Liavek 8

by Will Shetterly

  Adjusting his nose, which had fallen to one side, and refusing to be drawn further into a conversation that consisted of old jokes, the boy walked in.

  The Tichenese wizard's house consisted of one long hall. There were many doors off it and they were all opening and shutting with a fluttering movement that the hoy realized was faint laughter. He could see no rooms beyond them, just brick walls. It was, though he did not know it, the cheapest kind of housing on Wizard's Row. Frost could afford no better. He was not a mighty wizard, nor was he likely to become one, but then my Supremacies, what Tichenese can?

  "May … I … help … you?" came a sepulchral voice.

  "Get it?" the front door cried out again and the fluttering laughter from the other doors flamed up for a moment before lapsing into silence.

  "May I help you?" This time the voice was normal.

  The boy turned toward the sound and there was Frost. Typical of his race, he was dark as oak bark with hair just as rough. The boy had seen many such in the inn.

  "Are you the magician?" he asked, his voice squeaking on the final syllable like a Tichenese woman in labor.

  "We prefer the term wizard."

  "Are you the wizard?"

  "I am.

  "A-jarrrrrrrr," tried the door one last time.

  The wizard waved his hand dismissingly and the door slammed shut. "And what do you want of me?"

  "I wish to kill a certain count."

  Now if the wizard had not been Tichenese and new to the Row, he would have known at once that there was but one count worth killing. And that one count to be avoided at all costs. But he was, my Preeminencies, very new. And very Tichenese, which is to say he reveled more in what he did not know than in what he did.

  "That should not be so difficult. How will you pay me?"

  The boy had been pondering that very question all the way to Wizard's Row, scratching up under the silver nose where scabs and stitches itched in equal measure. It was as he walked, between one itch and the next, that he had realized the extent of his wealth and determined that should his plan succeed, he would work hard never to be poor again.

  "I will give you this silver nose," he said. "And I will also give you my good right arm for a year."

  "What earthly use have I for a severed arm?" puzzled the wizard out loud. The Tichenese are quite literal. He must have been a sore burden to his door.

  "I mean, sir, that I will work for you for a year."

  "I have a door already," said Frost. "But …" He reached out toward the boy's face. "The silver nose intrigues me. Were you born that way?"

  The hall doors fluttered briefly.

  "When is a nose not a nose?" asked the front door. When no one answered, it shouted, "When it comes to the bill!"

  The wizard made a sour face and waved his hand. The door turned into a curtain and blew about in a desultory wind.

  "Not born with it," replied the boy. "That was the Count's doing."

  So they struck a bargain and the boy went back noseless to the inn where, at the wizard's instructions, he carefully dug the bullet out of the hearth. Frost did know about correspondences and attractions, for those, as you know, my Ascendencies, are the very first lessons any real wizard learns.

  The boy also talked his way back into the innkeeper's good graces by the simple expedient of groveling. And having his wages cut in half. And though the hole in his face was grotesque (he tried fashioning a nose out of a different substance daily), it was no more grotesque than some of the inn's regular customers. One-eyed Jok, for example, or Half-an-ear Ema, or the redoubtable Wil of the Quarter Leg.

  So there they all were, three days after Restoration Eve, the inn fairly empty and the innkeeper asleep in a chair by the hearth. The dishboy, his nose this day fashioned out of the stub of a cheroot that had the added attraction of smoking gently as he worked, cleaned the pots and pans. Kaloo, back in her ordinary inn clothes, polished the silver, one spoon short.

  The door was summarily flung open and in stomped Dashif "Kaloo," he chortled in his joy, "I have good news."

  He was immaculate in a white ruffled shirt that smelled of sweet closet herbs. His trews were of wine-colored velvet. His doublet matched the trews. though threaded through with gold. As ever, his brace of pistols was snugged into the waistband of his trousers and there was—though none but Kaloo knew of it—a finely honed knife down in his right boot. It made walking the more difficult thereby, but he was never without that particular blade.

  It was, my Extremities, the moment of truth.

  Realizing who had come in, the dishboy picked up a certain bottle that contained the bullet he had dug from the hearth, and walked out of the kitchen. He held the bottle before him like a gun.

  Dashif, who had recently given up the weed, smelled the smoldering cheroot and turned to take a deep draught of it with his own quivering nose.

  It was his first and his final mistake.

  The charmed bullet burst out of the bottle and sped toward the place where it had last been lodged—Dashif's left pistol. Said pistol was snugged, as I have said, in the waistband of his pants.

  Ah, my Benevolencies, your imaginations leap before my simple tale. I am sure you have guessed the start of it. But not, I warrant, its ending.

  The bullet tore through that part of the Count's anatomy of which I have been too modest but to allude before settling itself in the barrel of his gun.

  In agony, Dashif pulled out both pistols and fired off a round each.

  He hit the dishboy's cheroot with one shot, with the other spread the boy's legs. Kaloo caught first her father, then her erstwhile lover, and lay them each before the hearth. Then she ran for the local leech.

  The dishboy did not die, though the Count did. Not of the wound, which was famous but not fatal. Many jokes were told of it, and not a few by the wizard's door. No, Dashif died of mortification after the Zhir wrote of him in their broadsides, one of which found its way into his hands:

  The Count counts not on gun or pen,

  Who once counted great among mortal men.

  Kaloo inherited both the inn and a large portion of the Count's estates, which was the good news Dashif had been bringing her. She immediately married the dishboy, for though she had only found him handsome before, without his nose she found him exciting. She made him remove his prosthesis when they made love, hanging it from a special nail above their bed.

  As for the Tichenese wizard, my Tremendousies, he wore the silver nose at the costume party he gave every Beggar's Night from then on. But he never—no never—learned to laugh at the jokes of his door.

  "Festival Day: Catechism" by John M. Ford

  Ninepins that thunder when bowling them down,

  Eight horses driving the nobles to town,

  Seven-starred oaths and a feeble excuse,

  Six-spotted dice always rolling a deuce,

  Five-finger exercise hitching your pants,

  Four-footed clumsiness trying to dance,

  Three shots of rum and a headful of foam,

  Two City Guards come to usher you home,

  One resolution no more to get tight—

  Count off the hours of Festival Night.

  "Six Days Outside the Year" by Will Shetterly

  Divination Day

  IN THE MIDDLE of a cool and sunny morning, on a palace balcony high above the noise and bustle of the harbor of Ka Zhir, Prince Jeng spooned iced cream with hazelnuts from a yellow porcelain bowl. "How is my father?"

  "He woke with a toothache a few minutes after midnight." The old slave's wrists were enclosed in gold manacles to display his position and his worth. A hand's length of iron chain dangled freely from each manacle to show that Advisor L'Vos could be bound again. "The dentist removed the tooth."

  Jeng clicked his tongue against the roof of his mouth before taking another bite of the sweet cream. "Though his pain ends, his bite is weakened. A good sign on Divination Day, or a bad?"

  L'Vos shrugged. "He says he is an
enlightened despot. To believe that the events of one day may shape the course of the next four years is foolish."

  "My father and I are remarkably alike." Jeng's voice changed subtly. "Does he suspect?"

  "The King always suspects. His recent illness only reduces his ability to act on his suspicions."

  "And he still favors my cousin."

  "Your cousin ended the island revolts—"

  Jeng grunted and waved his hand for silence. The grunt must have sufficed; the Prince remembered too late that while Advisor L'Vos's vision encompassed the future of nations, his eyes had been replaced with black marbles after an attempt to escape.

  Jeng turned away from the sightless gaze. Far below, sailors and slaves and officers and overseers worked within view of the palace of King Thelm of Ka Zhir, every Zhir's overlord. A steam-driven cart rolled along one pier, bringing bags of coffee and sugar to a freeladen ship that flew Liavek's blue pennant from its highest mast. "Twenty-three years of peace," Jeng said, not caring whether L'Vos understood what that meant to him. Twenty-three years since Liavek's navy had destroyed Ka Zhir's at the Battle of Gold Harbor. "My cousin would reinforce our friendship with Liavek. More fool he."

  Jeng licked his spoon clean, tasting sweet cream and cold silver, and turned back to L'Vos. "What does the King think I'm doing?"

  "What you wished. The wood is for a summer house. A careless messenger allowed a letter with architectural plans to be seen by a spy; I've been assured that the house would be beautiful, should you decide to build it. The cloth is for tents to be erected there, for a festival when you surprise the King with the gift of the house. Your Thunder Fist Marines have been brought inland for training on unfamiliar ground, and will display their new skills to His Majesty in the spring, undoubtedly when you give him the palace."

  "And the water-gas manufactory?"

  "I think he thinks your magicians seek to build a new sort of bomb, and your hired Tichenese have come to work with them."

  Jeng laughed, then placed another spoonful of iced cream on his tongue. The dessert was very good; he would try it with mango this evening. The dockworkers scurried below. Could they suspect that Ka Zhir's harbor would, within a few years, no longer be the only mouth of a hungry nation, that the eldest surviving son of King Thelm had begun to wrest the nation's dependence from the untrustworthy clutch of the sea?

  Jeng turned from the palace window. "The King thinks these are all parts of a gift from a loyal son."

  "Yes, Prince Jeng."

  "But he believes the loyal son is preparing a revolution."

  "Suspects. None of your plans occur near the sea. You cannot hold the capital without the navy, and the navy is loyal. He sees the beginnings of a pattern and waits to know its final shape." The old man paused, then added calmly, "His assassins wait, too."

  "If I feared the Black Cord, I would not be worthy of my father. How do the tests go?"

  "Very well. If the winds permit—"

  "The winds will permit. Haven't my magicians ensured that the winds will permit?"

  "Of course."

  "Good." Prince Jeng's thoughts were no longer on his plans, for there was nothing more for him to do. His part had ended when he ordered it begun. His people would succeed, and he would be his father's favorite by the end of Grand Festival Week. Perhaps three bites of the cream and nuts remained. He could taste each, thick and cool and sweet in his mouth. "Hold out your hands."

  The iron chains rattled as L'Vos obeyed. Jeng set the porcelain bowl into the slave's palms. "Eat." The Prince's voice held no hint of his smile as L'Vos fumbled for the spoon, then brought a dollop of cream and hazelnuts into his mouth.

  "It's good," L'Vos said, with no more feeling than the Prince.

  Jeng laughed. "My dessert," he announced, rewarding L'Vos with the knowledge that he had not been poisoned. "You may finish it."

  "Thank you."

  Jeng looked up at the King's balcony. "What will my father think," he asked, "when I give him Liavek?"

  •

  Across the Sea of Luck in the Canal District of the city of Liavek, beside the steps to a gray windowless brick building, a single blue flower of Worrynot grew in a small terracotta pot. The presence of the contraceptive plant was the only suggestion of the nature of the business practiced behind the bland face of the house named Discretion.

  A young man with plain brass bracelets on each wrist drew the bell chain. After a moment, the door opened, admitting him from a cool and sunny street that smelled of fish and salt and hickory smoke and a distant baker's fresh bread, into a warm and dark greeting room that smelled of frankincense smoke and jasmine perfume. A slender woman in black silk trousers and blouse touched one finger to her forehead in a mockingly affectionate greeting. "I would not have expected you today, Master Magician."

  He did not know if she knew his name; he had not cared to learn hers. She always addressed him with the same amusement, as though they knew each other's weaknesses. Perhaps they did: she served Discretion, and he visited it.

  "Oh?" he said. "No one spends Divination Day here, hoping twenty-four hours will guarantee four years of pleasure?"

  The woman laughed, the sounds of her amusement surprisingly husky from her narrow chest. "Not one. The superstitious fear a day within these walls will ensure the next four years' pleasures all bear an exorbitant price." She indicated a door carved with scenes of the Kil making love and war beneath the sea, which led to a spacious sitting room with thick carpets and low couches. "Are you superstitious, Master Magician?"

  "I do not need to be."

  She raised an eyebrow. He had not meant to brag, and he did not care to think about what he had truly meant. "Aychiar," he requested.

  "No one is expected to be available today." The woman, opening a low rosewood cabinet to reveal cloudy bottles filled with liquids and powders, reached for an amber Hrothvekan wine that he had drunk on his last visit to the house.

  He shook his head. "Aychiar is here?"

  "I could see." She stepped toward the hall.

  "I would appreciate it." When the woman glanced over her shoulder, he set a stack of gold ten-levar pieces on a delicate mahogany tea table.

  He could not tell if she counted the coins in that glance, but her smile became, if anything, more cruel or, perhaps, more pitying. "I suspect he is in," she said. "Will you wait in the sea room?"

  "Of course." He knew the way and went, wondering only if she had left him alone as an act of trust or of kindness, or if the House was so very shorthanded on the first day of Grand Festival Week.

  The sea room was painted in pale blues and aquamarines. The beams of the ceiling were bare cypress, and the floor had been sprinkled with white sand. Two oil lamps burned in niches carved into either wall. The oil smelled of cinnamon. The bed was a thick mattress covered with sheets the color of hyacinths or bruises.

  He waited for several minutes, standing motionless in the center of the room, telling himself to leave the House and making no effort to do so. When the door opened, a bare-chested youth in loose blue trousers entered. The boy's expression might have been boredom, or he might have just woken. His hair was a mat of black braids; his skin was as pale as a Farlander's or a dead man's. A pack of tattooed cats raced up his left arm and around his thin shoulders. "You," he said. It might have been the boy's usual greeting, and not a sign of recognition.

  The man opened his robe, letting it fall. He kicked it aside with a sandaled foot. Then he kicked off the sandals and waited, wearing nothing but a black silk loincloth.

  "What this time?" the boy said.

  The man could not make himself answer. Far away, in another room or in another world, someone plucked lazily at a cittern, spilling notes at the farthest edge of the man's hearing.

  The boy demanded, "What?"

  The man lifted his chin, a tiny beckoning gesture.

  The boy, smiling, reached into a fold of his baggy trousers and withdrew a black pearl-handled flick-knife banded in bu
rnished steel. When his wrist twitched, the knife opened as quietly as a book, its blade the length of a human hand. The boy crouched, the flick-knife low before him, his body twisted away in a fighter's stance, and smiled again and stood erect.

  The man nodded.

  The tip of the knife cut an inch into the man's left shoulder and separated skin and muscle in a diagonal line from his collarbone to a point near his navel. In spite of his resolve, the man grunted. He and the boy looked at the wound, watching flesh part like butchered meat. Naked bone glistened for the instant before blood filled the cut.

  The distant cittern played the first seven notes of "Rag Woman's Luck," then repeated them.

  "I wouldn't do this on Divination Day," the boy said.

  "The advice is a little late."

  The boy shrugged.

  "We earn our luck," the man answered, thinking the words sounded true and not sure what he meant by them.

  The boy nodded and lifted the knife. "How much?"

  "Until I fall and cannot stand."

  The knife leaped out, a kiss that traveled from the man's right cheek to his chin, slicing the corner of his lips in its passing. "And then?"

  The man tasted his blood. Speaking heightened the pain, so he enunciated extravagantly. He tapped the skin above his heart. "Kill me."

  The cittern notes raced each other, a mountain folk reel played for unseen, insane dancers.

  Birth Day

  Rangzha Fon did not enjoy intrigue. He enjoyed comfort, and he enjoyed wealth (for that was the best way to ensure continued comfort as a citizen of Ka Zhir). He enjoyed living in lands far from King Thelm's court (for that was the best way to ensure continued wealth as a citizen of Ka Zhir). If Rangzha Fon's idea of comfort had not included the amenities of a prosperous city, he would have sought a post as an ambassador to a trading town like Gold Harbor, where Zhir diplomacy was a matter of blatant threats and more blatant bribes, or to the inland matriarchy of Ombaya, where Zhir diplomacy was politely ignored. But Rangzha Fon's idea of comfort included fine restaurants, fine theaters, fine magicians, and fine courtesans, so he had come as the Zhir ambassador to Liavek in the hope that its uneasy peace with Ka Zhir would endure.