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

by Anderson, Barth

  In three long strides, the giant was towering over Basilio, the bodies, the blood, his scratcher drawn. He looked down at the fallen men and then at the nun.

  “You did that,” shouted the giant. “How did you—?”

  Basilio wanted to ask the giant who Zacarías was, but the situation was too far out of control for an interrogation. He flung his left arm wide and high, seemingly in surrender or maybe in benediction, and the giant crumpled to hands and knees, blood pouring from his opened throat. Then he flopped forward onto his belly.

  The last two men dropped to the street. One drew a finely wrought dagger and leapt at Alejo.

  Basilio noted how the other man held his dagger, point downward in his fist for forceful plunging. Valencia-style, Basilio thought. Right again.

  The other brandished a nasty partisan with studs nailed in its head and ran at Basilio.

  Alejo took a single, lunging step and crossed his wrists dramatically before the man’s face. The man leapt backward and dropped into a fighting crouch with his dagger before him, staring up at the hooded monk in shock.

  “He’s got something in his robe!” he shouted.

  “Get the Bible cask!” someone else was yelling. It was the giant. He’d lifted his head, his chin smudged with dusty blood.

  The moment of confusion and anger was all Basilio needed. “Help these poor souls, please!” he shouted at the man running toward him with a cudgel and dropping to his knees beside the fallen giant and the other two. “They’re hurt—what’s happening? In the name of God, some assistance, please?” Basilio said, gently dispatching the giant.

  Hearing the nun’s plaintive voice, the man stopped and looked at her with a dubious cock of his head. “What is it? They are bleeding?”

  A loud, nasal voice came from the lit street behind Basilio. “Who calls for the aid? Who needs of the help?”

  It was a strange accent. French? Basilio couldn’t place it, but the poor fellow was going to find himself gutted and flayed if he didn’t move along. “Is it plague?” Basilio whispered to the man standing next to him. Just a little closer, friend.

  “Monte is bleeding,” the man shouted. He leaned forward and whispered, “How did this happen?”

  Basilio lunged, left hand gripping the man’s shoulder, and he turned to face the nun as if she were about to impart a blessing to him.

  With a snap of his right hand, Basilio used the hem of his sleeve to slit the man across the throat. His cudgel fell with a loud thunk, and so did he—dead weight. They did that when surprised.

  The last man standing slashed his dagger at Alejo. The blade sank into the wood of Alejo’s parrying oak staff. The two grappled over their weapons, trying to free them from one another, swearing in frustration. His dagger wouldn’t come free, so the man rose high on the toes of one slippered foot and kicked Alejo, heel crunching against kneecap, and bending Alejo’s already broken leg backward at an unnatural angle. Alejo screamed and fell, wrenching the man’s dagger away as he dropped.

  But the man leapt forward, grabbed the dagger-in-staff and ran for Padrona. And the Bible cask.

  Basilio dove at him, but with a swivel of hips, the man slid past the nun and leapt onto Padrona’s back, landing tail-ward. Tied in place with leather straps, the Bible cask was between his knees.

  Basilio rolled to his feet, picked up a dagger and threw it at the mounted fellow.

  The blade flew in an absurd arc, high over the man’s head. It didn’t matter how desperate the situation: Basilio couldn’t hit anything with a throwing knife.

  The brigand gave a high, mocking laugh and toe-kicked Padrona hard. “Let’s go!”

  Basilio picked up the giant’s scratcher and ran at the mounted thief. He expected to be chasing man and horse down the street.

  But Padrona remained still as stone, merely looking over her shoulder at the thief in bland contempt.

  The man kicked Padrona again. Fear lit across his face. “Go! Yah!” The horse’s black-and-white flank shivered furiously, but Padrona refused to move, and a second later, Basilio dragged him down to the ground as the man screamed, “I’ll kill you, bastard evil Judas-horse!”

  Basilio straightened after the man fell silent. The scratcher stayed where it had been newly sheathed, and Basilio looked at Padrona in surprise.

  “That’s the same trick you pulled on me in Madrid,” Basilio said in quiet amazement. “Are you repairing fences, Padrona?”

  Basilio made to pat her neck, but the horse’s look of wild-eyed menace made him drop his hand. Instead, he turned, ran to Alejo and knelt beside him.

  “That villain kicked your wounded leg?”

  Alejo nodded once and let out a terse sigh. He hiked up the monk’s robe to examine his sickeningly misshapen kneecap where he’d been kicked. On Alejo’s thigh and hip, the deep wound from two days ago was fierce. A smear of rotten raspberries under makeshift dressing. It had been bleeding freely down his deathly pale leg.

  Basilio couldn’t stop a disgusted gasp from escaping his lips.

  “It will get better. Just stop looking at it,” Alejo grumbled, yanking his robe back into place.

  Before his poor stallion had tripped and plowed straight into Padrona, Basilio had managed to slide off Troya, tumbling into a deep bed of loose sand and small stones that buried him to his knees. But Alejo didn’t see the horse somersaulting riderless down the south face, straight for him. Somehow, though, he sensed it, and for reasons he couldn’t explain later, he hurled himself from Padrona’s back. The sheer audacity of the maneuver should have saved him, but Alejo landed hip- and thigh-first on the blade of a jagged boulder.

  Troya had to be killed. After, Basilio managed to throw Alejo onto Padrona’s back, and the miracle horse carried his old friend down the rest of the south face, led by Basilio, with Red Spur knights gazing down the craggy hill face after them.

  A second later, the heavily accented voice said, “Dear lord, what has happened here? A pestilence?”

  Basilio looked over his shoulder at him. The man’s accent sounded German, and Basilio hated Germans. The fellow wore the mismatched garb of a traveling actor or a merchant down on his luck—a blue bag of a hat covering mussy hair the color of wet sand, a green cape with a fox fur–lined collar over his arm due to the heat, and striped pantaloons that a sailor might wear. He looked harried, absurd, and nervous.

  “Is that man alive?” he shouted to Basilio.

  “For now.” Basilio remembered his disguise and shifted into his softer nun’s voice. “Praise be the Savior Jesus Christ.” Basilio then laid his hand on Alejo’s brow. Alejo felt like he’d just been dragged from a cold river.

  “Please,” the German said, stepping forward carefully, “we can help each other. I am being followed and need assistance, and you need a surgeon and I am the greatest who has ever drawn a breath.”

  The German was close enough for Basilio to kill now, and the fellow must have realized it too, for he raised his hands to show Basilio that he held no weapons. Though trying to smile, he had an angry sort of expression on his face beneath a bulging, brick-shaped head that seemed to totter atop that skinny neck.

  As he approached, the German said in a low, flat voice, “You are the unique and only Basilio Arias de Coronado y Morrillo, yes?”

  Upon his back, Alejo looked up at Basilio. Resolve hardened in his swimming eyes with a look that said, Run him through.

  Basilio stood, faced the young German, shrugged his shoulders and shook his cuff blades into place.

  “I was told you two might arrive cunningly disguised,” the foreigner said.

  Basilio caught his breath. Only one person in all of Spain would know such a thing. “And who told you that?”

  “The excellent and puissant Don Manuel.”

  Basilio let out his breath. His faked Barcelona accent lapsed. “Don Manuel? What a relief. You are the translator he hired, I take it?”

  “Indeed. I am Doctor Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Ho
henheim of Switzerland,” he said in a trumpeting voice. “But I prefer you call me Paracelsus.”

  Basilio hissed him quiet. “For the love of the Virgin, whisper or say nothing.” Basilio felt the urge to throw his nun’s mantle over the chest lashed to Padrona’s saddle. Hide it. Carry it to Don Manuel immediately. “Quick, where is my master, now, Para—? Parasa—? Where is Don Manuel?”

  “Alas, I’ve heard nothing since I disembarked in Cataluña eight days ago.” The man shook his head and his pale face went rigid. “Worse, there has been a fire at the Sow’s Purse Inn.”

  Basilio gritted his teeth in irritation. “We heard.”

  “It is just as well,” Paracelsus said, glancing up the street again. “There were three swordsmen from England there. It wasn’t safe.”

  “England?” Basilio said. “Don Manuel has quite a list of enemies, but I don’t know any from England.”

  “These men were following me, and now I don’t know where they are,” Paracelsus said, “which in part is why I came looking for you.”

  Basilio said, “Well, we too are being tracked.” He glanced down at the crowd of dead men in the alley. “We need to get out of here. My friend needs help and we need shelter tonight. Quickly.”

  “No, no, worry not,” Paracelsus said. “I have this morning secured rooms at the mansion of a local merchant and councilman by the name of Don Porfirio, who is well known to both Don Manuel and me.”

  A sneer twitched in the corner of Basilio’s wide mouth. A merchant and a councilman? He’d rather sleep in a cemetery.

  Paracelsus raised his hands, placating him. “He will keep our location secret. Don Porfirio has promised.”

  “Oh, he promised, did he? Well,” Basilio said.

  “After I gave him fifty maravedís of the money that Don Manuel sent me, yes,” Paracelsus said.

  Basilio supposed he liked that answer. He didn’t like depending on a German in the middle of the night with Alejo wounded, but the don’s original plan to get the Book of the Seven Hands translated was sinking fast and they needed to abandon ship. “Very well. But before you take us to this councilman’s mansion, tell me how Don Manuel calls you, Paracelesius.”

  “Paracelsus, actually. We met on his last campaign in Italy almost ten years ago, so I suppose he calls me the cirujano de la fuerza. That was my title.”

  The army surgeon? Basilio began to think something was wrong. “No. He referred to you by another name.”

  Paracelsus’s ugly brow wrinkled. “Then he must have called me…” He cleared his throat in dismay. “The Italian sorcerer.”

  Relieved, amused, Basilio said, “But you are not Italian.”

  “I’m not a sorcerer, either,” he said with distaste. “But I studied all medical arts available to me in Ferrara. I am a surgeon doctor and a doctor of surgery. An alchemist, an astrologer, and a scientific practitioner of medicine. I have worked miracles for Don Manuel and so earned that hateful nickname.”

  “You should hear what he calls my blood-brother here,” Basilio said as he dragged rag-doll Alejo upright. They stepped together, and blood oozed behind Alejo’s dragging left boot like a slug trail.

  “I’ll look at that when we get to the mansion,” Paracelsus said. “Follow this road up to the main way, and it will take you straight away to Don Porfirio’s. Ask for Guillermo, the houseman. He’s expecting three more guests.”

  When Basilio and Alejo reached Padrona’s side, they both paused to look back at the dead bodies lying this way and that in the dark alley.

  “Maybe the sorcerer is right,” Alejo said.

  “How’s that?”

  “I think maybe we are a pestilence.”

  “Not to fret. I plan to take care of the bodies,” Paracelsus said with a peculiar smile on his face.

  Basilio grimaced as he helped Alejo into the saddle. “You will? How?”

  “I am a board member of Ferrara’s Worshipful Company of Barbers and Surgeons,” the sorcerer said, clapping his hands together with disturbing glee as he eagerly strode down the dark alley. “Paracelsus knows just what to do with a few fresh cadavers.”

  With Alejo wounded and both of them fresh from killing six men, Basilio was relieved to lay his eyes on Don Porfirio’s homey mansion. As the houseman, Guillermo, who was dressed in a somber black jacket with a high, modestly curled collar, allowed them through the oakwood threshold, Basilio sighed in gratitude.

  “I am so glad you’ve finally arrived, gentlemen,” Guillermo said, hands wide, sidestepping alongside Basilio as he hauled his friend inside. Guillermo’s white-gloved hand came up, pointing. He had no face brand, so Basilio assumed he was a paid servant. “Through that door, if you would.”

  Guillermo led them to a receiving room, not a proper parlor as one would expect, Basilio noted, but allowances had to be made for Cataluña.

  “Is this the Sow’s Purse?” Alejo said, his arm flung over Basilio’s shoulder.

  “You know it is not,” Basilio snapped. “It’s the house of Don Porfirio. Remember Para—Paracelusio telling us that?” He turned to Guillermo. “Forgive him. He’s delirious. And quite heavy, I might add. Might I have a hand carrying him?”

  “Right this way,” Guillermo said. He guided them through a door, and the long, sumptuous receiving room greeted them with dark walls that were almost black. Don Porfirio was a lord with noble taste; Basilio recognized it with his very skin. Wide wooden benches and chairs around two neat tables were illuminated by bright golden oil lamps. An inviting hearth. Weapons, shields, and austere scenes of noble Christian knights from the reconquest of Spain adorning the walls. A family with pride and history. The room reminded Basilio of another—the Duke of León’s, long ago, a cozy hall where he pretended to be a knight with a poker from the fireplace.

  Guillermo gestured with one long arm to a wooden bench, but Basilio hauled Alejo to the flagstone fireplace. Guillermo seemed ready to burst when he saw Basilio dragging Alejo toward a fine, red, and very expensive-looking upholstered chair. “Oh, no. Please, please, no. Not in that…you can’t…”

  Basilio ignored Guillermo and deposited Alejo into the chair. He lifted his friend’s bloody boot gently and set it upon a low hearthstone.

  Guillermo watched them, saw blood dripping from the bootheel and seemed to taste something poisonous that he was forced to swallow. “Well, that’s that. It’s been a good life, all in all. The caballeros are famished?”

  Alejo’s head snapped up like the head of a puppet on a string. “I smell pork.”

  “I do apologize for that,” Guillermo said, his hand lifting to neaten his short, rippling hair. “But the heat has been unrepentant. We’ve opened every window and doorway for our don’s comfort, but kitchen odors are unpreventable, I’m afraid.”

  Basilio liked the houseman’s manners and noted that Guillermo’s shining black hair had been straightened to look Spanish, probably with lard. A light-skinned Moor, he’d probably been born an esclavo, judging by the lack of a brand from a slave trade upon his cheek. That spoke well of Don Porfirio. “It smells toothsome, and it’s wonderful to be in this beautiful room, Guillermo,” Basilio said. “Don Porfirio’s house is blessed with a talented chef. And staff. Clearly.”

  Guillermo gave Basilio a long, slow blink of approval. “I’ll send a bottle to fortify you at once, along with some dinner.”

  As soon as he was gone, Basilio took a chair and wedged it under the handle of the door. His nun’s cowl was stashed in a pack on Padrona’s back, and, with his short hair sweaty and tousled, he was looking his boyish self again. “I’d much rather have privacy for this, but I must move fast,” he said to Alejo and quickly shucked his women’s shoes. “Are you conscious? Can you understand me?” When Alejo didn’t answer, he pulled the Carmelite robes over his head, careful not to cut himself on the hems’ blades. It was a delicious relief to be free of the hot wool garment. Then he changed into the leather riding pants and was in the middle of tugging on a wrinkled black shirt when t
he receiving room door swung open with a surprising bang.

  “Christ!” Basilio shouted.

  The chair wedging the door shut had tumbled, its feet giving way and sliding across a small puddle of Alejo’s blood.

  Basilio spun away in vicious anger and humiliation. Though they were wrapped down tight with linen, his breasts had been seen by whoever had forced the door. With one muscular arm in a black sleeve, the charm that Don Manuel had given him dangling about his neck, he shot a rueful look over his shoulder and saw a tall negrafricana in a fine, white housedress with a fierce cheek brand under her left eye.

  “You shitty old black mule!” Basilio bellowed as he buttoned his shirt. “What do you think you’re doing?”

  As Basilio turned back, she was staring at him hard, as if unable to make sense of what she’d seen. “This one apologizes! She thought the door was jammed, señor,” the negra said. She lowered her eyes perfectly.

  La señora de la cocina, Basilio imagined. He had come to appreciate slaves greatly while living in the duke’s house in León, and he knew that making enemies with la señora of any wealthy house was like asking for a dose of leprosy. Especially if you were a guest.

  “You couldn’t knock?” Basilio said. His breath was rapid and he couldn’t calm himself. He tucked the steel charm into the linen wraps around his torso. “You should have knocked.”

  “Yes, this one should have, señor.”

  Basilio scanned the situation, the hard expression on her face, and his own sense of humiliation and fear. “I will not tell Don Porfirio about this.”

  La señora’s expression soured as she stared at the floor. “You are a gentleman,” she said. She stumbled over the word. Nonetheless, her diction was superb. Judging by her face brand, he was expecting the coarse voice of a field girl who’d been promoted to the kitchen, perhaps. But this woman didn’t swap her l’s and r’s as new slaves from the African trade always did. Indeed, la señora spoke in the most elegant Castilian Spanish Basilio had heard in years of traveling these outer provinces, even referring to herself, a slave, in the third person. Exquisite.