by Dave Duncan
“Filthy stinking shit-eating slimes!” he yelled, meaning it.
The gate clanged shut and the lock clattered.
He sat up, rubbing his elbow. The air was foul, cold, and damp, and the ragged wrap they’d given him was thinner than mist. The assassin was still curled up, but looking at him. She didn’t have any clothes on at all. There wasn’t enough light to see any details, which was good.
“I’m Brota,” he said.
She made a sort of hooting noise.
“What?”
Hoot again.
“Well, if you won’t, you won’t,” he said angrily. “You going to share some of that straw, or do I have to fight you for it?”
She came alive at that, spreading out the meager bedding so there would be room for two—two people very close together. It made sense to sleep like that to keep warm, but how long before she discovered that he wasn’t a she? Staying in character, he went across and lay down, turning his back on her. He was shivering, but cold could explain that.
The racket outside was getting worse, not better. The straw stank of sewage. Dad had warned him often that he might not live in a palace all his life. He’d managed not to brood about Dad until then, but now he had nothing else to do or think about. He was very tired, very sore, very frightened. After a while he realized that he was weeping. Didn’t matter. Girls did that and there was no one to see him.
Oh, great Goddess, please don’t let my dad die!
Chapter 2
Having retrieved the seventh sword from Swordsman Tilber, Wallie had to decide whether to wear it. The Aye vote said that it was the scepter, the emblem of state, so the sight of it would demonstrate that the work of the Tryst must continue and no one was indispensable. The Nay argued that many people might assume that Nnanji was as good as dead—and if he wasn’t, then Shonsu was usurping his authority. Also, Wallie had forced himself to give it up once and did not relish the prospect of ever having to do so again. Feeling guilty at that admission of greed, he compromised by carrying it under his arm when he went upstairs to the council hall.
The hall was a high and spacious chamber that could hold several hundred people. Compared to other buildings in Casr, it was starkly plain, with a high timbered ceiling, walls of flat slate, and horrible acoustics. Windows well above head height shed a poor light even at noon, and Wallie could not complain, for he had designed it himself. To him it was the most interesting place in Casr, perhaps in the World.
Its furnishing varied. Nnanji preferred to hold meetings standing up, so that people would waste less time in what he considered needless chatter. That night it held a single table at the far end, flanked by a dozen stools and lit by seven freestanding bronze candelabras. As he walked forward to join the meeting, the galaxy of twinkling flames illuminated a mere six faces watching his approach, and only four of those belonged to members of the council.
Traditionally, trysts had been led by a band of seven Sevenths, although six of them, like all the lesser ranks, had been bound by the terrible third oath of absolute obedience to the seventh, the liege lord. Nnanji could recite scores of epics about those ancient trysts, yet they had been temporary affairs, summoned by the Goddess to impose order in specific areas. The Tryst of Casr was much more, called to restore the honor of the swordsman craft, and dedicated to extending its rule throughout the entire World. The last time Wallie had inquired, the record clerks had lists of more than two hundred Sevenths, all of them officially members of the council.
Here were four. Many were too old or infirm to attend, some had never been to Casr, and only these few were available there now. The rest were scattered over a large part of the World.
Boariyi, of course, towered over everyone, even Wallie, and especially old Zoariyi, his uncle, standing at his side in a senior’s blue robe. He was bent, shrunken and toothless now and did not wear a sword, but age had neither dulled his devious mind nor blunted his extremely sharp tongue. Zoariyi had never quite forgiven Shonsu for stealing the leadership away from his nephew, but he remained loyal and his advice was always worth hearing.
Opposite them stood Lord Joraskinta, a solid, square-faced, young man who had accepted the Tryst more than a season ago when it arrived at the docks of Ashe, the city he ruled, and informed him that the World was changing. From now on all cities would be ruled by civilians, either kings or councils of elders, and swordsmen would be under their direction. Consequently he could accept this new order by swearing absolute obedience to the red-haired Seventh with the deadly smile, or he could refuse; in which case he would be challenged and slain—his choice. As soon as he had sworn, he had been ordered to abdicate his throne in favor of an elected board of elders, and had then been provided with a suitable retinue of senior swordsmen and sent off to Casr, to learn the ways of the Tryst. He had arrived only a couple of weeks ago, and this was his first council meeting. Ultimately, if he seemed reliable, he would be given a worthy job somewhere.
Where was the missing Lord Mibullim, who had been similarly recruited and should have reached Quo before Nnanji?
Lord Dorinkulu, standing alongside Joraskinta and leaning on a cane, had sworn to the Tryst years ago and done great service in extending its borders. Having never properly recovered from a severed hamstring, he served now as supervisor of training in Casr.
A significant couple of paces away from the others stood Katanji, whose withered arm and mere third rank would normally have eliminated him from consideration, but who qualified as an honorary councillor because he was treasurer of the Tryst and Nnanji’s brother. Although he had a trader’s ability to mask his feelings, he must be more worried than he had ever been in his life. His gaze never left Wallie. Without Nnanji, Katanji’s huge personal wealth would make him very vulnerable to whoever led the Tryst.
The sixth man present was Master Endrasti, included so that he could brief the council on what he had told Wallie on their ride in. Tough fighter though he undoubtedly was, he looked overawed at finding himself here, at the center of secular power.
Wallie strode to the end of the table, whose surface was empty except for the candelabras and a small basket containing pieces of soapstone. Without inviting anyone to sit, he tossed the seventh sword in its scabbard down beside them.
“Lord Nnanji is recovering from a wound. To imply otherwise in any way will be regarded as sedition. Does anyone here object to my wearing this sword during his convalescence?”
They all smiled, even Katanji and Endrasti, and Boariyi actually chuckled.
“No, my liege. Lord Nnanji ordered me to give it to you.” At that he lifted it from the table, drew it, and went down on one knee. "Live by this, wield it in Her service, die holding it!"
Wallie had overlooked the mystique a sword held for swordsmen. A swordsman must not wear any sword until formally given it by another. Since he had “given” the seventh to Nnanji that way, he must be “given” it back again. He took it with the correct response, “It shall be my honor and my pride.”
As he slid it into his own scabbard for now, placing his own sword on the table, he said, “Master Endrasti has much to tell us, and I do not believe he has ever seen our grand map. I suggest we move some lights and stools over there, to the Ulk Sector.”
Wallie had designed the hall himself. It was many times larger than it need be for meetings, but the plain slate walls served as a giant chalkboard, on which he tracked the exploration of the World. That would have been impossible before the coming of the Tryst, for the Goddess was the River, liable to alter its geography whenever She wanted. Wallie, by making the treaty with Rotanxi, had loosed the sorcerers’ literacy on the World and thus ended the Age of Legends. Endrasti must have seen, and even helped to draw, local charts, but he had never viewed the whole sprawling trace of the River that looped across two walls and was soon going to spread onto a third. Wallie walked him through it with the aid of a weighty candelabra.
“Your reports have helped create this, master, but this is the near
est thing to a complete map of the World that I know of. The sorcerers may have a better, of course; they won’t say and certainly won’t share it if they do. Here is Casr, on the RegiVul Loop. Fourteen cities, and yet how small it looks!
“The River flows anticlockwise in the Loop, from Ov around to Aus, but south of it lie the Black Lands, where lava flows have made the River unnavigable. We sent an expedition through the upstream rapids, and it found many prosperous settlements. We still have not reached the end of the River in either direction. This green line shows the trail to Quo. You can see the enormous distance you would have to travel to go from Casr to Quo by water.”
“It is humbling, my lord. I thought I had seen most of the River already. I never realized how much more of it there is.”
“Only the Goddess herself can ever know it all. We call this area the Vul Sector. West of it lies the Zan Sector, but even the sorcerers themselves seem vague about where the boundary lies.”
The Zan Coven seemed to be a branch or affiliate of Vul, for it had signed onto the Treaty quite willingly. The Yrt Coven, even farther downstream, had taken little more persuasion. Beyond that, the Tryst had found no more sorcerer cities for several years. If they existed, they kept themselves well hidden, but eventually swordsman missionaries had arrived at Hann, site of the holiest of all the Goddess’s temples, and that possibly explained the absence of sorcerers in the area, for sorcerers worshiped the Fire God.
Seen like this, pinned to a wall, the River was actually many Rivers, all seemingly much the same size, but tangled as a fishing line tormented by a litter of kittens. Loops were looped on loops in a gigantic snakes and ladders board, except that the ladders were shortcuts between snakes. It could flow in any direction, dividing and rejoining at random. Very few earthly rivers ever behaved like that, except in deltas, but the Goddess’s River never reached a sea or even a major lake. Wallie’s engineer training rejected it as an impossible perpetual motion machine, and he had not quite given up hope that, somewhere yet unseen by the Tryst, the World held a mighty mountain range to source all that water and an ocean to receive it. Even so he could not comprehend a stream that sometimes seemed to flow in circles.
The River’s major tributaries were branches of itself. It rarely wandered farther north than the RegiVul loop, while Hann lay close to the equator. Lacking chronometers or surveying instruments, Wallie had only a vague idea of longitude, but he suspected that the Tryst now ruled more than half the World. He could not reconcile that with the sorcerers’ claim to have thirteen covens, for he only knew of five.
Land roads were rare, but every new one offered another reach of the River to explore. By the time the Tryst had “discovered” Hann, ten years ago, other expeditions had pushed into the southern hemisphere and established cooperation with the Ulk Coven. It was in front of that section of the map that the council now convened, with Zoariyi and Dorinkulu on stools and the others remaining on their feet to demonstrate their manhood.
“Now, Master Endrasti, the last dispatch we had from you and Lord Nnanji, you had just reached a city named Fua. Here.” Wallie knelt, laying down the candelabra and accepting a soapstone crayon from Katanji.
“Right bank, my lord. We were sailing upstream, roughly northwest.” Going upstream, the right bank would be to the left, but he was too astute to remind his present audience of that elementary truth. “If I may… I think Fua lies farther south than you are placing it. The Dream God was well to the north and clearly showing seven bands, and Lord Nnanji thought he seemed wider than he did from Casr, even.”
“You said that in your report. I am worried that you will push the River so far south that I will have to dig up the floor of this hall to fit it in. Fua accepted the Tryst?”
“Quite happily, my lord. They had a band playing to greet us as we docked. But the reeve warned us that we would soon be entering the area influenced by the Kra Coven, and sorcerers had been warning the secular rulers there not to accept the Tryst. That was when Lord Nnanji sent Honorable Quarlaino to Casr with dispatches.”
Quarlaino had arrived safely.
“Tell their lordships what happened at Arbo.”
“Yes. my lords, after Fua, the next place with swordsmen was Arbo, on the right bank. Quite small, it had a garrison of five. They all swore allegiance, claiming they’d been waiting for years for the Tryst to arrive. And Lord Nnanji didn’t blame them for what happened. Some of them were seriously injured trying to rescue our men. They were a varied…”
Testy old Zoariyi barked an impatient cough. Endrasti glanced nervously at his audience and went swiftly to the point.
“The house of joy burned down in the middle of the night. It was the only one in town. We lost eight men in the blaze. One man escaped, an apprentice who had drunk little. The wine was drugged, we’re sure. The house girls had either all been warned not to drink it, or been carried out before the fire was lit.”
“Lord Nnanji did not retaliate?” Wallie prompted, having been told the answer earlier.
“Not at Arbo, my lord. There was no way of knowing who had set the blaze, and several homes were destroyed, which he thought was a sign to them that the Goddess disapproved. But he did send Adept Rudere and three Thirds back downstream to instruct garrisons to send him reinforcements. The Adept was to continue on to Casr.”
“He never arrived. Next town?”
“Ma,” Endrasti said. “Quite small, rather quaint. Only two swordsmen there, older men, but very spry still, both brothers.”
“We should be surprised if only one of them were,” Zoariyi muttered.
Endrasti hastily recounted the near-disaster at Zek and the massacre at Cross Zek, his listeners growling oaths at the news of swordsmen mowed down by gunfire.
Wallie continued writing with his soapstone, extending the map: Fo, Cross Zek, Zek, Nolar, Plo. “That about right?” he asked, rising. He had written in Kra with a query, somewhere in the mountains, farther south.
“Yes, my lord, except that I was told the River flows pretty much due west at Plo and then turns south toward Fex.”
That detail could be settled later. “And what happened after Cross Zek?”
“We carried the bodies to the River and sent them back to Her,” Endrasti said. “The liege decided that, as we were clearly in a war and had lost two score men in less than two weeks, we needed reinforcements before approaching Nolar and Plo. Back at Fo, on Shipwrights’ Day was when he sent Lord Mibullim and an entourage to Casr with orders to bring you up to date, Lord Shonsu, and ask you to organize a stronger force.”
“That seems curious,” Zoariyi said. “There are thousands more swordsmen strung along the River itself than there are here. Why come all the way back to Casr to recruit?”
“Probably for gold,” Katanji suggested wryly. “Fighting a war would be expensive.”
They all looked inquiringly at Endrasti, as if inviting him to change his story, which he did. “As far I recall his exact words, my lords, he said, ‘Shonsu knows a lot more about fighting sorcerers than I do, and it’s time I went home and gave my wife twins.’ My lords.”
The remark about twins could not be funny while Nnanji might be on his deathbed, and the suggestion that he did not feel as competent as Wallie to wage this war was so shockingly out of character that for a moment no one said a word. Wallie was less surprised than the rest of them, though. Knowing of Wallie’s past life on Earth, which he called his dream world, Nnanji would at least have wanted to consult him on the best way to tackle the crisis.
Knowing there was still more to come, Wallie prompted Endrasti to finish his story. Nnanji had withdrawn downstream with care, warning the city garrisons of potential trouble and in most cases reinforcing them from his diminishing troop. On Slaters’ Day he had sent Adept Hazenhik off with dispatches. He and his companions were also missing.
“A week later, on Jewelers’ Day, we set off for Casr ourselves. We were down to a mere score of men.”
That score of men
was the most surprising thing about Nnanji’s reaction, though. His usual response to an emergency was to take off like a startled hare, traveling with only one or two companions, because that was much faster. A small group could always sail on the fastest ships, even if they had to sleep on deck, and could almost always acquire horses for the land crossings, buying them outright if necessary. Wallie thought of those madcap junkets as the Nnanji express. Like Julius Caesar, he would often turn up unannounced where he was least expected. This time he had chosen the safe way. Either the danger had seemed extreme, or he was starting to feel his age at last.“Thank you,” Wallie said. “About a hundred days later, when the liege had reached Quo, he was attacked in his sleep, on the same night I was attacked in Casr. Moreover, three courier parties have failed to arrive and must be presumed lost: Honorable Ruderedispatched from Arbo, Lord Mibullim from Fo, and Adept Hazenhik from… where did you say?”
“Rea, my lord.”
“Rea.” Wallie folded his arms and looked around the distressed faces. “Add it all up, and we lost three score swordsmen, some of them women. Does anyone deny that we— yes, master?”
Endrasti was fidgeting for attention. “Begging your pardon, liege, but there were two heralds, also. After Lord Nnanji withdrew to Arbo, he sent a herald to the elders of Nolar and another to the king of Plo, proclaiming that he had been attacked and would retaliate in force unless he received submission and compensation.”
“What happened to those heralds?” asked Zoariyi.
