The runner, a halfbreed Selanese with the long legs and freckled complexion of his slave mother's people, was puffing hard as he burst from the olive groves uphill and hurried to the excavation where Tecia and her cousin's crew worked. Hair and loinclout soaked with sweat, the messenger halted at the lip of the trench. "Sorceress, you are needed!" he blurted when he had regained enough wind to speak.
Tecia sighed. "My tasks occupy me." She indicated the inscribed stone walls around her, the men with picks and buckets laboring to carry off the packed silt that had filled the hip-deep space where she stood.
"It is the headman's command. It is most dire. A revenant has been unbound. It has killed two men already."
"One victim the tomb robber, no doubt," she remarked wryly.
The messenger nodded. "You weigh the ingots correctly, Mage Helper. But the other is Gelages, your uncle's strong man."
Tecia tilted her head down and scuffed the debris at her feet, letting the twinge of loss run its course.
"Tell my uncle I will come," she stated.
The runner turned.
"Wait," she called.
He paused, forehead creasing.
"Drink some water. Rest." She pointed up at the sun. "The ghost will not venture out again until twilight. Haste is unnecessary."
The youth hesitated, darting a glance at the broken terrain through which he had to return. She could see him weigh the balance between her advice--sensible, but given by a woman--and his master's command of utmost speed. In compromise, he visited the water wagon, drenched a cloth, and wiped the perspiration from his brow and upper body. After several small careful sips from the dipper, he set off again fast enough to pretend he was hurrying, but slow enough to avail himself of the reprieve Tecia offered.
In the trench, Tecia finished making a rubbing of an inscription in the stone wall, stowed the leaf in her basket, and vaulted nimbly out of the trench.
"Another ten paces should bring us to the drain," she told her cousin Flen, the leader of the workers, as he turned toward her, waving away dust clouds.
He grunted, which she knew meant that if she were correct, they would keep working, but if she were wrong, they would stop and wait for her return, and let her shoulder the blame for the delay.
She sighed and turned away. She slapped the grit from her tunic and took her own turn by the water wagon, cleaning her face and hands and easing her parched throat.
At this arid time of year, it took imagination to recall the point of all this labor was to restore the ancient Ladian water system and reclaim another stretch of swamp. If all went well--if Tecia had translated the old scrolls well enough--when the rains returned, water would no longer linger in pools, nurturing the young of malarial mosquitoes and other vermin of stagnant water. A new generation of farmers could till tracts of fertile alluvial soil unavailable since their great-grandsire's day.
Tecia cursed the luck that forced her to leave. It had taken much persuasion to convince the headman to devote a work crew to the project, and much goading to keep it going. The dry season would not last much longer. However, a murderous revenant was not an interruption that could be ignored.
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