The Cirdonian glanced quickly around the room, seeing nothing but a helical staircase reaching towards more lighted panels a hundred feet above. He waggled his knife a foot from his captive’s eyes, then brought the point of it down on the other’s nose. “You tried to kill me,” he said softly. “Tell me why or you’re missing more than some fingers only.”
“Sabellia, Sabellia,” the maimed retainer moaned. “You’ve ruined me now, you bastard.”
Samlor flicked his blade sideways, knowing that the droplet of blood that sprang out would force the other’s eyes to cross on it. They would fill with its red proximity. “Talk to me, little man,” the caravan-master said. “Why are you here?”
The injured man swallowed bile. “My lord Regli,” he said, closing his eyes to avoid the blood and the dagger point. “He said you’d killed his wife. He sent us all after you.”
Samlor laid the dagger point on the other’s left eyesocket. “How many?” he demanded.
“A dozen,” gabbled the other. “All the guards and us coachmen besides.”
“The Watch?”
“Oh, gods, get that away from my eye,” the retainer moaned. “I almost shook—” Samlor raised the blade an inch. “Not the Watch,” the other went on. “My lord wants to handle this himself for the, the scandal.”
“And where are the others?” the point dipped, brushed an eyelash, and rose again harmlessly.
The wounded man was rigid. He breathed through his mouth, quick gasps as if a lungful of air would preserve him in the moment the knife-edge sawed through his windpipe. “They all thought you’d run for Cirdon,” he whispered. “You’d left your cloak behind. I slipped it away, took it to a S’danzo I know. She’s a liar like all of them, but sometimes not… I told her I’d pay her for the truth of where I’d find you, and I’d pay her for nothing; but I’d take a lie out other hide if six of my friends had to hold down her blacksmith buddy. She, she described where I’d meet you. I recognized it, I’d taken the Lady Samlane—”
“Here?” Samlor’s voice and his knife both trembled. Death slid closer to the room than it had been since the first slash and scramble of the fight.
“Lord, lord,” the captive pleaded. “Only this far. I swear by my mother’s bones!”
“Go on, then.” The knife did not move.
The other man swallowed. “That’s all. I waited here—I didn’t tell anybody. Lord Regli put a thousand royals on your head… and… and the S’danzo said I’d live through the meeting. Oh gods, the slut, the slut…”
Samlor smiled. “She hasn’t lied to you yet,” he said. The smile was gone, replaced with a bleakness as cruel as the face of a glacier. “Listen,” he went on, rising to one knee and pinning his prisoner by psychological dominance in the stead of his body weight. “My sister asked me for a knife. I told her I’d leave her one if she gave me a reason to.”
A spasm wracked the Cirdonian’s face. His prisoner winced at the trembling of the dagger point. “She said the child wasn’t Regli’s,” Samlor went on. “Well, who ever thought it would be, the way she sniffed around? But she said a demon had got it on her … and that bothered even her at the last. Being used, she said. Being used. She’d tried to have it aborted after she thought about things for a while, but a priest of Heqt was waiting with Regli in the shop where she’d gone to buy the drugs. After that, she wasn’t without somebody watching her, asleep or awake. The Temple of Heqt wanted the child born. Samlane said she’d use the knife to end the child when they pulled it from her … and I believed that, though I knew she’d be in no shape for knifings just after she’d whelped.
“Seems she knew that too, but she was more determined than even I’d have given her credit for being. She could give a lot of folks points for stubborn, my sister.”
Samlor shook himself, then gripped a handful of the captive’s tunic. He ripped the garment with his knife. “What are you doing?” the retainer asked in concern.
“Tying you up. Somebody’ll find you here in time. I’m going to do what I came here for, and when it’s done I’ll leave Sanctuary. If I’ve got that option still.”
Sweat was washing streaks in the blood-flecks on the captive’s face. “Sweet goddess, don’t do that,” he begged. “Not tied, not—that. You haven’t been here when … others were here. You—” the injured man wiped his lips with his tongue. He closed his eyes. “Kill me yourself, if you must,” he said so softly it was almost a matter for lip-reading to understand him. “Don’t leave me here.”
Samlor stood. His left hand was clenched, his right holding the dagger pointed down at a slight angle. “Stand up,” he ordered. Regli’s man obeyed, wide-eyed. He braced his back against the wall, holding his left hand at shoulder height but refusing to look at its ruin. The severed arteries had pinched off. Movement had dislodged some of the scabs, but the blood only oozed instead of spurting as it had initially. “Tell Regli that I’m mending my family’s honour in my way, as my sister seems to have done in hers,” Samlor said. “But don’t tell him where you found me—or how. If you want to leave here now, you’ll swear that.” “I swear!” the other babbled. “By anything you please!” The caravan-master’s smile flickered again. “Did you ever kill anyone, boy?” he asked conversationally.
“I was a coachman,” the other said with a nervous frown. “I—I mean … no.”
“Once I pulled a man apart with hot pincers,” Samlor continued quietly. “He was headman of a tribe that had taken our toll payment but still tried to cut out a couple of horses from the back of our train. I slipped into the village that night, jerked the chief out of his bed, and brought him back to the laager. In the morning I fixed him as a display for the rest.” The Cirdonian reached forwards and wiped his dagger clean on the sleeve of the other man’s tunic. “Don’t go back on your word to me, friend,” he said.
Regli’s man edged to the helical staircase. As he mounted each of the first dozen steps, he looked back over his shoulder at the Cirdonian. When the pursuit or thrown knife did not come as he had feared or expected, the retainer ran up the next twenty steps without pausing. He looked down from that elevation and said, “One thing, master.”
“Say it,” responded Samlor.
“They opened the Lady Samlane to give the child separate burial.”
“Yes?”
“And it didn’t look to be demon spawn, as you say,” Regli’s man called. “It was a perfect little boy. Except that your knife was through its skull.”
Samlor began to climb the steps, ignoring the scrabbling slippers of the man above him on the twisting staircase. The door at the top thudded, leaving nothing of the hapless ambusher but splotches of his blood on the railing. Should have stuck to his horses, Samlor thought. He laughed aloud, well aware that the epitaph probably applied to himself as well. Still, he had a better notion than that poor fool of a coachman of what he was getting into … though the gods all knew how slight were his chances of getting out of it alive. If the fellow he was looking for was a real magician, rather than someone like Samlor himself who had learned a few spells while knocking around the world, it was over for sure.
The door at the top of the stairs pivoted outward. Samlor tested it with a fingertip, then paused to steady his heart and breathing. As he stood there, his left hand sought the toad-faced medallion.
The dagger in his right hand pointed down, threatening nothing at the moment but—ready.
He pushed the door open.
On the other side, the secret opening was only a wall panel. Its frescoes were geometric and in no way different from those of the rest of the temple hallway. To the left, the hall led to an outside door heavily banded with iron. From his livery and the mutilation of his outflung left hand, the coachman could be recognized where he lay. The rest of the retainer appeared to have been razored into gobbets of flesh and bone, no other one of them as large as what remained of the left hand. Under the circumstances, Samlor had no sympathy to waste on the corpse.
The Ci
rdonian sighed and turned to the right, stepping through the hangings of brass beads into the sanctuary of Heqt. The figure he expected was waiting for him.
Soft, grey dawnlight crept through hidden slits in the dome. Mirrors had been designed to light the grinning, gilded toad-face of Heqt at the top of the dome beneath the spire. Instead, the light was directed downwards onto the figure on the floral mosaic in the centre of the great room. The hair of the waiting man glowed like burning wire. “Did the night keep you well, friend?” Samlor called as he stepped forwards.
“Well,” agreed the other with a nod. There was no sign of the regular priests and acolytes of Heqt. The room brightened as if the light fed on the beauty of the waiting man. “As I see she kept you, Champion of Heqt.”—
“No champion,” Samlor said, taking another step as casual as the long knife dangling from his right hand. “Just a man looking for the demon who caused his sister’s death. I didn’t have to look any farther than the bench across the street last night, did I?”
The other’s voice was a rich tenor. It had a vibrancy that had been missing when he and Samlor had talked of Heqt and Dyareela the night before. “Heqt keeps sending her champions, and I … I deal with them. You met the first of them, the priest?”
“I came looking for a demon,” the Cirdonian said, walking very slowly, “and all it was was a poor madman who had convinced himself that he was a god.”
“I am Dyareela.”
“You’re a man who saw an old carving down below that looked like him,” Samlor said. “That worked on your mind, and you worked on other people’s minds. … My sister, now, she was convinced her child would look like a man but be a demon. She killed it in her womb. The only way that she’d have been able to kill it, because they’d never have let her near it, Regli’s heir, and her having tried abortion. But such a waste, because it was just a child, only a madman’s child.”
The sun-crowned man gripped the throat of his white tunic and ripped downwards with unexpected strength. “I am Dyareela,” it said. Its right breast was pendulous, noticeably larger than the left. The male genitals were of normal size, flaccid, hiding the vulva that must lie behind them. “The one there,” it said, gesturing towards the wall beyond which the coachman lay, “came to my fane to shed blood without my leave.” The naked figure giggled. “Perhaps I’ll have you wash in his blood. Champion,” it said. “Perhaps that will be the start of your penance.”
“A mad little hermaphrodite who knows a spell or two,” Samlor said. “But there’ll be no penance for any again from you, little one. You’re fey, and I know a spell for your sort. She wasn’t much, but I’ll have your heart for what you led my sister to.”
“Will you conjure me by Heqt, then. Champion?” asked the other with its arms spread in welcome and laughter in its liquid voice. “Her temple is my temple, her servants are my servants … the blood other champions is mine for a sacrifice!”
Samlor was twenty feet away, a full turn and half a turn. He clutched his medallion left-handed, hoping it would give him enough time to complete his spell. “Do I look like a priest to talk about gods?” he said. “Watch my dagger, madman.”
The other smiled, waiting as Samlor cocked the heavy blade. It caught a stray beam of sunlight. The double edge flashed black dawn.
“By the Earth that bore this,” Samlor cried, “and the Mind that gave it shape; By the rown of this hilt and the silver wire that laps it; By the cold iron of this blade and by the white-hot flames it flowed from; By the blood it has drunk and the souls it has eaten
—Know thy hour”
Samlor hurled the dagger. It glinted as it rotated. The blade was point-first and a hand’s breadth from the smiling face when it exploded in a flash and a thunderclap that shook the city. The concussion hurled Samlor backwards, bleeding from the nose and ears. The air was dense with flecks of paint and plaster from the frescoed ceiling. Dyareela stood with the same smile, arms lifting in triumph, lips opening further in throaty laughter. “Mine for a sacrifice!”
A webbing of tiny cracks was spreading from the centre of the dome high above. Samlor staggered to his feet, choking on dust and knowing that if he was lucky he was about to die.
Heqt’s gilded bronze head, backed by the limestone spire, plunged down from the ceiling. It struck Dyareela’s upturned face like a two-hundred-ton crossbow bolt. The floor beneath disintegrated. The limestone column scarcely slowed, hurtling out of sight as the earth itself shuddered to the impact.
Samlor lost his footing in the remains of Regli’s coachman. An earth-shock pitched him forwards against the door panel. It was unlocked. The Cirdonian lunged out into the street as the shattered dome followed its pinnacle into a cavern that gaped with a sound like the lowest note of an organ played by gods.
Samlor sprawled in the muddy street. All around him men were shouting and pointing. The Cirdonian rolled onto his back and looked at the collapsing temple.
Above the ruins rose a pall of shining dust. More than imagination shaped the cloud into the head of a toad.
The Fruit Of Enlibar
By Lynn Abbey
THE HILLSIDE GROVES of orange trees were all that remained of the legendary glory of Enlibar. Humbled descendants of the rulers of an empire dwarfing Ilsig or Ranke eked out their livings among the gnarled, ancient trees. They wrapped each unripe fruit in leaves for the long caravan journey and wrapped each harvest in a fresh retelling of their legends. By shrewd storytelling these once proud families survived, second only to the S’danzo in their ability to create mystery, but like the S’danzo crones they flavoured their legends with truth and kept the sceptics at bay.
The oranges of Enlibar made their way to Sanctuary once a year. When the fist sized fruits were nearly ripe Haakon, the sweetmeat vendor of the bazaar, would fill his cart and hawk oranges in the town as well as in the stalls of the bazaar. During those few days he would make enough money to buy expensive trinkets for his wife and children, another year’s lodgings for his mistress, and have enough gold left to take to Gonfred, the only honest goldsmith in town.
The value of each orange was such that Haakon would ignore the unwritten code of the bazaar and reserve the best of his limited supply for his patrons at the Governor’s Palace. It had happened, however, that two of the precious fruits had been bruised. Haakon decided not to sell that pair at all but to share them with his friends the bazaar-smith, Dubro, and his young wife, the half-S’danzo Illyra.
He scored the peel deftly with an inlaid silver tool meant especially for this one purpose. When his fingers moved away the pebbly rind fell back from the deep-coloured pulp and Illyra gasped with delight. She took one of the pulp sections and drizzled the juice onto the back of her hand, then lapped it up with the tip of her tongue: the mannerly way to savour the delicate flavour of the blood-red juice.
“These are the best; better than last year’s,” she exclaimed with a smile. “You say that every year, Illyra. Time dulls your memory; the taste brings it back.” Haakon sucked the juice off his hand with less delicacy: his lips showed the Stain of Enlibar. “And, speaking of time dulling your memory—Dubro, do you recall, about fifteen years back, a death-pale boy with straw hair and wild eyes running about the town?”
Haakon watched as Dubro closed his eyes and sank back in thought. The smith would have been a raw youth then himself, but he had always been slow, deliberate, and utterly reliable in his judgements. Illyra would have been a skirt-clinging toddler that long ago so Haakon did not think to ask her, nor to glance her way while he awaited Dubro’s reply. Had he done so he would have seen her tremble and a blood-red drop of juice disappear into the fine dust beneath her chair.
“Yes,” Dubro said without opening his eyes, “I remember one as that: quiet, pale … nasty. Lived a few years with the garrison, then disappeared.”
“Would you know him again after all this time?”
“Nay. He was that sort of lad who looks childish until he becomes a man, then one neve
r sees the child in his face again.”
“Would you reckon “Walegrin” to be his name?” Ignored, beside them, Illyra bit down on her tongue and stifled sudden panic before it became apparent.
“It might be … nay, I could not be sure. I doubt as I ever spoke to the lad by name.” Haakon shrugged as if the questions had been idle conversation. Illyra ate her remaining share of the oranges, then went into the ramshackle stall where she lit three cones of incense before returning to the men with a ewer of water.
“Illyra, I’ve just asked your husband if he’d come with me to the Palace. I’ve got two sacks of oranges to deliver for the Prince and another set of arms would make the work easier. But he says he won’t leave you here alone.”
Illyra hesitated. The memories Haakon had aroused were still fresh in her mind, but all that had been fifteen years ago, as he had said. She stared at the clouded-over sky.
“No, there’ll be no problem. It may rain today arid, anyway, you’ve taken everyone’s money this week with your oranges,” she said with forced brightness.
“Well then, you see, Dubro—there’s no problem. Bank the fires and we’ll be off. I’ll have you back sweating again before the first raindrops fall.”
Illyra watched them leave. Fear filled the forge, fear left over from a dimly remembered childhood. Visions she had shared with no one, not even Dubro. Visions not even the S’danzo gifts could resolve into truth or illusion. She caught up her curly black hair with a set of combs and went back inside.
When the bed was concealed under layers of gaudy, bright cloth and her youth under layers of kohl, Illyra was ready to greet the townsfolk. She had not exaggerated her complaints about the oranges. It was just as well that Haakon’s supply was diminishing. For two days now she had had no querents until late in the day. Lonely and bored she watched the incense smoke curl into the darkness of the room, losing herself in its endless variations.
Tales From The Vulgar Unicorn Page 10
