G4

Rahu had three rules. First rule: never sleep in the same place twice. Second rule: never trust anyone who smiles before they have a reason to. Third rule: if they find you, run. If you can't run, fight. If you can't fight, disappear. He had been living by these rules since he was thirteen years old, which meant he had been living by them for six years, which meant — in the counting of his particular life — that he had been alive for a significant margin longer than the odds had ever suggested he deserved. Currently he was in the rafters of a grain warehouse in the merchant city of Nandagram, watching the men who were looking for him move through the shadows below. There were four of them. They moved well — professional spacing, overlapping sight lines, no wasted motion. Kedar Sahu's men, without question. Kedar Sahu ran the Nandagram underworld with the calm efficiency of a man who had long ago decided that violence was simply a tool, like a hammer or a measuring rope, to be applied where needed without sentiment. Rahu had stolen from Kedar Sahu's tax collection. Not for himself. He was extremely clear on this point in his own head, though he understood it would be unlikely to impress Kedar Sahu's men if he tried to explain it. He had stolen eight hundred silver pieces from the collection cart and distributed all of them — all of them, because keeping any would have felt wrong in a way he couldn't fully articulate — among the families in the Khalasi quarter whose rents the collection had been raised to cover. He had done it in the dark. He had left no name. He had been seen. Of course he had been seen. He was always seen eventually. From the rafters, twelve feet above the warehouse floor, he watched the four men and evaluated his options. Rahu was nineteen years old and looked, at first glance, like someone it would be fine to underestimate. He was not especially large — lean and mid-height, with the kind of build that belonged to people who moved constantly and ate only what they could carry. His face had a sharp-edged quality, all angles and shadows, with dark eyes that were simultaneously watchful and, when he chose, utterly blank. He wore dark clothing, nondescript. He moved, habitually, as though gravity were a negotiation rather than a rule. He had no formal martial training. What he had was six years of learning how to fight from people who were trying to kill him, which was, he had found, an extremely effective curriculum. The four men spread out across the warehouse floor. One of them was carrying a lamp, which was tactically poor — it illuminated them far more than it helped them see. Rahu filed this away. People who worked for comfortable men often made comfortable mistakes. He mapped his exit. There was a loading hatch in the roof ten feet to his left, unlatched — he had checked it on his way in, as he checked all possible exits in every space he entered. The drop from the hatch to the alley below was twelve feet. He had made worse drops. The question was whether to go now or wait. Waiting was safer, if he could stay still long enough for them to clear the building. He was very good at being still. He had spent a winter, once, hiding in the crawlspace of a temple, coming out only at night, and had learned that the human capacity for stillness was much greater than people imagined, if the motivation was sufficient. Then the man with the lamp looked up. Not at Rahu — at the rafters in general, the way a cautious man sweeps a space. But the lamp caught Rahu's eyes in the dark, and the man's sweep paused, just slightly. Rahu moved. He was across the rafters in four steps — barefoot, fast, the old wood making only the minimum of protest — and out the loading hatch before the shout from below had finished leaving the man's mouth. The cold night air hit him. He was falling. He tucked, hit the alley stones in a rolling impact that distributed the force through his shoulder and back, came up running, and was thirty meters away before the warehouse door slammed open behind him. He ran without panic. Panic was for people who hadn't planned. He had planned four routes from this district, contingent on different pursuit scenarios. He took the second one — through the dyer's quarter, where the colour vats produced a constant low smoke that confused lamplight and made the air thick with indigo and turmeric, past the old aqueduct, over the wall of the abandoned merchant's garden with the rotting trellis that was easy to scale if you knew which sections were still solid, and out the back gate that was never locked because the gardener had died three years ago and no one had noticed yet. He stopped in the shadow of a neem tree on the far side of the garden wall and listened. Distant shouts. Moving away from him. He had lost them for now. Rahu sat with his back against the neem tree and breathed carefully. He was bleeding from one knee — the landing had been slightly off — and his left shoulder ached from the impact. Nothing broken. He had broken things before and knew the difference. From this position, he could see a portion of the market square. And on the broad trunk of the central peepal tree, he could see a large notice — imperial seal, the Golden Wheel — that several citizens were reading by torchlight, their breath fogging in the cool night air. He read it from distance. His eyes were very good. They had to be. The tournament notice. All castes eligible. The Imperial Library. And at the bottom, in smaller text he almost missed: THOSE WHO BEAR THE MARK OF AGNI MARGA ARE ESPECIALLY SUMMONED. Rahu looked at his right hand. The mark had been there for two days. He had assumed it was a brand — Kedar Sahu's men had caught him briefly, two weeks ago, before he escaped, and he had assumed they'd done something to his hand in the few seconds before he'd freed himself. But the mark didn't look like a brand. It was too precise, too geometric — a shadow-knot, he thought, like darkness folded in on itself, the black of it somehow deeper than the surrounding skin. And it didn't hurt. It just existed, and occasionally grew warmer, as though responding to something Rahu couldn't perceive. He had ignored it because he had other problems. He thought about the tournament. He thought about the Imperial Library. He thought about the words all castes eligible, which in his experience meant nothing because the people who wrote such notices and the people who implemented them were entirely different categories of human being. He thought about Nandagram, where Kedar Sahu's men would be looking for him for the foreseeable future, and about the three other cities where he was similarly inconvenient to remain, and about the fact that the road to Suryapura was, conveniently, in the direction of east. He could run east as well as any direction. Rahu stood up from the shadow of the neem tree. He adjusted his pack. He assessed the streets ahead for watchers and found them satisfactorily empty. He began walking. Three steps in, he stopped. In the far side of the market square, half-hidden in the shadow of a stall awning, a small girl was sitting on the ground. Perhaps five years old. Alone. Crying silently, the way children cry when they've been doing it long enough that the sound has run out but the grief hasn't. Rahu looked at her for a long moment. He looked at the road east. He went to the girl. 'Hey,' he said quietly, crouching down to her level. 'Hey. Are you lost?' She looked up at him with enormous wet eyes and nodded. 'Okay.' He settled back on his heels. 'What's your name?' 'Pinki.' 'Okay, Pinki. I'm going to help you find your family. And then I'm going to leave, because I have some people looking for me and I'd rather they didn't find me here. Does that sound reasonable?' Pinki considered this with the grave seriousness of the very young. Then she nodded again. It took an hour to find her parents — market vendors who had been frantic and were currently being calmed by the watch. Rahu deposited Pinki at the edge of the tearful reunion and was gone before anyone could ask his name. He was back on the road east by midnight. In his palm, the shadow-mark pulsed once, like a heartbeat. He ignored it. He had places to be.