“It is the ambassador of the savages, my lord, the one they call Yalmuk Bloodarrow!”
At that news the lord rose from his bed and strode to the door, yanking it open. The constable rushed into the room, accompanied by a servant who wordlessly set about dressing his master with practiced efficiency.
“It was the end of the third night watch, my lord. The harbor squad had just finished their sweep of the old waterfront and were returning to the Hall of Justice with a chain of arrested malefactors …”
The lord interpreted these official-sounding words with the ease of long experience. The guards had been drinking in one of the all-night taverns and were coming in with their required quota of arrests. These would have been drunks helpfully supplied by the tavern keepers. The night watch only arrested drunks and left the rampaging, warring street gangs strictly alone. All the constabulary was really good for was raising the alarm in case of fire in the night.
“… when they heard a great uproar coming from the plaza.”
“Which plaza?” asked the lord patiently. Weite was a typical constable, which meant he was a little slow even when sober.
“The plaza before the Hall of Justice, my lord. There was a crowd gathered around the statue of Abushmulum the Ninth.”
“What was a crowd doing in the plaza at that hour?”
“The Tavern of the Bottomless Barrel had just let out, my lord. It is located just behind the statue. The body lay at the statue’s feet.”
“Has it been moved?”
“No, my lord. One of the watch ran to the Hall of Justice and informed me of the matter and I posted a guard around the body, then came here immediately to inform your lordship.”
“You were in the Hall of Justice and did not notice the crowd outside?”
“They were on the far side of the plaza, my lord,” Weite said imperturbably, “and the walls are very thick.”
Not as thick as your skull, thought the Lord of Tarsis. “Constable Weite,” he said, “I am going to examine the scene myself. Be assured I can find my own way to the Hall of Justice. While I am doing this, I want you to send a runner to each gate of the city. The guardians of the gates are to be informed that they are under no circumstances to allow anyone to leave the city this night, and in the morning they are not to open the gates as usual. The gates shall not be opened until I expressly order it. Do you understand me?”
“Perfectly, my lord!”
“Then go and do my bidding.”
Chest inflated to its greatest extent, Constable Weite drew himself up to attention, saluted smartly, spun on his booted heel, and clumped out of the bedchamber.
The Lord of Tarsis, disturbed by the murder and the consequences it might bring, left soon after. As he walked through the gloomy streets, flanked by guards bearing torches and lanterns, he feared greatly that his precaution was far too late. He was less concerned that the murderer might escape than that word should reach the nomad camp that their ambassador had been murdered within the city.
He did not seriously fear war with the nomads, but he did not want war to come before he was ready for it.
He found a sizable crowd gathered shivering in the snowy plaza before the Hall of Justice. Like so much of the city, the plaza, once splendid, was now dingy and ill-maintained; the facades of the facing buildings stained with time and soot; the flagstones chipped, pitted, or missing entirely; the statues worn and vandalized. Typical of the latter was the statue of Abushmulum the Ninth, a king of the long-ago time when Tarsis had had kings, so long ago that nobody knew why he had rated a statue. Certainly nothing else was known about him.
A ring of city guards encircled the base of the statue, facing inward, their poleaxes held at port arms. Within the circle of guards stood a group of late drinkers, most of them looking sobered by the cold and the situation. Few of them had the look of native Tarsians. Most were plainly travelers from elsewhere.
“Have any of the witnesses left the scene?” the lord demanded of the ranking guardsman.
“Not since we arrived, my lord,” the man answered.
“Very good. Take them over to the Hall of Justice and lock them in the dungeon to await questioning.” Immediately, some of the huddled drinkers began to protest. “Any that give you trouble you may kill,” said the lord. The protests stilled instantly.
The guards and the tavern crowd clumped off across the plaza leaving scores of dirty footprints in the snow. When they were gone the lord turned his attention to the still figure they left behind.
“Torches here,” the lord commanded. With suitable illumination thus provided, he studied the bizarre sight.
The body lay on the base of the statue, which was a block of hewn marble the height of the lord’s eyes, and the Lord of Tarsis was a tall man. The corpse rested on its back with the booted feet protruding beyond the edge of the pedestal, snow slowly gathering on the pointed, upturned toes. The face of Yalmuk Bloodarrow bore a look of great distress, which was understandable considering the great gash that lay across his throat all the way to the spine. Blood, now slowly freezing, had cascaded down the face of the pedestal. The stream ended at the fur-trimmed hat, which lay trampled and bedraggled on the pavement. Yalmuk’s hands were atop his chest, the fingers clawed like those of a cat fighting on its back.
Above the corpse towered the statue of Abushmulum the Ninth. The old king stood crowned and wrapped in his royal mantle. It seemed to the lord that, judging from the king’s expression, he was embarrassed to be caught in such company.
“Get this carrion down and take it to the palace,” the lord ordered. “Turn it over to the official embalmers and tell them to prepare the corpse the same as they would for a state funeral. He was an ambassador, even if he was only a barbarian and a nomad. His chief may want the body back.”
As his guards did his bidding, the Lord of Tarsis studied the pedestal. How had the murderer lifted the body so high? The late Yalmuk had been burly and heavyset. It was a job for an exceptionally strong man. Or else there had been more than one murderer. No matter. What was important was that the fool Yalmuk had shown the great discourtesy of getting himself killed within the walls of Tarsis, as if he had deliberately wanted to dishonor the city and its lord. It was intolerable.
To make matters worse, Kyaga Strongbow was due to arrive on the morrow, and he would surely demand to know what had happened to his ambassador. Was there any real hope that he would not learn about the murder?
The Lord of Tarsis knew these to be vain thoughts.
Travelers had thronged the Tavern of the Bottomless Barrel, and many of them, having seen the body, might have hurried away to the nomad camp to spread the news. Under his war security orders nobody was allowed to pass through the gates after nightfall, but that probably meant that the cost of a bribe to pass had gone up from one copper to two. Had there been any real likelihood that the murder might be kept hushed up, he would have kept all the witnesses under arrest and dumped the body outside the walls. As it was, such a course of action would only make things worse.
As he strode toward the Hall of Justice and a rigorous interrogation of the witnesses, it seemed to the lord that a shadow passed across him, darkening the slushy, grayish plaza. He looked upward, and for an instant he fancied he saw something flickering, as of a long serpentine shape darting into a cloud bank. Unexpectedly, he felt a great, unexplained sense of dread fall over him. He looked back and saw the statue of Abushmulum, distance and uncanny light and perhaps something else lending it almost a semblance of life. The old king seemed to glare at him in anger, as if blaming him for the sorry state of the once glorious city.
The lord shook himself as if to dislodge this illogical mood. I am allowing these peculiar events and the maunderings of that magic-besotted fool Alban unhinge me, he told himself. There is nothing wrong. But why, he wondered as he gazed at the likeness of Abushmulum, did the killer haul that corpse up to the base of the statue?
Chapter Four
The sound
of drums came to them, drifting across the dry harbor bottom, from beyond the walls of the city. The two men stood on the deck of the old hulk, leaning against its ornately carved quarterdeck railing. All around them, smoke drifted from the other inhabited hulks in wind-driven wisps.
“The nomads are getting impatient,” Ironwood said, his eyes slitted against the cutting wind. “They want to fight or move on. It’s not in their nature to stay in one place, doing nothing.”
“There have been rumors,” Nistur said. “Rumors of a new chief who has united the tribes.”
“They are more than rumors. I’ve been hearing reports for the last three years of this man who calls himself Kyaga Strongbow, and I’ve seen towns on the desert fringe that he’s sacked.”
Nistur shrugged. “Any pack of scruffy bandits can loot a defenseless town. It takes more to threaten a city like this.”
“I’ve heard something else,” Ironwood added. “Shellring came here this morning. She says that the lord’s officers are recruiting mercenaries, as many of them as they can hire, and offering good wages.”
Nistur cut a sharp glance toward him. “What a pity you are in no condition to seek employment.”
“I am almost recovered!” Ironwood insisted. “The weakness always passes after two or three days. I am fit for duty now.”
“And yet, even so, would it be wise to hire on at this juncture? The masters of Tarsis are entirely wanting in a reputation for fair dealing.”
“A mercenary who waits to be hired by a lord of sterling character will soon starve. They always balk when the final payday comes around, but they always pay, because they fear us. If they had the means to control their mercenaries, they’d have had no need to hire warriors in the first place.”
“You know the customs of your profession,” Nistur allowed, “but surely it is a good idea to be on the winning side. Is it likely that great mob of nomads can prevail against Tarsis?”
“I’ve not inspected the defenses of the city,” Ironwood confessed. “I never thought to be hired here. Tarsis is a place where mercenaries stay between wars. Many of the recruiters pass through here, and a fighting man rarely has to wait long for employment after he’s spent his pay.
“But to answer your question: the nomads fight mainly as horse archers. As such they are formidable on open ground. Because they are excellent bowmen, they can move fast and keep their distance while filling the air with arrows. At close quarters they are fair lancers and middling swordsmen. Such warriors are rarely able to take a walled, defended town. For that you need siegecraft. You must have skilled tunnelers and builders of mantelets and rams and catapults. The nomads scorn such things. Defending a city such as this may mean nothing more than manning the walls until the nomads lose interest and ride away.”
“Perhaps,” Nistur said dubiously. “But it is a city of merchants, and such persons are rarely inclined to part with their money for any reasons save fear and desperation.”
“I am going,” Ironwood insisted. “Whether or not it’s an easy war, I won’t stay here and live on the old man’s charity.”
Nistur sighed with resignation. “Then I have no choice save to go with you.” Absentmindedly he scratched beneath his beard, where the mark of Ironwood’s ring tingled faintly.
The mercenary favored him with a humorless smile. “If you didn’t wish to become the bondsman of a mercenary, you shouldn’t have taken a contract to kill one. Cheer up, Nistur. Falling under a geas is far from the worst that could have happened.”
“That remains to be seen,” the ex-assassin muttered.
* * * * *
The sign above the door of the tavern consisted of a pair of crossed swords. The two men ducked beneath the low lintel and entered the dim, smoky interior. It was only midmorning, but the place was packed with armed warriors, most of them wearing oddments of mismatched armor, the sure sign of mercenaries who picked up their equipment as needed from the battlefields of many lands. They also tended to sell it off a piece at a time for living money between hires and buy more secondhand when a new war was in the offing. Ironwood’s dragon suit was a great rarity.
At one end of the long room, with his back to a hearth fire, sat a recruiting officer with a parchment scroll and a gold-nibbed pen. Beside him sat a city accountant with an iron-banded chest and an array of steel coins ranged before him in stacks of five. Lined up before the recruiter were mercenaries standing in a patient file. As the name of each was registered, the accountant dropped five of the coins into a waiting palm.
“Five steels for sign-up pay,” Ironwood mused. “Not bad.”
“And it costs the Lord of Tarsis practically nothing,” said his companion.
“How so?”
“The mercenaries will spend almost all of it here in Tarsis, mostly at the taverns. The lord will levy a special tax to pay for the war, with the greater part of it falling on the tavern keepers. Thus these coins will flow right back into his coffers.”
“True,” Ironwood said. “It is always at the final payout that they balk.” He got in line behind a man who wore a studded leather cuirass from which hung short sleeves of bronze mail. “Often as not, they stop paying around the middle of the campaign, then promise to settle up all the back pay when the fighting is over. That is when you must speak sharply to them.”
“It is unfortunate that persons of honor must sometimes deal with the ignoble.”
In time they reached the head of the line. The recruiting officer lost his bored look when he scanned Ironwood’s armor and weapons. “Well, here’s a likely prospect. Your friend doesn’t look like a soldier, though.”
“Nor am I,” said Nistur. “I am a poet.”
“He’s handier with a sword than he looks, I can assure you,” Ironwood told him.
“Well, I think I can trust your judgment,” said the recruiter. “You have the look of an officer.”
“I’ve been a captain of foot in a half-dozen armies.”
“Excellent! I recruit for Shagbar’s regiment, and he has need of experienced captains. The rank carries double pay. Your name?”
“Ironwood.”
The recruiter’s pen, fresh-dipped in green ink, paused above the parchment. “Ironwood? I have heard that name.”
“So has everyone else,” said a man wearing an old bronze breastplate and an even older iron helm. “He’s a cursed man, and no one will serve under him.” Others growled their assent.
“Is it true?” asked the recruiter. “Are you that Ironwood?”
“I am he, but I bear no curse. It is—”
The recruiter held up a palm. “Peace, say no more. I have questions of morale to consider, you understand. I cannot hire one who will make the others distrustful and therefore less effective. It is nothing personal.”
“Aye, nothing personal,” Ironwood said. He whirled and stalked from the tavern, his face flaming.
“Well,” said Nistur, relieved, “so much for that. Now, why don’t we return to the ship and get warm, then make some traveling plans?”
“I know no trade save war,” Ironwood said. “It would be the same story elsewhere. Come, there are other recruiters.”
With an exasperated sigh, Nistur gathered his cloak around him and followed.
By late afternoon they had been turned down in a half-score of taverns. Ironwood’s reputation preceded him everywhere. Nobody could say for certain what was wrong with him, but no one wished to serve with an unlucky man. Finally, in desperation, they turned their steps down a filthy alleyway. At its end was a low, narrow doorway. Above the door was mounted a human skull with the hilt of a dagger protruding from one of its eye sockets.
“Is this wise?” Nistur demanded. “This morning all the regiments of repute rejected us. Each of those we have tried this afternoon was less savory than the last. Surely whoever recruits in this noisome dive leads nothing but bandits and gallows-cheaters.”
“Wise?” said Ironwood in a voice of almost demented bitterness. “Who speak
s of wisdom? I must have employment and surely, somewhere in this city, there must be a band desperate enough to hire one such as I!”
“My friend,” Nistur demurred, “I must admonish you that mutual desperation is not the best of bonds between warrior and chief.”
“We waste time,” said Ironwood. He had to turn slightly to get his wide shoulders through the narrow doorway.
The two entered the tavern, and Nistur saw, instantly, that the warriors within lived down to the very worst of his misgivings. Even the flickering, smoky light of the oil lamps was insufficient to disguise the brands, the cropped ears and tattooed faces whereby a score of lands distinguished their felons. On two or three he even descried the neck scars of unsuccessful hangings. Few had any armor to speak of, and their weapons consisted of little more than long daggers, notch-edged hatchets, and a few short swords. They looked none the less dangerous for their dearth of panoply.
The man at the recruiting table looked no less villainous than the rest, and only slightly better dressed and equipped. The clerk who sat beside him wore a glum expression, and the coins before him were stacked in threes. These two were not recruiting for an elite regiment.
The recruiter studied the newcomers with eyes reddened by smoke and drink. “Names?”
“Ironwood. I—” He broke off short when the recruiter brayed with laughter. “What do you find amusing?” he said, his voice low and menacing.
“Amusing? It’s riotous! None can accuse me of being overly picky, but even I am not so hard up that I will sign on a man with a reputation for bringing bad luck and disaster wherever he goes. Why, if I—” The words were cut off with a strangled squawk as Ironwood’s fingers closed around the man’s burly, unwashed neck. With a strength surprising in one so recently laid low, he raised the man from his bench and thrust him against the stone wall, where the back of his head struck with a vicious smack.
“Hard up for men, are you?” Ironwood bellowed. “Do you think me so desperate that I’ll be insulted by a lowborn bandit corporal like you? What do they hire your band for, killing the wounded and going through their purses after better men have done the fighting?”
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