The Book of Seven Hands: A Foreworld SideQuest (The Foreworld Saga)

by Anderson, Barth

  “Here they come!” Alejo shouted.

  Weaving between the short oaks, the two rode to the wagon trail overlooking the deep lion-colored valley beyond. When they reached the outcroppings that marked the cliff’s edge, Alejo reined up. He looked down the south face, a tipping slant of sharp boulders, and couldn’t imagine how they had made it up. Padrona shivered in resistance beneath him, so he patted her neck. “Yes. Didn’t look so scary on the way up, did it?”

  Basilio and his high-rumped horse came to stand next to Alejo and Padrona. Basilio leaned over to get a look and sucked breath through his teeth, studying the jagged boulders, sun-scorched tree skeletons, and an incline that looked like a cliff from this angle. “It’s a slide down into hell.”

  “Frightened?” Alejo shouted and snapped Padrona’s reins. “Jai! Venga, mamacita!” Padrona began her tentative descent, huffing and snorting angrily and tossing her black-and-white mane. “You must trust me, señora. Come. I’m with you.” Finally, she came to an even steeper incline, testing it with her forehooves, and Alejo almost flipped straight over her head. He steadied himself and the great vista of the desert floor seemed to swing up into his face until there was nothing between him and the rocky plummet below. Stomach plunging, he cried out and leaned back as fast as he could, till his head was flat against Padrona’s tail.

  Behind Alejo, Basilio was still goading Troya to take a first step. Alejo could look back easily from his absurd angle atop Padrona and see Basilio’s sleek stallion craning his neck back and forth, trying to look at anything but the drop-off below his hooves, screaming in sheer terror at what Basilio was urging him to do.

  “It’s Basilio!” came the urgent voice of Don César, the gloomy, pious, self-important Red Spur who’d shot Alejo’s little cousin just three months ago in Granada. It took concerted effort not to rein up to go back for a sword dance with him.

  Don César shouted, “Your arcabuzes, knights! They’re getting away!”

  “Troya, it’s time!” Basilio was shouting. “Do it. Forward! Down! Go!” But then, swearing, Basilio dismounted.

  “No!” Alejo shouted, looking up at Basilio almost upside-down from Padrona’s back. “Too many gonnes! You can’t—”

  Gravel and pebbles suddenly roared away beneath Padrona’s hooves and she pitched to the left, almost rolling. Alejo swung leftward and lost the reins, but Padrona planted her thick forehooves, locking her legs, and sat her rump down, forcing Alejo forward in the saddle. He couldn’t look back at Basilio from this angle, but he could hear Troya, still whinnying and screaming in refusal.

  As his old mare righted herself and slid like a toboggan down the south face, Alejo managed to grab the reins and wrench his neck around to catch a quick glimpse of Basilio standing before Troya on the cliff’s edge.

  He was tying a black scarf across the stallion’s eyes.

  Padrona let out a shriek as her wide black-and-white behind scraped across swaths of sharp gravel. Alejo threw his arms around her neck in desperation, her coarse mane whipping his face.

  Then Alejo heard the sickening order, “Stand and deliver, caballeros! Kill that man!”

  And then, the horrifying din of an arcabuz barrage.

  JULY 14, 1524

  VACANANA, CATALUÑA

  It was late. Three bells and the half-made moon could be seen through the highest windows of Castle Vacanana. Two blades were conversing inside the ballroom, she could hear, as steel slid along steel, and one of the fighters had a buckler too—she could hear the calm cymbal clangs as it conversationally worked the tip of a thick-bladed espada of some sort. The breathing of either man was not yet labored. The lady pressed herself against the wall outside the ballroom and listened. She was just in time.

  “Who do you think I’m after?”

  “It matters not.”

  She felt she had heard someone speak this way before—proud and overly mannered—and she suspected she might know the man. Aragonese? She wondered.

  “A Tudor spy has no quarry in Cataluña but mischief, and before you can capture some of it, I mean to dispatch you to hell.”

  “To do that, you’ll have to show me how you dance in España. Fiddles up!” the other man replied—an Englishman, she surmised.

  What a couple of mincing marionettes, she thought. Their exchange was a childish imitation of the port-town brawling in Sevilla, Lisbon, and Cádiz, where the mind-boggling wealth of the Indies and New Spain came splashing onto the docks like netloads of sardines, where sailors, conquistadores, gentlemen officers, privateers, and prostitutes all had to trade in a language of devastating insults in order to avoid a deadly fight with the quick, slim swords, the new espadas, that everyone carried for personal security. Mischief? Dancing? Fiddles? On the piers of Sevilla, these two would be cut open like a couple of mackerel, chattering on like this.

  But they sounded like accomplished fighters, she had to admit, as a loud pass of clashing metal came and went with fierce, guttural oaths, followed by the quiet tip-tapping again. The lady far preferred listening to a real dialogue of sword points like this—the question and quick response, the teasing, and the angry flirting. Putting on her dove-gray leather gloves, she inched her espada from its sheath.

  “I’m looking for a German alchemist,” the Englishman said. “I know where he’s staying but haven’t found him yet.”

  “Try Munich,” replied the other.

  She was more confident now that his accent was Aragonese.

  “He’s here. I followed him from Italy.”

  “Maybe you did. But the alchemist is Swiss, not German. Perhaps you weren’t aware?”

  The Englishman threw metal at the Aragonese. As the pass quieted once more into sharp clangs and foot stamping, she could hear how each was panting and heaving.

  “Let us work together, caballero,” the Englishman said angrily. “I want something in the alchemist’s possession, and you want the don. Well, I’ll deliver him to you. I have a man waiting to ambush him.”

  “You? Deliver the don to me?” The Aragonese laughed in delight. “You couldn’t deliver a message. You couldn’t deliver a bottle of milk! Don Manuel would make you deliver his—”

  Inexplicably, the Aragonese cried loudly in fury and pain. “Detestable snake! I didn’t even finish my insult!” A buckler and heavy espada clattered. Then a body crumpled upon the floor, hard.

  “For Henry,” the Englishman muttered in bitter triumph. His sword clicked into its sheath. “You should have agreed to help me when you had the chance.”

  The lady adjusted the crownlike mantilla pinned into her auburn hair so that the silver veils fell properly over her shoulders, down her back, and out of her way. Then, holding her espada behind the laced skirts of her dove-gray travel dress, she stepped into the ballroom. She took in the arrangement. The Aragonese was sitting on his rump, holding his thigh, which was gushing blood near the crotch. His sword and buckler were out of reach.

  “Unbelievable,” the Aragonese said in whispered shock, looking at her.

  The fair-haired Englishman gave a little ground so that he could face the woman and the Aragonese both. “What’s this?”

  As she looked over the crest etched upon his shining breastplate, the lady chided herself for not recognizing the Aragonese man from his patter. He was Don Angél Sessé y Lacasta. A Red Spur knight. She knew Don Angél to be a doltishly loyal henchman of the Marqués of Málaga, a southern lord for whom she’d worked years ago. Most spies and personal henchmen of the Marqués had determined what the aristocracy had kept secret, that the Marqués had died during a trek to the Holy Lands two years ago, but pathetic Red Spurs like Don Angél remained dutiful knights errant, searching for the hated Don Manuel and the Book of the Seven Hands that he’d stolen from the Marqués.

  “Doña Viray?” Don Angél said, still clamping his thigh with both hands.

  Doña Viray nodded her head once by way of a bow, and her sword darted forward and stabbed Don Angél in the throat. The alarm regis
tering on his face was upsetting to her, as was the sour smell of his body greeting death. Rey Carlos would not wish a Spanish knight to suffer, the lady thought, not even an idiotic one.

  “The Lady of Viray?” The Englishman glanced nervously at the man she’d killed. He drew his weapon again. “Impossible. She’s a fairy tale. There’s no such person. Get you gone, woman!”

  The Englishman gave plenty of ground as she followed him in her silent Turkish slippers to the center of the empty ballroom. Doña Viray lifted her espada and pointed it stiff-armed at the Englishman. He too lifted his sword, crossing hers, and took a decidedly Germanic posture. His widening eyes seemed to swallow the insanity of the situation—a French-looking woman dressed all in gray with a savagely broken nose and an espada so incredibly long and thin with such a deadly edge right down to the hilt. She could see that he knew the stories about her. While largely mythic—she hadn’t killed an entire regiment of marauding French soldiers or poisoned Ottoman Sultan Selim I—those stories had a delicious effect on her opponents.

  “El caballero was correct. You are here without permission,” Doña Viray said. “Shall I go inform Lord Casal of your intrusion?”

  Perspiration gleamed thick on his face from the last fight. “No, señora.”

  “Señorita, you cad. Cataluña was claimed by Spain’s Catholic kings decades ago,” she said, tapping either side of his sword point with her own, testing his determination and grip. Neither were convincing. “Rey Carlos demands to know why the alchemist is here, and why a Tudor spy is violating the Treaty of London to find him.”

  Again came the look of swallowing thoughts too big for him. “The alchemist has come to translate a book at the behest of a Castilian knight named Don Manuel.”

  Doña Viray slashed at his face, and the man barely knocked her espada away in time. She hadn’t meant to do that, and she scolded herself. It was a reflex at hearing her former lover’s name. “And what is this book?”

  “I’ve no idea,” the Englishman said curtly, as if finally realizing she was gaming him.

  “You know where the alchemist is staying?”

  “I’m close. Yes.”

  He already knows. Doña Viray could feel the truth reverberating up the Englishman’s sword from a telltale tic in his hand. Ten years before, she had tried to show this method of truth detection to Don Manuel, her teacher and lover, but he had dismissed it, calling such truth detection silly and superstitious, a woman’s craft.

  But Doña Viray could tell that the Englishman knew where the alchemist was in Vacanana. And he also seemed to realize she’d noticed the inadvertent clenching of his fist.

  He went for his cape.

  Doña Viray lunged.

  The cape flew down, coiling around her blade, and the Englishman countered.

  But in her left hand now was the daga de gancho. As she guided his sword aside with her dagger, she saw his eyes follow her hand, tarrying upon the crossed dagger and sword in the quickest blink of confusion. A weapon in the left hand surprised him, apparently.

  As if from a sheath, her espada slid backward, out from his cape, and she leaned back on her hind foot, poised perfectly for a thrust. The Englishman’s entire belly was exposed. She had him. She’d disembowel him and force him to tell her the alchemist’s whereabouts as he bled to death.

  But just then, a red cloak swirled before her. A priest dressed completely in scarlet was stepping between them.

  “Diablo!” she shouted in frustration.

  From beneath the red robes, a finely wrought espada flashed into view, and hers was beaten down.

  Doña Viray leaped backward with a cry of surprise and outrage. The fact that he was a priest of the Inquisición with nearly as fine a fighting sword as hers didn’t matter; she threw a livid thrust at him.

  Whirling, he beat down her two weapons a second time, forcing her back again. His face was invisible under a red hood and cowl, but in the shaft of moonlight through which he turned, Doña Viray saw his old wrinkled mouth grimacing.

  “I should have guessed,” he snapped.

  Then he faced the Englishman as if he knew she’d dare not stab him in the back.

  He was right. She gaped in outrage at his red cloak.

  Seeing two enemies before him now, the panicked Englishman immediately dropped into a defensive crouch. The espada of the inquisitor slipped under the Englishman’s parry, over his flailing black-and-silver cape, and found resistance briefly against bone and sinew. Then the old priest was muscling forward, maliciously driving the sword up into the man’s torso, the length of his old body flexing and shoving behind the steel.

  The man gurgled, jabbering nonsense in his mother tongue. Then the inquisitor stepped back and let him fall like a sack of flour to the ballroom floor.

  Doña Viray shouted, “That spy had information I needed.”

  “Yes. He seemed to know where the alchemist is staying.” The inquisitor knelt and laid his sword on the wooden floor. He examined the Englishman, hooking a necklace from around the man’s neck, producing a crucifix on his fingertips. On the inquisitor’s finger was a Vatican ring adorned with the seal of the Holy See. The inquisitor began reciting in Latin over the dead man.

  Doña Viray gave the wooden floor a furious stamp. “Devil, in the name of the Holy Roman Emperor Carlos the Fifth, turn and fight me!”

  The inquisitor stopped praying and looked up at Doña Viray. Anxiety wrinkled his brow. “So,” he said, looking back at the Englishman, crossing himself, “the foreign-born Hapsburg king sent his most trusted and storied assassin, La Doña Viray, to recover the Book of the Seven Hands. How does it feel to loot Spain of its riches on behalf of Charles?” He pronounced the king’s name in Carlos’s native French.

  “Once I find the book,” she said, “I’ll tell you how it feels. Pray, tell me where it is now, and I’ll spare your life.”

  “In time. Someone is bringing it to Vacanana.”

  Said with enticement. Did the inquisitor somehow know that she was hoping to kill Don Manuel on this excursion? No. He couldn’t possibly. But she rose to the bait, couldn’t resist it. “Who?”

  “The lady knows who will bring the book.” The old inquisitor gave her a questioning look and pushed his sword still on the floor aside with his foot, showing her he was unarmed. “But can she tell me more about the book itself? If you know that, I can offer you a precious piece of information in return.”

  Doña Viray sheathed her espada and daga and sneered at him. “I work for money, not information. And I don’t consort with old cutpurses posing as priests.”

  “But look at us. We are consorting.” He reached up and pulled back his hood. “Just like the old days.”

  If she was supposed to leap in surprise upon seeing his face, he was sorely mistaken. An old fellow with silver-white eyebrows and wrinkled skin hanging from his clean-shaven cheeks, his head covered in a tight red skullcap. She’d never seen this man before in her life.

  The inquisitor laughed. “You honestly do not know me, Imelda?”

  The lady looked back at him skeptically. She wondered if she did. She didn’t like the shaky, unstable feeling she was having. “No. Why? Who are you?”

  He offered his hand, fingertips down, and she found herself moving to take his noble blessing, a response as natural to her as taking her own father’s hand.

  Málaga. A decade ago. It was the last time she’d seen him.

  Doña Viray immediately put her hand on her hilt. “What?” she hissed.

  He’d been big-bellied and hale, with a hedge of a salt-and-pepper beard ten years ago. That man had commanded armies and the Red Spur knights in his blued, war-battered armor, and he’d protected the great city of Málaga from corsairs and the Turkish navy, from ships that he captained himself. This gaunt, unbearded granny was the same man? The inquisitor smiled at her, and, by God, she could see him now, the Marqués of Málaga in this skinny old man’s withered face.

  “My lord,” Doña Viray said
, giving a soft laugh of disbelief. “A priest? An inquisitor?”

  “The Vatican came to me, asking me to help stomp out a very dangerous heresy, and I dared not refuse,” he said. “And you are here for revenge upon the man who wronged you long ago. Sifuentes.”

  “You still refuse to call your archenemy ‘Don,’” she said in wonder. Doña Viray wanted to ask how this happened, how the Marqués had disappeared into the Holy Land, and how the powerful man had given away his title and life only to reemerge as a man dressed as an inquisitor of the Inquisición. Or was he an inquisitor? The ring on his finger looked authentic—a desk ring for stamping the Vatican seal. Only a very few were trusted with them. “Who are you known as now?”

  “Officially, I am Head Inquisitor Zacarías from La Inquisición in Valencia, visiting Lord Casal and welcoming the arrival of a pilgrimage. But I am also here on behalf of the Vatican Inquisición.”

  “And both offices are here for Don Manuel and his book, I take it?”

  The inquisitor who was once Marqués of Málaga strode toward her, red robes swirling like smoke around him. “My book.”

  She said, “Once upon a time, maybe. But the Royal Hapsburgs in Ghent say they owned the book once. Carlos’s grandfather wanted it too, and, now, so does Carlos. And so do I.”

  He gave a familiar chortle, and she could almost imagine his belly shaking. “Tell me why you want the book,” he said. “You aren’t a collector, as Sifuentes was. Is.”

  She refused to answer that question. “Rey Carlos as Holy Roman Emperor has sent me because he believes the book describes the arts of a secret society of powerful warriors known as the Ordo Militum Vindicis Intactae that stood against the Pope. They were disbanded and banned by Papal Bull, and I am here to enforce…”

  The inquisitor’s eyes widened and his lips slightly parted, perhaps in awe.

  She stopped speaking and watched him. “What?”

  “Our paths. They are identical. I am here as the black hand of…” He caught himself and said, “I interrupted you. Please finish, Doña. You are here to what?”