by Dave Duncan
"Your magic continues to serve you well," Thorian remarked softly. He was anointing his long limbs with copious quantities of fragrant oil. "How about clothing?"
"Wait here!" I slipped out the door to the gallery. Standing well back from the railing, I scanned the court below until I was sure it was deserted.
Staying close to the wall lest the floor squeak, I worked my way along to the next door. I listened, then opened it gently. Still hearing no breathing, I peered in and then entered.
Starlight flooded through large windows, revealing high writing desks and many shelves laden with rolls of vellum. Obviously this was the master's counting room, and not the sort of place I would normally look for clothes. One wall, though, was draped with weavings, depicting flowers and birds. The colors were much paler than I would have chosen for nighttime skulking, but they would suffice—perhaps they would even avert suspicion. I yanked down two of them and looked around for something to represent the obligatory belly pins. I found some ribbons bearing wax seals and took those, also. Then I returned to the bathroom.
Thorian was standing on a tall ewer, attempting to peer out the high window. He stepped nimbly down, and we began to fashion swaths for ourselves. He was no more practiced than I was, and mine kept falling off completely. He grew angry; I had to fight a powerful desire to laugh. Eventually we decided that we would pass muster—at a fair distance, in pitch darkness. We had settled on midcalf as being a reasonable status indicator.
"No shoes?"
"No. Nor hats."
Now where? I had already discarded the window as a potential exit. I might just squeeze through, but never Thorian. I had heard a few troops of ponies going by in the street below, and also voices. There must be a better way out.
Doubtless I amused the gods when I opened the bathroom door again. A flood of light sent me leaping back into my accomplice so hard that the big man staggered.
Then it had passed … I put my eye to the chink and peered. Two women were already descending the stairway. The one in front was bearing a torch and was obviously a servant, which was why there had been no conversation to warn me.
I felt a familiar tingling of presentiment. Something unholy was happening in this minor palace in the middle of the night. The bell had indicated visitors. Now a woman had been summoned from her bedchamber. I scented intrigue. A tale was being enacted for the gods' amusement, and I had been brought there to witness.
A deep voice rumbled on the lower level. "Go to bed now. Your mistress will not require you further. Hasmar, you will stay by the street portal." A door closed as the two slaves bowed.
Finding myself being squashed, I turned my head. Thorian was leaning on me, peering over my shoulder, eyes bright in the darkness.
"Did you see that second one?" he whispered with awe.
"Of course. About time."
"What do you mean, 'About time'? She's incredible!"
I resisted a desire to ask if she was prettier than the legendary Aunt Sirius. His enthusiasm was understandable, and also a most promising development.
"I mean that every good story needs a beautiful heroine. Now we have one. Shall we investigate?"
The big man nodded and followed me. Nothing would have prevented him from following. He was bewitched.
The female servant had gone off to the servants' end of the house and the male in the opposite direction, leaving the atrium unguarded—also leaving no sharp ears at keyholes, of course … Yet! Finding the seventh and the twelfth treads was slightly harder when descending, but we moved in stealthy silence back to ground level and took refuge behind some ornamental shrubbery.
In the light of the sputtering torches, I took stock of my fellow burglar. Combed and washed, Thorian was an impressive sight, far from the savage brute he had seemed in the coffle. With his size and imperious glare, he might even wear an arras and get away with it, in normal times. Times were not normal, and the city guard would not let him pass unquestioned. The square-cut edge of his raven-black beard hung halfway down his chest, but it could cover only part of the great sword wound. His shoulders and arms were bright with scrapes and bruises, and his back would rouse the guards' suspicions like a Vorkan banner.
However insignificant I might feel beside the giant, I knew I was a little less conspicuous. The rough chain had grated my back and shoulders raw. For a moment we exchanged smiles, like mischievous children on a prank. It was the first time we had seen each other properly, and Thorian had apparently accepted that the gods were guiding us; or else he had reverted to his faith in my sorcery.
And now what? Well, a trader of tales could not scurry out into the night and leave an odd little mystery like this unexplored, but whatever was happening was happening behind a closed door. Light showed below it. I felt disinclined to throw it open and announce that the gods required me to eavesdrop, carry on and pay no attention.
I tiptoed to the adjoining door, which bore no telltale slit of light underneath, sensing Thorian hot on my heels—very hot, but that second woman had been strikingly beautiful.
Heroines usually are.
The room we found was furnished with a wide table and many chairs, for dining. Leaving my accomplice to close the door, I hurried across to the far side, where arches led out into an enclosed garden. Truly that mansion was a small palace! In my time, I have known many royal houses decorated with poorer taste, too—Vlad's, for example, with its frieze of skulls.
Light streamed from the arches of the adjacent room, illuminating bushes and waterless in an ornamental pool.
Voices, in the night …
"… waited until tomorrow?" That was the woman.
A low rumble from the man—Jaxian's father, of course.
I slid out into the garden, with Thorian still close behind me, amazingly silent for his size. Keeping shrubbery between me and the window, I began working my way around the pool in a crouch until I could see the confrontation in progress within.
As Thorian had so quickly marked, the woman was lovely. Beauty is the gift of Ashfer; it has little to do with what a sculptor may mold or an artist tint. A man or woman can be blessed with youth and classic features and shapely limbs and yet fail utterly to have beauty. This woman had it in bargeloads. As anyone seeing Thorian for the first time would automatically think big , so she bore beauty ; she had an abudance of beauty. It made a man's head swim.
She was tall and slender, a girl poised on the brink of womanhood, a butterfly stretching its wings for the first time on the lip of its cocoon. She wore a cloak of royal blue, bound by a golden girdle just below her breasts and falling from there in many pleats to her golden sandals. Clipped by a simple gold band and shining like black water, her hair tumbled loose to her shoulders. She had probably been summoned from bed and had had no time to dress it. Her lips were pigeon-blood rubies set in ivory.
Her pallor raised my masculine fires. I wanted to rush to her rescue and carry her off. I wanted to frame epic tales about her. Even more I wanted to see invitation in her eyes, daring me to unfasten that cord and lift back the silk and possess the flawless body within. My heart thundered. I heard Thorian panting in the night.
The man was the one we had seen earlier, of course, Jaxian's father. He waved his hands as he spoke, flashing the jewels on his fingers. He would do very well for the villain of the story—old and sumptuous and obscene beside the girl's youthful grace. His nose was a vulture's beak.
"I accept that he is young and wealthy, Father," the woman was saying. "I agree that he is entertaining and witty. But his morals are notorious. You can smell the corruption on him. His body is warty as a toad's with oozing pustules. If you—"
"Absurd!" the man boomed, clearly audible for the first time. "Where do you gather such slanders? Filthy women's gossip!"
"Jaxian told me, since you ask. He saw him at the baths, a week ago, after the sword drill. Half the militia changed their minds and went home to bathe, he said. He said they would rather share a pool with the entire V
orkan horde than with Dithian Lius." Her voice was tuneful as a chorus of nightingales. She was being properly respectful to her noble parent, yet her manner was firm; she was displaying astonishing poise for her age. As she met his furious gaze, I noticed that she shared the family nose, although in her it was a subtler curve, a sign of dignity that added hauteur without reducing her beauty at all.
A sudden tap on my rump stopped my stealthy progress around the shrubbery. I glanced back and then looked where Thorian was pointing. We were not the only eavesdroppers. Blurred in the dark, three robed figures stood close by the arches, on the far side. Intent on the conversation, they seemed unaware that the garden had just acquired additional population.
That explained who had arrived when the doorbell rang. And if the owner of the house had not set the visitors there to spy on his interview with the girl, then who had?
This was turning out to be a very interesting night.
"I cannot believe you want your daughter infected with his foul diseases!" the girl said. "Forget Lius, Father, I beg you!"
"You are being perversely obstinate!" The man shook his jeweled fist in her face.
Thorian and I continued to creep around the bushes, and finally wriggled under the foliage at the far end of the pool and lay prone. The water would carry the sound, and we now had a much better observation post than those three earlier arrivals had chosen. Probably their dignity would have balked at the wriggling.
The father's next remark had been inaudible. He was pacing to and fro in his anger. To my skilled eye, that anger seemed false, but the girl would probably not detect that.
"Now you confuse me," she protested. "At first you said a merchant family. You said it must be a mercantile compact. The Quairts are a military clan."
"I am pandering to your ridiculous quibbles."
She straightened her shoulders, withstanding her father's anger superbly—holding her ground, keeping her voice level and her hands at her side. She was nervous, yes. Of course she would be, but the man might be meeting firmer resistance than he had expected. Where was her mother during all this?
"Very well. I do know Soshiak Quairt. He is a captain now, is he not? His last wife died of a fractured skull. The one before bled to death; the story was that she was pregnant and he kicked her. There was another before her, wasn't there? We must all feel regret at the poor man's misfortunes, of course. Would it be fair to expose him to the opportunity for further suffering? I would hate to think of him having to bury yet another wife."
Thorian shivered with fury. He wanted to rush to her defense. If a man has any mettle at all, then innocence in peril will make his sword arm twitch, and beauty does not reduce the effect. I could feel my own ire rising, although I always try to bridle my emotions when being a witness. All this might be a minor subplot; it might have nothing at all to do with Balor and the main drama of Zanadon. The girl might be only a floating leaf on the floods of history, but certainly my presence here had been arranged.
Her face was hauntingly familiar, too. I might have seen her in a dream, or she might be merely a reflection of my personal ideal of beauty—I did not know, but I mourned her distress. In my time I have seen more disaster than joy. I feared to hear the gods already weeping. Must I again witness tragedy and carry word of it to mortals, so that generations unborn might also weep?
"This is intolerable!" the man snapped. "I have offered you the finest bachelors in the city, and you spurn them all with absurd slurs and inventions. It confirms what I already knew and yet could not believe."
The girl put a hand to her lips. "I do not understand what you mean by those words, Father."
"You are besotted with another man!"
She took a moment to find her breath. "Father, forgive me, but how could that be possible? How could there be another man? I never go out, except with yourself or Jaxian. I see no one without you present. What other man?"
Her father paused in his pacing close to her and glared in her face. He spoke a name I could not hear.
His answer was a flood of red in her features.
Thorian issued a faint moan of dismay, and I nudged him angrily to be quiet.
The girl shook her head in silent denial, but her face was scarlet. She clasped her hands to her throat. Her resistance had collapsed, and she was vulnerable.
Her father moved closer, spoke louder. "I have seen how you look at him and how he looks at you. You have bewitched him and driven him out of his wits."
She shook her head in terror. "Me? It was he who … I don't know what you are talking about!"
"Shameless slut! You will destroy us all. Me. Your brother. Your aunts and cousins. All of us will be ruined by your evil wilfulness!"
She wheeled away from him and leaned on a chair back. He clasped her thin shoulder and dragged her around to face him.
"Do not deny this! The only solution is to marry you off at once—now! Before you bring down shame and ruin on the whole family. I have named you four fine men who would gladly be bound to the Tharpit clan. There is yet time to save our reputation. Choose, or I shall choose for you. Which will you take: Dithian Lius, Fathmonian Waus, Soshiak Quairt, or Osian Pomaniak?"
She closed her eyes. I wondered if she would faint, for her pallor had returned as fast as it had gone.
Her father eyed her carefully, then spoke more gently. "Shalial, my dear one! It is the only solution for us, for you. And especially for that unfortunate dupe whose wits you have addled as much as your own."
She shook her head without looking at him. "Father, oh, Father!"
"Do not presume to address me thus unless you will afford me a daughter's obedience. If you will not do what I ask out of respect for your father, or for the sake of your dear mother—may Morphith cherish her soul—then do it for his sake, and save him —now, while there is still time."
"Time? Surely I may have time? Just till morning?"
"No. It must be decided. I cannot sleep for worrying. Which?"
Her voice was so low that I could not be certain; but I thought she said, "They are all monsters!"
"Insolence! Your wilfulness is intolerable! It had best be Quairt. He will tame you."
"Father! Choose again! Select some other men!"
"No. You must be married as soon as possible. I see no other way out of this."
To my vast experience that was an obvious prompt, but she would not detect it. The whole burlesque had been very carefully planned, even to the choice of an hour when a victim's resistance is at lowest ebb. She was almost in tears now, understandably.
"There is one," she muttered. "One way out."
She was not watching, she did not see the sly satisfaction settle on her father's face.
"What?"
Her reply was another whisper.
"For why? To do penance?"
"To become a priestess."
Thorian moaned again.
"You would do this?" her father demanded.
She nodded.
"Say it! If I truly believe, then I might permit it."
"I will become a priestess."
The three cloaked watchers surged forward. Thorian tried to leap up and I grabbed his shoulder. I would have had more fortune slaying a bull with a fly whisk. Yet he sank back on his belly again—not, I confess, because of my superhuman strength, but because he had forgotten the branch right over his head. He must have half stunned himself. For a while he forgot his mad impulse to chivalry, and just lay and rubbed his damaged skull.
The girl had turned in fright and dismay as the three men entered the room. They were all priests. All were beardless and obese, and their heads were shaven. Two wore yellow cloaks, and the leader crimson.
That flash of crimson in the night cried out that this private domestic squabble did concern the matter of Balor. It was all one, somehow. The girl had raised her chin in defiance, and the pose made my niggling sense of familiarity burn hotter. If I had dreamed her, then I could recall nothing more of the tale I had dre
amed.
"You heard, Holiness?" the father said.
"We heard," said Crimson Cloak. "It is customary to kneel to the high priest, child."
"That was a trap!" Thorian growled furiously.
"Of course. Be silent."
The girl sank to her knees. The high priest was short, and odiously fat. He laid a pudgy hand on her head in benediction and spoke in a eunuch's falsetto. "Shalial Tharpit, you have stated of your own free will your desire to enter the service of Holy Maiana. The Great Mother welcomes you and will forgive your sins. Go now with our blessing." He sniggered.
It had been slickly done, I thought. She had even been maneuvered into making the suggestion. I wondered who the unnamed lover was.
I wondered what I was supposed to do about all this, if anything.
Shalial offered no resistance. She held her head high, not looking at her father as she went out the door with the two yellow cloaks. She knew she had been tricked, and by whom. She must also know why, which I did not.
Tharpit was left alone with the high priest. They smiled in mutual congratulation.
Very slickly done.
Even if Tharpit was one of the leaders of the city, as he must be, what grade of intrigue brought the high priest of the city from his bed in the middle of the night just to ensnare a young woman into the clergy? Now he watched impassively as his host turned and vanished out of my sight, soon returning with two brimming goblets. He handed one over.
"May this house be blessed," the priest said as a toast.
"I feel I need absolution more. I did not enjoy that, Holiness!" Tharpit tossed off his wine in one gulp.
"Of course not. Such a horrid ordeal for you! But your motives are ever so pure. You did no more than a father's duty. There is nothing to forgive, my son." The fat man sipped thoughtfully. "And there was no truth in your allegations?"
"Certainly not!"
Even at such a distance, I smelled a lie, and the priest obviously did. His forehead wrinkled all the way to his shaven scalp. "Of course it is customary," he said in a voice like thin oil, "to make an endowment upon such occasions." He sniggered again and extended a soft pink hand. "Just a little token?"
