The Book of Kane (14 page)

Puriali savored his triumph. “You see, Kane, I know that you are no common assassin and adventurer, no matter how uncommon your abilities. I
know
who you are.”

The sorcerer gestured impressively. “Kane, son of Adam and born of Eve, you are within my power and my power alone. For centuries beyond counting you have followed your accursed fate, but after this night you shall follow only the dictates of my will. I have seen your destiny in the stars, and the astrological symbols of your nativity bind you powerless within the pentacle.”

“Most impressive,” Kane admitted. “Your work would do credit to a far older sorcerer whose wisdom would transcend this provincial backwater. You have committed only a few mistakes, but regrettably this is not an art in which one learns through experience.

“In time even the stars change,” Kane explained, casually stepping out of the pentacle, “and yours are not the constellations of my birth.”

Puriali shrank back against the tower wall, seeking it, vain for an avenue of escape.

“And it’s ironic that you hadn’t known Eve was only my step-mother,” Kane continued, reaching out for Puriali, “inasmuch as I rather suspect there’s some trace of my blood in your veins.

“Puriali, come with me.”

Tamaslei awoke from dreams of Josin to discover Kane seated beside her bed. It was not a pleasant prospect, and she clutched the fur robes protectively about her silkclad shoulders. Remembering the thin-bladed dagger sheathed just behind the headboard, she regained composure.

“What do you want, Kane?” Her voice was surprisingly level.

“Payment. I have completed my part of our bargain.”

Tamaslei turned up the wick of her bedside lamp, increasing its companionable glow to brightness that split the chamber into shadows. Her figure was supple beneath the translucent silk. “No doubt there is proof?” Tamaslei’s eyes were upon the large bag that Kane carried. Its leather folds seemed too flaccid to contain the evidences she expected.

Kane’s tone was formal, but held neither rancour nor scorn. “Tamaslei, I give these to you in accordance with our agreement.”

He took her hand and dropped several bright objects onto her palm.

Tamaslei’s first thought was that they were jewels, then she saw they were something more. They were four oblong sigils carved of some crystal resembling jet, approximatelythe size of the first joint of her thumb, unusually heavy for their size and curiously warm to the touch. Each bore a carving upon its flattened side, and each carved figure was different: a dragon, a spider, a serpent, and a scorpion.

“I’m not certain I understand the jest, Kane. I hired you to kill the Vareishei clan, and unless you have brought me their heads as proof that you have fulfilled our bargain, I insist upon awaiting news of their deaths before I give you payment.”

She had expected protest, but Kane’s voice was patient. “You did not ask me to kill the Vareishei clan; you said you wished to purchase their lives. You were most explicit.”

“Come to the point of your jest, Kane.”

“There is no jest. You made a contract to purchase four lives. I took four lives. You hold them in your hand: Wevnor, Ostervor, Sitilvon, Puriali.”

“Do you think me a fool!” Tamaslei slid closer to the hidden dagger.

Kane took the serpent-carven sigil from her hand and pressed it to her forehead. Tamaslei stiffened for or a moment, then flung herself away with a violent shudder.

“The secret is all but lost,” Kane said, “but I assumed you understood when you agreed to our contract, and I took from them their lives as I promised to do.”

“And what of their physical bodies?” Tamaslei no longer doubted.

Kane shrugged. “Lifeless carrion. Perhaps their followers were of a mind to burn their bodies upon a pyre of their stolen riches, perhaps they left them for the ravens. Their life-force remains imprisoned within these sigils.”

“And what shall I do with them?”

“Whatever you wish.”

“If I smash the sigils?”

“Their life-force would be released to reanimate their former flesh, such as may remain of it. However transient that experience might be, it cannot be a pleasant one.”

Tamaslei rose from her bed and seated herself at her dressing table. One by one she dropped each sigil into her onyx mortar, smashing brutally downward with its pestle. The crystals shattered under her determined blows, suddenly disintegrating into thousands of dull granules. The sound of their shattering was like a cry of anguish.

When she had finished, Tamaslei seemed to remembered Kane’s presence, like one recalling a long-ago dream. “And the coronet?” she asked, coming to herself.

Kane produced the crown of Harnsterm from the depths of his bag. “The Vareishei no longer had need of it.”

Tamaslei snatched it from his hand and gazed into her mirror. Her eyes glowed as she adjusted the crown upon her head.

“There remains the matter of payment,” Kane reminded her.

“Of course! And you shall find me more than generous.”

“I only demand payment as agreed upon. A game is pointless if one disregards its rules.”

Tamaslei unlocked the iron-bound door of her aumbry , as Kane held open his bag. One by one she drew them out: four bulging leather almoners, a name written in blood upon each heavy purse. One by one they disappeared into the black depths of Kane’s bag.

“I have kept these forty marks of gold in readiness for you, as promised,” Tamaslei explained. “I insist on paying you full value for this crown as well. However, I don’t have enough gold on hand to make fair payment. Tomorrow evening, when you call upon me. I shall have obtained the full payment you have earned.”

Tamaslei judged that by that time she could obtain half a dozen sufficiently competent and considerably less expensive assassins to lie in wait for Kane.

“The crown is yours to keep,” Kane said unexpectedly. “I rather think Josin would have wanted you to have it.”

He pointed toward the depths of the aumbry . “If you will just pull out the false nailheads immediately above and below the middle shelf at the left, that will release the lock on the false bottom. Hand me as payment what you find within, and this most interesting assignment will be completed.”

Tamaslei bit her lip in anger, wondering how Kane could know of the aumbry’s secret compartment. But he was not as clever as he thought, for the false bottom concealed nothing of real value—it was luck that Kane had not learned of the hidden space beneath the hearth.

To her surprise, her fingers closed upon a thick leather purse. In wonder she dragged it out. It was a fat almoner, heavy with gold, just the same as the other four. Tamaslei gaped at it, turning it about in her hands.

There was a name written in blood:
Tamaslei.

She remembered the thin-bladed dagger beside her bed, then saw that it was now held in Kane’s hand.

“Josin knew you were sending him to almost certain death,” Kane told her, stepping near. “Josin came to me before he set out, and we made a contract.”

There is a story, so it is told, of certain bandits who took shelter beneath a tree, and as the darkness and the storm closed over them, they gathered about their fire and said to their leader: “Tell us a tale, to pass the night hours in this lonely place;” and their leader spoke to them: “Once certain bandits took shelter beneath a tree, and as the darkness and the storm closed over them, they gathered about their fire and said to their leader: “Tell us a tale, to pass the night hours in this lonely place; ‘and their leader spoke to them: ‘Once certain bandits took shelter beneath a tree…’”

Blacker against the darkening sky, the thousand-armed branches of the huge banyan swayed and soughed before the winds of the storm. Tentative spats of rain struck the barren stones beyond their shelter—streaking like the ranging shots of massed archers from the lowering thunderheads that marched toward them from across the desolate plain beyond.

Someone got a fire going. Yellow flames crackled and spat as the damp twigs caught; grey smoke crawled through the roof of banyan limbs to be whipped away by the winds. There were more than ten of them about the fire—outlaws and renegades whose dirty mail and mismatched matched weapons showed the proof of hard and bloody service.

Another hundred of them might have gathered beneath the banyan, pressed between its pillared maze of limbs and roots. The tree had spread its limbs and stabbed downward its roots, growing upward and outward for imperturbable centuries. Behind—along the trail the outlaws had followed—lay unbroken miles of tropical forest. Beyond—toward which their path led—stretched a miles-wide plain of utter desolation. Beneath the grey curtain of the approaching storm, could be glimpsed the walls of forest that enclosed the farther perimeters of the plain.

Across the jungle-girded plain, new forest crept through where a century before had been carefully tilled fields, crawled over flattened stones and heaps of broken rubble where once had reared a great city. Of the city, no walls or towers remained; so utter was its destruction that scarcely one stone yet stood upon its base. It was an expanse of total annihilation—a wasteland of toppled stone and fire-scarred rubble. After more than a century, only scrub and vine and secondary forest had invaded the ruin. More than another century would pass before the last mound of shattered wall would vanish beneath the conquering forest.

They gathered about their fire, laying aside their well-worn gear, pulling out such as they had to make their evening meal. Three days march, or maybe four—and their leader promised them more plunder than they in might carry. This night the prospects did not bring the usual chatter of anticipation. Uneasily, the men watched the closing storm, gloomily considered the plain of ruins beside which they were camped. For these were the ruins of Andalar the Accurst, and no man cared to linger in this place.

“The greatest city of the land,” one of them murmured pensively. “Nothing now but broken stone and rotted bone. Not even pickings to tempt a vulture there now.”

“Once there was pickings as rich as you’d dare dream,” another commented. “Andalar was the proudest city in the would.’’

“And the gods destroyed Andalar for its pride,” a third intoned, with less scorn than had he spoken in another place than this. “Or so I’ve heard.”

“I’ve heard a number of tales,” the first bandit argued. “No one seems to remember anymore.”

“I remember,” their leader murmured.

“Do you indeed know the tale of the doom that came to this city? Pray, tell us the tale.”

Their leader laughed, as at a bitter jest, and began.

The news of the death of Andalar’s king came as no great surprise to Kane. Luisteren VII was late into his eighth decade. Nor was the news—at first—any tragic blow to Kane; for he had taken certain measures to insure that Andalar’s ruler would never enter his ninth decade. Kane, as Lord Minister of Andalar, was well known to be a great favorite of the senile king’s half-witted heir, and, although it was less well known, the king’s youngest wife, Haeen, was a great favorite of Kane.

As the first shrill rumors of Luisteren’s impending death sped through the palace, and the funeral trumpets of the priests of Inglarn howled a tocsin throughout the twilit streets of the city, Kane smiled, filled his golden chalice and drank a silent toast to the memory of the departed. The king’s death had fallen several months earlier than his plans called for. Perhaps he should have administered the powders more conservatively, or possibly the aged despot’s heart had simply choked in its dusty blood. Whatever, Luisteren VII was dead. Kane’s position was secure. When the king’s favorite son mounted the throne as Middosron III, the new king would be only too content for Kane to manage the affairs of Andalar as he pleased.

Kane finished the brandy, leaned his massive body back in his chair, and reflected upon the past year. It had been a heady rise to power, even by Kane’s standards—but then, Andalar had been a prize ripe for the picking, and it mattered little to Kane that his course had been so formularized as to be tedious to him.

As captain of a band of mercenaries, Kane had entered Andalar’s service not quite a year before. Success in battle had brought him to the king’s attention, and his rise to general of the city-state’s armies had quickly followed. Andalar’s border wars victoriously concluded, Kane used the king’s favor to advance to high office in the royal court. A judicious prescription of certain esoteric elixirs known to Kane restored the aged king’s vigor and virility, assuring Kane’s influence over Luisteren. After that, it was only a matter of cunning statecraft: after Kane’s chief rivals were exposed (by Kane) to be conspiring against the king, Kane’s rise to Lord Minister of the city-state was as inevitable as the king’s imminent decease.

While it was hardly a novel situation for Kane, he did feel a certain pride of accomplishment in that never before had an outlander risen so fast or so far in Andalar’s power structure. Andalar was the oldest and grandest of the scattered city-states that held suzerainty over this jungle-locked region, and if a pronounced obsession with traditions and a decided xenophobia accompanied that proud heritage, so had an incalculable fortune accumulated in the royal coffers over the centuries. Kane was amusing himself with idle schemes as to the use he would make of Andalar’s bounty, when Haeen dashed into his chambers.

Luisteren’s youngest wife had not a quarter of her royal husband’s years. Haeen was slender, close to Kane’s six feet of height—but neither boyish nor coltish. Her figure was as precisely formed as that of a marble goddess, and she moved with a dancer’s poise—for she had once been a dancer in the temple of Inglarn. She had the rare combination of bright green eyes and hair of luminous black. At the moment her long hair was disordered, her elfin features bleak with despair. Kane wondered at her tears, for Haeen had shown no such evidence of wifely devotion during their own clandestine trysts.

“You know?” she said, coming to his arms in a swirl of silks.

Kane wondered at the lifelessness of her tone. There was no need for such convention in his private chambers. “I was told he had lapsed deeper into stupor about dawn. When the priests started their damned caterwaul a moment ago, I drank to your widowhood.”