Zarost nodded. In the old days, the head trader would have been willing to trade for a variety of things. He had been right. They were raping the last of the stock before abandoning the place.
“I am looking for a chart—” Zarost began, using the language of Korin as well as he could remember it.
“Bargh! I don’t speak with beggars!” Drakk growled. He extended his left hand. Zarost was about to shake it, but the mercenary withdrew his hand again, his black eyes full of malice.
“Pay,” Drakk said. “I want to see the colour of your gold.”
Why did distrustful men always think they could be good traders?
He drew a coin and placed it on the table. The mercenary picked it up and sampled it with his blackened teeth. He seemed surprised when he inspected the dents in the soft metal.
“This is too pure to be from around here. You from Kaskanzr?”
Zarost played along. He had been born in Kaskanzr, many many years ago, so there was honesty in nodding. Drakk sat forward on his chair, his face alight with greed. “What you want?”
“The Book of Is, and a map drawn in the latest year, from Highbough west, to the border here, from Slipper in the north to the six-sided land’s tip, across to Qirrh, if you have such in a strip.”
Drakk rolled the coin. “You are a far-travel one. Such things would be costly. Twenty of these outland golds, thirty if they are local Korin coins, sixty of those rubbishy Lûk gemknots, if that’s what you’ll use to pay.”
“I have enough. All of it will be outland gold.”
Drakk raised an eyebrow and then glanced aside. One hand slipped beneath the table and the mercenary shifted, as if to scratch an itch, but Zarost knew better.
“I have nothing more with me, it’s hidden in the woods,” Zarost announced quickly, “but I can retrieve the payment once I have seen the goods.”
The redhead henchman who had been approaching faded into the shadows again. These men were too greedy by far. They would steal whatever they could get their hands on. Were any charts remaining in Drakk’s palace worth buying, or had corpse of Passover already been picked clean?
The mercenary turned in his seat to address the slanting door at the back of the room. “Hulio. Hulio, you miserable turd! There’s a man here, wants a map—a specially expensive map. Bring your Farlander chart. And a book. The book that is. What? The book of ease!”
A faint sound of disturbed parchment came from the back room.
“A moment,” came a muffled voice.
So they still had a scribe-in-service. That was good. It meant the maps might be updated with news sold as traders passed by. A tall man emerged from the back room with a scroll in hand. The wretched and downcast expression he wore as he shuffled slowly to Drakk’s table told Zarost everything. The old scribe probably wanted to leave his current ‘employers’, but had discovered how convincing a blade to the throat could be. The man was pale and gaunt. He probably didn’t even earn a wage anymore.
“Here, Master Drakk,” he said tiredly, laying the scroll on the table. “This is my best piece.” He looked toward Zarost with a pleading expression, as if imploring him not to damage the work. With a careful gesture, he unrolled the vellum.
It was a beautiful chart, one of the best Zarost had seen. It would make a good gift. The old scribe must have laboured over it for months. Zarost ran his fingers gently along the illuminated border. The vellum was still soft. Zarost suspected it was a masterpiece from a man seeking to cleanse his soul of torment, seeking solace in his work, seeking peace.
Then he produced an ancient manuscript, wood-bound, yellowed with age but well-preserved. It had been carefully smoked and sunned throughout its long life. He rippled through the pages, showing Zarost the border-flourishes. As Zarost had expected, the copy lacked the stress patterns. The ancient language came before writing; without the phonic harmonies marked up, it was ineffective. He would have to find an expert in the spoken word to calculate the missing marks from first principles, but he could recognise the manuscript’s authenticity. When he compared the diagram for the invocation of the God Zorsese to the torn page he had pocketed in the Gyre Library, he knew it was an original. The text would have preserved the deeper metaphysical instructions perfectly. It was exactly what he needed.
“This book is not for sale.” The scribe closed the book and pushed it across the table toward Zarost.
“Yes it is!” Drakk exclaimed. He swung a fist at the scribe, and Hulio backed away hurriedly. Drakk laughed harshly. “Don’t mind Hulio, he is just too proud of his own work to be any good at trading. So, friend, you have seen it, let us see your gold.” The mercenary watched Zarost with feigned harmlessness, but behind Drakk, the old scribe caught Zarost’s attention.
The scribe’s eyes were full of warning. “Not for sale,” he mouthed.
Zarost understood. The scribe had seen this happen before, too many times. “Those who are proud of their work should consider what their ink would do on blotting paper,” he declared. “In a moment.”
He took notice of where the four crew-men were positioned. He didn’t like their kind, or what they had done to the good Rohm’s trading post. In a way these bandits represented what had been done to Oldenworld, the corruption of the old order into lawlessness. It was people like these who caused the solid systems of trade to fail; it was people like these who took the world backward into ever more impoverished states of existence, into dis-union, into Chaos. They preyed upon the industrious fellows like the poor scribe, never caring that without such gentle, hard-working folk there would be nothing in the world at all.
Yes, these bandits deserved a little extra from this trade. It was time for a lesson in the danger of greed. He had to be very careful; he didn’t want to be forced to use magic, because magic would bring Chaos, and this place already had enough of it.
Zarost pulled a heavy bag from the folds of his cloak—he had carried it with him all the time. There were many coins within it, brought to his hand from his private store in the Gyre Sanctuary by a Reference spell. Too many coins, over fifty Kaskanzan golds, but there was no time to separate his wealth now. He placed it on the table, like a declaration—a prize for the best fighter.
“Count yourself twenty out,” he said.
Drakk could not resist fumbling with the knot to see his treasure. The distraction would keep him out of the first round of combat. Zarost sensed a disturbance pierce the edge of his aura. Zarost fell. Not a moment too soon, something whipped past his head—the knife, thrown hard. There would be a second.
He grabbed the edge of the table and sprang up from the ground, somersaulting over to Drakk’s side. The mercenary tried to back his chair clear, but he was too slow. Zarost’s boot found his face, and the mercenary toppled backward in his chair.
The second silver flash crossed the room. Zarost drew the table with him as he landed, tipping it over to fall upon Drakk. There was a solid thump from the underside as the thrown knife struck home. Drakk thrashed, but the weight of the table kept him pinned. The bag of gold was close to hand, not yet fully opened. Zarost scooped it up and swung it against Drakk’s temple.
The greedy trader got more gold than was good for him.
Zarost grabbed the chart and the book, and stuffed them into his shirt. He ran for the window, where the ragged curtain flapped but the lanky orange-haired fighter danced into the way. He spun his oiled chain with a deadly familiarity. He was going to be very hard to beat, with only the bag of gold as a weapon. Zarost dodged clear of the first whistling swipe, but he was forced away from the window, toward the jumble of furniture. There was a low beam overhead.
The big brute was coming from behind him—his heavy movement was easy to sense. The knife-thrower was running from Zarost’s left side. He probably didn’t trust his throwing hand anymore, and would want to wield his last blade directly.
The chain-fighter lunged at him. Zarost jumped. The chain whistled under his feet.
They had h
im trapped against a sagging bench. Zarost backed onto it and twisted the knot of his moneybag free. The bandits circled closer, the big brute in the lead, wearing a hungry smile. He carried a mace the size of a small tree-stump.
Zarost threw the coins at him. They showered over the brute’s head. The glint of gold caught the bandits’ attention for a moment, just as he’d expected. Twardy jumped for the low beam, caught the rough wood between his hands, and swung quickly up.
The chain-wielder thrashed out, aiming to take out Zarost’s hands and ankles. Zarost almost rose and ran in time, but the chain flailed around an upright, and clipped his heel a painful blow. Bebittered bloodhounds, but the chain was a cruel weapon! Zarost hobbled swiftly along the beam, glad to see that the chain had hooked around an exposed nail. The orange-haired mercenary cursed as he tried to work it free. For the first time, Zarost considered that the lesson he hoped to dispense might turn against the teacher. He hurriedly prepared a Transference spell, just in case, but he didn’t want to use it, not with the scribe still in the building.
When he swung off the beam, the knifer was there when he landed on awkward feet; the man was too fast. His blade flickered crisscross through the air. The knifer drove him back. A low grunt of exertion warned him of the brute at his back. Zarost couldn’t guess where his blow was aimed. He took a chance, and fell flat to the floor at the knifer’s feet. The mace hurtled by, brushing his hair. The brute had been intent on clubbing him to the other side of the Winterblades. The big man was carried onward with the momentum of his swing, and the knifer jerked back to avoid being caught on the tip. Zarost saw his opening.
He grabbed the little knifer’s ankles, lifted him and swung him in a quick circle. Then he threw the small man against the brute’s legs. The knifer cried out, some bones cracked, and they tumbled onto the floor. Zarost ran for the open door. His right foot protested.
A loosely dressed figure stepped from the shadows and blocked his exit with the point of a long spear. Zarost cursed himself. He had forgotten about the Lûk merchant, wrongly assuming the man would leave the violence well alone. The merchant pressed the tip of the spear against Zarost’s throat.
“Ght! Ght! I cannot allow that you go, stranger. That’s a mighty pile gold there. If I these men don’t help to hold you, how could I my share claim?”
“Thank you, Rengwaam,” someone called out from behind Zarost in a thick voice. Curse his luck! Drakk had recovered. “Hold him, and you’ll have your share,” the leader promised.
Behind him, Zarost could hear the big man dragging his mace across the floor.
“Wait! Let me end him,” a man with a reedy voice said. “Please, let me end him.”
“Make haste, Crellaine!” replied the Lûk, squinting suspiciously at Zarost. “This one is slippery.”
Rapid footsteps approached, accompanied by the faint clinking of chain links. Zarost knew he would have his skull crushed if he stood still; he would be skewered by the spear if he moved. There was no time left for lessons.
Beyond the corner of the flapping curtain he saw a tiny figure in the distance. Nobody else would see the scribe who had solved the riddle. Like ink on blotting paper, he was running. That was good, he had a chance then. That was all Zarost could offer him, and he couldn’t extend the scribe’s lead any further.
The chain came with a rush of air, falling from behind and above.
Zarost spread his arms and cast the Transference spell. He reached out with his awareness, beyond the limits of beyond, and spread himself throughout. He was all, he was everything; he was unlimited. He embraced infinity, and was gone.
Zarost spun through the vastness of infinity. He was made of galaxies and dark, dark emptiness. He was safe—relatively. He cursed Ametheus for the end of the lesson. In the old days, Zarost would have been able to wield his power without causing indiscriminate damage. Ametheus had robbed all the wizards of the pure fun of using magic. In the old days he would have bound the bandits to each other with a Circle of Sin, he could have even placed a compulsion upon them to serve the scribe as their lord. That would have been fun! Instead, all Zarost could do was run, because fighting with magic would draw wildfire, and fighting the wildfire strike would do no good at all. He supposed the fighters would taste the gravy of their greed in the end; someone would replace them on the point of a blade. The days of the House of Rohm were truly ended, but his journey there was not wasted—he had the book and the map. What one carried into Transference, one could carry out again. It had to be so, he supposed, or wizards would always appear without their underwear, and that was a thought not worth lingering upon.
He needed to have the accents in the Book of Is marked up properly. He gathered his attention from the limitless backcloth of eternity and chose his destination with care. There was only one choice for such a scansion—Tattler Jhinny in the Lûk down of Koom. She was an expert in languages, she had studied all of them, and she would be quick. He supposed that the Gyre’s Lorewarden could scan the ancient text as well, but with the way things were in the Gyre at the moment, he wasn’t sure whom he could trust in the circle.
Better that he get the truth himself, before presenting it to the others.
Jhinny. It had been twenty years since he’d last seen her. She would be old by now. Still in that read-room in the Koom down, no doubt, whipping another generation of students into shape, cackling as they struggled to pronounce old Koramani words like fløs and ÿgådnishir, cackling again when they asked her what those words meant. He was looking forward to meeting the old Tattler again.
He considered the settlement of Koom: best for him to appear on one of the smaller casts, and work his way inward from there. No need to make a spectacle of himself. The eastern side-cast, where the red-leafed heart-creepers hung like quilts over the woven walkways and the dyed silks were hung upon the long-lines to dry in the breeze. He held that place in thought, and he was there. He appeared as he’d disappeared—fast and furry. The wind from the parting strike toppled his hat from his head. He dusted it off and looked around.
The capital of the six-sided land of Lûk had changed very little in twenty years—on the surface, at least. The vegetable gardens were still thriving between the golden soap-berry bushes, reed fences still threaded in curving patterns across the bowl. The smoke still billowed from the bakeries in the face of the Koom hills. Everywhere the vents poked up through the dry grass like the stems of a felled forest. The scent of thyme bushes lingered in the air, warm and dry. The Lûk were as scarce as ever, hidden in their burrowed settlement, safe from the dangers of dragons or wildfire.
They were the wisest of the survivors. It didn’t pay to be seen in Oldenworld.
Zarost looked nervously to the sky. He didn’t want to be out longer than he needed to be either. There was a kazunderstorm building, spreading out from the south and leading toward the Winterblades well to the north of Koom. It commanded the sky, and its edges grew at an alarming rate. This was not a simple nuisance-cloud with rumbles, turbulent winds and the odd sparkle of lightning. This was an unnatural column of bulging wrath towering across the heavens, blocking out the world below with its dark shadow, its face straining towards the edge of the sky where the air was so thin no creature could breathe it and where everything froze. Whipped with vicious winds, it would collect its ice into fists, and strike down at the earth. It would give forth shouts of thunder that would shake the mountains to their roots.
It was just the kind of cloud that would form after a major wildfire strike. With so much Chaos at its heart it would attract the Sorcerer’s attention. He would be drawn to it; he would take more power from it. What had triggered it in the first place? He had been far away in Passover. It couldn’t have been his spell. Never so quickly. It looked like it had built over something out in the wastes near Eyri. Had one of the Gyre wizards been careless with a spell? If so, what were they doing out there?
He headed for the main hatch along a bamboo pathway. Sometimes the tortured th
ings that wandered the wastes could trigger the wildfire themselves, he supposed. He was glad to be getting out of the way of the storm. He arrived at the rounded lid of reinforced rush-weave set into a wide bamboo frame. The small pattern of an oat stem in its centre told him that it was safe, not a trap-hatch. He stepped onto the woven surface, and the weave parted in a slit in the centre. He slipped into the woven chute that was the entrance to the east sidecast of Koom, and slid down to the eye chamber. The spicy smell of Koom met him, and with it came the distant sound of the moaning singers and the blurts of reedy message-pipes. He had entered the realm of the Lûk.
_____
The forest was familiar, in the way of all forests. Green things grew in clusters; the loamy earth was littered with bark chips, broad leaves and questing roots; and the great trees reigned supreme over everything—mostly redwood, or something equally aged and tall. The air was cool and moist, and smelled of old flowers. Ashley followed a rivulet to a slack pool where he let Princess drink. A family of bright yellow frogs hopped away across the lily pads. A mist oozed onto the pond’s surface. It seemed to follow them when they left, tracking soundlessly through the forest, always keeping its distance, always slightly behind. Ashley shook his head, he knew it was nonsense—probably just a breeze, pushing the moist air through the trees. He ranged out with his thoughts anyway, but he didn’t sense anything close by. In the distance, he encountered the sensation of a community of people, but he couldn’t tell where the thoughts were coming from, they were just voices, in his head not in any particular place. He passed a bridge made of cables woven from a kind of knotted fibre, and a disused pile of slender poles.
They rode into a glade where golden sunlight filtered through a gap in the trees to strike a wide bowl of grass. The forest was strangely quiet. Only the delicate frrrt! frrrrt! of a small bird broke the silence as it flitted from bloom to bloom along the edge of the hanging creepers. Then even that was quiet, hanging from a branch, watching them. Princess slowed uncertainly at the edge of the glade.
Second Sight: Second Tale of the Lifesong Page 33
