Shadow of the Warmaster

by Jo Clayton

  He moved past taverns and shops and other small businesses. For the first time he heard voices though he saw no one and none of the businesses were open.

  He heard a steady creaking as he drew near the largest of the circles with its speaker minaret a topped-out stone tree in the middle. He remembered the last time he stood there, crowds pressing about him, Geres Duvvar bringing him a paper cone of hot nuts. His grief over the loss of his cousin intensified suddenly, as if he felt it for the first time. He stood looking at the wall he and Geres Duvvar had leaned against while they listened to the Stentor shout. After a while he was aware of the creaking again. He looked up. A body was suspended from the speaker’s platform. A hanged man. He moved around so he could see who it was. “Herk,” he breathed. The Fehdaz’s face was black and distorted and he was stripped naked, but there was no question who hung there. Another memory came back full force-Elmas Ofka that night she found her brother dead of torture. Herk will pay, she said. It may take years, but Herk will pay.

  He shrugged. This wasn’t Elli’s work, she was too busy organizing the world. It didn’t matter. Herk the Jerk had enemies enough to guarantee he’d end like this. Without asking himself why he was doing it, he climbed the verdigrised spiral to the platform and cut the rope. He heard Herk’s body hit the stones with a loose boneless splat; the Fehdaz must have been hanging there for hours, more than a day, long enough for the death-stiffness to pass out of him. They took him when the Surge was just starting here, he thought, that’s why they hung him instead of tearing him apart.

  He climbed back down and stood over the body. It hadn’t begun to stink yet, the weather was too cold for that. He pressed his fingers hard against his eyes. Too many memories here, he couldn’t let Herk dirty them. He dropped his hands and looked around for a place to put him.

  The timbers of the Fekkri Gate were burned to stumps like rotted teeth and the pile itself was a shell, no more. He got Herk up and over his shoulder, carried the body into the Fekkri court and dropped it on the paving stones.

  He left, brushing at himself, a little nauseated. He moved more quickly now, he had a better reason than duty to visit his House. He wanted a bath.

  Goza House was in the southeast section of the city, where the Little Houses were and the tenements for the poor, the warehouses, the retting sheds and other factories, down near the water’s edge.

  The two parts of the main gate were moving in the wind, but not enough to swing closed. Seeing them like that made him angry. The gates of the Great Houses were closed, latched, probably locked though he had not thought to try them. Here the Houses were left open to the wind and whatever thieves escaped the Surge, here where the people were poor and not important. He went through the wall-arch and into the Front Court.

  The wind blew dead leaves into dust devils. A solitary spray of rain hit him in the face. The House was dead. Everyone was gone, even the Elders. He folded his arms across his chest, hugged them tight against him. It was like his grief for Geres Duvvar, and somehow worse. There was no focus, only a free-floating desolation. “They make a desolation and call it peace,” he said aloud.

  “What’s that mean?”

  Karrel Goza looked around, not seeing who it was who spoke to him.

  Tazmin Duvvar stepped from the Duvvar Court, stood leaning against a gate pillar. “What’s that?” he repeated.

  “Someone said it a long time ago and a long way from here. I don’t know who or where. The Outsider at the Mines, the teacher, you remember, she told it to her students and one of them told it to me. It just came to mind.”

  “Mmh, morbid,” Tazmin Duvvar said. “Sounds to me like you need a hot meal and a night’s sleep. Let your liver sweeten.”

  “How long you been back?”

  “I got here yesterday morning. I wasn’t ferrying yips about like you, cousin. One look at the looting there at the Palace and I thought hard times are coming and I better make sure we’ve got the stuff to ride ’em out, that it didn’t walk out in some stranger’s pouch.”

  “You see Herk?”

  “Hard to miss. Wonder who did it?”

  Karrel Goza stretched, yawned. “One thing I know, half Inci’s going to claim they were in on it. Any hot water?”

  “Started the boilers this morning. Bath?”

  “Yeh. I cut the bastard down, I didn’t like seeing him there. Dumped him in the Fekkri Court. I need to wash him off me.”

  Tazmin Duvvar looked up at the clouds, ignoring another brief flurry of rain. “Somebody’s going to have to do something about him if the wind keeps on in this direction; another day or two and we’ll be smelling him.” He moved away from the pillar and followed Karrel Goza around the house. “What’s happening in Gilisim? Did they ever find Old Pittipat or the Grand Sech?”

  “Not yet. What’s happening?” Karrel Goza stripped off his jacket and began undoing the fastenings on his shirt. “More of everything you saw before you cut out. More looting, more dead. People wandering around like they’re walking in their sleep. We haven’t begun to sort out who’s what and where they belong, let alone identified the dead. The best guess I heard is as much as a third of us is dead somewhere around Gilisim. It’s going to be a job, getting them buried. Elmas Ofka, her isyas and the Council from the Mines, they’ve got together with vips from the west coast and up from Guneywhiyk. Trying to work out how to organize things now there aren’t any more Huvved and the slave techs are gone, most of them. It’s a mess, Taz. Every one of them has his own idea how to run things. Bless the Prophet, Elli smoothes them down and gets them to start making sense. Not that she’s any saint herself; we’re going to have to watch and make sure she doesn’t take up where Tra Yarta left off.” He pulled open the door to the bathhouse, went in.

  Tazmin Duvvar lit the lamps while Karrel Goza started the water running and finished stripping, then he came back and settled on the towel bench, his feet up on the coping about the tub. “You figure we going to get any say at all?”

  Karrel Goza slid into the water, shivering as the heat closed round him. He settled his head on the neckrack, closed his eyes. “I’ve been thinking about that,” he said. “What we get, we’ll have to take. I did some talking with young Hayal Halak, him from gul Brindar. One of that woman’s students, he was the one who told me the desolation/peace quote. He went inklin for a while before he came to the Mines, he loves the Great Families about as much as he loves Huvved. He picked up some ideas from that woman that sound good, the Greats won’t like ’em, the Ommars either. I think Elli’s going to back him; a lot of them off the Sea Farms might too, they don’t want to see the Greats getting a stranglehold on trade. Isn’t going to be easy. Toss me the soap, eh?”

  “Here. Way things are, looks to me like whoever’s ready first is the one who’s gonna take it. Hay and his bunch got their shots planned?”

  Karrel Goza soaped the washcloth, scrubbed at his arm. “Planned is one thing, doing is something else.” He balanced an ankle on his knee, began washing his toes. “We’ve got numbers on our side. The Greats don’t smell very sweet to a lot of people, they kissed too much Huvved ass. We could lose it, though, if Brindars won’t talk to Incers and Incers won’t talk to Samlikkaners, and nobody talks to grasslanders, you know how it goes. You, me, the rest of them who took the Warmaster, we’ve got credit we’re going to have to spend.” He switched feet and stopped talking.

  Tazmin Duvvar thought that over, then he nodded. “You’ll have to give me the primer version,” he said. “I was never much good at the books, but I tell you this, I can talk a tickler into giving it away free, sit me in a tavern and let me chat her up. Lot of folk out there need that primer same as me. I can get them to give it a hearing. Can’t ask for more.”

  Karrel Goza splashed water over his face and hair, then climbed from the tub. “Throw me one of those towels you’re sitting on, eh?” He caught it and began rubbing at his hair. “I didn’t get out much. You see any of ours in Gilisim?”

  “Liv
ing or dead?”

  “Ahhh… both.” He wrapped the towel around him. “Come with me while I get some clean clothes.”

  “Why not. I’ve got to get back to feeding the stock, but they can wait a bit, they’re not as hungry as they were.” He picked up one of the lamps: “Goza Ommar’s dead.” He touched Karrel Goza’s shoulder, patted it lightly, then pushed the door open. “Melter, not much of her left but I knew it was her and I told the deadwagon who she was. We’ll have to go through the back, I’ve got the other doors locked. Duvvar Ommar next to her, same thing.”

  “Prophet!”

  “Yeh. Melter. Left her face alone. Told them about her too.” He held the door open for Karrel Goza, went round him and up the back stairs, holding the lamp high to light the dark narrow enclosure, glancing over his shoulder from time to time, talking while he climbed. “Ollanin, dead, all three, Goza, Duvvar, Memeli. Saw my sister Avy and the Memeli Ommar. Alive.” He waited on the landing, then went along the hallway to the corner room Karrel Goza had lived in from the time he got his license to fly. “They’d corralled a clutch of youngsters, had them out collecting our folk; I expect most of those still alive will be back here by tomorrow noon.” He stepped aside and let Karrel Goza work the pinlock and open the door, then followed him into the room and set the lamp on a table by the bed. “Ylazar Falyan showed up at Sirgыn Bol yesterday with a couple of pilots from the Mines; like us, Prophet be praised, they missed out on the Surge.” He perched on a ladderback chair, folded his arms on the top splat and rested his chin on them.

  “He looked around for mechanics, found me settling in here, hired me to go over a couple of the airships. Worked on the best till about midnight yesterday. He says he’s going to use them ferrying Incers home.”

  Karrel Goza looked up from his trouser laces. “I left Windskimmer at one of Sirgыn’s masts, I didn’t see anyone there.”

  “Took off for Gilisim this morning. Must’ve left before you got here.”

  “Ah.” He went poking through his drawers hunting for a clean shirt, found one and shook it out, then loosened the laces and pulled it over his head. “Big of him.”

  “Yeh. He’s praying real hard no one senior shows up and in the meantime making points for himself so he can keep his hold even if one does. I expect he’ll make it, he had the backbone to get out and over to the Mines when Herk started tightening down.”

  “Hard to say.” He padded to the dresser, peered at himself in the mirror.

  “Getting old, eh?”

  “Twice as old as I look and that’s older than time.”

  “You and Lirrit Ofka still going to wed?”

  “Soon’s we get a moment.” He dragged a comb through his hair; the damp had tightened the curls into knots that made him swear as he worked them loose.

  “Marrying out or she coming in?”

  “I don’t know. Who knows anything these days. We decided to see how things shape up before we jump one way or the other.” He looked over his shoulder at Tazmin Duvvar. “Might not be any more marrying in or out.”

  “Things going to change that much?”

  “You don’t sound very happy about it.”

  “Well, everyone likes to be comfortable and change is always full of burrs and bites.”

  “You really want to go back to the way it was?”

  “Nuh. Yeh. I don’t know. I want it to be comfortable like it was. I want to know what’s going to be happening tomorrow and a week from tomorrow and tomorrow next year. Yeh, I know better, but you’d better remember too, Kar, there’s a lot and a lot out there like me in those that’re still alive. Don’t get too fancy for us, eh?”

  Karrel Goza dropped on the bed beside the shoestool, set his foot on it and bent over to put on his sandals. “You feeding the animals,” he said. “What else needs doing?”

  “Just about everything, I didn’t have time yesterday or this morning for much but meals for me and the fourfoots. Looks like our folk dropped whatever they were doing where they were doing it and took off when the impulse hit.”

  Karrel Goza switched feet. “Mess?”

  “Could be worse. Left the fires going, the place could’ve burned down. Prophet’s hand on us, it didn’t, they just went out when the coal was gone.”

  Karrel Goza stood. He yawned, moved his shoulders, clasped his hands behind his head and stretched; the shirt tail he hadn’t bothered tucking in lifted in the cold draft coming through the door. He shivered, found an old sweater and pulled it on. “Outside first. Starting to feel like snow.”

  “Yeh. How long you going to be here?”

  “Elli wants me back by tomorrow.” He waited till Tazmin Duvvar was outside with the lamp, then he pulled the door shut and reset the lock. “She says the serious fights should be starting about then and she’ll need all the backing she can get.” He let Tazmin Duvvar go ahead with the light. “You said you thought most of our folk will be here by tomorrow?”

  “Laza said he’d bring them, favor to me if I’d work without pay since he’s short of coin. You want me along?”

  “Yeh. If you’re going to be persuading people to back us, you ought to know what you’re talking about.”

  2

  The room was filled with slow moving shadows from the dying fire and wandering warm drafts mellow with the smell of the mulled cider steaming on the hearth.

  The long window was closed but unshuttered, its embrasure was padded on the bottom and sides to make a comfortable windowseat; it had thick yunkhide tacked over the padding, rubbed to a deep glow by decades of soaping and sitting. Karrel Goza was stretched out in the window, sipping at a mug of cider, listening to the rain drum against the glass. Taz was right, he thought, morbid doesn’t make it. He was exhausted, sore and deeply content. The emptiness that was desolation in the morning now seemed to vibrate with possibility. An emptiness waiting, wanting to be filled. He sipped at the cider and thought about that a while and after a while he stopped thinking altogether. Tomorrow could wait until the sun rose. Now was hot cider, red fire and the steady beat of the rain.

  XVI

  1. 265 days std. from home and heading back.

  In the Split.

  I went out to the Belt and brought Slancy back, put her down on the plateau, then we started loading. I got the ex’s together and made my speech about how rough it was going to be riding in the hold for some three months while we were insplitting to Helvetia. I told them if they wanted to miss out on that, I’d take their names instead of them. They could wait for a more comfortable ride; I’d leave them shelters and a miniskip so they could get around. I didn’t want unhappy passengers; taking that many people I knew shitall about into Slancy made me very nervous; being trashed and rescued didn’t turn any of them into angels. I told them the food was going to be ship-basic which they’d get sick of very fast; there wouldn’t be water or any other way of taking a bath, so they’d be pretty ripe when they walked out of the hold; most of all, life was going to be very very boring. Insplitting was bad enough when you had something to keep you busy. Sitting around and staring at the hold walls was something else. I didn’t get a single taker; they wanted out of there, the sooner the better.

  A few of them I knew something about, I brought up front. Stowed them in the crew cabins so I’d have some shooters back of me if there was trouble. Aslan and Adelaar, of course. N’Ceegh and his boy, along with the weapons he skipped over to the Mines to collect which I impounded for the duration, not that I didn’t trust him, he and Pels got on like long lost brothers, I just didn’t want that much firepower wandering around loose. Churri the Bard and his girlfriend; both of them were oldtime survivors, besides I kind of enjoyed baiting Adelaar. The Omperiannas; Kumari had a passion for music of all kinds, that’s why them. The rest brought the shelters in and set them up in the hold, got them organized in sectors like they were out under the trees, improvised screens for privacy areas; they worked almost like they were ’droids with the pattern imprinted. It was a smooth
loading, surprised me a little till I thought about it. These weren’t your average thumb-fingered boneheads, Bolodo skimmed cream for them.

  Two hundred sixty-five days std. out of Telffer, according to ship’s log, we lifted off Tairanna and headed for the Limit.

  2

  As soon as we dived, Pels activated the squirtlink, sent the squeal to ti Vnok’s receptor, giving him the passpartout so he could get hold of the data packet, letting him know we had Leda Zag and Ilvinin Taivas so he could tell whoever was interested and stir us up some heavy support. The squeal was too short to trigger ears and even if someone got lucky, there were no tags on it to identify either end. The cover was down, I hoped it’d be thick enough to turn the knives waiting for us.

  3

  The trip went better than I expected.

  Adelaar disappeared into Slancy’s workshop with my home stats to get a start on redoing its security. This time I made sure Kinok kept ves tentacles out of her business. I swept the shop and removed all suspect foliage; like most of us, when it comes to someone outside the family, ves ethics get a bit shaky. Ethics aside, pulling her string about Churri was one thing, she got nasty on the verbal end and gave me a good flaying when she felt like it, but on the business end, she was a wall; she knew what she wanted and what she didn’t and no jabs would shift her; if she didn’t want snoops watching her work, that’s what she intended to get or she just might decide to ditch that part of the deal and more than ever I wanted her touch dressing up my house. Funny, having lived so long and semi-voluntarily acquired a body and with it a definite end to that life, I was beginning to appreciate the fragility of… well, everything.