Ghost in the Cowl (15 page)

Would the poets of Istarinmul one day recite tales of the Balarigar?

“Horrifying thought,” muttered Caina. 

She ate her meal as the poem finished and the murmur of conversation resumed. Perhaps she could find a way to give some of Ulvan’s money to Damla. The poor woman deserved it, after what had happened. Or perhaps Caina could use it to buy some slaves and set them free. Still, she would need a plan for the slaves, a way for the freedmen to support themselves. ..

She turned her head and saw Mazyan walking toward her, his drum tucked under one arm as if he feared someone would steal it.

Caina’s mind noted details as he approached. No sword, but he had the calluses of a swordsman upon his right hand. The build and balance of a fighter. A dagger at his belt, and she suspected he had at least one knife in his boots. She felt his cold black eyes examining her in turn, assessing her as a threat. 

“Master Marius,” rumbled Mazyan. 

Caina inclined her head. 

“The poet,” said Mazyan. “He wishes a word with you.”

“Why?” said Caina.

“That is his business,” said Mazyan. “He is outside, taking the air. Will you come or not?”

His tone implied that he might well drag her outside if she refused, and Caina wondered again if Sulaman was an agent of the Teskilati. 

“Very well,” said Caina, getting to her feet. “Lead on. We can march to a drumbeat, if you like.”

The scowl Mazyan gave her was just short of murderous.

Sulaman stood alone outside of the House’s front door, staring into the Cyrican Bazaar. It was quiet now, the stalls and shops closed for the day. To the northwest Caina saw the massive gleaming bulk of the Golden Palace and the College of Alchemists, illuminated by sorcerous light, and the smaller palaces in the Emirs’ Quarter and the Masters’ Quarter.

“Master Marius,” said Sulaman. He looked older in the darkness, almost tired. After her brief stint with the Circus, Caina understood the effort that went into performing. 

Caina sketched a bow. “You wished to speak with me.”

“Look at my city,” said Sulaman. “There is so much grief here. So much suffering.” He sighed. “But we all suffer, do we not?”

“The star is the key to the crystal,” murmured Caina. 

“Yes,” said Sulaman. “And I am sorry that caused you pain.”

Caina shrugged. “That was not your doing.”

“No,” said Sulaman. “And there is much grief in Istarinmul. This was a house of grief,” he gestured at the House of Agabyzus, “until you came.”

Caina felt a chill. Did he suspect? Did he know that she had brought down Ulvan?

“A fortunate coincidence,” said Caina.

“Undoubtedly,” said Sulaman. “Did you know that the Grand Wazir and the Brotherhood confiscated all of Ulvan’s property? He is impoverished now. The sight of a Master Slaver marked with his own brand…I fear it is too much for them.”

Caina shrugged again. “He shouldn’t have left it lying around.”

“Clearly not,” said Sulaman. “Mazyan.”

The drummer stepped forward with a scowl and handed Caina a leather bag. “Take it.”

“What is it?” said Caina. She felt the weight of coins within it.

“One hundred golden bezants,” said Sulaman. “An offering of thanks, for the joy you have brought to this house, for there is too little joy in Istarinmul.”

“You’re mistaken,” said Caina, holding the pouch. “I have done nothing.”

“Of course not,” said Sulaman with a small smile. “Nothing at all.”

Caina considered that for a moment. What if Sulaman was a Ghost? The Emperor had believed the Ghost circle in Istarinmul exterminated, but perhaps some of them had survived. 

“Who are you?” she said at last. 

Sulaman’s smile widened. “I am merely a poet, observing the life of my city. A poet who recites the tales of Morgant the Razor and Nasser Glasshand and Alasadd of the Seven Djinni and the Seven Lamps. And you are merely a courier, no?”

“That is exactly right,” said Caina.

“I am glad we understand each other,” said Sulaman. “Farewell for now, Master Marius of the Imperial Collegium of Jewelers. I hope you continue to bring joy wherever you ago.”

He left without another word, tall and thin and spare in his flowing robes, and Mazyan followed. 

Caina stared after them, weighing the purse in her hand. Another mystery. At least Sulaman did not seem hostile. 

And with his words, the idea simmering at the edge of her mind took fire.

She had been trained as a Ghost nightfighter, equipped with the skills of stealth and disguise and infiltration. The Ghosts had intended her as a spy and an agent…but Caina realized that the Ghosts had also given her the skills of a master thief. 

The palaces of the Masters’ Quarter and the Emirs’ Quarter gleamed in the night.

Caina had the skills of a master thief, and Istarinmul offered so many worthy targets.

She strode back into the House of Agabyzus, intending to get a good night’s sleep.

There was a great deal of work to do. 

Chapter 14 - Bounties

For the next six weeks, Caina kept herself busy.

And for the first time in decades, the Slavers’ Brotherhood of Istarinmul knew terror.  

At first Ulvan’s sudden fall from grace did not unduly concern the cowled masters of the Brotherhood. He had been a Master Slaver, true, but new-raised to such august dignity. Little wonder such a young man had been unable to keep order amongst his slaves. This “Balarigar” was likely a figment of Ulvan’s fevered imagination, a second-hand tale he had heard from the few soldiers who had escaped the debacle at Marsis. And the story itself was likely an invention of the survivors of Marsis to cover their cowardice, a fragment of Szaldic myth they had seized upon to excuse their egregious failure against the Imperial Legions in Marsis. If such a man as the Balarigar truly existed, the reward of five thousand golden bezants would flush him out. 

And if not…well, the matter would eventually pass from mind. The rabble of Istarinmul always celebrated their little heroes, their assassins and thieves and daring pirates, but such troublesome fools always overstepped and destroyed themselves. 

Or so they thought until eight days after Ulvan’s downfall, when one of the Master Slavers awoke and went into his strong room to find his gems and platinum coins stolen. The cowled master raced into his study to bellow for his slaves, only to discover that someone had taken his ledger and his correspondence. Now in a fury, the cowled master rushed to his cells, only to find them empty and his guards unconscious upon the floor. 

When they awoke, the guards claimed to have glimpsed a hooded shadow prowling around the grounds. Someone had drugged them, and the cowled master found himself a sudden fervent believer in the myth of the Balarigar. 

###

The evening after that, Caina took a meal in the common room of the House of Agabyzus, and the khalmir of the watch arrived with a new decree to pin to the door.

The bounty upon the head of the Balarigar had risen to three thousand bezants, with seventy-five hundred for information leading to his successful capture.

###

Thirteen days after Ulvan’s downfall, the body slave of the Master Slaver Konyat rose before dawn and hastened to his master’s bedchamber. Konyat had built his fortune by kidnapping Caerish peasants and selling them to the mines, and the body slave hurried as fast as he could without making noise. Konyat was a hard master, a man who brooked no errors or sluggishness in his slaves. If the body slave was late, at the very least he would endure a flogging. 

If the master was in a particularly bad mood, he might order the body slave thrown to the wild beasts in the fighting pits.

The slave knocked upon Konyat’s door. 

“Master?” he said. “It is Balran. Your slave has come with your morning coffee.”

No answer. 

That was peculiar. Balran never entered his master’s chamber without permission, of course, but if the master wanted to wait for his coffee, he would have said so. 

Balran considered the proper course of action. Ideally one that would end without him flogged for fed to starving lions. 

Perhaps five minutes later he decided to knock again. 

“Master?” he said. “Your slave has brought your coffee.” 

Still no answer. 

This was distressing. The master had made it clear that his slaves were never to do anything without permission, and had drawn up elaborate schedules detailing every aspect of life in the house. Unfortunately, this situation had not been covered in the master’s schedules. Given the master’s preference for brutal punishments, Balran was not certain what to do.

At last he decided to return to the kitchen and await instructions. That seemed the wisest course.

Fifteen hours later the overseer finally worked up the courage to enter the bedchamber, and found the gagged Master Slaver Konyat hanging upside down from the ceiling by a rope, still in his nightclothes, both his cheeks marred and disfigured by the livid burn on his own brand.

The master was alive, but too terrified to leave his bedchamber, and Konyat’s slaves found their lives much easier.

After that, the reward for the Balarigar’s capture went up to fifteen thousand bezants. 

###

Nineteen days after Ulvan’s downfall, the seneschal of Master Slaver Markut was baffled. 

The master had simply vanished. 

Alarmed, the seneschal roused every slave and guard and ordered them to search every room of the palace. They examined the master’s private apartments, his study, his bath, his harem, and his balcony. Slaves walked the gardens, and the bodyguards marched through the great hall and the dining hall, the kitchens and the storerooms.

Master Slaver Markut was nowhere to be found.

The seneschal was a hardheaded man, and had dismissed the stories of the Balarigar as a superstitious myth of the Szaldic slaves. The Szalds believed in all manner of nonsense, spirits and devils and demons, a sorceress called the Moroaica or the Bloodmaiden who was the source of all the world’s ills. The seneschal was certain that Konyat and Ulvan had been robbed by their own slaves, and had seized upon the legend of the Balarigar to excuse their incompetence.

But now the seneschal felt a twinge of unease.

He rushed to the master’s strong room and found the locks hanging open, the jewels and contracts taken. Thieves! Yet there was no trace of Markut himself. Had the thieves taken him for ransom? If they had killed him, there would have been a corpse, blood, signs of a struggle.

But the seneschal found nothing.

Three fruitless hours later the seneschal decided to check the slave cells below the palace. At the moment, they were empty, the master having just sold his entire inventory to Grand Master Callatas and Ricimer of the Widow’s Tower. 

Within the cells the seneschal found Master Slaver Markut lying hog-tied and gagged, his eyes rolling back and forth in fury and terror. 

The reward for the Balarigar’s capture rose to twenty-five thousand bezants and ten thousand for his death, and the College of Alchemists sent a guard of Immortals to the home of every Master Slaver and full member of the Brotherhood.

###

Twenty-five nights after Ulvan’s downfall, Marwan, a khalmir of the Immortals, stood watch over the palace of the Master Slaver Turkan. He felt the alchemical elixirs thrumming through his blood, filling him with strength and speed and power.

And rage unlike anything Marwan had ever known before the Alchemists had taken him. 

He wanted to kill, to kill until his black armor was red with blood and his scimitar shattered from overuse, and then he wanted to kill with his bare hands, kill until his body failed or there was no one left in the world to kill.

The only thing that could have kept his fury in check was the iron discipline of the Immortals. 

Just as well as that he possessed it. 

His eyes swept the gardens, his lip crinkling with disgust. For all their wealth, the Master Slavers were pathetic cattle – fat, cringing old men. If Marwan had been locked unarmed in a room with every single cowled master, he could have killed them all and emerged without breaking a sweat. It amused him to watch the fat fools bluster, all while Marwan considered the many ways he could make the men of the Brotherhood scream. 

Marwan did not fear them, and did not fear anything save for the wrath of Grand Master Callatas. The tales claimed Callatas had killed hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children on the day that Iramis burned, killed them all in an instant, and when Marwan looked into the old man’s cavernous gray eyes, he believed it. 

What must that have felt like? 

So if Callatas wanted the Immortals to guard the Master Slavers, then Marwan would guard the slothful fools. 

“Khalmir!” shouted one of his men. “Look!”

He pointed, and Marwan saw a figure crouched upon the garden wall, a figure in a black cloak. 

The Balarigar. 

At last, someone he could kill! Marwan supposed he ought to have been thinking of the reward for the Balarigar’s capture, but he did not care about that. He did, however, care very much about killing, and the rage filling his veins rejoiced. 

“The fool has made a mistake!” said Marwan. “Take him! Take him now!” 

His Immortal brothers surged forward with a cry, racing for the wall as the Balarigar jumped backward over it. They all shared his rage, his hatred, his lust for blood. Marwan grinned behind his skull-mask. Together they could make the Balarigar’s dying take days.

They reached the wall, seized the lip, and pulled themselves over, landing in the street of the Masters’ Quarter with a clatter of armor. The splendid palaces of the Quarter rose around them, and the street was deserted. Marwan saw no sign of the Balarigar.

He did, however, see a ragged black cloak lying upon the ground near a small bale of straw.

“Straw?” he hissed in fury. “Straw? We were fooled by straw!”

Belatedly his mind caught up to his wrath, and he realized the crude dummy had been a ruse. Someone had wanted to lure them out here. 

“Back to the mansion!” he said. “Haste!”

But by the time they arrived, the Balarigar had already cleared out Master Slaver Turkan’s strong room and made off with his ledgers.

And Marwan became much more interested in hunting down the Balarigar.

No one defied the Immortals and lived. 

###

Thirty-four days after Ulvan’s downfall, Tarkaat, the Wazir of Public Games donned his robe of rank, adjusted his jeweled turban, picked up his rod of office, and climbed the stairs to the Wazir’s box in the Ring of Thorns, his two body slaves trailing after him. 

The Ring of Thorns was one of Istarinmul’s larger fighting pits, capable of seating ten thousand spectators. There were larger ones, of course – the Masters’ Ring could hold twenty-five thousand when the Brotherhood felt like entertaining the masses, and the Arena of Padishahs near the Golden Palace could seat fifty thousand. Yet the powerful and the wealthy and their followers attended the Masters’ Ring and the Arena of Padishahs, but the Ring of Thorns was in the Alqaarin Quarter, and the poor and slaves tended to fill its seats. 

It was just as well, Tarkaat thought. Istarinmul was restless, and growing more so by the day. The loss of the war against the Empire and the chaos of the golden dead had already set the city to boiling. And now Istarinmul buzzed with rumors of the Balarigar, the mysterious shadow-cloaked thief who targeted the Brotherhood. The cowled masters surrounded themselves with bodyguards and mercenaries, while the merchants and the artisans and the poor laughed at the torment of their betters and cheered the Balarigar’s deeds. Some poets had even begun preparing an epic about the Balarigar’s exploits. 

Tarkaat thought it a dangerous stew. He expected riots and insurrection daily. Hopefully the spectacle of the games would calm the mob, distract them from the Balarigar’s audacious thefts. The public crucifixion of the Balarigar would have been best, but since the Teskilati and the city watch had proven themselves singularly incapable of finding the thief, it fell to Wazir of Public Games to calm the city through spectacle. 

His duty was stern, but he would not flinch from it. 

He took a deep breath and stepped to the railing of his box. The Ring was packed to capacity, and he felt ten thousand pairs of eyes turn towards him. 

“Citizens of Istarinmul!” he thundered in his orator’s voice. “By the generosity of our Most Divine Padishah and the august Brotherhood, these games have been convened. For your entertainment, the lands of Istarinmul, Anshan, Cyrica, and Alqaarin have been scoured for the finest gladiators, for the most fell and skilled combatants! In the name of the Padishah, I declare these games open!”

A roar rose from the crowd, and the gate below the Wazir’s box opened. Tarkaat looked down and saw the first of the gladiators stagger onto the sands.

And he blinked in surprise. 

Most gladiators either had the lean, muscled builds of hunting predators or the bulk of a ferocious beast. The man below Tarkaat was obese, and to say nothing of elderly, with only a ragged fringe of white hair encircling his liver-spotted head. He carried a short sword in his right hand, and wore only a loincloth, his belly quivering as he staggered back and forth across the floor of the Ring. 

A murmur of surprised laughter rose from the crowds.

Tarkaat's first thought was that the quality of gladiators had declined markedly.

His second thought was that the man below had quite obviously been drugged, to judge from his incoherent mumbling. 

His third thought was that the man was not a gladiator, but in fact the Master Slaver Kazyan of the Brotherhood.

The crowd came to the realization at the same time, and a gale of laughter washed over the Ring. Master Slaver Kazyan gaped up at them with incomprehension.

“Oh,” said the Wazir of Public Games. “Oh, that’s not good at all.”

Tarkaat suspected that damned poem about the Balarigar was about to get another verse.

###

Forty-two days after she had thrown Ulvan over the railing of his balcony, Caina sat in the common room of the House of Agabyzus and took her dinner. 

And as she expected, the khalmir of the watch arrived with his men to affix yet another decree to the door. The poor scribes had to be wearing themselves out. After they left, Damla walked past the door, glanced at the paper, and joined Caina. 

“You have been busy,” murmured Damla.

“How much?” said Caina. 

“Fifty thousand bezants for the death of the Balarigar,” said Damla. “Seventy-five thousand for his capture.”

Caina nodded. She did not worry about anyone overhearing them. Half the city was talking about the Balarigar. 

“And the death penalty,” said Damla, “for anyone caught harboring the Balarigar.”

“I see,” said Caina. “Then perhaps the Balarigar should move on, so he does not bring innocent people to risk.” 

“No,” said Damla. “That is, the Balarigar has helped many people. Out of gratitude, I think those he has aided would be honored to harbor him.” She shrugged. “But I am only a simple merchant and know little of such things.”