by Michael Shea
“Well,” Hex murmured, looking down the length of the narrow town that fell away seaward. “At least it looks like the plan is well devised.”
The undulating rooftops of Polypolis formed a scaly, moon-silvered finger that ended in a claw—the landspit that hooked out into the tar-black sea. The wall ran straight down its southern side and even out along the landspit for a bit—for the killing-slope lay cheek by jowl with Polypolis, immediately beyond the wall. Side by side both slope and town ran upland, inland, to end at the skirts of the same tangled range of hills.
“Yes,” Sarf whispered, after a moment. “A few archers can keep the whole wall clear.”
Hex nodded, mentally rehearsing the rest. Their two ships lay in the little harbour within the landspit’s curve—he could just see their masts from where he stood. The town itself would screen them from offshore eyes should Snolp’s ships come in view prematurely next morning. Meanwhile the town’s few craft were in their control, so that anyone fleeing the place would have to go inland and through the hills. By that route it was a full day’s journey to the next town whence the peelers might be alerted, and that posed no threat. Let them only get their fodder to the slope and chained down by sun-up, and the rest of the town could fly en masse with the alarm for all it would matter.
Sarf’s touch on his arm made him start, and when he turned he flinched again at the leather-snouted monster he confronted. Sarf tapped the muzzle he was wearing. With a vexed nod, Hex donned his own. They had soaked them in seawater on disembarking, and the herb filling the vented pouches now gave off a bitter exhalation, a cold, scorched reek that made his whole face feel numb. Of course, if he went in unprotected by this effluvium, his whole body would shortly be narcotized by the slotherweed smoke that now filled the lodge. Sarf had the sash up high, and was climbing through. Hex hoisted the smokepot and helped get it inside. Then he grasped the sill and hauled himself over it.
He made more noise than Sarf had. This surprised him, for his spirit felt taut, gathered for action, athletic. Abashed, he crouched with Sarf, and they waited for any noise or light to answer his echoes from the smoky dark. Far, shuttered windows sketched by leaks of moonlight showed them a big room—the whole floor, it seemed. The tables of a refectory filled half of it, and a small performing dais much of the rest. Beside this rose a staircase to the upper floors, and up these stairs thronged the smokeshapes, bent on their soundless attack. The pair watched them rise and thin, and then carried the smokepot to the foot of the stairs. Now Hex worked the bellows while Sarf climbed up to the hose’s limit, and directed the fumes towards the second floor.
As he did so he turned his face away from the streaming hose—and seemed to Hex a high-set gargoyle whose hideous, mouthless scowl presided over this bloody enterprise of theirs. To shake off this lurid fantasy he signalled Sarf to come down and help him take the smokepot higher. At the landing was a short stem of hall with a door on each side, which then branched left. They crept to the turning—the solid joinery silent as stone underfoot—and looked down a longer corridor, with two more doors on either side.
Sarf motioned vigorous pumping and Hex nodded. As Hex applied the bellows with steady vigour, Sarf moved left and right, packing both halls with such smokes as would quickly paralyse anyone who emerged from one of the rooms. When this was done, Sarf laid down the hose and gingerly opened the first door.
An empty bedroom. He left it open, went to the next room, found it likewise empty, treated it the same. Hex for his part pushed farther open a door already ajar—one of the two in the short hall, Empty. He turned to the other. Even as he touched the latch he heard a snore within. He brought up the hose. Sarf, who had found the other rooms empty, plied the bellows. Hex pressed the nozzle to the underdoor gap and for five minutes they prepared the air within. Then Hex dared the latch.
The door gaped in on a misty chamber, its floor half covered by an avalanche of moonlight admitted through an unshuttered casement. A large bed with a carven headboard stood in the shadowed corner, its coverlet abulge with two snoring occupants. Their deep sleep heartened the invaders. Briskly they brought the pot nearer, saturated the bed with smoke. Hex and Sarf then withdrew to the hall.
“I’ll check upstairs,” Sarf whispered. “Get some chain on them.”
Hex nodded. Everything was taking on an ease that made him wonder if they were themselves drugged by leakage through their muzzles. Why should the third floor need less precaution than this one? But Sarf stole up the next flight without bothering with the smokepot and Hex himself, feeling light as a dancer, returned to the bedside. With a key he began unfastening and unwinding the manacles wrapped around his waist. He peeled back the coverlet. Two men slept on their sides, knees bent, snugly paralleled like two spoons. The one behind spoke a shapeless syllable in his sleep, his bearded chin stabbing the neck of his bedmate—a clean-shaven and somewhat plumper man who stirred, but did not wake. The bearded one’s arm was draped over the other’s shoulder, and their two right hands lay together. Convenient, Hex decided. With a short chain, he linked the two wrists. Once the other two were linked the pair would be locked in single-file. Their skin felt cool and faintly clammy, and their faces sweated. Perhaps they were getting more smoke than needful. He turned to open the window and a dark form lunged towards him.
He identified the returning Sarf long moments before his pulse rate had settled again. The top floor was empty. Sarf closed the smokepot’s vents and Hex opened the window. They locked collars round both sleepers’ necks and combined some shorter shackles to make three feet of lead-chain for each. They paused.
“Well,” Hex said, his voice unguarded for the first time, “we’ll have to get their left arms free.” His voice didn’t wake them. Neither did the mild mauling involved in hauling their left arms out so they could be linked.
“They’re really out,” Sarf said. “If they weren’t snoring so loud I’d think they were dead. Let’s use the door to fan the room.”
Soon the smoke was all but gone, but the shackled pair still snored. “Let’s get some shoes and leggings on them as long as we’re waiting,” Hex offered.
The notion, though sound, was faintly preposterous, and they laughed. Clothes lay on the floor by the bed. Dressing the two men was relievingly ludicrous and at the same time seemed to make their victims more properly theirs. Hex wrestled a pair of leathern pantaloons—rather outlandishly cut, in his opinion—up the slack, hairy legs of the bearded one. Chuckling, he told Sarf:
“ ‘And there did nod, upon that vine, A pair of blossoms, tightly twined.’ Eh? You recall the Lay of Bobol? Oh, I forgot—you’re a philistine.”
“Here, these must be his half-boots.”
“Yes. What a difference in foot-size, yet they look almost of a height.”
“Mmm. We’re lucky they’re both slight, in case we have to drag them.”
“Listen, those collars will compel full cooperation. Besides, why should they fight us and be hurt? They’re only going to detention till they’re ransomed.” This was the lie to be told all the abductees to procure their silent compliance in their transport, and Hex told it without looking up, because he had just felt a tension enter the leg he’d clothed. He looked up into the bearded man’s open eyes. They were startlingly awake and conveyed to Hex a distinct impression of character, shadowed though the man’s face was. There was ambition, effrontery, a sharp self-interest in that candid stare. There was also in the beard—spade-shaped, glossy with brushing, exquisitely trimmed—something self-coddling and finicky. Here was arrogance and timidity conjoined, and all this struck Hex instantly, so intimate had their doings made him with this stranger. He drew his sword and touched it to skin just below the hollow of the man’s throat.
“Good evening,” he said. “You are our prisoners.” His gesture was smooth. The sword point dented the throatskin with just the perfect tension—steel under firm command. His voice, masked by his muzzle, had an almost amiable remoteness—a calm anonymity tha
t carried conviction. The man blinked. His bedmate began to stir—little paddling movements as though he were swimming up to consciousness. His eyes came open, though they were still glazed. In a child’s voice rusty with sleep he asked:
“Bi-Bi?”
Unthinkingly Bi-Bi laid one hand on his bedmate’s head, then looked startled by the click of chain this made.
“What do you want with us?”
Sarf answered, and Hex was pleased with how neutral and unalterable the muzzle made the words sound.
“You’re to be detained at a camp we have arranged in the hills, and when Snolp pays your ransom, you will be freed. If you cooperate and come quietly you’ll be treated well—sheltered and amply fed. If you resist we’ll cut you. Get up now, and if you have anything like cloaks tell us where they are.”
“But we have none here, we slipped away from the Hall you see to be alone. We’re completely unprepared to go out like this.” In his ardour to be believed he half sat up. Hex held the blade firm and cut the man over the collarbone. He fell back with a grunt, and looked at the two invaders, his eyes alert now.
“Tell me just one thing,” he said. Hex saw he had been right—this Bi-Bi was very nervy. Though lying obediently flat beneath the swordpoint he was talking fast and with brio. “Are you or aren’t you working for Rasp? It is him, isn’t it? Because I’ll double whatever he’s paying you to do this to us. I’m paying him enough already and he tries to squeeze more out of us with terror tactics? Let me guess. You’re getting five hundred each, eh?”
“I will answer you,” Hex said solemnly. “We are not working for Rasp. We are working for ourselves. We are many. All your colleagues in the Hall are being taken too, at this very moment. Snolp will meet our demands because he must to get his harvest. So, good Bi-Bi. Take blankets if you have no cloaks, and cinch your boots. We must be moving.”
“My name is Oberg, if you don’t mind. Umber,”—this to his bedmate—“we have to get up now. Come on. Up.”
The smooth-faced Umber, once roused and clear-eyed, looked at the two invaders as through glass, or as though they were not quite in the same room. He hunched even nearer Oberg than their chains required, accepting his help with his blanket and the fastening of his boots. He was peevish and querulous about the awkwardness of these arrangements, but exclusively to Oberg, who absorbed his plaints with murmurs and deft, tending touches. Even while the latter’s acid eyes kept flicking measuringly at the pair, his hands with unthinking expertise neatly knotted—from behind—Umber’s improvised cape. Something in this almost maternal display seemed to irritate Sarf. Abruptly he took Umber’s lead-chain and marched the pair out, Hex stepping in behind to take the chain trailing from Oberg’s collar. As they moved down the stairs the symmetry of their procession was strange; it seemed the chains, combined with the bawdy link between them, had made a single entity of their captives: a two-headed creature leashed fore and aft, docilely shambling between its captors to its death. Yet at the same time Hex felt uneasy, as though it flowed to him through the connecting chain, the restless, weasely wit and brass of Oberg. In spite of himself he was impressed by the man’s swift adjustment to this nightmare of narcosis and abduction. Downstairs before the door Sarf paused and turned. Deliberately he reached his swordpoint towards the cut in Oberg’s neck, making the man lean back, jaw clenched.
“Now. Understand how serious your position is. While we’re in town you must be absolutely silent. The least noise will force us to kill you to save the rest of our profit, and we’ll slash your throats instantly.”
As they stepped into the street even the faint click of chains seemed proclamatory, and this moonlit act of piracy seemed stark, surreally blatant. Hex, seeing Sarf strip off his muzzle, did likewise, glad of the air, but feeling less well armed for coercion now that his face was visible. But they had their victims going now, still a little tranced by the sudden strangeness and moving obediently to the dream that had enveloped them.
They came abreast of the Hall—a yet more imposing structure than the Lodge—and passed between it and the wall. They saw movement up in a dormer window, and the gleam of a dark-lantern in a ground-floor casement. The air smelled of slotherweed and the whole big edifice sounded discreetly astir with the creaks and thuds of some whispery business within. Two crusaders posted in the shadows of the main door raised their hands in oddly formal salutation. None of them, it appeared, knew quite how to carry off the role of plunderer naturally, and the fact that they were actually bringing the business off, through sheer method and boldness, now filled Hex with admiration. In the basement of the Hall, he knew, the purchased felons from the satrapies of Pil the Unkillable were prisoned. To have them docile for the morning’s horror they slept drugged by the Slimshurians’ narcotic of choice even while the latter—above their heads—were being numbed by slotherweed and chained to take their places. Those convicts would waken—not to the killing-slope, not to monstrous death worming from the sun-gilt sea—but to freedom. Ah, the moral symmetry of it!
Keeping always in the shadow of the wall they commenced, at its end, upon the road into the hills. This road, after a mile and a half of meanders, would pass by a certain gully. Down this gully a path had been improvised which short-cut back seaward to the killing-slope. Strung out in their chained pairs and trios, the crusaders’ three score captives would let themselves be led quietly thus far into the hills, seduced by the fiction of detention and ransom. Once in the gully they would guess, but all along it were stationed crusaders with padded clubs, and as each few captives were snatched towards their true destination they could be stunned and hustled bodily along the last eighth mile if they set up an outcry. As Hex, trailing their prey into the first hill’s shadow, reviewed these arrangements, he found he could not repress an empathic qualm for the chained pair. He needed to revitalize his sense of their murderousness. He opened his mouth, but just then, Oberg spoke:
“We’re clear of town now—you’ll let me make a new offer, eh? There’s no harm in that, surely?” As he did not try to slow his pace, his captors said nothing. The road hugged a dark gorge. Ahead, it arched into visibility, wrapped across bleached hills pleated with blackness. Oberg’s words, as he continued, seemed to scatter amidst these hills, grow aimless and feeble the instant they were uttered on this—for Oberg—final path. “For you men to cash in, you don’t need Umber. Let him go, he’ll hide in the hills, and his lips are sealed till you’ve finished your business with Snolp—one Encourager less will make no difference when you’re holding the entire work force for ransom. Meanwhile take me back into town by a safe route I’ll show you and I’ll take you to where I’ve cashed my savings. Almost two thousand dhroons in specie—I pledge my life on it!”
“First tell us more about Encouraging,” Sarf said. His lazy intonation surprised Hex, till he recognized in it his own desire to revivify their captives’ crimes. “What part does it play in the harvesting operations?”
“Bi-Bi’s the youngest First Encourager we’ve ever had. He’s only twenty-eight!” Umber offered. It seemed as strange that the man should address his captors at all as that the breathy disclosure should have such a cosy ring, as if all else were well.
Hex replied in the tone of exaggerated interest used for flattering children, “So you’re both Encouragers! And what do you do in the harvest?”
“Well we sing the oratorio, of course! We sing from the wall on our own special stage above the orchestra, though I’ve always felt we’re just totally drowned out anyway because of all percussion and brass they give the orchestra. In any case Bi-Bi sings Shlubb the Primal in bass, and I sing under-tenor. I sing Slimb’s part where he addresses Shlubb the Primal.”
And, incredibly, in a sweet cool voice without constraint, Umber sang:
Advance, great Shlubb, both Dam and Sire
Of all that thrives ashore!
Ascend! Embrace what you desire
Of fruit your own fruit bore!
For all thy spawn are
but at pawn
Beneath the open air—
Some few reclaim of those who’ve ta’en
Their life from your deep lair!
The tune, while grave and hymnal, was decorously gay—such an air as might invite kings and dignitaries to some festival. The melody’s eerie dispersal through the gorge, the singer’s bizarre complacency—they were almost hypnotic.
“So,” Hex said, intending irony but his voice sounding mechanical, “you warble the Shlubbups on their way up the slope?”
“It sounds,” Sarf put in, managing a better sneer, “as if you’re far too prominent to be missing from the ransom list.”
“Not at all!” This from Oberg. As he spoke he squeezed Umber’s shoulder—a gentle turning off, as it were, of his lover’s guileless flow of words. “Umber’s right about our inaudibility. The orchestra itself, you see, does the real work—it gives the beasts their rhythm. The oratorio sung by the five Encouragers is a traditional element only—the eponymous Slimshurian’s first contact with the Shlubbups, that sort of thing. I’m not a native myself, but nowadays I can promise you it has as little consequence to most natives as it does to someone like me.”
Umber seemed about to make some denial of this theme of his inconsequence. Oberg squeezed his shoulders again, more peremptorily this time. “So we’re far from really functional to the harvest,” he finished. “That should be the only point as far as you gentlemen are concerned.”
