Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  “Power,” said Giacomo, “and glory.”

  Conrad was dead before Giacomo had said the last of it. Giacomo let him fall sprawling in the street, and spat on him. “That for love,” he said. “That for a lifetime of groveling. I sold your soul for Paradise.”

  “And you shall have it,” said the monk who had not spoken before.

  Giacomo could not answer: the point of a dagger just touched the membrane of his heart. With a small grunt, the monk thrust it home.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  Sioned fell headlong into her cold and barely breathing body. Someone was shaking it, slapping it, and shouting at it, which was a tremendous annoyance. She fended him off with a buffet of wind and a gust of temper.

  The temper was stronger than she had meant. He flew backward and struck the wall with sickening force.

  She scrambled out of the knotted bedclothes, heart in throat. He was conscious but badly winded; his face was greenish pale. She breathed strength into him and soothed his bruises as she could, reassuring herself that there was nothing broken.

  She opened her mouth to speak, brimful of apologies, but he forestalled her. “Don’t,” he said. “Don’t be sorry. I lost my wits; I of all people, who should know better. You were as near dead as made no difference. I should have known what it was, and been wiser than to startle you out of it.”

  “I had already come back,” she said. “It was over—what I was taken to see.” Even as she said it, the memory flooded and nearly drowned her. “I have to go. I can’t stay. I have to—”

  “Tell me,” he said.

  She did not know if she could, but once she got the first words out, the rest came in a rush. Every moment was as vivid as if she lived it anew. She saw more this time, sensed more: more darkness, more foreboding. Part of that was simply that she knew how it ended, but some was greater clarity of understanding. She knew who had done this. She could guess why.

  Ahmad’s face stilled as he listened, emptying of all expression. When she had told him all she knew, she left the rest to him: to speak or to be silent.

  Dawn grew grey in the silence. The light of the nightlamp dimmed and paled.

  The hour of prayer had come and gone, and he had done nothing about it. That shocked her a little. He was a good Muslim always, in all his observances.

  The sun was nearly up when at last he spoke. “This is a terrible thing. It changes too much; sets too many forces at odds. And it is my fault.”

  “How can it be your fault?” she asked him.

  “I . . . made a bargain,” he said.

  “With the jinn?”

  “Before that,” he said. “With the Old Man of the Mountain.”

  Her breath hissed between her teeth. “You, too? What did you sell him? Your soul?”

  “I hope not,” Ahmad said. “There is a price, but he has yet to name it. When the time came for him to take it, he said to me, I would know.”

  Sioned’s head was aching. She forced herself to think clearly, to see everything that there was to see—and not to indulge in a fit of anger that he had kept this from her for so long.

  When she could trust her voice and her powers of reason, she said, “I’m sure he wants you to think you had something to do with it—but I don’t believe this is the price. It’s too convenient for too many people, and it serves your cause too well. Whatever he wants of you, it’s not your ease or benefit.”

  “This isn’t the price,” Ahmad said. “This is the thing I paid for. I told him the name of the one I hated, and the reason for the hatred. The rest I left to him. This guilt is on my head; this debt of the spirit is mine to pay.”

  “I don’t think so,” she said stubbornly. “I have guilt—somehow I was supposed to prevent it, or change it, and I turned my back. You did little to alter anything, except maybe to make it happen faster. Even that is my fault, since you did it for me.”

  He glared at her, but suddenly his face lightened; he laughed, if painfully. “We are clever, aren’t we? We take the woes of the world on our shoulders.”

  “This is true,” she said. “I caused this: your guilt; the marquis’ death, though my bones tell me he was marked for it long before I set foot in Tyre.”

  “We are all at fault,” said Ahmad. “We can’t stay any longer. My brother is going to be wanting me beside him as the Franks tumble in disorder.”

  “My brother would probably prefer that I lose myself at the ends of the world,” Sioned said, “but he’ll have to suffer my presence regardless. After I go to Tyre.”

  That took him aback. “Tyre! Are you mad?”

  “Probably,” she said. “But Henry is there, unprotected.”

  “They’ll kill you. They already believe that you committed murder; then you vanished in the midst of a phantom battle. Now their lord is dead, and you can wager that he was found with an Assassin’s cake in his hand. If you show your face, they’ll rend you limb from limb.”

  He spoke sense—altogether too much of it. But she thought now that she understood the jinni’s message. It had not been about Conrad; it had been about Henry. “I have to go,” she said.

  She waited for him to thunder, “I forbid it!” But he knew her too well for that. He went quiet instead, lifted himself up with a soft groan, and greeted the servant who had come in with kaffé and new bread and a bowl of fruit stewed in honey with cloves and cinnamon.

  The man’s eyes were fixed on the toes of his slippers. Sioned realized that her only garment was her hair. She reached for the first thing that came to hand: one of the coverlets from the bed.

  She was hungry—starving. Gods knew when she would eat again. Hakim was still refusing to look at her. She wheedled him into a smile, though not into raising his eyes; he was pleased to fetch the things she asked for.

  Ahmad still had not said anything. His bath was ready; usually she shared it, and a grand sharing it was, but today she let him go to it alone. She could have left then, and maybe should have, but she wanted to bathe, too: a ritual cleansing, as it were, before she faced what she must face.

  He was gone a long time. She began to suspect that he had seized the opportunity to escape without an open quarrel, but also without farewell. Her temper had risen to a fair pitch when he reappeared, clean, tidy, and dressed to travel.

  She was still naked under the wrapped coverlet, with her hair in a tangle and a last bite of bread on its way to her mouth. He would have been well within his rights to regard her with disgust, but there was no such thing in his eyes. “I couldn’t go,” he said. “Not without a word.”

  “Good,” she said, biting it off.

  “Will you not consider coming with me? I’ll deliver you safe to your brother, and together we can find a way to save your cousin in Tyre.”

  She shook her head. “It will take too long. Just let me go. I’ve got an army of the jinn; what harm can an army of men do to me?”

  “Too much,” he said grimly. “Sioned—beloved—”

  “Don’t you have a war to fight?”

  “Not with you!”

  They both stood astonished at his vehemence. For lack of anything better to do, she pulled him to her and kissed him, then thrust him away—truly away, through walls of worlds, into his camp that waited for him somewhere in the hills of Syria.

  She had caught him off guard, or she could not have done it. It left her weak but not incapacitated: testimony to the training that she had had and the strength that she had gained—and her sheer outrageous luck, that she could have done this without disaster the first time she ever attempted it. Even sending him from warded place to warded place was dangerous. She could have destroyed them both.

  But she had not. He was safe in his camp. He did not come roaring back as she had half dreaded. It seemed that he saw the sense in what she had done, once she had done it—or else he was too stark with rage to muster a counterattack.

  There was a bath waiting, and clothes that were suited to a lady of the Franks. She must summon the
jinn to protect her. Then she must go—but not before she had done one further thing.

  Safiyah was in the room where they most often studied magic, the library with its trove of treasures. She had her small black servant with her; he was writing down words as she instructed, learning the language of magic as Sioned also had done. She finished the lesson before she acknowledged Sioned’s presence: a courtesy to the pupil, and one that Sioned had known to expect. Fortunately for her sense of urgency, the lesson had been nearly done.

  Then at last, having praised the child for his diligence and dismissed him to do as he pleased, Safiyah turned her attention toward Sioned.

  Sioned had nothing to be ashamed of and nothing to hide, but she still felt like a child brought to account for a transgression.

  Safiyah did not flay Sioned alive for her many sins. She simply said, “If you die, my lord will not be able to live.”

  “Your lord is a strong man. He has kin, wives, children, to all of whom he is devoted. He’ll survive; he’ll go on. He won’t die.”

  “Nor will he live,” Safiyah said. “Life will be a burden, dragging itself out from day to day, until death is a blessing.”

  “Time heals grief,” Sioned said.

  “Not when souls are torn apart,” said Safiyah.

  “What shall I do, then?” Sioned demanded. “Shut myself in a cave and never come out?”

  “Be careful,” Safiyah said. “Be as sensible as you can. Remember that men are not as strong as we are, for all their loud protestations to the contrary, and that while you could carry on, he could not. He loves you with all his heart, child, and without you he would have no heart left.”

  “Whereas I had none to begin with,” Sioned muttered.

  Safiyah’s lips twitched. “We are colder than they, and harder. We’re fiercer, too, and stronger in defense of what we love. You love your kin, and that is right and proper. Of course you must protect them. But protect yourself, too—for his sake.”

  “I can promise to try,” said Sioned.

  “That will do,” Safiyah said. “Come back to us, child, when the world changes again. You have kin here, and people who love you. Remember that.”

  Sioned’s throat was tight. She had come expecting a reprimand, and received only understanding. It was almost too much to bear.

  She had no words to say. She took the thin hands and kissed them, and embraced the frail body—so strong within, so fragile without—and left before she lost her composure altogether.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Mustafa should have left Tyre as soon as he had delivered Richard’s message, but it was late and he was tired, and whatever the marquis’ faults, he treated royal messengers well. There was food that a Muslim could eat, and a sleeping place in the hall—though before he could claim that, a page tugged at his sleeve.

  The lord Henry had a room to himself, and servants who were his own, and guards to keep him there. But he could bring a guest in, offer him such hospitality as a man could accept whose religion did not allow him to drink wine, and give him sleeping room if he would take it.

  “Do you know where she is?” Henry asked when it was polite to speak of anything but trivialities.

  “I know that she escaped from here,” said Mustafa, “and that someone—or something—provided a diversion while she did it.”

  “It’s said the Assassins came for her,” said Henry, “or the Assassins’ demons. But I would never believe that of her.”

  “It wasn’t the King of the English,” Mustafa said.

  “She was meeting a man in the city,” Henry said. His tone made Mustafa’s eyes sharpen. “They said it was an Assassin—that she was performing foul rites with him, and plotting destruction. I think . . . it was someone she knew, and someone she maybe . . .”

  Mustafa was not one to betray secrets, but he was moved to tell this man the truth. “It was the lord Saphadin. I went to him when she was captured; I told him what I had seen. He would have come for her, and taken her where she would be safe.”

  “Saphadin?” Henry looked as if Mustafa had struck the wind out of him. “The lord Al-Adil? The sultan’s brother? God’s bones!”

  “You never suspected?”

  “I didn’t—” Henry raked fingers through his close-cropped hair. “She ran off with him?”

  “Would you rather she had stayed and been executed?”

  “No!” Henry snapped in an unwonted fit of temper.

  “Then you can be glad that she’s safe. I’m sure she is that—wherever she is.”

  “He could save her,” Henry said, sinking down onto the bed, weighted with gloom. “He could sweep in with armies of God knows what, and carry her off like a knight in a song. And what could I do? I sat here, not even chained. I would have let her die!”

  Mustafa had no comfort to offer, except to remind Henry of the truth. “She didn’t die. You would have if you’d tried to stand between the marquis and his prey.”

  Henry was little comforted, but at least he was quiet. He did not move or speak as Mustafa retreated to a corner for his evening prayer, then spread a blanket and lay on it, determined to get what sleep he could.

  He was uneasy. It was nothing he could put a name to, nor did it have anything to do with the city itself. This was something different. Something was stirring. Maybe Conrad had awakened it when he cast blame on the Assassins.

  Conrad had not been at dinner. He was waiting to dine with his lady, people said. But Isabella was in a strange mood this evening. Mustafa had seen her before she went up to her rooms, seen how odd her expression was, as if she walked in a dream. He had paid no attention to it then; he had been preoccupied with finding Henry.

  As he lay in the corner of Henry’s room, the memory began to haunt him. Dark had fallen beyond the walls; the night was deep and preternaturally quiet. The revelry in the hall had died early. He tossed on his blanket.

  Henry had gone to bed; he was motionless behind the curtains. His breathing was deep and regular. If he was not asleep, he feigned it well.

  The door was barred, the window too small for even Mustafa’s narrow body. He was imprisoned here until the guards without chose to let Henry go.

  It had been terribly foolish of him to trap himself here when he could have been in the hall, free to come and go. He could only wait and try to pray, and hope that whatever was in the air, it would not harm him or the man in the bed, who had begun, very softly, to snore.

  A sudden tumult brought Mustafa staggering to his feet. He had slept a little after all; his mind was thick with fog. People were shouting, screaming, crying. He strained to catch words amid the babble. When he succeeded, at first he did not believe what he heard. “Conrad! Conrad is dead!”

  Henry lurched through the curtains of his bed, as bleared and astonished as Mustafa. He had slightly more presence of mind: he hammered on the door until the bolt shot back and a wild-eyed guard peered in. “We’re going out,” Henry said to him.

  There was a breathless pause. Mustafa would not have been surprised if the guard had gutted Henry with his pike, or if he had slammed the door shut and refused to open it again. But the man either had the habit of obedience, or was wise enough to be afraid of Henry’s hot blue glare. He scrambled back out of the way before Henry ran him down.

  The hall was in an uproar. Henry cut through the crowd with his bulk and the power of his rank; Mustafa clung as close as he could. They mounted the dais, man and shadow; Henry raised his voice in a bellow that overwhelmed the lot of them.

  His gimlet eye fixed on one man who seemed most distraught, but who had found his way to a sort of calm. “Tell us,” Henry said.

  Word by word, Henry got it out of him. The marquis had gone to dine with his friend the bishop, but that was long hours ago. His squire at last had gone looking for him, and had stumbled over him, sprawled in the middle of a street. There was a black dagger in his heart and a cake clutched in his hand, still warm—though that was impossible; the corpse was s
tone-cold.

  The squire had paused for a fit of hysterics, which had brought out the watch. Where they had been while their lord was stabbed to death, God knew—or Satan; for this was surely the handiwork of his servants. They were making up for lost time now, having sent a man to the castle with the news while they brought the lord’s body back more slowly.

  Half the city seemed to have followed them. It sounded like a storm coming, a long low rolling sound shot through with shrieks and wailing. The hall was silent, listening. Eyes rolled white; faces were stiff with fear.

  “She did it,” someone muttered. “She came back—she and her allies. She finished what she started.”

  One instant Henry was on the dais, listening as intently as the rest. The next, he was down among the throng, fingers clamped about the man’s throat. “No woman’s hand was in this,” Henry said in a low growl that managed to reach the farthest edges of the hall. “Least of all hers. She was an innocent, condemned by one man’s jealousy. You can thank the Lord God that some good angel came to her rescue.”

  The man gasped for breath. His face had gone an ugly shade of crimson. Henry raked his glare across the hall. “There will be no more lies spoken in this place. I take command here until the succession shall be settled; I bid you therefore withdraw and wait, all but the marquis’ personal guard and the members of his council. When morning comes, there will be orders and dispositions. For now, take what rest you can. You will be needing it.”

  Henry was an affable young man, with an easy manner and a light touch with the servants. But when he took command, men obeyed before they could think to resist. The hall cleared with remarkable swiftness and not a word of grumbling—though Mustafa was sure there would be plenty of that once men were out of Henry’s sight.

  He did not consider himself dismissed. He was invisible in Henry’s shadow. Someone would have to get word to Richard, but he was not offering himself for the task.