Delighted, I set to scribbling. I did not recognize the priest, who was half-masked, but his vestments were familiar. I wrote myself a reminder to visit the second-hand regalia market. The full-skirted black gown was from the recently bankrupted Temple of the Stars Immortal, the foil crown from the defunct Eternal Circle, the cape from the Rescissionists, and the feathered half-mask from some phallic-stone cult whose name escaped me. Only the sceptre, a staff topped with a knobby wooden hand, was original.
The high priest glowered around the assembly and brandished the staff over his head. "The Fiery Hand!"
"The Fiery Hand!" The underpriests shouted it lustily. Audience response was more hesitant.
"The Fiery Hand!"
"The Fiery Hand!" After a few similar exchanges, the high priest lowered his staff and turned to prostrate himself before the altar. He remained like that for so long that the devotees, and even one of the priests, began to fidget, and I started to doodle on the edge of my page. I remember thinking that this cult would not last long; the ritual was badly scripted, the priesthood lacked a sense of theatre. Nothing exciting would ever happen here. In the event, I was both right and wrong.
Suddenly, the high priest leaped to his feet and twisted to face us. We all jumped. "The Fiery Hand!" he shrieked. We responded dutifully, "The Fiery Hand!" and he stomped from side to side of the room, spraying spittle with his words. "The Fiery Hand will reach into your souls," he screamed, "it will pluck out the evil within you! It will crush the wicked between its forefinger and its thumb! It will cleanse the world in the fires of its flaming palm!" The devotees started to perk up. "The harlots and usurers, the thieves and liars! The kings and princes and high priests of the unbelievers, the merchants who give short weight! The tax collectors who bleed the righteous dry! The proud, the merciless, the fornicators, the murderers—" He stopped short as his eyes fell upon Shree, who was taking down every word. In the silence, I nudged Shree. He looked up.
The priest gathered himself to his full height and flourished his staff at Shree. "The hottest flames in the Fiery Hand," he hissed, "will be reserved for spies."
Oh dear, I thought, not again. Fortunately, the most sensitive cults were often the slowest; the greatest danger we normally ran was losing our notebooks. In that first moment of passive surprise, Shree and I drew knives from under our cloaks, jumped to our feet and began, according to a well-rehearsed strategy, to slide back-to-back towards the door making menacing gestures.
This usually worked. Only once had a congregation seriously tried to stop us, a gaggle of redoubtable old ladies in the Palace of the Effulgent Fowl. This time started out to be no different. The high priest spluttered ineffectually; the under-priests dithered towards us and halted, eyeing the knives; the devotees, interested but not keen to take part, watched open-mouthed. Something bounced off my head—the woman by the door had thrown the rent-box at me. I snarled at her and she scrambled into the corner. Then we were at the door and I groped for the handle. The handle broke.
This was unfortunate. The few seconds it took for me to pry at the doorcrack with my knife were all the high priest needed to recover his nerve. He leaped for us, pushing the under-priests ahead of him. They were not armed, but one of them, falling towards me, accidentally fetched me a stinging blow on the side of the head with his heavy wooden glove. Through the whirling lights in my eyes, I wondered if we should tell them the truth, that we were recording them for posterity, one small tile in a fascinating cultural mosaic. Perhaps they'd be flattered. The high priest smacked me, also on the head, with the hard wooden finial of his staff.
"Reverend sir—" I began, but at that moment the door crashed straight into the back of my skull and sent me flying into the high priest's arms. He managed to hit my head again as we tumbled together into the circle of devotees. "Reverend sir—" I started over, but he scrabbled away from me on his hands and knees.
I sat up groggily and tried to focus. The first thing I saw was my notebook, lying open on the floor a few feet away. I crawled in that direction. A familiar voice was shouting, "Tig—the knife!" I shook my head, trying to clear it, looking around dreamily. Near the door, a picturesque cluster of three bodies was engaged in the Viper's Wedding, another popular dance from the whorehouses. Stopping to watch, I became aware, in order of discovery, that Shree was one of the dancers, that he was not dancing, and that the other two were not dancing either.
"Raksh take you, Tig—the knife! Give me the tupping knife!" Something of Shree's urgency broke through, also the fact that he was cursing ferociously in Sheranik when he was not yelling at me. His knife lay beside the notebook; I picked up both and held them out helpfully. By kneeing one of his assailants in the groin, Shree freed a hand and grabbed the knife; then it was a quick double thrust, one-two, Sherkin-style, into the unguarded breast of one enemy, and a lightning slice at the neck of the other. Both collapsed. Bright bloody flowers blossomed on the open book in my hand.
Shree lunged for me, but was tackled by one of the under-priests. They landed in a tangle almost in my lap; thoughtfully, I raised my fist and brought it down hard on the back of the priest's head. It seemed only fair. Seconds later, Shree was dragging me down the dark corridor and the door was closing behind us to cut off the shouts from the sanctuary. At the portal, we stumbled. Something like a wet sack was lying across the doorstep, a sack with limp arms and legs attached, and a head lying at a strange angle. Shree stooped and pulled the head into the light—the acolyte on door duty, still bubbling red where his throat had been sliced across. "Who—?" Shree began, puzzled, but inside the temple the door crashed open again.
Shree grabbed my arm and started to haul me up the Thread-of-Gold, then jerked to a stop. The shadows across the way were moving forwards, taking murky shape, silently closing in around us. Shree bellowed in Sheranik, trying to slash in all directions at once without dropping my arm, but there were at least four assailants and they fanned out beyond the range of his knife. Such a fuss over a grubby little cult, I thought dazedly, then hands seized me from behind and a rough-fibred, vile-smelling darkness came down over my face. I gasped for breath, lost Shree, stumbled backwards; only the arms pulling at me from behind kept me on my feet. Through the muffling obscurity, somebody clouted the back of my head.
It was one clout too many. I sat down, hard. The hands groped for better purchase on my shoulders, then jerked and fell away. A dead weight slumped on to my back and bore me down into the mud.
Lights shot across the darkness inside my lids. I couldn't breathe. I deduced hazily that I was smothering to death under the pole-axed body of one of my attackers, but any action seemed like too much effort. I lay there quietly, waiting for my life to flash in front of my eyes—most of it would be painful or perhaps dull, but I wouldn't have minded seeing Calla's phantasm one more time. Or would she be waiting for me in the afterworld? I hoped so. But the pictures did not come; instead, the blackness began to fill with tiny points of light, like a soft mist of gold dust, and I was reminded of something I had thought was long gone; I was on the edge of remembering when the weight lifted and the world ripped open with a noise like a knife slashing through heavy sackcloth. So that, I told myself, is what death sounds like.
"Damn it, Tig, wake up!"
I opened my eyes. The afterworld, if that's where I was, was no brighter than the one I'd left behind. I sat up and took a deep, gagging breath. Nor did it smell any better. I looked up and focused on a presumed guardian spirit who bore a strong resemblance to Shree.
"Am I dead?"
"It seems not." Shree pulled me to my feet, examining the bashes on my head with clinical interest. "Not yet, anyway. But it's not for want of trying."
* * *
3
"I DON'T UNDERSTAND it." Shree took the first gulp of his second beer and slammed the beaker on the table. I winced. The tavern's flickering lamps and clatter of voices were touching off explosions in the hollow of my head, though stopping for a drink had been my own
idea. We'd be safer in a crowd, I'd told Shree, and furthermore my legs seemed to have jellied from the hips down and he could hardly carry me all the way back to the Gilgard. I needed a drink, or imagined I did. Shree had agreed readily, folding his bloody cloak innocently over his arm as we came in. My cloak was almost clean, having been covered by that vile-smelling sack during the bloodiest moments of the brawl, not that blood on one's cloak was at all remarkable in this unreclaimed neighbourhood.
Still involved with exploring the lumps on my skull, I had barely touched my beer. The vision of the golden mist teased at my memory, but I pushed it aside.
"What don't you understand?" I asked.
Shree jabbed at the top of his beer, raising little white welts in the foam. "The attack at the Fiery Hand. It doesn't make sense."
"Never mind," I said, "nothing about those cults makes sense, almost by definition. And they're not the first to mistake us for the Primate's spies."
He glanced at me impatiently and took another deep swallow of beer. "Were we at the same fight, Tig? Forget the Fiery Hand. You noticed the other ones, didn't you? The two bully-boys inside the temple, with masks and daggers? The ones who battered the door in at the last moment? The ones I killed?"
"Oh, yes," I said after a moment's hard thought. "Those ones. Yes, of course I noticed them."
"And then the bunch outside? Four masked scraggers who pulled a grain-sack over you and started dragging you away, and were doing their pitiful best to chop me into butcher's meat? Remember them?"
I closed my eyes and concentrated. "I suppose so. What happened to them, anyway?"
"Well," he drained his beaker and waved for another, "that's when the other bunch came along."
"Other bunch?" I managed a queasy sip of beer.
"There were four of them, too, but I didn't see their faces. They jumped out of nowhere and attacked the first lot of scraggers—the survivors, that is; I'd already dealt with two."
"They saved us?"
"I don't know about that," he said testily. "I was just getting warmed up. And anyway, once they had driven off the first lot—" He stopped and drank deeply.
"Yes?"
"They went after you themselves." He gazed reflectively into his beer. "Fortunately, they were not very experienced."
I stared at him, barely comprehending. He grinned at me and added a proverb in Sheranik, something about green plants having red sap, which I didn't even try to understand. I cradled my head in my hands.
"Interesting, Shree, but not really unusual. These temples bash at each other all the time. Remember when the Serene Recovery League was feuding with the Ever Divines—or was it the Everlastings? They practically wiped each other out, and over a very minor theological point. We were bound to get caught up in something of the sort eventually. No, there's no mystery there, except that anyone would bother with such a scruffy little religion as the Fiery Hand."
He drained the beaker, signalled for yet another, brought his head close to mine and spoke slowly and clearly, as if to an idiot with a hearing problem. "You're not thinking straight, Tigrallef. This had nothing to do with the cult wars. Didn't you see what was happening?"
"Actually, I didn't get to see much at all. People kept hitting me on the head. The whole body to choose from," I added feelingly, "and everybody hit me on the head. And I couldn't see anything with the sack over my face—"
"The scraggers who slit the acolyte's throat and crashed through the sanctuary door," Shree interrupted, "were only there because you were. They only killed the lad because he got in their way. They paid no attention to the priests. They were not interested in the Fiery Hand. They didn't want me, Raksh knows. Likewise with the ones outside, all of them. It was you they were after." He raised his beaker in a toast. "To you, Tigrallef. At last, somebody's taking you seriously."
I gaped at him for a moment, then pushed my beer aside. My head cleared; the gibberish of the evening's events resolved into a clear, coherent message. Shree was right. Somebody had tried to abduct me, somebody else had tried to kill me. My stomach began to heave.
"The informant who told you about the Fiery Hand—I'd wager he was in on it too. Or else somebody bribed him to get you there on this specific night. What do you think?"
"Mmm."
"And there was another interesting thing," Shree went on. "The last lot were using triple-curved swords, like the ones they make in Miishel—"
He broke off as I lurched to my feet and made for the door. My need was urgent for fresh air and a friendly gutter to be sick into. Shree caught up as I stumbled into the street.
"I can't take you anywhere, can I," he sighed. "Really, Tig, if you can't hold your alcohol, you shouldn't be drinking." He took my arm. Under his cloak, I glimpsed the shimmer of a naked iron blade. Shree took me from the tavern as far as the Gilgard gate, then vanished back into the city on some mysterious errand, which I assumed meant a visit to Lissula's brothel for news and possibly pleasure. The way he handed me over into the guards' keeping was not very subtle.
"Lord Tigrallef has had," he winked at the gate officer, "a very wet night—and I don't mean it was raining." He mimed emptying a quick succession of beakers. The officer grinned. It was true I was weaving from side to side like a shuttle on a loom, but who wouldn't after such punishment to a sensitive head? "See he gets to the archives all right, will you?" Shree added, and disappeared back into the street.
"Come on now, my lord Scion," said the officer, still grinning. "Up to bed—you've had your fun for the night."
Fun, I fulminated, as I staggered the long route to the archives between two offensively helpful guards. Fun. An expedition to a shoddy little temple, attempted assassination and/or kidnap, several blows to the head, and half a beaker of putrid beer. Fun.
One of the guards nudged my shoulder as we started up the final flight of stairs. "Practising, my lord?" he said. His partner snickered. "Don't worry, Lord Scion, nobody thinks the less of you, especially if you've had no experience in that line. They do like you to have a bit of practice beforetimes." He patted my shoulder, a little too familiarly for a low-ranking guardsman to a Scion of Oballef, the brother of the Priest-King, and a peer of Sathelforn through my mother the Lady Dazeene. I shrugged his hand off. Whatever twaddle they were talking, I felt too awful to be interested. "As long as you're careful, of course," he added enigmatically.
They parted from me in the antechamber, still with those silly smirks on their faces. I paused in the darkness until the pounding eased in my head, then opened the door. I expected more darkness on the other side and no further barriers between myself and my pallet, but the room was brightly lit and crowded with people.
Six guardsmen, two pages, holding between them a green silk cushion with a scrolled paper on it, tied in green-and-gold ribbon, four third-grade Flamens, the Second Flamen himself, a goggling handful of my pupils, and Angel, firmly ensconced in the entrance to the stacks, clutching a book in one hand and his largest scroll-knife in the other. The atmosphere was tense.
The Second Flamen, not a bad soul as Flamens go, cleared his throat. "My lord Tigrallef," he said, "your servant—is he dangerous?"
"Good evening, Revered One. Angel's my colleague, not my servant. And no, he's not dangerous. Put the knife down, Angel."
Angel slammed the knife point-down into the nearest table with a violence that made the Flamens jump, slid on to his haunches on the floor and pointedly began to read. I groped my way to a chair beside the table and sat down with my aching head in my hands. "Was there something you wanted, Second Flamen?" I murmured.
The Second Flamen, pulling himself together, sketched in the air the ritual greeting of a Priest-King's messenger. I freed one hand for a perfunctory reply. The Flamen coughed again and began to speak, lowering his pitch an octave or so while almost doubling his volume. It was serious, then. "The Hereditary King of Gil and High Priest of the Cult of the Lady in Gil presents his compliments to Lord Tigrallef, Scion of Oballef and Prince Ro
yal of the Island of Gil." He lifted the scroll reverently from the silk cushion and handed it to me with a flourish.
I unrolled it, scanned it, dropped it on the table and put my hands back where they were needed, supporting my poor abused head. "If Arko wants to see me," I said, "why doesn't he just drop in? He knows where I am. There's no need for a formal summons."
"But, my lord," protested the Second Flamen in his normal voice, "this is an important matter, as you must know."
"I know nothing about it."
"But a formal audience is required."
"Why?"
"Well—for one thing, the Primate needs to be present."
The Primate. I moaned softly to myself. "Tell my brother," I murmured, "that I will attend him in the morning, as he commands." I signed a polite dismissal with my fingers. The Second Flamen, however, continued to hover at the other end of the table, until I finally gave in and looked up at him.
He was smiling, now that his duty was done. "I would guess, my lord Tigrallef, if it's not too much of a liberty to say so, that you've been enjoying yourself."
I groaned out loud. "I suppose you could call it that. So?"
"It's good, my lord, very good. Naturally, we all understand. The loaf before the feast, as they say, to prime the palate! Anyway, a little knowledge will be useful on the night."
I stared at him hard until his smile faltered, and then glanced around the room. Only my pupils looked as puzzled as I felt. Angel was flipping through his book and ignoring the whole scene. The guardsmen and Flamens, even the pages, wore tolerant little smiles.
I suppose I should have guessed at that point, but I was not at my brightest. Tiny hammers were pounding on the inside of my skull. The puzzle could wait until morning. I gave no more thought to it then, nor to the assassins at the Fiery Hand; nor, when I managed at last to dismiss the Second Flamen and wobble off to my pallet, did any premonitory nightmares come to me in my sleep. Only the usual ones.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 2
