The Seascape Tattoo

by Larry Niven

  “There are magics,” Mijista snapped. “I have heard of such things. This one is called glamour.”

  There was something in her voice that made Aros look at her again. She was as intent as he, but he noted that her hand had tightened on his arm.

  “I too have seen such things,” the princess said. She seemed to be coming out of her trance. “My lady in waiting can do this.”

  The king watched them all. “Ah, well, General … knight to queen four. Mate.”

  General Silith flinched, and then relaxed. “Well played, Your Majesty.”

  The king’s eyes glittered. “You know … for some time I’ve known that all of you have considered me a fool. That there was something … were things going on in my kingdom that were not of my making. There was little I could do about it, because the power of the priesthood and the military seemed to have been aligned and turned against me.”

  He appeared to have regained his full stature. “But I believe that Madam Silith is correct. You are not the general. I believe you are Belot and do not know the small games that we play. And if you are imitating the general, then he attempted to move against you and failed. The plot has splintered. And this would be a very good time indeed to become my father’s son once again.”

  There was a slyness in the king’s eye that glittered, a sense of power that Aros had not seen before but suddenly recognized. A man who knew his throne was precarious, that his enemies were too powerful to confront directly, and that only if he played the doddering fool could his life be secure.

  “This is the wizard, Belot! Seize this creature!” he said to his guard, who hesitated.

  “Silith” swept his sword out of its scabbard. For all the speed and smoothness of that draw, Aros knew in that moment that it was not the general.

  But the general’s men did not see, did not notice. They were entranced by the situation. “On them!” the impostor snarled.

  “By the serpent!” Aros snarled and drew his sword. And for a moment he was terribly tempted to dive forward and engage.

  Retreat felt like swallowing fire. “Ladies, behind me,” he said, and he watched to be sure they’d done that before he began to back away.

  The One’s grin was a bit wrong. He hadn’t noticed what was happening behind him. He laughed, not quite like the general. “No? No fight left?”

  “Silith would have known I have promises to keep. Behind you, wizard.”

  Belot sneered, then looked anyway.

  Half of Silith’s troops were dropping back, lowering their weapons. More followed. An officer shouted, “General Silith or no, I stand with my king!”

  “Guards, attack! Take them, you cowards!” the Silith figure commanded. More dropped back.

  Belot lashed out. Two men fell. Silith’s remaining troops parted in martial order, leaving him a wide path. The One ran lightly from the throne room, and a score of troops followed.

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Shadows

  The city burned around them. Somehow, and Neolith was uncertain when it had happened, the fight had shifted. It was not between the escaped sacrificial subjects and the city guard. Now the conflict was between the king’s loyal guard and the general’s remaining troops.

  In the time that they had crept through the streets heading south toward the bay, violence had erupted, and Neoloth figured that he knew who and what was responsible for freeing these victims turned warriors. He saw Aros’s handiwork in this.

  Aros. His heart ached. Everything had exploded now, and he had no idea how to fix it, where the princess was, or even if she was still alive. There was only one man who could conceivably bring it all together, and that was a man whom he had betrayed. Neoloth had helped the Red Nun get the lure into the general’s clothing again, even after massive security had been implemented. One of Shyena’s best potions, buttressed by power from the talisman. He hadn’t known Aros would be at the party: the Aztec had lied! But if Aros thought he had been betrayed, who knew what he might do?

  And yet … and yet … So much chaos and confusion, and that was the Aztec’s specialty. He had been with the general’s family. The time tunnel had been attacked. Prisoners freed. Tahlia had been one of the prisoners …

  He could search for the princess and miss his ship … if the message had reached Captain Gold, and Gold had responded. There was no certainty here. All he could do was head for the bay …

  “Where are we going?” Drasilljah asked.

  “To the South Bay,” the Red Nun replied.

  The chaos seemed to be spreading. A thug rose up out of the shadows and challenged them. “Who the hell are you!”

  He turned and yelled to people that they couldn’t see. “Over here! I think we have—”

  The Red Nun blew a handful of powders into the man’s face, and he fell back, twitching violently.

  Good. Neoloth wasn’t certain how much charge remained within his talisman: he had taxed it greatly since the last recharging. There was just no way of telling how much remained.

  They were safe in the darkness for the moment but would have to move, and move soon, if they were to have any chance at all of making their ship. Still—

  “Wait,” he said. “We need to see.”

  “I have a spell,” Drasilljah said. “But not the power to use it. I am sorry.”

  “You protected the princess,” he said. “You have no reason to apologize.” Something occurred to him. “What if we made the spell together?” He glanced at the Red Nun.

  “We … joined to share power,” he said. “Is it possible that Drasilljah and I can do the same?”

  A cynical smile crossed Shyena’s lovely face. “My favorite spell. I doubt that that ceremony can be duplicated in this time and place,” she said. “But I think I can form a conduit between the two of you. Together, perhaps.”

  They linked hands, both Drasilljah and Neoloth holding the edges of the talisman.

  As Drasilljah and the Red Nun watched, his shadow began to grow. It thinned and stretched and slithered out of the alley, and eventually detached from his body and became a thing unto itself.

  Neoloth sank back against the wall and, with eyes closed, became one with his shadow, seeing what it saw as it moved through the streets.

  There … a barricade.

  There … soldiers.

  The other way. He slid back and went to the left. The further it stretched, the more it hurt. He couldn’t breathe.

  But he could see. Soldiers on the odd wheeled vehicles to the left, nothing to the right.

  They ran together, following the twisting shadow, and then reeled the shade back into their bodies, took a moment to breathe, and began again.

  Again and again they stopped, rested, and then extended their shadows.

  From Neoloth’s perspective, it was a strange thing … he felt somehow flattened, extended, as if the world had expelled color and devolved to shades of gray, as he stretched around corners and up walls.

  The last barrier was a building on the outskirts of town, and here there was a barricade of soldiers who were beating an escaped prisoner with clubs as the shadow watched.

  No way around the soldiers, and if they waited longer, the sun would be up, and they would be more exposed.

  They had to move, and now. He and the Red Nun might have been capable of climbing over the building and lowering themselves on the other side. Aros would have scrambled up like a spider, with no problem at all.

  Neoloth cursed under his breath. The three magic users knew there was nothing to do but move forward. Right through the blockade.

  A diminished tingle told him the talisman was almost exhausted. The charge stored up in the desert was a distant memory. But there was another source, if he had to tap it. The idea sent fear through him, but …

  If he had to, he would.

  One step at a time, the three emerged from the alley, now cloaked in their mutual shadow. If a particularly focused and sharp-eyed individual were to stop and look directly at them,
he might notice the change in light and shape of the shadows, but the battle was raging at the barricade, the escaped prisoners desperately struggling with the guards.

  One step at a time. Cloaked in shadow, they were like some primitive jellyfish, the organs within barely visible through the clear flesh. If the guards stopped and stared …

  “Here,” Shyena whispered. They had reached the barricade on the road, a series of spiked wheels blocking the way.

  It was possible to climb up through them, but it was hard. Once Shyena slipped and was gouged by a spike. She howled in pain—

  And one of the guards, just administering a coup de grâce to a wounded prisoner, turned.

  They froze on the barricade, afraid to move. Neoloth wasn’t certain but suspected that the talisman required less energy to cloak a stationary object than a moving one.

  The guard wiped blood out of his eyes (apparently, the escaped prisoner had managed to get in his own blows) and flicked the blood off his sword and approached the barricade.

  To Neoloth the world looked like it might have from within a sandstorm, dimness filled with dark, swirling clouds. Clearly, to the guard, something was vaguely visible, unclear … but he snatched up one of those odd, flameless torches and shined it over them.

  Suddenly, his eyes widened, and he opened his mouth, “Hey!”

  Then his eyes went even wider, and he fell to the ground, an arrow in the back of his neck. With a scream, another trio of escaping prisoners fell upon the guards, and while they were busy, Neoloth and his companions scrambled the rest of the way up the barricade and were gone.

  * * *

  The sandstorm image had cleared just as the guard’s eyes widened. The talisman might be useful again in the future, but for now it was almost dead.

  They fled south along a narrow path and then reached a dock, already busy with morning fishermen. The fishermen’s gaze slid over the three, and then back at the smoke rising from the city, and then to their nets and oars. He noticed that the boats were all the standard sailers or rowers. None of the new, odd steam vessels. That might have explained their lack of interest. More than most, they may have understood that something was happening in the world and wished to stay out of its way.

  So, after arraying their clothing carefully, they walked the dock’s stinking planks until coming down the other side and heading off around a rock-strewn path between two tumbled masses of boulders, to a bay on the far side.

  And there, for the first time, Neoloth was able to draw a breath, because Captain Gold’s triple-masted ship was anchored, and a rowboat awaited.

  * * *

  Gold’s giant nephew Dorgan stood balancing in the boat, looking anxiously up at the smoke curling into the air from the direction of the city. When he saw them, he seemed infinitely relieved. “Where is Kasha?” he asked.

  “Coming,” Neoloth said, with all the hope he had ever felt in his voice.

  “We have to go,” the giant said. “Uncle says we miss the tide if we don’t. And maybe soldiers come.”

  “We have to wait, please,” Drasilljah said.

  “Who you?” the giant said, eyes roaming over her with obvious relish. She pulled her cloak tighter. “Wizard? Can you make tide?”

  She shook her head.

  “We wait five minutes,” he said.

  But five became ten, and ten fifteen, and every time the giant began to draw up the anchor, Drasilljah showed him a little more leg, and he relented.

  Then, at the last moment, when they had to leave …

  A horse came riding up along the beach, and on its back was Aros. And behind him, clinging with desperate strength, was the princess.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Debts

  As sun rose over the coastal mountains, Captain Gold’s Pelican was out to sea, bobbing on the morning tide, sails filled with wind.

  Neoloth stood on the quarter deck, looking down at the main deck, where Aros, Captain Gold, and Dorgan were commiserating, planning, reconnecting, perhaps celebrating their escape.

  Aros looked up at the wizard and waved his arm in lazy salute, smiling. He waved back, nodding.

  There would be time for discussion. Tales to be told. But now …

  Neoloth knocked on the cabin door. Drasilljah opened it, young now, plain and winded, but proud. She looked at Neoloth shyly. “The princess is resting,” she said. “But … I think she would like very much to see you.”

  “Yes, I would,” Tahlia called to them. She was sitting on a couch at the side of the room, swathed in robes, her hair disarrayed and wet, perhaps from a bath.

  She was exhausted, trembling. For weeks, terribly long weeks, she had kept her terror under control, but the last days had been beyond her limit. All those skeletons. She would have been one of them, and who would ever have known which? It lived in her viscera, that memory.

  She’d tried to save them. Had done her best and failed.

  Those candy princes who spouted poetry and spoke of love were useless, as were the muscle-bound adventurers who thought jousting and hunting prowess would stir her heart. Aros had seemed one of those.

  Two things had sustained her. One was Drasilljah, stalwart and true through the very worst. There was no way she could repay her maidservant, but she would surely try.

  And the other … Neoloth-Pteor, the court magician. Mysterious, not quite to be trusted … but somehow, under it all, she had known there lurked a heart, and that it was hers. And where that had always amused her, knowing that she would be traded for advantage to a prince of another kingdom, there had always been a part of her that had wondered.

  How different would each of us have to have been?

  And here they were in a cabin on the Pelican, heading back to Quillia, and safety, because of this man. What must she look like? To herself, in the mirror (and Gold had given her the captain’s cabin—was there any way to repay him, as well?) she was wan, and the bruises on her cheek and arms darkened her.

  But she was not in the mood for cosmetics. She had been hustled aboard the Pelican with time only for a brief and formal greeting with the wizard before Drasilljah and Gold had taken her to the cabin in a thunderous rustle of canvas.

  It was time for more.

  “Leave us,” she said, surprised at the huskiness in her voice. Was that deprivation or emotion?

  Drasilljah retired from the room without protest.

  The candles flickered in the light wind sighing through the portal, and the creaking timbers spoke of the endless rolling and washing of the ocean carrying her to safety.

  “Neoloth,” she said. “You have done great service to my queen mother, and to Quillia.” A quick, soft smile. “And to me.”

  “That reason,” Neoloth said, “was more important to me, by far, than the others.”

  She nodded carefully, watching his face. “May I ask you a question? Several questions, actually.”

  “Of course. Anything.”

  “And you will answer honestly, to the best of your ability.”

  “I swear. Truth or silence.”

  She smiled. A good answer. “Very well, then. The Red Nun. She was my jailor. And now she seems to be an ally. How did this happen?” She paused, feeling for the right words. “Can she be trusted?”

  “You would not be free without her, Princess. She joined the Hundred to gain revenge against General Silith, who destroyed her childhood village. I convinced her that helping you was her best way to bring this to pass, and from that moment on she was an ally, and trustworthy, as long as Silith remains dead. We have Aros’s word for that.”

  She looked carefully at his bearded face, and knew that there was more to the story. Wizard’s secrets. She had seen so much by now that she was not at all certain that she would want to know.

  “I see. Well, the proof is in the fact that I am free. When we reach Quillia, she will be treated very well indeed.” She paused. “Now, who is this man Aros? He seems quite remarkable. I am to understand that in the effort to resc
ue me he impersonated this general’s missing son?”

  Neoloth laughed. “Yes, that was the plan.”

  “A dear friend and ally to you?”

  “Ha,” he said. “I arranged for him to be arrested. I rescued him from execution, placing him in my debt. He was forced to play the role.”

  Her eyes widened. “Well … who was he?”

  “An enemy,” he said. “The worst … or best … I ever had.” He gave her a brief history of their contentions. “It seemed perfectly reasonable to render him to the hangman when I had the opportunity. And equally reasonable to consider a man of his resource and capacity the perfect ally in arranging your release.”

  “And has he fulfilled his obligations to you?”

  Neoloth sighed. “More than. He has demonstrated an intelligence, courage, and honesty which quite frankly make me reconsider everything I thought I knew of him.”

  She smiled, delighted. “Excellent. You are my subject?”

  “Loyally and to the death.”

  “Then you will immediately free him from bondage. When we return to Quillia, he will be offered a high commission in my mother’s army; you may depend upon it.”

  His expression was one of humorous satisfaction. “What a strange place the world is, Tahlia.”

  “Indeed. And I assume this ship and its sailors are friends of yours?”

  “Of Aros,” he said. “And they also have performed with honor.”

  She shook her head. “Rogues, with a code of honor. I think that something must be done for them, as well.”

  “As you wish.”

  “And now we come to the last and most important questions.” She rose and inspected one of the candles. Its fire wavered in the breeze. She needed a moment to collect her thoughts.

  “What does it concern, Princess?”

  “You, my fine wizard. You placed your life and soul in jeopardy for me. You have been the greatest imaginable servant to my mother and the kingdom. What reward do you seek?”

  His eyes shifted away from hers in a way that told her everything she needed to know. Her formal, imperious manner dissolved. She crossed the cabin and took his hands in hers.