbol on a door at the edge of the casteless quarter.
Shabdkosh wasn’t much of a town. It existed as a way-stop for the important people traveling to and from the Capitol. They may have shared the same desert, but the Capitol was served by several mighty aqueducts that enabled it to sustain a huge population, while Shabdkosh had a few deep wells that could serve at most a thousand souls, after they had watered the caravan oxen and the carriage horses of the first caste of course.
So Javed’s next stop was to poison the well inside the warrior-caste fort. It had been a long time since any criminals had been bold enough to threaten anything this close to the Capitol, so the guards here were complacent, and as the merchant who delivered their rice, Javed was a familiar face. Nobody noticed the always friendly rice merchant drop a clay jug down their well.
The formula was potent and often deadly even in small dosages. It was one of the Inquisition alchemists’ more useful mixtures, because the victims would not usually experience any symptoms for six to eight hours after ingesting. By the time they knew something was wrong, other soldiers would have been drinking all day.
Meanwhile, he knew that the Inquisitors who had been secretly living among the casteless would have seen the mark he had left for them and begun their preparations as well. There were a large number of casteless living here due to the sulfur mine, a tedious, smelly trade that the worker caste thought beneath them. Javed had two other conspirators, one having taken the place of the overseer, treating the non-people with extra petty cruelty to make them bitter, and another playing the part of a casteless religious fanatic, nurturing hostility and fomenting rebellion. He didn’t envy his brothers, living in filth and disease pretending to be stupid fish-eaters in order to accomplish their mission. Javed was looking forward to ending this charade and returning to the Capitol. His brothers had to be ecstatic, certainly hoping to never smell sulfur again.
Once the casteless started seeing warriors clutching their guts and collapsing at their posts, it would be hailed as a sign of the Forgotten’s favor. The strong made weak, so the weak could become strong, and all that nonsense. His allies would kill a few warriors to show the rest how easy it was, and then the casteless’s bloodthirsty nature would take over. Out of obedience or fear, most of the non-people would remain hiding in their shacks, but he had been assured that enough fools and hot heads would rise up to ensure quite a bit of bloodshed.
Casteless were violent, but untrained and stupid. They would squander their energy on the wrong targets, the workers who profited from their labors most likely. So Javed would personally make sure there were sufficient casualties among the important people to make this a notable act of rebellion. He would do so by setting the lone first-caste compound on fire, burning it to the ground while its occupants were trapped inside, and picking off anyone who made it out alive.
Javed returned to his shop and removed his bag of tools from where he’d kept it hidden in the rafters. There was one particular arbiter who had sneered at the quality of his rice. Javed didn’t even particularly care for rice, but he took his cover identity very seriously. He would make sure that arbiter got a poisoned crossbow bolt to the face.
He never asked why the Law needed them to kill a town, especially one only a couple days journey from the most important city in the world. He had seen no more signs of wickedness here than anywhere else, but regardless of the reason for their death sentence, Javed was looking forward to carrying it out.