Oath of Swords

by David Weber

  "I see." Tharnatus gazed up at the scorpion above the altar, and his tone was thoughtful, even chiding. "You should have brought the girl here for your sport, My Prince. Had you done so, no one would ever have known. You might have enjoyed her far longer, and she could have fed the Scorpion when you were through. Now?" He shrugged, and Harnak flushed but kept his own voice level.

  "I've brought the Scorpion many a feast, and I'll bring Him more. But this slut was officially a ward of the crown. I thought it best her body be found rather than vanish and raise possibly dangerous questions."

  "Yet the course you followed led only to a different peril, did it not?" Harnak nodded unwilling assent at Tharnatus' raised eyebrow, and the priest continued seriously. "My prince, such pleasures are your right, both as prince and servant of the Scorpion. But it is fitting neither for you to deny your brethren their pleasure nor the Scorpion His due, and you must be wary. You will never be fully secure until you rule Navahk in your own right. Until then, not even He can guard you from death if your actions lead to discovery."

  "Aye," Harnak agreed in a sulky tone, "yet if the Scorpion had struck Churnazh down when first I asked, I would already wear the crown."

  "You know why that was impossible," Tharnatus said sternly. "Your father's guards are too alert to guarantee the dog brothers' success, and we dare not disclose our own presence by sending a greater servant. If the dog brothers had tried and failed before the war, suspicion must have fallen upon you, and he would have had you killed. If we strike him down now, while his alliances are weak and disordered, we risk giving all of Navahk to Bahnak of Hurgrum, and Bahnak will be our mortal enemy so long as he draws breath."

  Harnak bent his head once more with a guttural sound of frustrated agreement, and the priest touched his shoulder.

  "Be patient, My Prince." He made his voice gentle. "Your time will come. Indeed, but for your own . . . involvement, we might attempt Churnazh now and lay the blame upon Bahnak or his son, trusting the thirst for vengeance against Hurgrum to hold the alliances together. As it is, we can but do our best within the possibilities open to us, and we shall. The Scorpion rewards His faithful well."

  Harnak nodded again, less choppily, and Tharnatus slapped his arm.

  "Very well, My Prince. Tell me exactly what you wish done."

  "I want the sluts and Bahzell killed," Harnak said flatly. "They have to die if the tales are ever to dwindle away, and until the tales do, my chance to take the throne is small."

  "Agreed." Tharnatus furrowed his brow and pursed his lips. "Yet it isn't enough that they simply die, is it, My Prince? The women—" He waved a hand in dismissal. "All we require of them is silence, but Bahzell . . . we must prove his death, not simply remove him."

  Harnak's ears twitched agreement, and the priest frowned once more. "Nor, I think, should we involve a greater servant in this. I doubt Bahnak guards the wenches as well as his own family, in which case the dog brothers can deal with them whenever we wish, perhaps even make it seem an accident. Yes," he nodded, "that would be best—an accident that points no fingers at you. And to help with that, it would be as well to wait a time, I think."

  "I want them dead now!" Harnak snarled, but Tharnatus shook his head.

  "Patience, My Prince. Patience and stealth, those are the virtues of the Scorpion. It may be unpleasant, but you must endure it for a time longer. Think, My Prince. If nothing befalls them for weeks, or even a few months, few minds will leap to the conclusion that you had them killed. If you wanted that done, would you not have acted sooner?"

  Harnak grunted, then jerked his head in assent.

  "So," the priest went on after a moment, "that leaves Bahzell, and in order to slay him, we first must find him. Not, I think, too difficult a task. The Scorpion's least servants can find him even in deepest wilderness, in time, yet I doubt we will require their services. A hradani in other lands should be easy enough for the dog brothers to track without the Church's aid, and if he's found a place for himself far from Navahk or Hurgrum, so much the better. He'll feel more secure, unthreatened and unwary until the dog brothers can take him. And," Tharnatus smiled unpleasantly, "he is an outlaw, with a price on his head. What more reasonable than that someone should return that head to Navahk to claim blood price, and so prove his death to all the world?"

  "He won't die easy," Harnak growled, one hand pressing his ribs. "I'll not deny I thought him a weakling, but that's a mistake I won't make twice. In fact, I'd feel safer sending one of the greater servants after him."

  "Come now, My Prince!" Tharnatus chided. "He's only one man, and any man is mortal. The dog brothers can deal with him—and the Scorpion's servants are not to be squandered on tasks others can accomplish. We may use each of them but once for each blood binding."

  Harnak clenched his jaw, then sighed, for the priest was right. Sealing a demon to obedience was a risky business, even for the Church of Sharna. A single slip could—and would—spell the grisly death of the creature's summoners, and such exercises of power were difficult to hide from those with eyes to see. Fortunately, there were few such eyes in hradani lands, where even Orr and his children were looked upon askance, but it would take only a single misstep to spell the destruction of this temple, for the hradani had not forgotten the Dark Gods' part in the Fall of Kontovar. Harnak's own cronies would cut his throat if they even suspected to whom he'd given his allegiance, but that was a risk he was willing to run. The secret power of the Scorpion had smoothed his way more than once, and the rituals that raised that power fed other, darker hungers.

  "Very well, Tharnatus," he said at length. "Let it be the dog brothers. And let it be soon. I'll wait for the sluts, if I must, but I want that whoreson's head to piss on in front of my father's court!"

  "And you shall have it, My Prince," the priest murmured, then raised his head and smiled as a sound echoed down the hall behind him. He and Harnak turned to the open doors, and the sounds grew louder—and terrified. Pleas for mercy and the desperate, panting sounds of struggle floated through the doors, and then two cowled priests thrust a twisting, fighting figure through them.

  The girl was young, no more than fifteen or sixteen, just ripening into the curves of womanhood and clad only in a thin white robe, and her arms were bound behind her. Her ears were flat to her skull, her eyes huge with panic, as she fought the binding cords, but there was no escape, and a dozen more priests and worshipers followed into the temple.

  The captive's pleas died in a strangled whimper as she saw the huge scorpion and the altar it crouched above. She stared at them, terror gurgling in the back of her throat, and then she threw back her head and shrieked in horror as her captors dragged her kicking, madly fighting body forward.

  "As you see, My Prince," Tharnatus purred through her hopeless screams, "your business here tonight can be mixed with pleasure as well." He reached into his robe to withdraw the thin, razor sharp flaying knife and smiled at the crown prince of Navahk.

  "Will you stay to share our worship?"

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Patchy frost glittered in shadowed hollows, but clear morning sunlight touched the city's stone walls to warm gold as Kilthan's wagons creaked and rumbled towards Derm. The road sloped steadily down to the city's colorful roofs, the Saram River swept around its western flank in a dark blue bow, gilded with silver sun-flash, and the final line of rapids and cataracts foamed white less than a league above the bustling docks. The sails of small craft dotted the Saram's broader reaches below the city, lush farmland stretched away from the river in both directions, and the mighty, snowcapped peaks of the Eastwall Mountains towered far beyond it.

  The Barony of Ernos had been blessed in many ways, from the richness of its soil to the accidents of history and geography which gave it unthreatened frontiers and a ruling family noted for sagacity. The current Baroness Ernos was no exception. She'd inherited and maintained both her father's efficient and well-trained army and his longstanding alliances with the neighboring Empire
of the Axe, and she used them with considerable business acumen. Her relations with Axeman merchants were good, tariffs and taxes were low, and she allowed no brigands to take root in her well-settled lands. All of which, coupled with her capital's location as the northernmost port on the Saram River, had conspired to turn Derm into a major trade entrepôt.

  It would be too much to expect Rianthus to lower his guard anywhere, yet a palpable sense of relief had settled over the wagon train as they crossed into Ernos from Moretz. The duty schedule remained as arduous and the penalties for inattention as severe, but now the road—far better maintained than on the Moretzan side of the border—ran through rich, well-tended farmland and comfortable villages, not rough hills ideal for outlaw roosts.

  Brandark was fascinated by a land where most villages lacked so much as palisades and not even larger towns had any serious fortifications. The chance of any Navahkan army's reaching Ernos were slight, yet he shuddered at the thought of what one would do to those defenseless towns if it ever should. But the truly remarkable thing was that none of them seemed to feel any need to protect themselves from their own neighbors. He'd known from his reading that there were places like that, yet he'd grown to adulthood in Navahk, and even now, with the evidence before him, no Navahkan could quite believe in them.

  Bahzell could. He could even see in this secure land the ideal to which his father aspired. Prince Bahnak could never have been happy ruling such a peaceable realm; there was too much of the hradani warlord in him for that, and Bahzell doubted, somehow, that his father had ever fully visualized the end to which he strove. Yet that was beside the point. Bahnak looked not to the reward of his labors but to their challenge, for it was the struggle he loved. The sense of building something, content in the knowledge that the task was worth doing.

  In an odd sort of way, Bahzell understood his father far better now. Prince Bahnak would die of boredom in a world bereft of intrigue or the deadly games of war and politics. Indeed, he would regard the mere notion of such a world with puzzled incomprehension and laugh at the idea that things like altruism had any place in his life. He was a practical man, a pragmatic builder of empire! His reforms aimed simply at making that empire stronger, more self-sufficient, better able to withstand its enemies and conquer them when the time was right. Anything else was nonsense. Bahzell couldn't have begun to count the times he'd heard his father declare that a man looked after himself and his own in this world. Those who tried to do more were bound to fail, and the sooner they did it and got out of everyone else's way, the better!

  Yet that was the same prince who'd raised his sons and daughters with the notion that they owed their people something, not the reverse. It was the commander who insured that the least of his troopers got the same rations, the same care from his healers,that any of his officers might expect in the field. And it was the father who'd raised a son who couldn't turn his back on Farmah. No doubt he was heartily cursing that son for landing in such a harebrained scrape, but Bahzell could imagine exactly how he would have reacted had his son not taken a hand. The fact that Bahnak saw no contradiction in his own attitudes might make him less of the cold, calculating prince than he cared to think, but it also made him an even better father than Bahzell had realized.

  Now the first wagons were inching through the gates of Derm amid the friendly greetings of the city guard. Bahzell strode along in his post beside the pay wagon, and he saw a few of those welcoming guards turn thoughtful when they clapped eyes on him. But Kilthan was well known here; anyone in his employ—even a murdering hradani—was automatically respectable until he proved differently, and he saw little of the instant hostility he'd met elsewhere. Wariness and curiosity, yes, but not unthinking hatred. The observation left him cheerful enough to forget, for the moment, the vague, troubling memories of the dreams which still made his nights hideous, and he found himself whistling as the cumbersome wagons wound through the streets.

  Kilthan's couriers had preceded him, and his local factor was waiting. The compound the dwarf's trading house maintained just off Derm's docks was larger even than his seasonal camp outside Esgfalas, for his wagons would be left here for winter storage when he took to the river. Bahzell knew from overheard comments that Baroness Ernos paid Kilthan a handsome subsidy to make Derm the permanent base for his eastern operations, and her motive became obvious as he watched the other merchants haggle for similar facilities. Just as Kilthan's caravan served as a magnet to draw the others with him on the road, so his headquarters drew them into leasing winter space for their wagons . . . or disposing of them to local carters who would cheerfully sell them back—at a profit, no doubt—next spring.

  Bahzell watched it all, making mental notes to share with his father, but then they reached the docks, and the sight of the river drove all other thoughts from his head.

  The Saram had looked impressive from a distance; close at hand, it was overwhelming. Bahzell had seen the upper reaches of the Hangnysti, but they were mere creeks beside the Saram. The broad, blue river flowed past with infinite patience and slow, deep inevitability, and the thought of that much water in one place was daunting. He could swim—not gracefully, perhaps, but strongly—yet hradani and boats were strangers to one another, and he felt a sudden, craven longing to keep it that way.

  Unfortunately, he had no choice, and he drew a deep breath and spoke sternly to his qualms as the train unraveled into its individual components. The largest string of wagons—Kilthan's—rumbled gratefully into a vast brick courtyard between high, gaunt warehouses, and work gangs were already descending upon it. Bahzell joined the six other men Hartan had told to guard the pay wagon and shook his head as he watched the bustle engulf them.

  Rianthus had told him Kilthan intended to spend no more than a single day in Derm, but he hadn't quite believed it. It hadn't seemed possible to unload, sort, reorganize, and stow so much merchandise away aboard ship in so short a time; now he knew the guard captain had meant every word of it.

  Teams of hostlers joined the train's drovers to unhitch the draft animals. Foremen with slates and sheafs of written orders swarmed about, shouting for their sections as they found the crates and parcels and bales whose labels matched their instructions. A full dozen local merchants circulated with their own foremen to take delivery of goods Kilthan had freighted to them from Esgan or Daranfel or Moretz, and a dozen more bustled in with new consignments bound further south or clear to the Empire. Squads of officers and senior guardsmen kept an alert eye out for pilferers, racing fingers clicked over the beads of abacuses, sputtering pens recorded transactions, fees, and bills of sale, and voices rose in a bedlam of shouted conversations, questions, answers, and orders. It was chaos, but an intricately organized chaos, and the first heaps of cargo were already being trundled off to dockside and the broad-beamed, clumsy-looking riverboats awaiting them.

  "Quite, ah, impressive, don't you think?" a familiar tenor voice drawled. Bahzell turned his head, and Brandark grinned up at him. "Did you ever see so many people run about quite so frantically in one place in your life?"

  "Not this side of a battlefield." Bahzell chuckled. "I'm thinking some of these folk might have the making of first-class generals, too. They've the knack for organization, don't they just now?"

  "That they do." Brandark shook his head, ears at half-cock, then turned as his platoon commander bellowed his name and pointed at a line of carts creaking back out of the courtyard towards the docks. The Bloody Sword waved back with a vigorous nod, then glanced at his friend.

  "It looks like I'm about to find out what a boat is like." He sighed, hitching up his sword belt. "I hope I don't fall off the damned thing!"

  "Now, now," Bahzell soothed. "They've been sailing up and down the river for years now, and you're not so bad a fellow as all that. They'll not drop you over the side as long as you mind your manners."

  "I hope not," Brandark said bleakly. "I can't swim."

  He gave his sword belt a last tug and vanished into the cha
os.

  True to his word, Kilthan had every bit of cargo stowed by nightfall. The final consignments went aboard by torchlight, and even Bahzell, whose duties had consisted mainly of standing about and looking fierce, was exhausted by the time he plodded across the springy gangway of his assigned riverboat. He felt a bit uneasy as his boots sounded on the wooden deck and the barge seemed to tremble beneath him, but he was too tired to worry properly.

  As usual, his size was a problem, especially with the limited headroom belowdecks, so he was one of those assigned berth space on deck. He would have preferred having a nice, solid bulkhead between his bedroll and the water, given his recent restless dreams, but he consoled himself with the thought that at least the air would be fresher.

  The riverboat's master was a stocky, squared-off human who knew a landlubber when he saw one. He took a single look at the enormous hradani, shook his head, and pointed towards the bow.

  "That's the foredeck," he said. "Get up there and stay there. Don't get in the way, and for Korthrala's sake, don't try to help the crew!"

  "Aye, I'll be doing that," Bahzell agreed cheerfully, and the captain snorted, shook his head again, and stumped off about his own business while Bahzell ambled forward. Brandark was already there, sitting on his bedroll and gazing out at the stars and city lights reflected from the water.

  "Looks nice, doesn't it?" he asked as Bahzell thumped down beside him.

  "Aye—and wet." Bahzell grunted, then grinned. "Deep, too, I'm thinking."

  "Oh, thank you!" Brandark muttered.

  "You're welcome." Bahzell tugged his boots off, then stood and eeled out of his scale mail. He arranged his gear on deck and groaned in gratitude as he stretched out. "You'd best be taking that chain mail off, my lad," he murmured sleepily, eyes already drifting shut. "I'm thinking someone who can't swim's no need of an extra anchor to take him to the bottom."