Lord of the Isles (31 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“My name is Frasa,” the first Serian said; he bowed. Cashel couldn't have told the two apart with any degree of certainty. They looked like identical masks carved from a block of mahogany.
“And I am Jen,” said the other, bowing in turn. “We would like to hire you, sir. We will pay more than your present employer.”
“Ah,” said Cashel. He wondered if he ought to bow. “I'm Cashel or-Kenset. Ah, I'm a shepherd.”
“Shepherd!” Mellie giggled from his shoulder.
“We are merchants, Master Cashel,” Frasa said. “We have a cargo here in Carcosa. You have noticed that passions are
running high against members of our religion. Perhaps you share those passions?”
“I never met a Serian before just now,” Cashel said uncomfortably. “If you want to worship devils, I guess that's your business.”
Jen blinked, then broke out with a startled guffaw—the first sign of emotion Cashel had seen from the still-faced pair.
“We don't think of what we do as worshipping devils, Master Cashel,” Frasa said, “but as you imply, that's neither here nor there. We need a shepherd of sorts; a strong man to shepherd us through the dangers of a hostile city until we can sell our cargo.”
“Our faith prevents us from harming another human being, sir,” Jen said. “What another person does on our behalf is between. him and his gods, however, and we pay well. Highlanders from the interior of Seres protect our ships from pirates, but it wouldn't be practical to bring them out of the compound with us.”
“They're cannibals who file their teeth,” Mellie said, caressing the lobe of Cashel's right ear. “Some of them can see my people. They eat us, too.”
Cashel found listening to three people at the same time meant he didn't understand what any of them were saying. He heard the words; he just couldn't connect them in his mind with anything real. “Look,” he said. “You need guards. I'm just …”
He glanced back toward the street of clothiers, feeling embarrassed. “Look,” he repeated, “I don't want you to think I do this a lot. I just, well …”
He couldn't not have acted, any more than he would've let seawolves ravage somebody else's flock. He didn't know how to explain that. Back home, of course, he wouldn't have had to explain, because everybody felt the same way.
About sheep, at least. Maybe not about wooden-faced strangers.
“We're aware that we could hire professional men of violence,” Frasa said. “Though perhaps not easily, given the
way Count Lascarg is using”—he smiled coldly—“devil worshippers as a scapegoat for social turmoils. In any case, we would prefer to contract with a person whose first concern was justice rather than money. Though we'll willingly pay your price—say, three Haft silver pieces a day?”
“Four,” said Jen decisively. “We couldn't hire any two men to do what we were privileged to watch Master Cashel do just now. And of course, we'll pay you for today, sir, whatever your decision as to further employment.”
Cashel tried to imagine that kind of money, counting on his fingers. Ilna would be thrilled—
Ilna wouldn't know. He might never see his sister again.
He cocked his head to look at Mellie. The sprite went up on tiptoe, joining her fingers above her head as if she was preparing to dive from his shoulder.
“Oh, don't worry about me, Cashel,” she said with a grin. She was too perfectly beautiful to be real; and of course she
wasn't
real in the human sense. “Highlanders don't bother me. Rats are much worse, and if there's Highlanders there aren't any rats—”
She did a handstand, placing her fingertips exactly where her toes had been a moment before.
“—unless the Highlanders are fed
really
well.”
The Serians waited. Cashel shrugged and said, “Well, I guess we can try it for a while.”
He stuck out his right hand to seal the bargain. Jen and Frasa bowed instead, and Frasa took a well-filled purse from beneath his robe.
The stone trumpeter blew joyous ripples in the sunlight.
C
arcosa after dark was a smoky, threatening warren. Garric had rented a lantern at the Captain's Rest, but he hadn't bothered to hire a linkman to guide him and Tenoctris back to the Red Ox because he had a good sense of direction and the recollections of King Carus besides. Murmurs and clinks in some of the narrow alleys they passed made him wonder if a third person in the party wouldn't have been a safety measure.
Aloud he said, “Though I'd worry that anybody we hired here would lead us
into
a band of robbers.”
“I think we're safe enough with you, Garric,” Tenoctris said. Then she added, “With the help of your medallion, if someone should be foolish enough to attack. He's with you, isn't he?”
“Sort of,” Garric muttered. He didn't want to think about what Carus' growing presence might mean.
He'd refused to wear a sword following the night at the Stroma River: he didn't like the way his personality shifted when his hand rested on a sword hilt. The rented lantern hung on the end of a three-foot iron rod so that the user could hold it in front of him. In a pinch, the rod could be an effective weapon.
But Garric preferred not to think about that, either.
A man and woman argued in a door alcove; the man was drunk, the woman sober enough to fall silent till the lantern's yellow light passed on. A third figure, another man, watched from across the street—waiting also, but patting a bludgeon into the palm of his other hand.
It was none of Garric's affair, but it made him feel uncomfortable anyway. And yet—he didn't know the real rights or
wrongs. The drunken man would be clubbed; probably robbed, possibly killed. But if the woman didn't have a protector present, what would happen to her at the drunk's hands? Garric was beginning to understand why Tenoctris put “good” and “evil” in quotes; but he was still sure that whatever the merits of the particular situation, a society in which violence was the primary means of settling disputes was an evil society.
“There's pressure on the visible world as forces build on other planes,” Tenoctris said quietly. She'd described her talent as an ability to see things. That extended to the personality structures of those around her. “Cities are always worse than villages because anonymous people will do things that they wouldn't in the face of their neighbors, but I suspect it's worse now in Carcosa than it was a decade ago.”
They rounded a dogleg in the street. “That's the Red Ox,” Garric said thankfully.
A lamp hung over the door of the inn. It had a large oil reservoir and sides of glass clearer than any window in Barca's Hamlet. As Garric started inside, he realized that the stocky man leaning next to the doorway was Raid, the drover's chief guard. He was fully armed and looked worried.
“Sir?” Garric asked. “Mistress Tenoctris and I have come to talk with your master as we promised we would. Is he—”
He nodded toward the inn. The common room was huge and raucously busy. The part of his mind that was Reise's son noted professionally that they covered the floors here with sawdust instead of rushes.
Raid shook his head. “Master Benlo went out at nightfall,” he said. “I don't know just where for sure, but I shouldn't wonder if he'd gone the usual place—across to the cemetery.”
He gestured by moving only his eyes. Under the slanting lamplight Garric could see a gouge that the guard had almost polished out of his helmet; the damage was a reminder of the fight at Stroma River.
“He went there every night we stayed at this inn,” Raid continued. “Only he never took his daughter with him before. He—”
“He took Liane?” Garric said.
“This time, yes he did,” Raid said. “And he made it real clear that me and the boys wasn't to come with him. But you know, kid, I sure think somebody ought to go see what's happening.”
“Somebody will,” said Tenoctris. She started across.
“Kid, wait!” Raid called. “Take this.”
Garric turned. The guard held out his sword and belt. Garric took the weapon with a nod of thanks. He buckled it on as he crossed the street with Tenoctris.
There was a gate into the cemetery a hundred yards down the street, but when Garric hesitated the old woman patted the wall immediately across from the Red Ox and said, “Lift me up. They're not far from here.”
Garric didn't understand how she knew, but that didn't matter. He leaned the lantern against the wall and used both hands to set Tenoctris on the coping five feet up. His fingers almost met around her petite waist.
Tenoctris swung her legs over to the other side, looking as though she planned to jump down. That didn't look safe to Garric, so he swung himself onto the wall and over, then lowered the old woman to the ground as gently as he'd raised her up.
The lantern was still on the street side of the stonework. Garric hunched to go back for it.
“Leave it,” said Tenoctris with a decisiveness that was usually beneath the surface of her personality. “It isn't necessary now. It's this way.”
The graveyard was a village of tombs the size of shepherds' huts, mixed with many hundreds of stone troughs a foot wide and a few feet long; some of the latter still had lids carved with a crude tree-of-life pattern. They were all empty. Ornamental cypresses had grown to great heights among the human structures.
From his reading Garric knew the troughs had held the bones of the ancient poor in a custom which hadn't survived the collapse of the Old Kingdom. Families removed the bones to these individual ossuaries after the flesh had decayed during a year in the huge common sepulchre in the center of the grounds. The latter's dome had long collapsed and its walls were overgrown with ivy and honeysuckle.
Many of the tombs were still in use by the wealthy and powerful of today's Carcosa. The walls were cleaned, the roof slabs replaced where necessary, and new coats of arms were chiseled over the entrances to replace those of the original builders.
Tenoctris led the way between the larger tombs and over the troughs lying every which way like deliberate ankle-traps among the resting places of their betters. Garric used the city's sky glow and the light of the recently risen moon to help him pick his way, but the old woman moved faster and with a sureness that kept her from tripping as Garric did time after time.
She must have eyes like a cat
.
He was afraid for Liane and afraid as well for himself. He had no idea what they would be meeting. From what Tenoctris had said earlier, even she wasn't certain.
“Sister take you!” Garric snarled as his foot sank in a shadow-hidden hole that could have wrenched his knee and crippled him for life. He was sorry for the words as soon as he spoke them: this was no place or time to be calling on the Queen of the Underworld.
An iron bell rang from the center of the city; Garric didn't know whether it warned of disaster or if it happened every night in Carcosa when the watches changed. He belonged back in Barca's Hamlet.
But for now he was here, and since he was here he'd follow the guidance of an old woman who said she had the good of the cosmos at heart.
Tenoctris held up a hand in warning. They halted ten feet from two tombs built as a facing pair; the one in black basalt, the other a fine-grained granite so light as to be white in the
moonlight. A pavement of dark and light blocks joined the pillared doorways. The wreaths of yew and holly on the pale tomb indicated a recent interment there.
“The folk of today, even the wizards, think because the original bodies have rotted to dust that the tombs are empty,” Tenoctris whispered in tones of cold disdain. “If they saw what I see, they'd know better than to place their dead here where those who were so much greater lie. They might as well throw their children to seawolves!”
Garric massaged his bruised shin without speaking. A breeze murmured through the cypresses, some of which were so huge and old that their roots had crumbled the vaults they'd been planted to decorate.
Tenoctris twisted a twig from the boxwood tree beside her. “There,” she said, pointing her makeshift wand toward the basalt tomb.
The black stone was barely an outline in the dim light, but perhaps for that very reason Garric began to see a blue flickering—not so much light as the ghost of light—from the stone-grated eye window at the roof peak and around the edge of the rusty iron door. The panel was slightly ajar.
Garric reached the tomb in three strides and shoved against the vertical door handle. The heavy door flexed with a groan but didn't open; it was stuck against the sill. Garric heard Benlo chanting unintelligibly while Liane's higher, clearer voice called,
“Phanoibikux petriade kratarnade
—”
“Stop!” Tenoctris shouted. “That spell will—”
Silent red light glared through the basalt the way the sun penetrates flesh. The whole graveyard shone in momentary vivid clarity. Benlo screamed on a rising note that ended in a gurgle.
“Liane!” Garric said, and hit the door panel with all his weight and strength. The wedge holding it shut scraped back and flew into the sunken vault within.
Niches lined the walls. They'd once held the ashes of cremated nobles; now they were empty except for dust and a
single black candle lighting the symbols written on the floor three steps below ground level.
Benlo bor-Benliman lay in the middle of a seven-sided star around which were written words in the Old Script. He'd been disemboweled by a single upward stroke; his blood writhed on the stones beneath him.
Liane stood like a reversed image against a portal of intense red light in the middle of the vault. Her hands were raised as if to thrust back an unseen horror. She and the doorway were a flat painting on the air. Her dark hair and clothing were red and the white skin of her face and hands a black that gleamed like obsidian.
“Garric!” Liane's voice cried.
The light winked out and she was gone. Garric's arms snatched at empty air.
Tenoctris stared down at Benlo. His blood traced a word in the Old Script. “Strasedon!” Tenoctris said. “The utter fool! He summoned Strasedon to him!”
The trail of blood slumped into a normal pool and began to congeal in the light of the black candle. Death filled the vault with its familiar slaughterhouse stench.

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