But there was still the barred doorway and the three administrators beyond.
“How did you get past them?” Caz asked Talea.
“I haven’t been past them. Eejakrat believed my story, but only to a point. He wasn’t about to give me the run of the city. I had a room, not a cell, on the level below this one. If I wanted out, I had to send word to him. We haven’t got time for that now. Pretty soon they’ll be finding the body I left.”
Mudge located a small fragment of loose black cement. He tossed it down the stairs they’d ascended. It made a gratifyingly loud clatter.
“Nesthek, is that you?” one of the administrators called toward the doorway. When there was no immediate reply he rose from his position at the desk and left the game to his companions.
The escapees concealed themselves as best they could. The administrator sounded perplexed as he approached the doorway.
“Nesthek? Don’t play games with me. I’m losing badly as it is.”
“Bugger it,” Mudge said tensely. “I thought at least two of them would come to check.”
“You take this one,” said Clothahump. “The rest of us will quietly rush the others.”
“Nesthek, what are you…?” Mudge stabbed upward with his sword. He’d been lying nearly hidden by the lowest bar of the doorway. The sword went right into the startled guard’s abdomen. At the same instant Caz leaped out of the shadows to bring his knife down into one of the great compound eyes. The guard-administrator slumped against the bars. Talea fumbled for the keys at his waist.
“Partewx?” Then the other querulous guard was half out of his seat as his companion ran to give the alarm. He didn’t make it to the far door. Pog landed on his neck and began stabbing rapidly with his stiletto at the guard’s head and face. The creature swung its four arms wildly, trying to dislodge the flapping dervish that clung relentlessly to neck and head. Flor swung low with her sword and cut through both legs.
The other who had turned and drawn his own scimitar swung at Bribbens. The boatman hopped halfway to the ceiling, and the deadly arc passed feet below their intended target.
As the guard was bringing back his sword for another cut, Jon-Tom swung at him with his staff. The guard ducked the whistling club-head and brought his curved blade around. As he’d been taught to, Jon-Tom spun the long shaft in his hands as if it were an oversized baton. The guard jumped out of range. Jon-Tom thumbed one of the hidden studs, and a foot of steel slid directly into the startled guard’s thorax. Caz’s sword decapitated him before he hit the floor.
“Hold!”
Everyone looked to the right. There was a waste room recessed into that wall. It had produced a fourth administrator guard. He was taller than Jon-Tom, and the insect shape struggling in the three-armed grasp looked small in comparison.
The insect head of Talea’s disguise had been ripped off. Her red hair cascaded down to her shoulders. Two arms held her firmly around neck and waist while the third held a knife over the hollow of her throat.
“Move and she dies,” said the guard. He began to edge toward the open doorway leading outside, keeping his back hard against the wall.
“If he gives the alarm we’re finished, mates,” Mudge whispered.
“Let’s rush them,” said Caz.
“No!” Jon-Tom put an arm in front of the rabbit. “We can’t. He’ll—”
Talea continued to struggle in the unrelenting grip. “Do something, you idiots!”
Seeing that no one was going to act and that she and her captor were only a few yards from the doorway, she put both feet on the floor and thrust convulsively upward. The knife slid through her throat, emerging from the back of her neck. Claret spurted across the stones.
Everyone was too stunned to scream. The guard cursed, let the limp body fall as he bolted for the exit. Pog was waiting for him with a knife that went straight between the compound eyes. The guard never saw him. He’d had eyes only for his grounded opponents and hadn’t noticed the bat hanging above the portal.
Caz and Mudge finished the giant quickly. Jon-Tom bent over the tiny, curled shape of Talea. The blood flowed freely but was already beginning to slow. Major arteries and veins had been severed.
He looked back at Clothahump but the wizard could only shake his head. “No time, no time, my boy. It’s a long spell. Not enough time.”
Weak life looked out from those sea-green eyes. Her mouth twisted into a grimace and her voice was faint. “One of… these days you’re going to have to make… the important decisions without help, Jon-Tom.” She smiled faintly. “You know… I think I love you… .”
The tears came in a flood, uncontrollable. “It’s not fair, Talea. Damn! It’s not fair! You can’t tell me something like that and then leave me! You can’t!”
But she died anyway.
He found he was shaking. Caz grabbed his shoulders, shook him until it stopped.
“No time for that now, my friend. I’m sorry, too, but this isn’t the place-for being sorry.”
“No, it is not.” Clothahump was examining the body. “She’ll stop bleeding soon. When she does, clean her chitin and put her head back on. It’s over in the corner there, where the guard threw it.”
Jon-Tom stood, looked dazedly down at the wizard. “You can’t…?”
“I’ll explain later, Jon-Tom. But all may not be lost.”
“What the hell do you mean, ‘all may not be lost’?” His voice rose angrily. “She’s dead, you senile old…”
Clothahump let him finish, then said, “I forgive the names because I understand the motivation and the source. Know only that sometimes even death can be forgiven, Jon-Tom.”
“Are you saying you can bring her back?”
“I don’t know. But if we don’t get out of here quickly we’ll never have the chance to find out.”
Flor and Bribbens slipped the insect head back into place over the pale face and flowing hair. Jon-Tom wouldn’t help.
“Now everyone look and act official,” Clothahump urged them. “We’re taking a dead prisoner out for burial.”
Bribbens, Mudge, Caz, and Flor supported Talea’s body while Pog flew formation overhead and Jon-Tom and Clothahump marched importantly in front. A few passing Plated Folk glanced at them when they emerged from the doorway, but no one dared question them.
One of the benefits of infiltrating a totalitarian society, Jon-Tom thought bitterly. Everyone’s afraid to ask anything of anyone who looks important.
They were on the main floor of the palace. It took them a while to find an exit (they dared not ask directions), but before long they were outside in the mist of the palace square.
The sky was as gray and silent as ever and the humidity as bad, but for all except the disconsolate Jon-Tom it was as though they’d suddenly stepped out onto a warm beach fronting the southern ocean.
“We have to find transport again,” Clothahump was murmuring as they made their way with enforced slowness across the square. “Soon someone will note either our absence or that of our belongings.” He allowed himself a grim chuckle.
“I would not care to be the prison commandant when Eejakrat learns of our escape. They’ll be after us soon enough, but they should have a hell of a time locating us. We blend in perfectly, and only a few have seen us. Nevertheless, Eejakrat will do everything in his power to recapture us.”
“Where can we go?” Mudge asked, shifting slightly under the weight of the body. “To the north, back for Ironcloud?”
“No. That is where Eejakrat will expect us to go.”
“Why would he suspect that?” asked Jon-Tom.
“Because I made it a point to give him sufficient hints to that effect during our conversations,” the wizard replied, “in case the opportunity to flee arose.”
“If he’s as sly as you say, won’t he suspect we’re heading in another direction?”
“Perhaps. But I do not believe he will think that we might attempt to return home through the entire assembled army of t
he Greendowns.”
“Won’t they be given the alarm about us also?”
“Of course. But militia do not display initiative. I think we shall be able to slip through them.”
That satisfied Jon-Tom, but Clothahump was left to muse over what might have been. So close, they’d been so close! And still they did not know what the dead mind was, or how Eejakrat manipulated it. But while willing to take chances, he was not quite as mad as Jon-Tom might have thought. I have no death wish, young spellsinger, he thought as he regarded the tall insect shape marching next to him. We tried as no other mortals could try, and we failed. If fate wills that we are to perish soon, it will be on the ramparts of the Jo-Troom Gate confronting the foe, not in the jaws of Cugluch.
Once among the milling, festering mob of city dwellers they could relax a little. It took a while to locate an alley with a delivery wagon and no curious onlookers. Clothahump could not work the spell under the gaze of kibbitzers.
The long, narrow wagon was pulled by a single large lizard. They waited. No one else entered the alley. Eventually the driver emerged from the back entrance of a warren. Clothahump confronted him and while the others kept watch, hastily spelled the unfortunate driver under.
“Climb aboard then, citizens,” the driver said obligingly when the wizard had finished. They did so, carefully laying Talea’s body on the wagon bed between them.
They were two-thirds of the way to the Pass, the hustle of Cugluch now largely behind them, when the watchful Jon-Tom said cautiously to the driver, “You’re not hypnotized, are you? You never were under the spell.”
The worker looked back-down at him with unreadable compound eyes as hands moved toward weapons. “No, citizen. I have not been magicked, if that is what you mean. Stay your hands.” He gestured at the roadway they were traveling. “It would do you only ill, for you are surrounded by my people.” Swords and knives remained reluctantly sheathed.
“Where are you taking us, then?” Flor asked nervously. “Why haven’t you given the alarm already?”
“As to the first, stranger, I am taking you where you wish to go, to the head of the Troom Pass. I can understand why you wish to go there, though I do not think you will end your journey alive. Yet perhaps you will be fortunate and make it successfully back to your own lands.”
“You know what we are, then?” asked a puzzled Jon-Tom.
The driver nodded. “I know that beneath those skins of chitin there are others softer and differently colored.”
“But how?”
The driver pointed to the back of the wagon. Mudge looked uncomfortable. “Well now wot the bloody ’ell were I supposed to do? I thought ’is mind had been turned to mush and I ’ad to pee. Didn’t think ’e saw anyway, the ’ard-shelled pervert!”
“It does not matter,” the driver said.
“Listen, if you’re not magicked and you know who and what we are, why are you taking us quietly where we wish to go instead of turning us over to the authorities?” Jon-Tom wanted to know.
“I just told you: it does not matter.” The driver made a two-armed gesture indicative of great indifference. “Soon all will die anyway.”
“I take it you don’t approve of the coming war.”
“No, I do not.” His antennae quivered with emotion as he spoke. “It is so foolish, the millenia-old expenditure of life and time in hopes of conquest.”
“I must say you are the most peculiar Plated person I have ever encountered,” said Clothahump.
“My opinions are not widely shared among my own people,” the driver admitted. He chucked the reins, and the wagon edged around a line of motionless carts burdened with military supplies. Their wagon continued onward, one set of wheels still on the roadway, the other bouncing over the rocks and mud of the swampy earth.
“But perhaps things will change, given time and sensible thought.”
“Not if your armies achieve victory they won’t,” said Bribbens coldly. “Wouldn’t you be happy as the rest if your soldiers win their conquest?”
“No, I would not,” the driver replied firmly. “Death and killing never build anything, for all that it may appear otherwise.”
“A most enlightened outlook, sir,” said Clothahump. “See here, why don’t you come with us back to the warmlands?”
“Would I be welcomed?” asked the insect. “Would the other warmlanders understand and sympathize the way you do? Would they greet me as a friend?”
“They would probably, I am distressed to confess,” said a somber Caz, “slice you into small chitinous bits.”
“You see? I am doomed whichever way I chose. If I went with you I would suffer physically. If I stay, it is my mind that suffers constant agony.”
“I can understand your feelings against the war,” said Flor, “but that still doesn’t explain why you’re risking your own neck to help us.”
The driver made a shruglike gesture. “I help those who need help. That is my nature. Now I help you. Soon, when the fighting starts, there will be many to help. I do not take sides among the needy. I wish only that such idiocies could be stopped. It seems though that they can only be waited out.”
The driver, an ordinary citizen of the Greendowns, was full of surprises. Clothahump had been convinced that there was no divergence of opinion among the Plated Folk. Here was loquacious proof of a crack in that supposed unity of totalitarian thought, a crack that might be exploited later. Assuming, of course, that the forthcoming invasion could be stopped.
Several days later they found themselves leaving the last of the cultivated lowlands. Mist faded behind them, and the friendly silhouettes of the mountains of Zaryt’s Teeth became solid.
No wagons plied their trader’s wares here, no farmers waded patiently through knee-deep muck. There was only military traffic. According to Clothahump they were already within the outskirts of the Pass.
Military bivouacs extended from hillside to hillside and for miles to east and west. Tens of thousands of insect troops milled quietly, expectantly, on the gravelly plain, waiting for the word to march. From the back of the wagon Jon-Tom and his companions could look out upon an ocean of antennae and eyes and multiple legs. And sharp iron, flashing like a million mirrors in the diffuse light of a winter day.
No one questioned them or eyed the wagon with suspicion until they reached the last lines of troops. Ahead lay only the ancient riverbed of the Troom Pass, a dry chasm of sand and rock which in the previous ten millennia had run more with blood than ever it had with water.
The officer was winged but flightless, slim, limber of body and thought. He noted the wagon and its path, stopped filling out the scroll in his charge, and hurried to pace the vehicle. Its occupants gave every indication of being engaged in reasonable business, but they ought not to have been where they were. The quality of initiative, so lacking in Plated Folk troops, was present in some small amount in this particular individual officer.
He glanced up at the driver, his tone casual and not hostile. “Where are you going, citizen?”
“Delivering supplies to the forward scouts,” said Caz quickly.
The officer slackened his pace, walked now behind the wagon as he inspected its occupants. “That is understandable, but I see no supplies. And who is the dead one?” He gestured with claws and antennae at the limp shape of Talea, still encased in her disguise.
“An accident, a most unforgivable brawl in the ranks,” Caz informed him.
“Ranks? What ranks? I see no insignia on the body. Nor on any of you.”
“We’re not regular army,” said the driver, much to the relief of the frantic Caz.
“Ah. But such a fatal disturbance should be reported. We cannot tolerate fighting among ourselves, not now, with final victory so soon to come.”
Jon-Tom tried to look indifferent as he turned his head to look past the front of the wagon. They were not quite past the front-line troops. Leave us alone, he thought furiously at the persistent officer. Go back to your work and
leave this one wagon to itself!
“We already have reported it,” said Caz worriedly. “To our own commandant.”
“And who might that be?” came the unrelenting, infuriating question.
“Colonel Puxolix,” said the driver.
“I know of no such officer.”
“How can one know every officer in the army?”
“Nevertheless, perhaps you had best report the incident to my own command. It never hurts one to be thorough, citizen. And I would still like to see the supplies you are to deliver.” He turned as if to signal to several chattering soldiers standing nearby.
“Here’s one of ’em!” said Flor. Her sword lopped off the officer’s head in the midst of a never-to-be-answered query.
For an instant they froze in readiness, hands on weapons, eyes on the troops nearest the wagon. Yet there was no immediate reaction, no cry of alarm. Flor’s move had been so swift and the body had fallen so rapidly that no one had yet noticed.
While their driver did not believe in divine intervention, he had the sense to make the decision his passengers withheld.
“Hiiii-criiickk!” he shouted softly, simultaneously snapping his odd whip over the lizard’s eyes. The animal surged forward in a galloping waddle. Now soldiers did turn from conversation or eating to stare uncertainly at the fleeing wagon.
The last few troops scrambled out of the wagon’s path. There was nothing ahead save rock and promise.
Someone stumbled over the body of the unfortunately curious officer, noted that the head was no longer attached, connected the perfidy with the rapidly shrinking outline of the racing wagon, and finally thought to raise the alarm.
“Here they come, friends.” Caz knelt in the wagon, staring back the way they’d come. His eyes picked out individual pursuers where Jon-Tom could detect only a faint rising of dust. “They must have found the body.”
“Not enough of a start,” said Bribbens tightly. “I’ll never see my beloved Sloomaz-ayor-le-Weentli and its cool green banks again. I regret only not having the opportunity to perish in water.”
The Spellsinger Adventures Volume One: Spellsinger, the Hour of the Gate, and the Day of the Dissonance Page 54
