Deathknight

by Andrew J Offutt

  “A good girl,” Falc said to the Housechief, to mitigate his semi-rejection of her. “I do like her attitude and carriage. From Kem?”

  “Yes. You have seen her aforenow?”

  “No. The Kem-trained do have a way of holding their heads.”

  Alazhar gave his own balding head a little twitch to show that he was impressed. “She has also just come into heat — oestrus, in the event you wish to reconsider.”

  Falc shook his head.

  “Might one ask what it is about her that displeased you?”

  “Nothing, I assure you.”

  “You have a practice of not accepting the first offered?”

  “I have done so,” Falc said, batting aside a question both stupid and wasteful of breath and time.

  “No prying was meant, Knight of the Order — Oh! My great apology! Do be at home in this House.”

  Falc’s nod was brief. He saw no reason to say anything more. Having been welcomed, belatedly, to partake of House Chasmal’s hospitality, he hefted the horn carved into the likeness of a legless darg. He drew the plug from the tip of the tail and took the thin stream of amber liquid expertly and easily at a distance equal to the length of his forearm. His head easing forward as his thumb eased over the snout, he took the last of the stream without spilling so much as a drop.

  At that moment an ajmil and two boyslaves came into the room. They bore four steaming buckets and one that did not steam. The four were poured into the wedge-shaped tub, which was of brass-banded marble the colour of a cow’s cream a week after the birth of her first calf. Falc watched the girl’s grace as she set down her bucket. To Alazhar he turned a dark face with eyebrows raised; the Housechief nodded.

  “I shall see to it, Sir Falc.”

  “I have four-fifths of an hour?”

  “I fear so. Sereah! Go and sit by the waterclock and think carnal thoughts. When four points have elapsed, return to this chamber.”

  “And knock,” the omo said.

  The mildly pretty slave glanced up at him, a tall lean hawk-faced man all in bulky black that did not lessen the darkness of his face. Eyes on the man so dark they looked black, too; like a pool of water in an old and abandoned quarry. She nodded, and left her head down.

  “Get hence,” Alazhar said, and she was gone, with neither man having seen aught of apprehension or anticipation in the attractive face with its pointed chin and cvarmed eyelids. She was neither girl nor small, Sereah. Alazhar turned back to the guest. “Do be at home in this house,” he said and, the slaves having left, he too departed the company of the omo Falc of Risskor.

  Never forgetting his thumbtip over the pouring hole in the horn he held, Falc waited until the door had closed before he went to it. Quietly he eased the bolt across. He lifted the horn and drank deeply from the large end. Lowered it while he swirled the beer in his mouth. Spat it into the bathwater, and poured in the rest of the rhyton’s contents. Wisps of steam rose lazily from the big basin. Into it Falc upended the fifth bucket, the tepid water. He saved back only a little. The rhyton he rested on a low table carven of selwood and fitted with iron feet.

  Falc lifted his hands to the vicinity of his collarbones. With two little snik sounds the clasps of his cloak came free of the metal receptacles in his leathern shirt. They differed from its ninety-seven thumbprint-sized studs of iron only by being not convex, but hollowed to receive the cloak’s clasps. In his hands the hook on the carnelian buckle’s back came free of the leather. He laid aside the unenhanced weapons belt, which bore two holes only. A knight of the Order might smuggle this or that, but he did not fatten. With the gemstone buckle, the sheathed sword and knife, and the belt’s width that matched the length of his forefinger in front and nearly twice that in back, he had divested himself of four kilograms of weight.

  Falc paused, eyes closed. Slowly he lifted his arms and seemed trying to stretch up to overtake his extended fingertips. As slowly, he came down again onto his feet. His lips were moving.

  He drew up the hem of his surcoat of black, which fell to mid-calf. Ritually rolled upward, it came off over his head to be laid on the table with care, rolled. He freed the three laces on the left side of his half-sleeved mailshirt of leather, then loosened the six under his right arm. The shirt peeled all the way across to the left, revealing another layer of leather. On the left side, the coat parted with the overfold. The three laces drew through their holes; they were attached to the underlayer, which was dull and smooth. It swung loosely outward and Falc doffed the undershirt with its added protection of another strip sewn across the back.

  He laid aside over seventeen kilograms of iron-bossed black leather with a little clunk of its throwing knives and, on his knees, ritually arranged the mailshirt so that it could be got into swiftly.

  His quilted under-jerkin clasped in back. Rising, he pulled it, with its studded crotch-protecting pendant, over his head. Under it he wore the cap-sleeved, double layered shirt of Rissman cotton, this from the area of his native Risskor. It was grey with age and much sweat, except for the long sleeves. Those were black because they showed, down to his gauntlets of black suede reinforced with stiffer bands of the same.

  Falc extended his arms straight before him, fists balled, and stood very straight with his head high. His crawk-head beard, trimmed short, seemed to bristle outward from his chin. He dropped his arms to his sides before removing the left gauntlet, and the right. He was careful to lay them on the low table so that they were palm to palm, left on top. Straightening, he stood with his head bowed a long moment before he drew the cotton shirt straight up over his head. An omo in such a position was vulnerable; Falc whipped both arms swiftly down and let the shirt fall.

  Strangely, for a man who wore such a bulk of clothing above the waist, he looked little smaller without it; only tauter. The clothing was dull black and the omo, while lean, was no small man. His chest was divided into distinct plates. Muscles moved visibly in it, and in his arms and back, with the movements of those thick-wristed arms. Rangy rather than bulky, he was nevertheless a man of obvious strength and condition, with a stomach in which the musculature was visible.

  His body was marked by more scars than one.

  A knight-Son of Ashah did not sit to remove his boots. Lifting his left leg across the right on which he stood, he drew off the soft boot without a waver or a hop. That stockinged foot he planted, and removed the other boot of old black suede, soft with the rintseed oil that lent it some odour other than that of feet. The stockings were kept up by being folded over the boot-tops. That foot planted, he removed the left stocking, and then the right. First arranging the toe of each stocking in the boot and the rest dangling, he stood the boots between tub and door, pointed doorward.

  “A knight of the Order Most Old is ever ready to go forth on behalf of the Order, honour, or his Contractor,” he murmured, and added other quiet formula-words memorised long ago.

  His leggings were leather with the rough side faced out, for a dull appearance. Under them, gauzy cotton tights had been white and were now grey. Falc skinned out of them and stood nude but for his crotch-protector. A tall man and dark, lean of hip and small of buttocks; wiry of calf and tight-skinned in the thigh. The hip strap of the snug, reinforced pouch for his genitals was a hairy and visibly rough length of rope about half the thickness of his least finger. Almost as oddly, the stonepouch itself was white.

  Having disrobed in the ritual Way of the Order that left a man ever ready for swift defence and vulnerable for one instant only, Falc arranged his discarded clothing. He patted the knife of unrusting obsidian in the slender sheath attached to his stonepouch. With his arms folded over his chest he performed thirty-three slow squat-to-heels and rise-on-toes. The last ended with his seeming to strain toward the sky, his lips moving, his body a taut line from the toes on which he balanced to the upward straining fingertips. His lips were moving. He relaxed and breathed deeply, diaphragmatically, for ninety-nine beats. The number of a man’s fingers and its multipl
es, without the thumb, formed the mystic number sacred to Ashah.

  Falc stepped into the tub and sat. Immediately his eyes closed. His lips moved while he washed the pouch for his stones, wrung it, and laid it on the floor well away. The obsidian knife remained with him in the tub.

  Once he had bathed, swiftly and in a businesslike manner, he drew his shirt and under-leggings or tights into the water with him. He murmured the poem of the Way, sloshing the garments gently. Then Falc of Risskor rose and stepped naked from the tub to turn and, on his knees, wash his own undergarments in the way of all knights of the Order Most Old.

  2

  The ajmil Sereah returned full of the widespread curiosity about these men. What did Deathknights wear under all that crawk-coloured clothing, and what were they like naked? Could they truly be as other men, these strange traveling monks who were so sinister and were known to do death as part of their work, their Order? Were they more than other men as some said, smiling? Were they less, as others sneered, perhaps hopefully?

  Naturally Sereah concealed her disappointment at finding this knight O. M. O. dressed, at least partially.

  Fresh-washed tights and shirt of cotton hung on a cord stretched before the window. From the same knapsack that had produced that cord, along with comb, toothbrush, razor and scissors, Falc wore snug black leggings of wool, low boots of wine-red felt, and a long-sleeved, long-tailed shirt of mossweave the colour of glittery jet. Its collar was aesthetically high; its chest was blazoned with the Order’s stylised closed fist and enough of a forearm to show the scar of Sath. This was in deep scarlet picked out with nothing, so that at times it hardly showed against the black. She saw that he had no sideburns, and no hair was visible because of his coif or skullcap. No, Sereah saw, he did not wear an earring. So much for that myth of these grim monkish messengers and super-warriors!

  “Do not stare at your betters, ajmil.”

  “Abjections, my lord! I did not expect my lord to be clothed.”

  “You have no experience with knights of the Order, Sereah of Lock?”

  “No, my lord.” She regarded the floor, wondering how he knew whence she had been sold, when she was eleven.

  “We choose who sees our skin, ajmil. I am like other men in few respects, and I am cruel as well.”

  “My lord has but to command his slave.”

  “I see that you have brought beer. Drink.”

  “My lord... I may not.”

  “Your lord has but to command, you said? Is this your obeisance, your abjection? Drink.”

  She went to her knees. “My lord, I may not. It is not permitted.”

  “And if I beat you?”

  To the floor Sereah said, “It is not permitted that an ajmil of this household drink beer, Master. To beat me would be cruelty without need or provocation.”

  “You provoke me by lecturing me, Sereah.”

  *

  When much later another green-jerkined ajmil came, she noted that neither Sereah’s clothing nor the Deathknight’s had been unlaced, but that Sereah had been physically chastised. Further, he was fully dressed even to mailcoat and that big cloak like a sail, and held his belt of weapons. What was not visible were the scores of questions he had asked of Sereah, and the knowledge of Langese affairs he would take away with him and bear home to Kinneven. Carefully not looking at Sereah, the new ajmil addressed Falc’s chest.

  “I am bidden to guide Sir Falc to my master the lord Chasmal,” she said.

  “An odd house,” he commented, “in which ajmini begin speech with the personal pronoun. Outside, both of you, and wait.”

  The slave opened her mouth to speak and thought better of it. She stepped outside the door. The mildly whipped Sereah accompanied her.

  Falc closed the door.

  In private, he performed the Rite and Words of the Blades, buckled on the belt, drew sword and renewed the approved shorter version of his vow. Sword sheathed, he went out to be led, unnecessarily, to the anteroom of Holder Chasmal’s audience chamber. His guide did not go in but closed the melt-bossed door behind him. He stood soft-booted on a refulgent floor of tiny multi-coloured stones that formed a mosaic landscape.

  Across the large, empty chamber another door opened. In to face him filed three men in helmet, cuirass and greaves. They were sword-armed but empty of hand. The man in the middle wore one of those silly little electric pistols that (sometimes) launched a jolt for seven or ten meters. He also wore a ring with a large green stone. An aventurine with intaglio, Falc saw, just as he saw that the leftward household peacekeeper wore his sword on his right hip and the rightward man was just past his youth.

  Seven or nine other things Falc noticed then as well, though that was wholly automatic. He had no expectation of having need of the observations and knowledge gained; his was the eye of an omo. Since they were helmeted, he too covered his ever-present coif with helmet. That came automatic, to a knight of the Order.

  “And what does a Deathknight seek here?” That from the man in the middle, he who wore the ring of authority and cuirass of shingled placks. His eyes were strange, the pupils large and almost round.

  Falc had been taken aback by three armed and armoured men, household peacekeepers, but he had not showed it. He deemed it best now to let them see him taken aback by the question and tone, and he did.

  “Passage,” he said, “to Holder Chasmal.”

  “Who are you, Deathknight?”

  “I am Falc, of Risskor —”

  “Risskor!”

  “— Contracted with Holder Kinneven of Lock, with a message for your lord.” Only control kept him from adding “your master,” as reminder.

  “Pass in to our lord an armed Deathknight in mailcoat? Not likely!”

  This time Falc met the ringed man’s gaze without showing anything of reaction or emotion. He felt both. He was accustomed to respect, and an omo had to grow accustomed to unreasoning fear that came from lack of knowledge. He was not accustomed to challenges. His expression was as bland as was possible on a large but lean face of unusual darkness, with prominent brow and cheekbones and hawk-like nose. The three Langomen saw blue eyes nearly as dark as his black moustache and side-whiskers and the kempt beard that left most of his chin bared. His brows were not fierce in that fierce hawkish face, but straight, even tending to a slight upward tilt where they approached each other above his nose. A dark, black-bearded and -moustached man with midnight eyes, all in black broken only by the deep red gemstone of his belt buckle. Even the hilts of his weapons were of crawk-hued horn. Masters of effect, these servants of Ashah.

  “I am just now called to audience, to deliver my message to your lord.”

  “We know what sort of message your kind delivers, Deathknight. Have you the scar on your wrist?”

  “Remember my purpose here, weapon-man. You overstep your authority and your master’s hospitality. The words of hospitable welcome have been spoken to me, twice. And you know I bear the scar.”

  “A Deathkmght, though!” The man with the ring wagged his helmeted head. “We serve Holder Chasmal, Sir Deathknight, and surely we serve him best by keeping you from him.”

  “Lock is no enemy of Lango. I am the same Falc who visited your lord Chasmal on behalf of Holder Kinneven less than a year ago, when I met you. Altmer, is it not? Prefect of the House?”

  The other two shot surprised glances at their leader; Altmer tightened his lips and stared. “And do you observe the ninth day of the month Sarloj?”

  Falc bade himself cease seething. “You know that I do. Are you unable to hear, or understand? I am here on an entirely peaceful mission. I am merely a messenger to your master from a fellow Holder and friend.” (The left-handed man snorted but Falc continued without pause or glance.) “Your lord has nothing to fear from mine, for they are friends. Holder Chasmal has nothing to fear from me, who am Contracted with Aron Kinneven, Holder of Lock — in Juliara.”

  “Nothing to fear, you say. Peaceful mission, you avow. Hand over your weapon
s for safekeeping, then, whilst you visit our lord Holder.”

  “You know I cannot. I have taken the oath of the Order Most Old, and bear the scar. We of the Order hand weapons to no one. We use them or we break them ourselves.”

  “Break your blades, then. It is as one to us.”

  “What soars in you, Prefect Altmer? I will break my weapons when they have dishonoured, or when I yield me. In fewer words, I’ll not break them ever.”

  “Yield, then.”

  “What!”

  Incredibly, Altmer dared repeat the incredible.

  All of this was quite outside Falc’s experience. A man grew accustomed to certain aspects of being of the Order; aspects both good and bad. Respect might be fear, but that was familiar and tolerable. This scornful challenging, however, was unprecedented. Altmer’s purpose and goal seemed apparent, but that did not make it acceptable to Falc. Or believable.

  “I do not want to say this, Altmer of House Chasmal, but I am forced: I will not yield me or my weapons or my mission. Three of you are not enough to make me consider that. This is hard for me, but I wish no trouble here. Already I have accepted enough from you to put my Honour in question. You will not call your master to confirm that he has just caused me to be escorted here?”

  In reply to that most earnest and even demeaning effort, Falc received three sneers. Consciously lowering his shoulders in a relaxing exercise, he swiftly reviewed the words of the Way of Sallenar the Calm; the so-called Calm Psalm. Only then did he speak.

  “I go far and far with you then, Altmer. I walk the desert for you: Falc of Risskor, of the Order Most Old, swears by his scar and the events of the ninth Sarloj, and by the First Knight of the Order, Sath Firedrake, and finally by Ashah patron of the order: I am here to deliver a verbal message to Holder Chasmal, and that only.”

  Their eyes and their silence told him that they were aware of what he had done, and impressed. None could be so insolent or so stupid as to reject or gainsay such a mighty oath from a Son of Ashah. The younger peacekeepers looked with visible nervousness to their leader, seeking guidance. It was he who spoke, again.