Master Of The Hashomi rb-27

by Джеффри Лорд

  The Baran listened to Blade’s entire story without comment. When Blade had finished, the Baran stood up, went to the window, lit his pipe, and stood there smoking it in silence for nearly ten minutes. Blade was not comfortable during those ten minutes. He could not be entirely sure that the Baran would believe him, or what might happen if the Baran thought he was lying.

  Finally the Baran turned to Blade and frowned. «I am not sure I want to believe you. No, do not be afraid. I do not say this because I think you are an enemy to the Baranate, a teller of lies to sow fear and confusion. You would not have spat in the face of the Thieves Guild if you were. That was the act of a brave man, an honorable one, a man worthy to be a Demad and one of the Eyes of the Baran.

  «I do not want to believe you, because if what you say is true, then there is no hope of peace with the Fighters of Junah.»

  «How much hope did you think there was before?» Blade asked bluntly.

  «More than there can be now,» replied the Baran, after a moment’s hesitation. «I cannot say exactly. I was thinking of a plan, to offer them freedom from persecution in return for oaths of loyalty and the disarming of their trained warriors. I had not reached the point of asking my councilors to study the plan, so I do not know how practical it might have been. Yet it would have been worth trying, even if it held only a small hope that I would not be obliged to shed the blood of my own subjects.»

  Blade was tempted to point out that rulers unwilling to shed the blood of their subjects often wound up with the subjects shedding the rulers’ blood. However, saying that would certainly give offense.

  The Baran seemed to read Blade’s thoughts, and smiled sadly. «Yes, I know. I should not be so tender toward the Fighters of Junah. They have made themselves enemies not only to me but to many of my loyal and peaceful subjects. Still, I prefer that war and slaughter be the last weapon I take up, rather than the first. You would not quarrel with that wish, I trust?»

  «Not at all.»

  «Good. I may as well tell you that your knowledge of the Hashomi will make you an important man in any plans we make against them and their allies. It is good to know that you will not be thinking entirely of killing.»

  «You believe I’m telling the truth?»

  «Yes. No matter how many problems your tales of the Hashomi may cause, I must believe them. We have learned something about the Hashomi ourselves, over the years. All that we have learned matches what you saw in the Valley of the Hashomi. So I believe you, and I will make new plans from what you have said.»

  Blade could no longer keep from grinning. This was not just success, but triumph. His news had not only reached the Baran, but it would turn the whole power of the Baranate in a new direction for the fight against the Hashomi. That didn’t guarantee victory, but it would certainly make the Master’s task a great deal more difficult.

  The Baran noticed Blade’s pleased expression. «You’ll stop grinning soon enough, Blade, when we put you to work. The first thing you’re going to do is write down everything you’ve learned about the Hashomi.»

  «Is that safe?»

  «You’ll do it yourself, and what you write will never be out of my own hands. But it must be written down. We can’t risk losing all your knowledge if you don’t come back from some journey as one of the Eyes.

  «Then we’ll be taking you out to the place where the Eyes of the Baran learn their work. Perhaps it won’t impress you, considering that you’ve seen the Hashomi at work in their own country. But we have a few tricks of our own that you’d do well to learn.

  «Then-«The Baran spread his hands and shrugged. «Then you’ll go out, and it will be as Junah wills it.» He rose and slapped Blade on the shoulder. «It may be some time before we meet again, so I will say-may Junah bless you.»

  «With a long life?» said Blade, laughing. «In this work, I doubt it.»

  The complete story of Blade’s adventures among the Hashomi was nearly as long as a novel. He had to write out every word of it with a quill pen and ink, on sheet after sheet of parchment. Then they sent him off to learn how to be one of the Eyes of the Baran.

  The training camp was in an ancient castle, centuries older than the Baranate, perched on top of a mountain several days travel to the north of Dahaura. From the top of the castle a man could see nearly a hundred miles in every direction on a clear day.

  Unfortunately there were few clear days up in the mountains. Even so, Blade was kept much too busy to admire the scenery.

  The training was rigorous and intelligent but taught Blade practically nothing he didn’t already know. The only novelty was the skilled work done in giving him a disguise.

  As the eunuch in charge of the training put it, «We know that you have done certain things to make you a marked man for the Thieves Guild. You will not live long enough to do any work for the Baran without a disguise.

  «We cannot take away your height or your scars. Yet there are things we can add to you, until your own mother would hardly know you.»

  Blade’s head was shaved again, and his scalp rubbed with something that made it turn blue. He was ordered to grow his beard, and when it had grown long enough it was tinted gray and divided into two plaits braided with gold thread. A patch went over one eye, and several impressive scars were tattooed on his face, neck, and arms.

  The final touch was a heavy leather boot with complicated bindings and fastenings. When the boot was on and everything was tightened, it looked as though Blade had one foot so deformed he didn’t dare show it. Yet he could move just as fast with the boot in place as he could barefoot.

  Blade’s mother certainly wouldn’t have recognized him. In fact, he barely recognized himself the first time he looked in the mirror in his room.

  The eunuch smiled at Blade’s surprise. «We respect the Hashomi here, but we do not believe they are the only people in all the world with secret arts and skills in death. Perhaps they believe they are, but if so, then that is their problem-not ours.»

  That was quite true. The arrogant confidence of the Hashomi in their own skill might lead them to a foolish contempt for their enemies. Or at least it might have done so, without the Master. As unbalanced as he was, the Master of the Hashomi was too shrewd to make such a blunder.

  Besides, the Hashomi were only part of the menace facing Dahaura, and not even the most dangerous part. Without the Fighters of Junah, the Hashomi could hardly be more than a large nuisance.

  Suppose the alliance of the Hashomi and the Fighters of Junah broke apart? What then. Either would be much less dangerous separately.

  That was an idea worth pursuing, Blade realized. But not now-he didn’t know enough about the plans of the Fighters of Junah, and neither did anyone else. In time-yes, he’d file away the notion in his mind. There might be something in it, for the future.

  Chapter 19

  At last they let Blade out of the castle and sent him back to Dahaura. His «cover identity» was that of an officer of the Baran’s army; wounded in battle against some of the wild tribes beyond the frontier, now on a pension that gave him just enough to live. His wounds and his poverty were expected to arouse a good deal of sympathy and get men and women alike to talk freely.

  «There are risks, of course,» said the chief of the Eyes of the Baran. «If you meet a soldier who actually fought in the battle where you say you were wounded, you must of course get away from him as quickly as possible. To let him catch you in a lie would not be wise.»

  «No, it would not,» said Blade, more politely than he felt. The chief of the Eyes of the Baran was another of those grayhaired eunuchs who seemed to be everywhere and do nearly everything in the Baran’s service. This one’s name was Giraz, and he kept himself as lean as a shoelace by vigorous exercise and light eating. He also had an annoying habit of treating his subordinates as if they were children who needed to be told the facts of life. Still, he listened to them when they spoke, and he was willing to work eighteen hours a day for the Baranate. For those two virtues Blad
e was willing to forgive Giraz quite a few vices.

  Blade moved about Dahaura as freely as a fish in the ocean, saying little and listening a great deal. Being a pensioned-off veteran was good for a drink, a meal, or even a night’s lodging in many places. Most people seemed to be loyal to the Baran, or at least concerned about looking that way.

  In those few places frequented largely by the Fighters of Junah, Blade was not so lucky. Several times he was asked to leave, twice he had things thrown at him, and once three men came at him with knives. They wore the clothes of common laborers, but they moved and held their weapons like professional fighting men. Blade had a good deal of trouble fighting them off without revealing too much of his own, skill, and the tavern’s furniture got badly smashed in the process.

  After that Blade started carrying a walking stick. It was the sort of thing a man with a partly crippled leg would carry, and looked perfectly harmless. In fact it was weighted and balanced so that Blade could wield it with deadly effectiveness on a second’s notice. With a little more warning, he could unscrew one end and expose five inches of razor-sharp steel. Sword-canes were not everyday wear in Dahaura, but enough people carried them so that no one would suspect anything sinister about Blade if he used one to defend himself.

  Blade quickly learned that something was happening in the ranks of the Thieves Guild that was making even the prostitutes and dealers in stolen goods have second thoughts about dealing with them. No one would talk freely about this «something,» of course. The Thieves had always been ruthless with those who said the wrong thing at the wrong time, and that certainly hadn’t changed. But the rumors were everywhere in Dahaura, like fleas in the bedding of a cheap inn, and Blade started collecting those rumors.

  He wasn’t the only one. Giraz was too good an intelligence chief to let his agents know too much about each other, but Blade had eyes and ears and a mind to draw conclusions. Esseta was certainly involved in the spying on the Thieves. She now had a house of her own outside the walls, with a dozen women in it-all paid for by the Baran, Blade was quite certain. Blade could not see how anything less could have overcome Esseta’s life-long refusal to get mixed up in politics.

  Meanwhile, Kubin Ben Sarif was busily organizing the Brothel Keepers to fight the Thieves-or at least join in the watch kept upon them. Kubin knew exactly what he was doing and why, but he kept it a secret from most of his fellow keepers. They didn’t need to know why they were doing what he told them to do, as long as they did it.

  There seemed to be a small army of spies, plotters, and assassins running around in Dahaura. It reminded Blade of West Berlin, notoriously filled with agents from every intelligence service on both sides of the Iron Curtain. He’d done only one mission there, and was glad that was all. He’d never felt quite so much in danger every minute-until he came to Dahaura.

  With all the spies the Baran had on the job, a picture of what the Thieves Guild had in mind slowly appeared. It was a picture that frightened everyone who had full knowledge of it.

  The Thieves Guild was allying itself with the Fighters of Junah. They were determined to have not merely justice but vengeance, thorough and bloody. The things they wanted avenged went back many years, and Blade’s killing of the master who’d tried to rob the Baran was only the final straw. They’d given up hope of getting what they wanted from the Baranate, so that anyone who sought its overthrow had possibilities as an ally. There were only two such groups that the Thieves knew of the tribes across the eastern frontier and the Fighters of Junah. The tribes were a long way off and hostile to strangers of every sort, whether they were friends or foes of the Baran. Most of the Fighters of Junah were close at hand, in Dahaura and the other five large cities of the Baranate; they needed help, and they knew it.

  At first Blade was surprised to find anyone in Dahaura forming an alliance with the Fighters of Junah. He’d thought that most people would give up anything, including vengeance, rather than join the Fighters.

  That was true of most people, but not of the Thieves Guild. They had short tempers and long memories. More important, few of them had any religion to speak of. Some of them were said to worship at the shrines of cults even older and more persecuted than the Fighters of Junah. Most believed only in gold, a good knife, and a painful death for traitors and tale-bearers. It did not bother them that the Fighters of Junah were heretics, as long as they were allies.

  The Fighters of Junah couldn’t afford to pick and choose their allies, any more than the Thieves. So they were welcoming the alliance with an open mind, if not yet open arms.

  How far the alliance had gone was hard to learn. What frightened Blade was how far it might go. An alliance of the Thieves with the Fighters of Junah meant an alliance of the Thieves with the Hashomi. The Hashomi were deadly and efficient, but there could not be that many of them in Dahaura. With the Thieves to guide them, spy for them, and hide them, the Hashomi could become far more dangerous. Dahaura held few secrets from the Thieves Guild.

  Nor was that the worst of it. There were the drugs of the Hashomi, the drugs that could spread madness and destruction through a whole city. What would happen if the Hashomi and the Thieves together started dropping drugs into the feed at every stable in Dahaura? Or putting them into the brewing vats of all the city’s largest breweries? There were a dozen other possibilities, all gruesome. Working together, the Thieves, the Hashomi, and the Fighters of Junah could attack more different points than the Baranate could possibly hope to defend. Dahaura could be thrown into chaos within a single day, if the work was done properly.

  The Baran didn’t ask Blade for advice, and Blade was glad. He wouldn’t have been quite sure what to say. His instincts told him to advise rounding up every Thief in Dahaura and torturing them until they’d revealed everything, then executing them all in pubic. His better judgment told him this was impossible. Even trying it would simply grab only a part of the Thieves and drive the rest into hiding, angrier and more dangerous than ever.

  The key was the leaders of the Thieves Guild, the Council of Twelve. If they could be swept up all at once, the Thieves would be leaderless and at least temporarily paralyzed. Then they could either be rounded up at leisure, or possibly even ignored while the Baran’s fighting men went after the Hashomi. Standing orders were to avoid any sort of trouble with the Fighters of Junah-unless, of course, they started it.

  Esseta was apparently putting her sister courtesans on to the job of tracing the movements of the Council of Twelve. She had to be discreet about this, of course, and very careful in her choice of women to help her. Some of the women of Dahaura’s brothels hated the Thieves so much that they’d never be able to keep their mouths shut. Other women were the friends of Thieves, or secret dealers in stolen goods. They might turn double agent.

  More and more, Dahaura reminded Blade of West Berlin. He remembered how glad he used to be when a mission to Dimension X ended up involving him in the same sort of espionage work he knew and did so well.

  Now he’d be far happier in a Dimension where nobody had ever heard of spies!

  Chapter 20

  The night was clear, and the moon so full and bright that the narrow road ahead gleamed like silver. A light breeze carried the scent of roses and flowering trees. On this kind of night Blade would have preferred to be riding for his own pleasure, rather than on the Baran’s business.

  However, the Baran’s business had to be carried out. So Blade searched the tops of the villa walls on either side of the road, looking for a crouching figure waving a red scarf. That would be one of Kubin Ben Sarif’s men, waiting to meet Blade and lead him to a rendezvous with the leader of the Brothel Keepers. By order of the Baran, Blade was to place himself under Kubin’s orders for the next month.

  What this might mean, Blade could only guess. Giraz, the chief of the Eyes of the Baran, had hinted that he was to spy on Kubin.

  «Not that we believe the man to be disloyal, you understand,» said the eunuch. «We do believe from what he h
as done in the past that Kubin might be-ah, impulsive-in his use of what he has learned.»

  That put Blade in an awkward position. When Kubin became aware that he was being spied on, he would take offense. He would not protest directly, or abandon the Baran’s service. He was too loyal and hard-headed for that. But Blade’s past services to Kubin might not protect him from an «accident.»

  Blade didn’t like getting involved in this kind of sideshow. The atmosphere of everyone spying on everyone else was becoming thicker and thicker, and that he liked even less. From his experience he knew that such a situation was bound to fall apart violently and unpredictably, and sooner rather than later.

  Blade stiffened in the saddle. One hand went to the hilt of his sword, the other tightened on the reins. His knees locked, ready to drive his spurs into the horse and make a dash for safety.

  There was a dark shape perched on a wall, waving the promised red scarf. Two faces also peered through the iron spikes on the wall, one on each side of the man. That wasn’t according to plan.

  Ambush!

  The word shouted itself in Blade’s mind. He was just about to spur his horse to a gallop, when a familiar voice called softly, «Blade! Ride down to the second gate on the left. We’ll meet you there. Show no sign you’re expecting anyone.»

  It was Kubin Ben Sarif. Something was wrong. It could be anything, so the only sensible thing to do for now was to obey Kubin’s instructions.

  The second gate on the left was open, and two men in dark clothes and hoods were waiting just inside it. Blade turned his horse in through the gate and Kubin appeared out of the darkness, two more men with him. The first two closed the gate and Blade dismounted.

  «What are you doing here?» he whispered, sharply to Kubin. «You could be compromising everything!» Several of the villas around here belonged to people whose loyalty was doubtful, and there were always servants who might be bribed or persuaded to talk. In addition, Kubin Ben Sarif was hard to mistake for anybody else. If he was seen here, in a rendezvous with Blade, it could blow Blade’s cover so thoroughly that he’d be no further use to the Baran, even if he didn’t end up dead in some back alley in Dahaura.