There’s reason to believe that balance is the way of more than the acrobat.
Minch’s bodyguard strode up to Dun Lidjun, his sandals slipping on the loose stones—that is, after all, why the road outside the entrance is gravelly—stopping insolently close to Dun Lidjun, less than a swordslength away. His dull olive green tunic held the small tight wrinkles that meant it had been recently unpacked.
He bowed properly. “I am Deren der Drumud,” he said, introducing himself informally, which was proper under the circumstances. “I have long had the honor of being guard to Lord Minch.”
Dun Lidjun returned the bow. “Dun Lidjun. I serve Lord Toshtai.” The marshall of all of Lord Toshtai’s forces was being modest.
“Lord Minch finds evening falling unexpectedly,” Deren der Drumud said, as custom demanded, “and he seeks shelter for the night.”
It didn’t seem to bother him that it was barely the hour of the horse, but then hypocrisy doesn’t bother many in D’Shai, for the same reason, I suppose, that fish are not annoyed by water.
It would have been uncouth to point out that while night does many things—ask Edige of the Night if you ever have the misfortune to confront that Power—one thing it never, ever does is fall unexpectedly, nor does it fall in the hour of the horse, the hour that sits astride noon.
Dun Lidjun was not uncouth.
Behind Deren der Drumud, a dozen warriors in olive livery displaying a tree-symbol fanned out in feigned menace. The theory, of course, is that they were preparing to eagerly spend their lives to buy their lord a few moments to flee. A silly theory, granted; somebody willing to kick over the table by denying hospitality that blatantly would likely be perfectly willing to wait until the lord was within the walls of the keep, where he would be even more vulnerable.
Of course, there was a good reason and a sound motivation behind the exercise of the silly theory: If anybody made a miscalculation, it would give the warriors a chance to kill somebody. All warriors are, by definition, members of our beloved ruling class. Members of our beloved ruling class love to kill.
Dun Lidjun nodded, not briskly. “Quarters wait,” he said, without the usual sort of mindlessly rote delivery of overflowery promises; Dun Lidjun was rarely on duty for such things, and, for a warrior, had little patience with form. “Be welcome,” he said. He started to turn away.
Deren der Drumud’s eyes narrowed. “Quarters?” He spat the word out like a curse. “I do not care for the implications of such informality, Brown Turtle,” he said, addressing Dun Lidjun formally.
Dun Lidjun’s face went studiously blank. “My apologies, Strong of Arm,” he said, bowing. “I would have thought… but never mind; the error is mine.” He straightened. “A suite waits, a suite where incense burns softly quietly waits for Lord Minch and his company. Cool drinks sit in their glasses, dew a-beading their sides, gently whispering, ‘Drink me.’
“Soft breezes, scented with rose and lemon, blow in through open windows, just for the delectation of Lord Minch’s noble nose. In the bathhouse, water has been heated to a pleasant temperature just short of scalding; it waits to draw the ache from Lord Minch’s supple but weary muscles.
“Just this morning, Lord Arefai, son to Lord Toshtai, has gone out in search of game that, properly prepared, might please Lord Minch’s discerning palate; bird, fish, and meat are this moment being rushed to the cooks so that they may prepare it to Lord Minch’s delicate taste.” Dun Lidjun had already gone on rather longer than formality required.
He continued: “A dozen virgin maids, their pleasantly round buttocks straining against the thin fabric of their shifts, now bend over washtubs, scrubbing furiously at blankets and sheets that will be hung on savorfruit trees, to gather their gentle scent as they dry. Peasants plow their fields and plod through their paddies, hoping that their rice and wheat will be honored by being chosen to assuage Lord Minch’s appetites.”
The tips of Deren der Drumud’s ears were red. He had expected the little man to quail before his displeasure, not confront him with overelegant embellishment.
“The sun…” Dun Lidjun stopped himself. “The sun gets no farther from the horizon as we stand here talking; be welcome.”
Custom called upon Deren der Drumud to respond with polite thanks for the invitation, but he hadn’t quite decided what to do when there was a sudden snap.
It was nothing, really; a squirrel, above, had finished with a jimsum nut and had dropped the shell, which had hit the gravel below.
But Deren Der Drumud panicked; he went for his sword, fast.
Dun Lidjun’s hands were nowhere near his own sword, but that wouldn’t have mattered. I had and have never seen anyone able to raise kazuh faster than Dun Lidjun could. There was no doubt in my mind that he could have his sword in hand before Deren der Drumud could strike. I fully expected him to take a step back and free his own weapon, block, and then cut Deren der Drumud’s head off.
But he did nothing of the sort.
As Deren der Drumud’s hand snaked for the hilt of his sword, Dun Lidjun, his kazuh flaring bright enough for a mindblind man to see, simply took a half step forward and laid his slim hand on Deren der Drumud’s thick wrist.
There was no strain in Dun Lidjun’s face, but Deren der Drumud grunted and creased his face as he struggled for a moment trying to draw his sword, desisting when he saw how useless it was.
“Control yourself, man,” Dun Lidjun hissed, holding on just a moment longer. He took a step backward. “Be still, Strong of Arm. It was just a squirrel. Bid Lord Minch and his party welcome to Den Oroshtai, if it please you.”
He turned about and walked away.
Deren der Drumud stared at his back for the longest time.
Ver Hortun raised an eyebrow. “And what do you think of that, Kami Dan’Shir?”
“I think Deren der Drumud is both nervous and a fool,” I said, too frankly.
Ver Hortun beckoned me on. “I don’t think one needs to be a dan’shir to discover that,” he said. “The horse is patient but the cooks are not; you’d best rush the meat to the kitchens before dropping the horse off at the stables.”
First the deliveries, then the wizard.
Narantir’s workshop was in the musty basement of the old donjon, the older and smaller of the two residences within the keep’s walls. The set of rooms had been used as a dungeon during the days of Oroshtai himself, but there’s rarely a need for a dungeon, and certainly not for two, in Den Oroshtai; D’Shaian justice tends to be swift.
I hated the workshop. For one thing, it smelled bad. Given some of the things that went on down here, that wasn’t surprising. Over near the outer wall, where a finger-high slit allowed a trickle of light into the room, a pile of bones stood in one corner under a workbench. It takes a long time to get the smell of rotted flesh from bones, Narantir once told me. Next to the workbench, yet another one of Narantir’s skeletons was in either the early stages of assembly or the advanced stages of disassembly. At least it was an adult’s this time.
An empty wineskin lay next to the bag of straw that Narantir used as a bed. The stone floor was carpeted mainly in dirt but partly in, well, everything else. Dirty robes were heaped in the far corner. The room was probably cleaned once every ten years or so, whether it needed it or not.
It needed it.
It would have taken an order from Lord Toshtai to get a servitor down here to muck out the room, and Lord Toshtai either wasn’t interested enough to bother or, like most people, gave wizards as wide a berth as possible. I would have been willing to bet on the former; the lord of Den Oroshtai wasn’t known for being reticent in his orders to his subjects, myself included.
Narantir had mounted a small, squarish, black iron cookstove on the nearest of roughhewn worktables; a slowly boiling pot of some vile green liquid sat on the grate, the wizard stirring it slowly with a wooden spoon. The thick fluid burbled and spat, but Narantir ignored the green speckling of his arm and hand.
He had been ga
ining weight again. His belly, always protruding, now strained against the circumference of his robes, and the fleshy wrinkles in his face were filling out. His black beard and hair were uncombed and greasy, and he had smeared something, probably lampblack, above his left eye.
He was not happy.
“Truth spells,” he said, probably to himself. “Always it’s the truth spells.” He looked over at the small brown rabbit cowering in its wicker cage. He extended a finger to scratch at the top of its head, but it scurried to the other side of the cage. “Sorry I am, but foolish enough to disobey orders I am not.”
I cleared my throat.
“Oh, it’s Kami Khuzud,” he said, as though he barely recognized me.
“Kami Dan’Shir,” I said. “But it’s still me. Truth spells?”
He frowned as he moved the pot on the iron grate, quietly cursing to himself when it didn’t immediately stop bubbling. He pawed through a pile of tools on a nearby bench, eventually producing a pair of tongs that he used to lift the pot off the burner and onto the already marred surface of the table itself.
“Truth spells,” he said. “There’s been a defalcation in the village; Lord Edelfaule detected it, he says, and Lord Toshtai wants me to make sure which one of two is guilty before sentence is executed.”
I didn’t ask the nature of the sentence; we D’Shaians, including members of our beloved ruling class, are predictably simple people.
He sighed. “So here I’ll be for the next day and a half, preparing to squat over a pentagram, knife and rabbit in hand.” Narantir wasn’t fond of necromancy, but it wasn’t because of any delicacy of his digestion—he just liked to work with things that other people had killed.
“Who is the truth spell for?” A wave of guilt and fear did not wash over me; I hadn’t done anything that desperately needed concealing, not for weeks.
“You know Madame Rupon?”
I nodded. “The troupe guested at her house,” I said, gesturing toward the town. “And I’ve eaten breakfast at her table not unoften of late.” An overofficious woman, certainly, an unattractive woman, clearly, but not the sort to get into trouble with our beloved ruling class.
“She and FamNa are in the dungeon,” he said, pointing toward the wrong wall with his thumb. Narantir has no sense of direction.
“What did they do?” I should have made that What are they accused of doing? but I didn’t.
He shrugged. “Made some money disappear, Edelfaule says.”
“Lord Toshtai’s eldest living son is of course correct,” I said. “The heir to Den Oroshtai is unerring.”
Narantir, not the most perceptive of mortals, still caught the undertone. He looked from me to the rabbit, to the pot. “It is a hidden truth, at that.” He smiled. “Perhaps you would like to investigate it?”
It was my turn to shrug. “I don’t know much about money.”
Money doesn’t overburden a traveling acrobatic troupe, and handling it hadn’t been my responsibility. Which was perhaps just as well; my father insisted that I spend time enough to learn basic sums, which had taught me subtraction—subtraction is just an addition puzzle.
But complex arithmetic like division was far beyond me. To do multiplication, you have to break down numbers into their component parts, and then set them down in rows and columns and then add some parts of it together and subtract other parts out. I mean, I know some of the results—a dozen dozen is a gross, so a gross divided among a dozen people will give each a dozen. That’s easy enough to figure out: you set out a square of, say, twelve pebbles by twelve. That’s a gross. But real division is complicated, and I’d never learned it.
He shrugged. “It’s fairly simple. There’s a new schedule of rates and taxes for taverners and roomkeepers—Lord Toshtai has ordered some changes made. Instead of the taxman visiting every couple of months, the roomkeeper is supposed to collect it daily, and deliver it by runner every fortnight.”
“And Madame Rupon kept it for herself?” That didn’t make any sense.
He snorted, and explained. No, of course not. She had made it disappear. She had charged a deilist fifteen coppers, six fille, three shards for room and board for the week, as permitted under the old schedule. She would have put one copper, four fille, two shards away for the collectors, but Veldrum the tax collector had come by with the new schedule on his waxboard, which called for twelve, four, and one for room and board, and two, two, and one of that to be paid as tax.
Veldrum’s records were clear, and undisputed. She had given him the two, two, and one, and given the deilist three, two, and two to square accounts with him.
“I don’t see the problem.”
Narantir snorted. “That’s because you’re an idiot. There’s a missing copper and shard. After the rebatement, the deilist has paid twelve, four, and one; Lord Toshtai has received two, one, and two. Add it up: out of the deilist’s original fifteen, six, and three, we’ve accounted for fourteen, six, and two. There’s a copper shard missing, and she made it disappear.” Narantir stirred the pot angrily.
He scratched it out on the dirt floor.
IIII III IIII III ]]]]]] ///
“That’s the original, eh?”
“Sure.”
He scratched another number out.
IIII IIII IIII ]]]] /
“That’s what the deilist finally paid, after she rebated, eh?”
I thought about it for a moment, aided by fingers and toes. Fifteen minus three is twelve, six minus two is four, and three minus two is one.
“Yes.”
He scratched another number.
II ]] /
“And there’s the taxes.”
I nodded.
“So compare the two. The fille cancel out, but we’re missing a shard and a copper. So where’s the extra money, and what did she do with it?”
IIII IIII IIII II(I) ]]]]]] II (I)
He circled the marks for the missing copper and shard, then threw up his hands in frustration. “I’d thought of trying synecdoche, but money is too frangible; there’s no real whole for it to be part of. No chance to do relevance, and contagion isn’t going to apply unless the deilist constantly walked around with exactly that fifteen, three, and six in his purse, which he didn’t.”
I furrowed my brow. It didn’t make sense. Stealing from Lord Toshtai wasn’t just forbidden, it was stupid, and while I knew Madame Rupon and her ugly daughters were not the brightest people in the world, surely they wouldn’t be that stupid…
Would they?
“They’re in the dungeon now?”
He nodded. “In the same cell you occupied, not too long ago.”
Not a pleasant place. Too damp, too locked in, too hopeless. There had to…
I don’t know what it is that raises my kazuh, and sometimes I’m not even aware that it’s there.
It all started to clarify, but then Narantir—may Spennymore, one dark, moonless night, mistake him for a willing young woman—shattered the clarity.
“Out, out, out, with you,” he said, muttering some spell under his breath. “I’m surely not going to have your zurir messing up the delicate balance of forces in my workshop, Kami Dan’Shir, you may rely on that without question or doubt.”
I hadn’t even asked him why Lord Toshtai would want me at dinner tonight. He hadn’t given me the chance.
Well, when in doubt…
I headed up to my room for my juggling sack. It wasn’t much to look at, not really, just a battered brown leather sack I’d made from a cured hide, its mouth held tightly shut by a drawstring, a broad leather strap sewed to its side so that it could be slung easily over a shoulder. Just a typical juggling sack.
Not much inside, either. Some juggling sticks, some juggling bags, a half dozen rings. Just the secret of life, that’s all.
I went to my usual quiet corner of the courtyard under a spreading bolab tree whose thigh-thick branches seemed to be untrimmed, but which never quite reached toward the top of the wall, as though the gar
dener had taught them better, as well he may have, come to think of it. Gardening can be a high art, too. The tree provided green shade on a hot day, the light gentle hiss of wind through rustling leaves, and, in due season, a few of the fist-sized bittersweet fruit—but it wouldn’t provide access for somebody trying to sneak in over the wall.
Most importantly, it provided some privacy. I needed to think things out, and when I needed to think things out, I need a private place to juggle.
I know that sounds strange, but it’s like Gray Khuzud used to say. Says. “When you don’t know what else to do, go back to the beginning.” That’s what my father always taught me, and that’s what I believe.
My beginning was with juggling. I could argue—I’d thought about arguing—that as a dan’shir, no longer an acrobat, I should be giving up juggling, putting it aside in the same way that a peasant who had survived the challenge sword to become a warrior would keep out of the fields and paddies.
But: juggling was never my stinking rice field, my prison.
It had been my beginning; it was now my link to my past, my connection to my distant family. Juggling, of all of the arts of the acrobat, was the only one I was any good at, the only one I really cared about. I had lost several of my loves of late: my sister, Enki Duzun, to death; NaRee to Felkoi and the road; my father, Sala, Fhilt, and Large Egda to my new profession.
I wouldn’t lose this one. Never. If anybody were to ask, I’d have to say that a dan’shir must juggle.
I hadn’t kept any of my juggling equipment when the troupe left. The physical artifacts don’t matter to the likes of what I had been. Stay-at-homes think of it differently, but I had been an itinerant acrobat for all of my seventeen years, and an itinerant finds memories to be sufficiently heavy cargo.
But an acrobat learns how to make and service his own equipment, and I’d not lost those skills in becoming whatever a dan’shir might be.
Still, I didn’t need flaming wands or sharp knives or even rings. Simplicity has its virtues.
Hour of the Octopus Page 4
