Liar's Island: A Novel (2 page)

“Cursed or not, the very idea of Hrym languishing in your master's collection disgusts me!” Rodrick said. “Hrym thrives on open air, long roads leading to nowhere in particular, and a general life of adventure!”

“I wouldn't mind resting on a pile of gold coins somewhere cool and dry, actually,” Hrym said. “If anyone's asking me. Which no one ever does.”

“Honestly!” Rodrick said more loudly. “Doesn't the thought of such waste, of turning a majestic creature like Hrym into an ornament—doesn't it sicken you, Kelso?”

“It's Kresley,” Kresley said automatically.

A long pause. “If you say so. I'm sure you know best. But your confusion about your own name aside, doesn't it trouble you? The way your lord and master keeps such wonders—none as wondrous as Hrym, but still, quite wondrous—locked up, out of sight in a vault, made useless? Is it any wonder I wanted to take a few of them away with me? Those relics deserve to be appreciated, not kept sealed away for one rich man's pleasure.”

“You were just going to sell them,” Hrym said. “And for sums only another rich man could afford.”

“Yes, true, but I was going to sell them to
several
rich men, to sort of spread the joy around, you see.”

“I get the sense that Rodrick isn't taking us very seriously.” Haverford looked Kresley up and down. “I can't imagine why.”

“Fine,” Kresley snapped. “Men, let's go in.”

“The first man who comes through that door,” Rodrick called, “will be frozen into an ice sculpture of himself. The process is
generally
fatal, but at least you'll make a beautiful decoration at your own funeral.”

“Don't worry about it,” the wizard said. He muttered something and made a series of complex gestures. He stepped forward, tapping each man briefly on the back of the neck. “There,” he said. “Protection from ice, cast on all of you. Go forth and do whatever it is people like you do. As you should have ten minutes ago.”

“Protection from ice won't help if they've got traps set up in there,” Haverford muttered.

The wizard rolled his eyes again. “I wouldn't worry about it. This Rodrick probably hasn't had to think his way out of a problem since he first got his hands on that sword. This building, it's just an old storehouse, not an armory. They might try to push a pile of crates on top of you, but otherwise I wouldn't fret.”

“Did someone out there say ‘protection from ice'?” Hrym said.

“You're still a
sword
,” Rodrick said. “We can, you know … cut them. Stab. What have you.”

“But you're no swordsman,” Hrym said. “No offense, but if it's just you against, what, three of them?”

“Four!” Haverford called, and drew his blade. “Five, counting our illustrious leader.” Now he was smiling. “Things are looking up. These are the sort of odds you like, eh, Kelso?”

“Kresley,” Kresley muttered. But, yes—he did like these odds. He considered sending Haverford in first, in case there
were
traps, but the man would look at him with even more scorn than usual if he did that. Kresley strode forward and kicked the door off its hinges. The interior of the storehouse was visible in light streaming through the dusty skylights, and the space was almost entirely barren, apart from a few cobwebbed shelves near the back.

Rodrick stood in the center of the space, sipping from a flask and holding a crystalline longsword that shimmered like diamonds and sent up faint curls of icy vapor all along its length. Rodrick lifted the sword, and a blast of white wind spiraled toward the door. Kresley winced and closed his eyes, but apart from a cool, damp breeze, he felt nothing, and when he opened his eyes, Rodrick was making a face like he'd bitten a lemon.

Haverford shouldered in, followed by the other men. The wizard seemed content to wait outside. “How bad of a beating do we put on him before we drag him back to the little lord?” Haverford asked.

“Medium bad,” Kresley said. “Feel free to break his arms and hands, but leave the legs and feet—otherwise we'll have to carry him the whole way back.”

“You
are
cursed, Hrym,” Rodrick said.

“
You're
cursed,” the sword replied, voice emerging from the empty air in the vicinity of the blade. “Oh well. It's been a while since I was owned by a nobleman. As I recall, they hardly ever sleep in ditches or haystacks.”

The guards advanced.

They were quite surprised when a djinni appeared before them in a swirl of mist and wind, rising nearly eleven feet tall, its lower body a swirling funnel of air, its upper body that of a muscular dark-skinned man, with a very solid-looking scimitar gripped in each hand.

“You will not harm this man,” the djinni intoned, dust and filth swirling around in its whirlwind. Kresley stepped back, and even Haverford retreated a few steps. Kresley looked at the sword in his hand. He considered dropping it so the creature wouldn't mistake it for a threat.

“Ha,” Rodrick said from behind the genie. “You didn't expect that, did you, Kelso? I can summon djinns. Djinn. Djinnis? One of my many skills.”

“No it's not,” Hrym said. “You've never even
seen
a djinni before. The plural is djinn, by the way.”

“Shh,” Rodrick said. “This is a marvelous opportunity to embellish my already considerable legend.”

Kresley swallowed. “Ah … wizard? Do you … is there such a thing as … protection from … djinn?” He stole a glance through the open door and saw the wizard running away as fast as his sandaled feet could take him.

“Guess not,” Haverford said, and ran away too, followed by the other guards.

Kresley waited a moment longer, as befitted his position as head of the household guard, and then he ran away as well.

2

Summoned

After a long silence, broken only by the susurration of the djinni's whirlwind body, the creature slowly rotated until it faced the fugitives. “You are Rodrick and Hrym.”

“Hmmm,” Rodrick said. “What do you think, Hrym? Do we admit anything? Is this thing going to kill us?”

“It could kill you, maybe,” Hrym said. “I don't see how a man who's half wind can possibly hurt me.”

“I mean you no harm,” the djinni said.

“Oh. That's reassuring.” Rodrick held up Hrym's glittering blade, putting the length of enchanted ice between himself and the djinni. He was frankly overawed at the presence of the immense magical creature, but he'd had a lot of practice pretending to be bored and unimpressed—people hardly ever expected you to steal things when you looked totally bored by them—so he hid his surprise well.

The djinni's vortex had picked up bits of trash from the storehouse, and scraps of paper and ragged bits of leaf swirled where its legs should have been, an effect that made the thing seem less monstrously inhuman, though not by much.

“Thank you for scaring off those … oh, let's say ‘muggers,'” Rodrick said.

The djinni stared at him impassively, and Rodrick resisted the urge to clear his throat, duck his head, shuffle his feet, or run for his life under the unmoving onslaught of its gaze.

“How do you know our names?” Hrym said.

Excellent question, Rodrick thought. If he hadn't been halfway to soiling himself with fear he might have asked it himself.

“I was sent to deliver a message,” the djinni said. “The thakur of Jalmeray requests the pleasure of your company at his palace in Niswan.”

“I understood some of those words,” Rodrick said. “Notably ‘pleasure' and ‘palace.'”

“Jalmeray,” Hrym said. “You mean that island off the coast of Nex? With all the monasteries and tigers and so on?”

“Ah,” Rodrick said. “The place where those fighting monks study, isn't that right? I hear they'll take anyone who shows talent. You just have to go there and pass some kind of test, where you punch an efreeti in the face, outdrink a marid, spank a djinni—things like that. Then you get to join a House of Perfection and live on rice water and regular beatings for years while you learn how to punch a man's heart out through his back, or kill someone with your pinky finger. Never saw the point, myself, as a sword is just as effective, and you don't get blood on your fingers unless you use it wrong.”

The djinni was not noticeably amused. “Jalmeray is a wondrous island, the westernmost of the Impossible Kingdoms of the Vudrani.”

“And this thakur you mentioned is, what? The king?”

“In essence,” the djinni said.

“Hmm. I don't owe a foreign king any obedience—”

“Oh, because you're so obedient to
local
kings,” Hrym said.

Rodrick shrugged. “Local kings tend to have local soldiers who can compel obedience, though, so I walk a bit more softly around them, you have to give me that.”

“This king of Jalmeray sent a djinni,” Hrym said. “The one standing right here. You remember. Look at him. He's got a scimitar in each hand, and when he kicks you, you get kicked with a
tornado
. You want to disobey him?”

“I will not compel your attendance,” the djinni said. “You are invited guests. A ship leaves the docks tomorrow at first light, the
Nectar of the Gods
, and there is a berth for you if you wish to board. Whether you accept the invitation or not makes no difference to me.”

“All right, fair enough, but can you give us a
hint
?” Rodrick said. “Does this thakur want to hire us to do something unsavory? Marry me off to his ugliest granddaughter to bring some fresh blood to the family line? Give me a medal for some act of heroism that's temporarily slipped my mind?”

The djinni still didn't look amused. Rodrick might give up trying soon at this rate. “I cannot say,” the creature replied. “But for a man from the barbarous lands of the Inner Sea to be granted an audience with the thakur is a great honor.”

“Honor doesn't fill my belly, or my purse,” Rodrick said.

“Mmm. If you proved hesitant, I was instructed to offer this incentive.” The djinni sheathed one of the scimitars—sheathed it where, or in what, exactly, Rodrick couldn't see, but that was supernatural creatures for you—and reached into the swirling vortex beneath its waist. Its hand reemerged holding a small leather bag, which the djinni tossed to Rodrick.

The bag clinked endearingly, and a peek inside revealed the warm yellow glow of gold, coins stamped with multi-armed women and elephant heads and roaring tigers.

“That is merely a taste of the wealth that awaits you,” the djinni said. “If you come to Jalmeray, and reach an accommodation with the thakur, you may well leave the island with your own weight in gold.”

“Every time someone says that,” Rodrick said, “I wish I were a great deal fatter.” He made the coins disappear almost as neatly as the djinni had made his sword vanish. “We will consider the thakur's kind invitation. Do convey my thanks.”

The djinni turned to smoke and vapor, and Rodrick was briefly buffeted by a strong wind as the creature disappeared into or merged with or rode away on currents of air.

“That was unusual,” Rodrick said once the wind had died down. “Even by our standards.”

Hrym briefly pulsed with red light and giggled, the sound of a demented child who was also probably possessed, and Rodrick winced. A skylight overhead cracked, but fortunately didn't fall in. He aimed the blade away from him, toward a dusty corner of the warehouse, and a few icicles shot forth from the sword, smashing into a shelf and knocking it over with a clatter.

The sword had spent some time the previous year in close proximity to an imprisoned demon lord, and Hrym had the ability to soak up sufficiently powerful ambient magic. He'd picked up some kind of demonic taint, which so far hadn't proven
too
deleterious—he didn't seem compelled to slaughter innocents for the sheer joy of spreading chaos, at any rate—but he had these little … episodes.
Fits
, Rodrick might have called them, if Hrym had been human. More and more, though, Hrym giggled horribly, and pulsed with red light, and when that happened, chaos and disorder seemed to spread. Vases broke, chandeliers fell from the ceiling, food rotted, wine turned to vinegar. And those were just the
atmospheric
effects. Lately the giggles had been followed by outbursts of icy magic, like lethal spasms.

One such demonic fit had ruined their attempt to break into the little lord's vault the night before. It was such a
good
plan, too—look tough, get hired to do security at the ball, slip away to the basement, freeze the guards watching the vault, turn the locks to ice, smash them open, steal the wonderful relics within, get on a ship before the little lord even noticed the theft, sell the loot to a not-terribly scrupulous fence named Skiver in Almas, enjoy ill-gotten riches, etc.

But Hrym had one of his fits just as Rodrick was creeping toward the vault, his titter and the attendant
crack
of a roof beam breaking neatly in two overhead alerting the guards to their presence in time to yank a cord that set an alarm bell to ringing somewhere up above. Worse, Hrym had fired off spears of ice, seemingly as involuntarily as Rodrick loosing a sneeze, blowing holes in the wall and ceiling above and calling even more attention. They'd escaped and tried to make their way to the ship bound for Almas anyway, but the little lord's men were there, and they'd pursued Rodrick and Hrym relentlessly through streets until they ended up here in the Coins.

The worst part—all right, one of the many bad parts—was that Hrym wasn't even aware of his condition. He had no memory of his giggles, or the chaos, or the ill-timed bursts of ice magic. As far as Hrym was concerned, the guards had just noticed them when they were sneaking up on the vault—it was pure bad luck.