She walked, and tried to think.
Reswen,
Nothing had touched her this way before. Oh, she had had longings, had had crushes, even, but nothing like this. How is it, she thought, that in a matter of two days—or a little more, actually—this mrem can become the most important thing in my life? How is it that so much can change, and against my will? This was never my idea. Another flirtation, no more. If he must desire me, no harm in my enjoying myself—
That had been the rationalization for so long, with so many. She knew it for a rationalization; she had known it for one for a long time. Until now, it had never bothered her. They made my life hard enough when I was young, she would think. Now it’s my turn to enjoy what’s happening. I’ve paid enough price of pain and trouble in my time. Let them do what I desire, and let me enjoy it.
But suddenly that coin was no longer current. Suddenly it mattered more whether someone else was enjoying himself than whether she was.
It frightened her. In the background, while her body walked the streets, out of the poor but respectable neighborhoods and into the ricketies, her heart and mind debated one another and found no common ground. This is not safe, said the mind, pragmatic, practical. You’re never going to be trusted with this kind of work again.
Fine, said her heart. I don’t want it. Nor would he want me doing it, really. He has been restraining himself from saying as much, but he’d much rather his lady wasn’t a whore and a spy.
There, you see, said the mind, scornful. What does he know, after all? You’re neither.
Oh? said her heart.
She walked, and the sun shone on the muck in the streets, except where the buildings leant so close together that the sun missed the dung-clotted gutter entirely and fell only in a single lean strip of light on a mud-daubed wall. Never mind that, said her mind, retreating in slight confusion, what matters is that you won’t be able to live the way you have been. No more travel, no more rich folk hanging on your every word. You will have to be his only, if you follow through with this foolishness. No more money of the kind you’ve been used to. Others will desire you—you know you’ll slip, every now and then, and let the talent work—but the desire will do you no good; certainly none of the only kind of good it’s ever done you—
There’s better “good” than that, said her heart, as she sidestepped just in time to miss the contents of someone’s sandbox as they hissed down out of a window into the street. His love is given freely. He cares without being made to—Oh miracle, however it happened! Let the money and the attention of the stupid rich take itself elsewhere. He’s here now—and oh, the thought of losing him by not acting, not taking what he offers—
She walked, and the argument went back and forth, the mind steadily and desperately being pushed back against a wall of fear. That was what it came down to, at the last. The way it has always been is going to change. And you will not be in control. In the hot sunlight, when she chanced to walk where it fell, she shivered. The fear had not been so terrible since the first time it happened, since a he-mrem looked at her in a way no one else ever had, and she knew somehow that it was her fault, and that the peace of all her life before that was at an end.
She walked. She headed upwards, helpless hostess to the argument, the desperate plea that things should stay the way they were. It was not until the shadow fell over her, not until she looked up at the old dark walls and the still shape standing on top of them, that Laas knew her choice was already made, and her doom sealed, and all the arguing vain. Sorimoh stood there with her sword outstretched over her city; but more real to Laas, just then, was the image of Reswen standing between her and the statue, dreamy, amicable, his eyes resting on Niau with calm love—letting Laas know that his choices were made too, and letting her know what they were. She could not bear any more than he could the thought of all this raucous life starving to death. Nor could she bear the thought of his exuberance, his fierce passion; his gentleness, withering away in the aridity of her own fear. It should not be allowed.
Would not be.
Gods help me, she thought, I am his, and his city’s, and a traitor to my own people.
She stood under the cool shadow, gazing up at the dark shape silhouetted against the bright noon sky. A breath of wind, the first she had felt that day, slipped through her fur.
Well, she thought, if I’m a traitor, best I get on with it.
She headed down into the city.
•
Lorin was in a great quandary.
He was thinking that perhaps he should be brave . . . and he had no idea where to start. He had never been brave. Not when he ran away and hid after his father and mother were killed; not when he left that city, sick of the look of it, fearful of some later pursuit; not when he first came to Niau and went to ground as quickly as possible. He had not been brave all that time ago when Reswen had found him out, and bought him ... relatively painless though that process had been, once he had been reassured that Reswen was not going to have him spiked up. And all the time since, he had stayed small and quiet, slunk about, done his business in darkness and as much silence as possible....
It was looking as if it was time to stop. That was what was troubling him.
There was no doubt in his mind now. Oh, perhaps the tail-twitch reaction continued. There’s no such thing as a liskash any more!—over and over, a desperate denial. But the denial wouldn’t change the facts. Something was doing a liskash’s kind of magic, with deadly results.
There was only one problem. There are no liskash in Niau!
Lorin had been thinking about that one for a while, and unfortunately, the answers that kept coming up made him shake like a distempered kit. The books might say what they liked about the supposedly increased effective range of liskash when doing sorcery, but that still meant that a liskash had to be somewhere in the general neighborhood to do its spells. Even miles away would be too far; it could not be hidden, say, up in the hills. Nor could it be in the town lands—certainly it would consider that too dangerous, even with all its power. And besides that, someone would have found it and raised the alarm by now.
Wouldn’t they?
Lorin sat in his house with his head in his hands, in the dark. There were wards all around, now. They showed no fire, in the real world, but in the next he knew they would be blazing. He did not mind attracting the attention, at this point, if any was being attracted. He wanted no one inside his mind just now.
If I were a liskash, he thought, and I wanted to get into Niau, how would I manage it?
Tunneling under the city walls seemed ridiculous, though the legends seemed rather vague about a, liskash’s ability in this direction. He thought it rather unlikely, however. All the stories seemed to describe the liskash of old as too proud a race to do anything so demeaning as dig holes in the ground. Holes might be dug for them, but Lorin couldn’t think of any way to do that without attracting attention ... and certainly not from anywhere outside Niau which would enable a tunnel to be made in anything like a decent time. The town lands, on the hillside of the city, were notoriously open, and tunneling through the desert sand seemed silly too.
What, then? Tunneling, by magic? But it would have been noticed. Simply appearing out of nothing? Lorin thought about it for a moment, and then snorted at himself derisively. Not even magic could move air out of the way quietly when something appeared out of “nowhere.” No indeed, the explosion of air that would have accompanied the appearance of a liskash would have raised more than mere questions. Roofs would have come off for blocks around.
The simplest way, he thought, would be to sneak the liskash in with something else ... preferably something that won’t be investigated. Your personal effects, let’s say. If it came in through the front door ...
He had heard descriptions of the arrival of the Easterners.
There seemed little to go on there; most of their ba
ggage had been slung over the backs of burden-beasts. But there had been some big carts, draped—cages, for beasts from the Eastern countries. Some of them were in the city beast garden even now.
All of them?
Lorin shook. What a thought: that possibly there was something down in the beast pits that was a lineal descendant of the old lizards, the ancient master-species of the world, whom the mrem had supplanted; an angry liskash, biding its time and smiling while mrem-kits threw buns and feedroots at it, and keepers, all unknowing, pushed fresh meat to it once a day on billhooks.
In any case, it had to be looked into. And there was no use telling Reswen anything about it, not just yet. His constables would be helpless. If they stirred up the liskash, there would be death and destruction past belief. Of that Lorin was sure.
Yet someone had to go find out if the thing was in fact here—and if so, where it was, and in what condition, and what could be done about it.
There was no one but Lorin to handle that.
He couldn’t seem to stop shaking. It would be wonderful, he thought, if there were someone else I could give this job to—!
But there was no one.
He started to go over the whole thing in his head again—then stopped, swearing. He had done this five times already. It was not getting any better.
He got up and moved fast, to minimize the shaking, and got on his cloak. No matter that he would swelter inside it, this time of year; the concealment would be of use. It would be dark very soon. And with any kind of luck, there would not be too many people around Haven tonight....
Now that was a thought.
He flopped down at the bench again and fumbled over the books piled up on the table for one in particular. I must be crazy, he thought, as he riffled through the pages. He had certainly never tried anything quite this daft before. But it was necessary ... or might prove to be. He doubted he would have the courage, or the opportunity, to pull off twice what he intended to try at least once.
He found another scrap of parchment from a paid bet, turned it over, hunted across the table for quill and gall-ink, dabbed at the inkwell, and swore some more. It was almost dry. He scrabbled the pen around at the bottom of the well and tried to get a glob of ink onto the point of the pen, then scribbled hastily, with much blotting and smearing. Damn. Damn, damn …
Normally Lorin took more time about his copying than this, but the fear was rattling his bones so that he had no desire to spend any more time about it than usual, The wording was straightforward enough, after all, and the symbology was not of the more difficult kind. He had been tempted, at first, to try the Eastern version of the spell; it was quicker and more effective. But on the other hand, his enemy would more likely be familiar with that one. Better stick to the West....
His enemy. Oh, this was bad, very bad indeed. The whole thing had gone far past earning a bonus now. He was involved.
Lorin had sworn himself oaths, before, that he would never become involved. His father had become involved, and look what. had happened to him.
But what could he do? There was Reswen, and that pretty lady, so obviously in love, and here was something lying up somewhere in the city—or so he thought—that was going to bring all the loves, and hates, and lives, to a very abrupt end. Whatever other emotions and reactions one might suspect from a liskash, mercy had never been one of them. Either there would not be one stone left upon another, after the thing was through with them ... or something much worse would be happening. The legends were obliquely horrific about certain of the lizards’ eating habits ... in and out of the body.
He shuddered all over and finished his copying, tossing the miserable blunted quill aside and rolling up the parchment carefully, ink side in, to blot the wet bits on the dry back. Lorin stowed the thing in a pocket and then slipped out his door, locking it behind him, cursing his shaking hands.
He made his way through town unnoticed, as far as he could tell. No passing constable paid any attention to him, which was just as well, since if by bad luck he stumbled across one who could read, the little writing he carried in his pocket would be sufficient to see him sitting on top of the wall in a most uncomfortable manner ... not that Reswen would let that happen, but Reswen could hardly be everywhere.
There were a few torches outside Haven, but otherwise the place was mostly dark; the constabulary presence was minimal. Lorin breathed a sigh of relief at that. He had little enough idea what he was looking for—he hardly needed the constables breathing down his neck.
He slipped through the gates and made himself familiar with the shrubbery for a few minutes, watching the courtyard. There were only two constables there, one of them leaning in great boredom against a pillar of the house’s portico, another standing to one side of the door. That was just as well, from Lorin’s point of view. He had no immediate plans to go into the house—in fact, he was hoping to avoid it.
The constable by the pillar turned to say something to the one by the door. Lorin slipped out from between the friendly bushes and stole softly back along the left side of the walled property, down the passage beside the house that led to the stabling quarters. A few lighted windows threw pools of light on the flagging and the grass. Lorin avoided them, once or twice having unhappy disagreements with the thornbushes along the way.
Down at the end of the flagged passageway lay the stable block, concealed from the house by various ornamental plantings and a low wall over which various vines and down-trained trees sprawled and scrambled. Lorin paused there among the plants, trying to get his bearings. A light breeze sprang up, and Lorin got a whiff of the dark rich stable smell; there were soft shuffiings and lowings from the beasts in their byres.
He slipped quietly around the plantings and headed toward the stable block, more for cover than because there was anything there that he wanted to see. To the best of his knowledge, all the beasts the Easterners had brought with them had been disposed of. It was their carriers that he was interested in ... the big ornamented boxes. They had to be here somewhere....
They were. He spotted one of them at the end of the stable block, its pull-bar lying on the ground in front of it with a large rock placed on top of the crossbar to keep the wagon from rolling. It was really a rather large box. It looked larger the closer he got to it....
Lorin stepped softly down toward it past the doors of the stables. There was some snorting and snuffling as the beasts winded him, then settled down again. His footsteps, sounded incredibly loud to him, but there was no sign of any notice being taken of him from the house; its backside was almost completely dark except for one window, high up.
He stopped about his own height’s distance from the box. It had big doors on one side, which would certainly make hell’s own noise if he tried to shift them. But there were also air slits higher up, and it would be possible, with some climbing, to get at them. Fortunately Lorin was a good climber, even as mrem reckoned it.
Less fortunately, Lorin was shaking like a leaf in a high wind. He paused there for a few seconds, thinking to try to calm himself down—but this was so patently absurd, and he was so terrified that one of the constables in front might take it into his head to come around, that he immediately grabbed a loop of rope hanging down from a canvas bound over the top of the cart, and began clambering up as quietly as he could. It seemed to him that the scratching noises he was making should have waked up the world, and most particularly the creature he suspected of being inside the box. But if he was correct in his surmise, that creature would not be awake at the moment. It would be out of the body, the better to keep an eye on things.
The better to keep an eye on things like you, his mind screamed at him, but Lorin simply gulped and kept climbing. That other’s attention should be far away from him at the moment ... otherwise he would never have gotten this far, surely. No, it had its mind on business.
If it’s here, his mind remarked, sardonic a
nd afraid. He came to the top of the box and paused there a moment, panting a little; it had been too long since he had done any climbing. When he had recovered slightly, he looked around. The canvas did not cover the entire top of the box. There was another air slit showing down at the far end of it, where the canvas had slipped aside. Slowly and quietly he crawled down toward it.
There was a deep groaning sound, and the box moved.
Lorin froze.
The sound stopped.
Idiot, idiot, he thought, and inched forward. The box groaned again, more softly this time. It was only settling on its springs.
If only the sound doesn’t bring the damned constables, Lorin thought, and inched forward again, and again, to get the noises over with. Then the air slit was just under his hands.
He held quite still to make sure that there would be no more noises, then put one eye down to the slit with the greatest caution and looked inside.
Darkness, nothing but dark. He held his position. Slowly that eye got used to the dark; he closed his other eye to help it. The merest trickle of light came in through other air slits.
Exiled: Keeper of the City Page 28
