The Tyranny of the Night iotn-1

by Glen Cook

  Else whispered to Stewpo, "You see? Discipline is failing. They're drunk enough to forget why they came. They'll get a notion to start looking for secret Deve treasure in a minute. Then we'll have them."

  The families and their most precious possessions had moved into the tunnels and cellars undermining the quarter. If complete disaster befell, there was an evacuation tunnel running under Sonsa's south wall. Though Else was not supposed to know about that, or several other tunnels leading out of the quarter. The younger Deves often forgot to speak Melhaic when he was around.

  Else had done his best on behalf of the resistance because any success might inspire Devedians elsewhere. If Sublime was busy suppressing minorities at home he might not have time to look to the east.

  "Here's the man we're waiting for."

  A tall man well-wrapped in black appeared. This was the taller of the two who had come over aboard Vivia Infanti. The one Else had attacked. He seemed in surprisingly good health.

  "Stand by," Else cautioned. "He'll use his powers to see what became of the people who should be here."

  There was some truth to the rumor that old Deves were sorcerers. Not all of them, just a few. About as many as in any similarly sized group of old people. Those with that dollop of talent had been tasked with masking the hiding places of the women and children.

  A number of obvious hiding places had been singled out for the opposite effect

  The tall Brother moved toward Else's hiding place suddenly, swiftly, sensing something. "Match! Now!" Else said. He held the firepowder weapon on target. The sorcerer broke into a sprint.

  The match man did his job.

  There was a thunderous boom and a great cloud of sulfurous smoke. When the smoke cleared the Brother was sprawled on the cobbled street, ten feet back of where he had been when the weapon discharged, pierced through the heart by a silver ball, dead before he hit me ground.

  The explosion was the signal hidden Devedian fighters were awaiting.

  They made themselves known from the roofs, with a surprise rain of death directed mainly at the Brotherhood of War.

  Men shouted orders to put all torches out.

  Men shouted orders to belay those orders.

  Devedian fighters emerged from the narrow byways, struck, faded away. Snipers up high continued to deliver misery to the intruders.

  Else barked and swore at the men working the firepowder weapon. He wanted the weapon ready in case the older Brotherhood witchman turned up. But, even with three men working, it took five minutes to swab the fire tube and repack it with powder, wads, primer, iron pellets, and the silver scrap that was all skinflint Stewpo was willing to provide for a second firing.

  It grew quiet outside. The Deve fighters faded away, taking their injured. They let the raiders remove their own casualties. Hope remained that it might be possible to get through this without alienating the Three Families.

  "Outlander!" one of Else's team barked. "Here comes the other one."

  Else elbowed his way to the window slit.

  The mystery man from Vivia Infanti arrived shouting. Like whipped dogs the Household troops returned and began to creep off into the tight alleys and streets of the Devedian quarter.

  The Brotherhood sorcerer spotted his fallen henchman. He studied the surrounding night as he edged toward the dead man. But he became so distressed that he failed to remain sufficiently alert

  One of the crossbow bolts whizzing around caught a nip of flesh.

  He let out a roar driven more by emotional pain than the sting of his wound. Then he began to cast a spell that had been prepared in advance.

  That would be something meant to blind or disarm the snipers. Otherwise, he would suffer an endless shower of missiles. The spell would effect his own men, too. But he would not be worried about them.

  "This isn't good," Else said as soon as he recognized what was happening. "Not good at all. Do we have any cold water handy? Do we have rags we can soak?"

  His assistants wanted to know why that mattered.

  "Because we've got a ferromage on our hands. This tube is going to get too hot to handle. Maybe even hot enough to set off the firepowder inside. If that happens, the weapon is useless. And we'll be dead."

  The sorcerer did them a favor, though.

  While his magic was still growing, while his surviving Brotherhood henchmen were bringing out weapons made of wood or glass, he seemed to sense the source of, if not the cause of, his apprentice's misfortune.

  He uttered another thunderous cry and headed toward Else and his team.

  Else aimed desperately, the tube not yet too hot to rest atop his shoulder. "Match man! Match man!"

  He heard the firepowder hiss in the primer pan. The Brotherhood sorcerer seemed to hear it, too, because he made a sudden, violent effort to stop.

  The firepowder exploded. Silver scrap and iron sand spewed into the night. Impact laid the Brotherhood sorcerer out in the air and flung him backward.

  Something hit Else from behind, violently.

  Else was out only momentarily. He recovered consciousness, found the cellar filled with smoke. It stank of spent firepowder, with a taint of smoldering timber.

  The firepowder tube had exploded. He was still alive only because the match man had absorbed the blast. The Deve's blood was all over him now.

  Else tried to look outside again. The view was inadequate. The target was down but did not seem mortally injured. The surviving Brotherhood soldiers were dragging him away.

  The smell of wood smoke grew stronger.

  It was time to find somewhere else to be. There was a whole cask of firepowder somewhere in the darkened cellar, along with all the brave, dead young Deves.

  His every breath no longer monitored, Else seized the opportunity to serve his God, Dreanger, and the Sha-lug elsewhere. He abandoned the Devedian quarter by means of a deep, wet tunnel that led not to the country outside the city wall — that one would be crowded and well-guarded — but to a crypt in a mausoleum in the cathedral cemetery a hundred yards northeast of the Devedian quarter wall.

  The existence of the tunnel was one of those secrets Else picked up when young fighters had not paid attention to what they were saying.

  Despite the tumult in the Devedian quarter the rest of Sonsa was enjoying a quiet summer night. No moon interfered with the view of the sea of stars. A few belated fireflies still sparked among the tombstones and memorials. Neither the dead nor the living nor the Instrumentalities of the Night seemed interested in the progress of one filthy fugitive armed with a long knife and a short iron bar he had picked up during his flight.

  Smoke and firelight rose above the Devedian quarter. The keg of firepowder had gone up while Else was in the tunnel. Household troops and Devedian fighters now worked shoulder to shoulder to stifle the flames.

  Else took advantage of the opportunity offered by Fate's indifference. He looked for his other Sonsan contact, wishing he had sought this one first. He could have avoided all that Devedian unpleasantness. By now he could be in Brothe, employed in the Patriarch's armies. All unaware of the fact that Deve spies had penetrated the Palace of the Kings.

  Rumor said the Patriarch was assembling an army to conquer Calzir. Or it might be the Emperor. Whichever, evidently, there were few takers. The campaign, if ever it materialized, would be extremely arduous while offering private soldiers little hope of plunder. Calzir was poor, agricultural, a bitter place to live. For two thousand years not much had changed there but the names of the masters.

  An old joke said that Chaldareans and Pramans fought a war with Calzir at stake and the Pramans lost.

  Calzir, though, did have considerable strategic significance. It bestrode the horn of Firaldia and the huge island of Shippen, gazing out at the slim waist of the Mother Sea. And it provided a Praman bridgehead on the Firaldian peninsula.

  Else passed by four times before he discovered the cast bronze leopard that identified the home he sought. The leopard was no bigger than a
house cat. It did not stand out. He had anticipated something more dramatic.

  He slipped up to the door and knocked the prescribed series, unsure that anyone would respond at this hour. He ran through the series a second time, then a third, shrinking into shadow in order to be less noticeable. He leaned out once to consider the progress of the fire in the Devedian quarter.

  They seemed to have gotten that under control.

  His fourth effort was rewarded by appropriate counter-knocks from inside. He offered the counter countersign.

  The narrow door opened a crack. Else saw nothing but heard a whispered query. He offered the proper response.

  The door opened another inch. It was as dark as the Patriarch's heart in there. He did not move. He would not until he was invited or refused. There would be some sort of protection set up for the householder.

  "Come forward."

  He moved carefully, keeping his hands in plain sight, doing nothing that might be considered suspicious. The agent would be nervous, what with the Brotherhood raving on about foreign agitators stirring up the Deves.

  "Turn to your right."

  He could not see the speaker in the dark. The whispers came from a low altitude.

  Not another dwarf?

  No, it developed. Not another dwarf. A woman. Which he discovered once they entered a small room where a single weak candle burned. "I thought…"

  "You were expecting my husband. He passed away last winter."

  "I don't believe they know that at home." He did not mention al-Qarn because, he recalled, this agent believed he served the Eastern Emperor.

  "It hasn't been reported. I need the money. Pledga left me no other income when he went."

  Else did not ask how or why. He did not care. And knowing would change nothing. He considered the woman. She was small in stature and frame, about forty, graying, obviously proud, still striking and still betraying traces of the beauty she had been not so long ago. "I understand. Are you alone, then?"

  The woman studied him as intently as he studied her. Each considered his or her life to be in the hands of the other.

  "Yes. As long as the stipend keeps coming, I can afford that."

  "Your husband let you know what he was doing?"

  "We had no secrets. He told me a story he believed. But he was a bit gullible. What do you need?"

  "A place to hide."

  "You're the foreign spy they're warning everyone about." Her large, dark eyes came alive with humor.

  "I'm a spy. The one they're talking about is one they made up to scare people. A boogeyman to make people behave the way they want."

  "They described you pretty well. We need to do something about your hair."

  Else sighed. "Maybe so."

  "Right now you need to get clean."

  Elseremained invisible for three weeks. He retreated to an attic room whenever Anna Mozilla had company. Which was often. The widow was a gregarious woman with numerous friends and relations who enjoyed gossiping. She had no children.

  She was energetic and positive and must have been the driving force in her marriage. She gathered regular news of events in the city.

  The Three Families fell out with the Brotherhood of War because the badly wounded Brotherhood sorcerer tried to order the Devedian population exterminated after he escaped the fighting in the Devedian quarter. That was a presumption of such epic arrogance that the Three Families all refused to allow it.

  Brotherhood casualties that night included twelve dead and nineteen seriously injured. The uninjured survivors were unable to resist when the Durandanti evicted them from their barracks.

  "They chartered a ship to take them to Brothe," Anna Mozilla reported. "But they'll be back." A large Brotherhood establishment, Castella dollas Pontellas, the Fortress of the Little Bridges, existed just a few hundred yards from the Chiaro Palace, and even closer to Krois, the island stronghold of the Patriarch. And the current Patriarch had that sweetheart relationship with the Brotherhood.

  Anna continued, “The dons aren't pleased. The sorcerer threatened them with writs of anathema. Bishop Indigo threatened right back, banning the Brotherhood from the Sonsan See forever. He was never their friend. He preached against letting them set up here in the first place, back when I was a girl."

  "The sorcerer did survive?"

  "Yes. But they say he was hurt so bad he'll be crippled from now on. And he'll never perform major sorceries again."

  "Uhm?"

  "I heard he lost part of his left arm and the rest is useless. And that side of his face was destroyed. There's so much silver embedded in him, his own body will ruin whatever spells he tries." She sounded pleased.

  "I really wish he was dead," Else said. "But I'll settle for second best. You say he left Sonsa?"

  "Almost two weeks ago, now. He offended Don Bonaventura Scoviletti so badly that the Scovilettis say they won't support the Patriarch in anything that involves the Brotherhood in any way. Bishop Indigo is Don Bonaventura's uncle, by the way."

  "Interesting. That must've taken guts. So. We had a nasty, major black-hearted villain here and even now we don't have any idea who he was."

  "One of the top sorcerers from the Castella Anjela dolla Picolina. They say he came here because the augurs predicted that a huge threat to the Church would materialize in Sonsa."

  "Be an ironic twist if his attempts to prevent that actually caused it."

  "A lot of people are saying that."

  "The trouble with the Deves should fade away, now. For a while. Without the Brotherhood to keep everybody angry."

  "That's the talk. But things will never set back to normal."

  "I should slip out of Sonsa, now."

  "Not yet." Anna Mozilla sounded reluctant to see that happen, though what she said was, "The dons are still looking for somebody who sounds like the man I found at my door one night a while back. The Devedian elders insist they were duped by a provocateur from Dreanger who died in the explosion that started the fire in their quarter. You don't look like a Dreangerean."

  "Goes to show you, you can't believe everything you hear."

  Anna Mozilla gave him a look. He was fooling nobody but himself.

  Fourteen days later, in the village of Alicea, twenty-two miles east of Sonsa, Else chanced on a dozen men out of Grolsach, Rence, Reste, and several other small political entities in the confusion of Ormienden and Dromedan. They were mostly very young and very tired. Else was tired himself. But he was on the road to Brothe at last

  He had killed a hare with a slung stone earlier in the day. The rabbit bought him a place at the fire. The dozen were headed for Brothe, too, with ambitions toward finding work as soldiers. They were mostly strangers who had come together on the road.

  The Grolsacher brothers Pico and Justi Mussa and their friend Gofit Aspel had deserted the men who held their apprentice indentures. They had picked up Rafi Corona and shifty-eyed old Bo Biogna while drifting through Dromedan, in Ormienden. The rest had accumulated since. Except for Biogna and a very large and slow-witted fellow who insisted on being called Just Plain Joe — whose traveling companion was a moth-eaten mule named Pig Iron — the men had no military experience. This was a first adventure for everyone. Even Bo Biogna and Just Plain Joe did their military stints in their home territories. When they heard Else was a traveled veteran they insisted he tell them all about the glory of war.

  He told them the truth. They were not happy. That was not what they wanted to hear. But they had seen enough of the world to suspect that reality refused to bow to wishful thinking.

  10. Khaurene, in the End of Connec

  Word spread throughout the End of Connec. The synod of the Perfect had ruled that true Maysaleans must resist evil when evil became oppressive. So the Bishop of Antieux could be ignored if he confined himself to his cathedral or just lurked in his country manor, ranting about heresy. If he sent men to harm Maysaleans they would not be expected to turn the other cheek.

  Brother Candle expected
that most would, even so. Seekers After Light were gentle folk who longed for a world free of greed and hatred and all the evils Man practiced upon his fellows.

  Brother Candle had argued against any surrender to the venom of the flesh. But he would not contest the will of the synod. God would be acknowledged His role as final arbiter. In any event, the targets of the Brothen interlopers were more often Connecten Episcopals than Maysaleans.

  Bishop Serifs had kept his head down since the attack on the Patriarchal legate, though the Patriarch kept demanding a more aggressive campaign against heresy.

  The legate was slow to recover from his wounds.

  Antieux was quiet. Count Raymone Garete, young and quick of temper, remained in Khaurene, Duke Tormond's seat, held there by Tormond so he would not provoke the Church.

  Brother Candle made his way through the crowded morning streets of Khaurene for the first time in two decades. No retinue accompanied him but he received more attention and respect than he had when he was Charde ande Clairs.

  Episcopal and Maysalean alike, people saluted him or bowed or even hailed him in the ancient imperial manner. Becoming Perfect was considered a great accomplishment by Connectens of all faiths. Even Deves and Dainshaus, who could be found in all the larger towns and cities of the Connec, respected a holy spirit when they encountered one.

  The old fortress called Metrelieux stood on an eminence overlooking a bend in the fat, slow, brown Vierses River. Metrelieux had been the seat of the Connecten dukes since time immemorial. The present fortress had been erected using dressed limestone from local quarries four centuries ago, on the foundations of an Old Brothen fortress that had served the identical purpose in imperial times. The original structure had been looted for building stone during the two centuries following the collapse of the Old Brothen Empire.