"Thirsty." His head drooped. He dribbled some more on what was already a large damp spot on the front of his tunic. He looked very young and sleepy, sweet, a frayed angel from the Lucian tradition. Fiercely, I punched his shoulder to keep him awake.
"Tell me the truth, guardsman," I demanded, "how old are you?"
"Thirty-two," he said vaguely. "No, wait. Twenny—twenty-three."
I glared at him. "How old are you really?"
"Nineteen," he mumbled, ashamed, "nearly."
"So you're eighteen."
His eyes grew distant as he worked it out. "Yes," he said.
"Oh, gods." I leaned my elbows on the table and propped my miserable forehead against my cold hands. "Eighteen. Oh, lords of Fathan. How could the Primate send a cub like you on a mission like this?"
"Not him," Jonno said, "Grandda."
"Hush!" From the street came the distinctive clash of a knife being withdrawn clumsily from its sheath.
"S'Grandda—but Great-uncle—" He gulped, turned green and cupped his hand over his mouth.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the shadows change again at the doorway. At least one scragger out there had nearly got his courage up. Come on, come on. I wished they would hurry; I wanted the first rush to happen inside the pothouse, where the chain would be at its most effective, but waiting was not easy. Jonno moaned softly behind his hand.
"Last time this happened, I was with Chasco in Uagolo," I muttered bitterly. "Between us, Chasco and I wiped the streets with those bastards."
Jonno let his hand fall away. "Uncle," he said faintly.
"Shut up about your tupping relatives," I snapped. "We're about to be attacked—do you understand? Listen carefully: no matter what happens, you must stay close to me. Jonno, do you understand?"
"Attacked, did you say? Ah, damn." His voice turned tragic again. "It's because I'm in the C-C-Corps, isn't it? Everybody hates me . . ."
"It's the money belt as well, but yes, if you must know, the Primate is not popular, and neither is the Flamens' Corps. Be quiet."
"But I told you, s'not the Primate, s'Grandda."
"Tell me later."
"He said—he said to ask a question . . ."
"Ask me later."
"No, no, no, no, not you. You're tall . . . s'posed to ask the short one . . ."
"Shut up, Jonno."
"S'about the cook."
"We don't have a cook."
Offended, he subsided into hiccoughs. Now I could hear a murmur of voices in the street. In the alcove, suddenly, lamplight flashed on something too large to be a knife, more likely a cleaver, rising for an overhand pitch. I estimated the distance and shook out a length of chain. The glittering filament of it snaked across the room and retracted itself red-tipped; the shadows gurgled, the cleaver clattered on the flagstones. Lardbarrel sagged into the light and fell half across the counter with his head and arms dangling and his hair hanging straight down. Below him, a dark puddle began to collect on the floor. A ghastly burbling noise deep in the darkness of the alcove suggested the landlord had got in the way of the same stroke. Jonno squinted at the body of the tapman.
"Wha'?"
"No, don't get up yet." I pulled him back on to the bench. "Don't move until I tell you."
"But tha' was—thass magic."
"It's wrist action."
"Can I t-try?" He reached towards the shining coil on the table.
"No! Don't touch it." I swatted his hand away before he could lose his fingertips. There was a flurry of clatters in the street, just audible over the rising howl of the wind, and the telltale rectangle was empty for the moment—the scraggers outside may also have thought the tapman's fate was magical. I remember thinking something of the sort myself, the first time I saw the chain in action. Quick change of plan: it could well be a good moment to move, while the object lesson was still fresh in the scraggers' minds. I stood up and quickly redistributed the weapons, cosh and one knife handy in my belt, one knife in the right hand, chain fully retracted in the left.
"Come on, Jonno. Wake up. Stay with me." I hoisted him up, keeping my chain-hand free, and dragged him a few steps before his own feet swung into action. His head lolled against my shoulder and then forward on to his chest. He completed the ruination of his black tunic by vomiting a mixture of second-hand liquor over it.
"Why am I doing this?" I hissed. "Why don't I just leave you, like I meant to in the first place?"
The boy was beyond answering. Cursing him, I hauled his dead weight as far as the door and peered into the wild night. The scraggers were still there, a cluster of six standing across the narrow street out of the wind, whispering heatedly among themselves. At the sight of me, they looked startled and flattened their bodies against the wall. There was a sharp incongruity between the holiday colours they wore and the knives and clubs they carried in their hands. I assumed my most menacing face and pulled Jonno across the threshold into the street.
I suppose they could not be blamed for relaxing a bit. At rest, the chain does not look like a weapon. They could see the knife, but it was held awkwardly at the end of the arm burdened with the guardsman. They looked at each other and began to fan out in a semicircle around us.
"Get thou gone," I snarled.
One of them laughed. "Or what?" he shouted in Gillish. "Or you'll have the Primate's bastard there throw up on us? Kashkibal, we've been waiting a long time to have one of his kind in our hands." He moved a step closer and feinted with his knife.
I dodged a club thrown from the left. "I'm warning you, friend. I do not want to hurt you. Leave the boy alone, and we'll have no quarrel, you and I. Otherwise, I'll kill you."
He laughed again. "We want his belt and his balls, that's all. You can have the rest of him. Just drop him, friend, and move out of the way."
"All right." I let Jonno slump to the ground, freeing my knife hand. That gave them a broken second's pause, but at a cry from the leader they advanced on all sides, and I had to short-chain three of them with one swing and slice with the knife at one coming in from the right. By the time the chain was retracted, only the two hindmost were left standing. They looked at me stupidly.
"Witchcraft!"
"Would you like to see it again?" I gave them a demonic smile and raised my left hand. When they were gone, I sighed and pried Jonno out of a puddle of new vomit and set off hauling him down the street.
We attracted less attention this time, mostly because the worsening weather had driven many of the merrymakers indoors. It was about two hours short of midnight on a night when the streets should have bustled right through until dawn, but the great stormbowl had other plans for Beriss.
The marketplace we had passed through little more than an hour before was now almost deserted except for merchants cursing the loss of business as they secured the storm shutters on their stalls. Of the hundreds of bright banners, many were reduced to tatters clinging to their fastenings. The figure of the Scion Tigrallef, lonely and unlighted, stood on its pedestal amid a great mob of dead candles. The shrine was still open but the Flamens had obviously taken refuge inside, leaving the two black-clad guardsmen to keep watch on the nearly empty stairs.
Studying the guardsmen from the shadows between two boarded-up stalls, I spent a few precious moments reviewing the facts.
Jonno was a spy.
I had brought him ashore with the intention of leaving him here. This was my chance.
It was his own choice to pickle himself in rotbelly brew; I had tried very hard to stop him.
I had already saved his miserable life once that night.
I owed him nothing.
He was getting heavy.
He stank.
My most sensible course would be to drop him as close as possible to the foot of the stairs and run like a rippercat . . .
. . . and then, of course, to wonder for the rest of my life whether he got his hands and his head chopped off, in that order, for losing us while drunk. I sighed.
&nb
sp; Earlier in the evening, Jonno and I had found the marketplace to be a gentle fifteen-minute stroll from the waterfront. Going in the reverse direction took almost an hour.
Jonno's dead weight was only one of the retarding factors. Occasionally his feet even worked properly, and I could tow him along as a welcome rest from dragging him. Every so often he would whimper and make noises about wanting to lie down; he called me Uncle and carried on wild dialogues with Grandda, to the point where I seriously felt like dumping him after all.
The greatest delay was the frequent need to make detours. Four were to avoid patrols of the Flamens' Corps or of ordinary troopers out to round up drunkards, one was to avoid a knot of revellers who might have recognized Jonno's uniform through its surface layer of mud and vomit, but the worst was when I realized we were being followed, and pulled Jonno into somebody's slop pile to hide. When our pursuers slunk past a few moments later, I saw it was the two surviving scraggers from the pothouse with an indeterminate number of their friends. I waited until the furtive scraping of their sandals had faded away into the next street, then pulled both of us, reeking, out of the slop pile and down the nearest dark alley. Two streets later we were lost, and it took a while to find our bearings again. The only comfort—a mixed one—was that advance rain-squalls of ferocious power and wetness swept over us every so often, washing the puke off Jonno and the slop off us both. At the same time, they soaked us to the skin.
At last, by sheer chance, we hit the corniche about a hundred yards from the main quay. Now all that lay between us and safety was the guardpost at the head of the quay, manned by a troop of dun-tunics under the harbour master's command. Pulling a semi-comatose Jonno along to a sheltered spot across the corniche from the guardpost, I could see no way past them that did not involve more bloodshed, of which I had already done more than I liked for one evening. But we were just over an hour from midnight by then—Tigrallef's deadline—and my scruples were beginning to feel like a luxury the expedition could ill afford.
Beside me, Jonno stirred and sat up. He sank down again immediately, clutching his head. I explained the situation to him in a savage whisper, including the information that it was all his fault.
He moaned and opened his eyes a crack. "We d-don't need to hide from them, Memorian. We have clearance to go on the quay."
I banged my head against the wall a couple of times at the magnitude of my own stupidity. That's what being pursued and then attacked for much of an evening will do to one. I pulled Jonno up—"All right then, laddie, you've got to walk and talk for about five minutes, and then you can lie down, Vilno promises"—and led him confidently across the corniche to the head of the quay. He walked like one of the undead of Satheli demonology, but at least he was upright.
The two troopers in the outer guardpost, stepping out to challenge us, held their hands up in a Gillish salute at the sight of Jonno's rain-washed uniform. To me, a mere civilian but a memorian under the Primate's flag, they accorded a respectful nod. Jonno returned the salute creditably, though he made an asinine comment about the lovely evening just as another rain-squall bucketed down on us; and then we were past them, and I was frogmarching a rapidly fading young guardsman along the wave-washed quay. Twice before we came level with the Fifth, I saved him from stumbling to a watery death. I had to carry him the last few yards. Altogether, I'd had about as much of Jonno as I could bear for one day.
I dumped him at the foot of the gangplank. The Fifth looked properly battened down, with the storm fenders in good order and a storm lantern burning at the bow, and I could see Malso and Entiso had followed my instructions about the rigging. What I could not see was any sign of the crew. The gangplank was still holding, loosely secured at the top end, but with the tide in and the water so high in the harbour, it was dauntingly steep. It was also slick with spray and sliding up and down like a hand saw against the edge of the deck in the still moderate swell.
"Hoy! Malso! Put out the boarding net! Malso! Malso! Entiso! Mallinna! Raksh take you, where is everybody?"
No reply. Cursing, I grabbed Jonno and threw both of us flat against the gangplank. It was very like crawling up a rockface hauling a dead deer with me for supper; but the last time I did that, it was not raining and the rockface stayed put. Furthermore, the dead deer did not groan, tremble, sneeze and try to struggle free in a panic when it realized where it was. Jonno did all those things before passing out and becoming a dead weight again. A couple of centuries later I managed to push him over the top of the gangplank and roll after him on to the deck.
Lying flat on my face on the sopping deckboards, gasping for breath, muscles on fire, fingernails bristling with splinters from clinging to the rough wood of the gangplank, I made myself a solemn promise: that I would never, never, never again take young Jonno out for the evening.
In fact, given recent disasters, it hardly surprised me at that point to discover a thin cold object was pressing into the back of my neck.
"Keep very still, Master Vero, for your own sake."
"Oh Raksh," I groaned, "Malso, what do you think you're doing?" I started to flip over. Sharp metal bit into my neck on three sides.
"Keep still, I'm warning you. There's a new moon at your neck. Anything too energetic, you could take your own head off."
A new moon. I had never heard the phrase used that way before, but the concept was clear enough. I kept very still, apart from trying hard to push my neck into the deckboards, as far as possible from the razor-edged metal crescent arching over it. "Why are you doing this, Malso? What have you done with the others?"
"They're safe, all three of them—be patient. Hurry it up, Entiso, I hate getting wet."
Entiso hurried it up. Arms trussed behind my back, legs forcibly bent back at the knees, ankles bound together and connected to wrists with a short cord in such a way as to give me the shape of an archer's bow. All this in under a minute. Entiso had done this kind of thing before.
* * *
10
MALSO LUGGED ME across the deck into the main cabin, now Angel's quarters. When my eyes adjusted to the storm-mantled lamp in its clamps on the wall, I saw that everyone was accounted for. Angel was propped up on cushions on the big pallet; beside him on a wooden stool was Mallinna, pale and angry, with her hands tied behind her. Beside her, Tigrallef was bound to another chair but otherwise looked alarmingly at ease with himself, with his eyes cast down and a half-smile on his lips. Mallinna made up for his silence and Angel's by cursing Malso and Entiso fluently in about eight languages while they carried me in, dumped rne on my side on the smaller pallet and swabbed the blood off my neck.
"What have you done to him, you pillak briin koshu?" She had finished on an impressively filthy note. This was new light on Mallinna's character. "Vero, how bad is it?"
"Just a few scratches," I said sourly. I tried to move my legs, found that any serious effort threatened to dislocate my shoulders, and compromised by lying still.
"Don't worry, Mistress Mallinna, it looks much worse than it is. Anyway it's his own fault, I warned him not to move." Malso got up and propped the new moon against the wall next to the door—a wicked oxbow of metal, now I could see it from a safe distance, trimmed darkly with my blood along its inner edge, fitted to a sturdy wooden handle like a broomstick. He nodded to Entiso, who silently left the cabin. "Are you comfortable, Master Vero? Shall I get you a pillow? I've got some very good ointment for those scratches down in my quarters, I'll fetch it when I have a moment."
"Don't bother."
"No, I must. Even scratches can fester."
"You show a surprising regard for my health."
"You will see—" he began; but the door opened again with a gust of wind and rain, and Entiso dragged in an object that I figured had to be poor Jonno. He lay where Entiso dropped him, a bedraggled black heap in the unsteady shadows on the floor. I saw Mallinna frown as she tried to figure out what he was, then she gasped with outrage.
"You pillak, Malso."
&
nbsp; He spread his hands innocently. "None of my doing, Mistress, he was like that when Master Vero brought him aboard."
"Vero! You said you wouldn't hurt him!"
"I didn't hurt him. He's blind drunk."
"You said you wouldn't get him drunk!"
"I also said I wouldn't bring him back. Next time you can take him ashore."
"I doubt there will be a next time," Malso said.
"What do you mean?" she flared at him. "Are you going to murder us, you ferret, you traitorous shull, you pillak, you great pile of—"
"I'm not a traitor, Mistress Mallinna," Malso said firmly, "I'm a loyal soldier of the Opposition, and I would not think of killing you unless the good of the cause made it necessary—and then, believe me, I would find it a terribly sad duty. No, you and the First Memorian are quite safe. As for Masters Vero and Tilgo, we offer them something better than a hopeless fool's errand that would get them slain for nothing—we offer them vengeance against the murderers of their loved ones, may their bones bring forth flowers."
"They haven't been murdered yet." Tig lifted his head and smiled dreamily at the so-called fisherman.
"Oh, lad. Once they've been sent to the Mosslines, you have to consider them dead; and then you pray it comes true as quickly and painlessly as it can. No, Master Tilgo, you can't bring them back from the Mosslines any more than you can bring them back from the dead. We can't let you waste your precious gift in the attempt, not while the cause of freedom needs you."
Gil Trilogy 3: Lady Pain Page 18
