The Dread Wyrm (Traitor Son Cycle) (25 page)

“Pagan? Not so fast, young Edmund. Heretical, perhaps.” He shrugged. “Dar as Salaam—the greatest city in the world.” He smiled. “Fine swords.” He shrugged. “Not really the best armourers.”

“You went there?” Edmund asked.

Master Pye frowned. “I was on a ship in the harbour eight days, wind bound. Went ashore and didn’t get made a slave.” He shrugged. “When I was young and foolish.”

The black man had a habit of sitting perfectly still.

“This man is someone important. What happened?” Master Pye was in a hurry.

Edmund shook his head. “Ser Ricar was there.”

The Order knight shook his head. He wrote on a wax tablet and Master Pye looked at it.

“Random has a clerk who speaks Ifriquy’a. Or Wahele or Bemba, I forget which.” Master Pye took his own wax tablet, wrote a note and put his ring on it to seal it. “Take this to Ser Gerald.”

Edmund took the tablet.

Master Pye gestured with his hand. “I think you should run.”

Ser Gerald Random came in person, stumping along with his master clerk who handled all his foreign shipments.

His clerk wore a gold ring and black cloak like a man of property. He bowed with his hands together.

The black man returned the bow most courteously.

The clerk spoke.

The black man answered.

After two exchanges, the black man spoke at some length.

On the fourth exchange, he smiled. It transformed his face.

The clerk looked up. “He’s a messenger. He’s looking for—for Magister Harmodius.”

“He’s a little late,” Ser Gerald said.

“He says he came ashore from the Venike ships; that the Golden Leopard refused to serve or house him, and he intended to leave Harndon at first light.” The man spread his hands and smiled. “He
apologized
for killing four men, but said that they attacked a woman, and he cannot allow such a thing.”

Two hours had passed since the two matched giants in ebony and ivory had stumbled into the yard. They’d had enough reports of the carnage in Palm Alley to know who had attacked Blanche and who had died.

“He seems unconcerned,” Ser Gerald growled.

His clerk shook his head. “Boss, I was there a year. I met men like this. They have a saying, ‘That which is, is.’ And they say,
Inshallah
, which means, ‘Let it be as God wills.’”

“Deus Veult!” Ser Gerald said. He nodded.

Ser Ricar nodded.

“No wonder they get along,” Edmund said, not very loud.

Master Pye leaned in. “I have a shop to run. We have a hundred items to deliver in fifteen days. And my gut feeling is that this is going to make a storm of shit.” He looked at Ser Ricar. “Can you hide him?”

Ser Ricar nodded.

The clerk spoke to the infidel, and he shook his head vehemently.

“He says he has a mission and he must go. He says that if we’ll hide him for one night, he’ll be gone by daybreak.” The clerk smiled. “He says if we’d retrieve his horse, he’d be eternally grateful.”

Ser Gerald rolled his eyes.

“Grateful enough for me to get a long look at his sword?” Master Pye asked.

An hour later, while Ser Gerald dickered with a bored Venike factor for a sea-sick stallion, all the apprentices and journeymen gathered in the Master’s shop around the clean table he kept there. Nothing went on that table but finished metal and parchment; today he laid his wife’s third best linen table cloth atop it after sweeping it, and the infidel knight—all the apprentices agreed he must be a knight—drew his sword and laid it on the table.

The strong daylight from the gable overhead made the blade seem to ripple and move.

Every metalworker in the room sighed.

The sword was a hand longer than the longest sword the shop had ever made, and swept in a gradual curve from the long, two-hand hilt all the way to the clipped point with its rebated false edge. The grip was white ivory from the undead mammoths of the deep south, and the crossguard was plain steel. Set into the blade—a masterpiece of pattern welding—were runes.

“Are the runes silver, Master?” Edmund asked. The colour of the runes was just barely perceptible as different from the rest of the blade.

Master Pye shook his head. “Oh, mercy no, Edmund. They are steel. Steel set into the steel.”

“Look at the finish,” murmured Duke. He had become the shop’s expert of finishing, and he now had a dozen boys working for him.

Sam Vintner, the most junior man present, was trying not to breathe, but he sighed. “So beautiful!” he said.

Tom leaned very close. “Magicked,” he said.

The infidel was on his toes, watching them very carefully. He was very tense.

The clerk made reassuring noises.

“He says—he says that in his own country, he would never allow any but his master or the Sultan to touch his sword. He says his master has filled it with power.”

Master Pye nodded. “Aye, lads. It’s full of power.” He went to a cabinet in the wall behind his prie-dieu and opened it with a word. The journeymen all knew what it was—a secret cabinet with a hermetical lock. Only the older boys knew how to open it—it was where the precious metals were kept.

Master Pye took out a set of spectacles that appeared to have lenses of faceted jewels. He leaned over the sword and put the jewels over his eyes.

“Sweet Mary, Queen of the heavens and mother of God,” he said.

He took them off and handed them to Edmund, who had never used them before. In fact, Edmund, now the senior journeyman in a shop big enough to be called a factory, was learning that Master Pye had more secrets than a necromancer.

Edmund put them on. The cabinet shone with energy in mage light.

The sword lit the room.

“What do you see, lad?” Master Pye asked him.

“The sword!” Edmund said.

“Aye,” Master Pye said. “It is a sword in the
aethereal
, too.” He pointed at the cabinet, which was merely a point source in mage light. “Things that are magicked are like shadows, and the hermetical
praxis
burns like a flame in the
aethereal
.”

“But this is a sword,” Edmund said. He took off the glasses and handed them to Tom, who was bouncing impatiently.

The infidel was still nervous. He spoke.

The clerk translated, after a long pause. “He asks if any of us know Harmodius.”

Tom put a hand on his master’s arm. “He’s got a magick ring,” he said, looking through the jewels at the paynim.

“Aye. He’s trouble, and no mistake. What do you boys reckon, when you see a sword that’s a sword in both the real and the
aethereal
?” Master Pye was pedantic, because he was
always
teaching.

They all looked at each other.

Edmund said slowly, “That it will function as a sword. In the
aethereal
, too.”

Master Pye gave him the glance of approval that they all treasured. He was not big on praise, was Master Pye. But he was more than fair. “Indeed, boys. That’s what is called a Fell Sword. Except that that’s a Fell Sword that will cut in the real
or
in the
aethereal
.” He bent over it and fitted a very pragmatic and ordinary loupe in his eye.

“I wonder who made it?” he asked.

The clerk repeated the question, and the infidel knight began to answer. He spoke for some time, and long before he was done, the clerk began writing.

“He says his master re-made it. But he says that it was made more than a thousand years ago.”

Edmund all but choked.

Master Pye nodded. “Ahh!” he said, with utter delight. “It is one of the six!” He lifted the sword from the table, and in that gesture, he was transformed from a tall, ungainly man with bulgy eyes and bad breath to a hero of legend whose shadow fell over the table like a figure of menace.

“Who is your master, my lord?” he asked.

The clerk repeated the words.

The infidel spoke.
“Abū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ’Aḥmad bin Rušd
.” He bowed. His eyes were on the sword.

Master Pye smiled. “I confess to a very boyish inclination to try and cut something with it.” He carefully put it on the table, and returned to being a bent-shouldered man in late middle-age with a fringe of hair and bulging eyes. “His master is Al Rashidi.”

The journeymen all breathed in together.

“The Magus!” Edmund said.

Master Pye pointed at the tiny sign of an eye emerging from the sun. “The very same.” He offered his right hand to the infidel.

The black man took his hand.

Master Pye did something with his hand—changed grip somehow.

The infidel knight grinned. “Ah—
rafiki!”
he said.

“He says, ‘Oh, friend!’” said the clerk.

Master Pye nodded. He turned.

“Boys, that’s one of the six—on a table in our shop. I expect that in the next quarter hour, we’ll have the most complete set of weights, measures and dimensions for that sword as exist in all the world. Eh?”

He took the clerk by the shoulder and led him—and the infidel, who didn’t want to leave his weapon—out of the shop.

“Six?” Duke asked.

Tom whistled. “Don’t you know anything?”

Duke gave him a look that promised bruised knuckles. Duke had made journeyman on pure talent, and lacked the book learning of the other journeymen.

“Hieronimus Magister was the greatest magus of the Archaics,” Edmund said. “You should read his essay on the property of metals. It is the origin of proper study.” He shrugged. “At any rate, he was the greatest of mages. In their world, he is treated as a prophet.” He pointed out the door, where the black man had gone. “When the Umroth attacked, he made a hundred swords for the Emperor’s guard to use against the not-dead.”

Tom was measuring and Sam was writing everything in his neat hand on wax.

“At the end of the last Umroth war, only six remained. They kill—both here and in the
aethereal.
But strange events follow them—weather, monsters, the Wild, assassins.” Edmund shrugged. “I thought they were a myth.”

Duke reached out—always the boldest of them—and picked up the great curved sword.

“Holy Mother of God,” he said.

He, too, seemed to grow in stature and dignity.

“Oh,” he breathed. He put the sword down, carefully. “Oh—my God.”

As Duke was never impressed by anything, Edmund couldn’t stop himself. He plucked up the sword.

Once, as a child, Edmund had gone with his mother and sisters to the cathedral and there, by chance, he had been standing in the nave when the sun emerged from the clouds and shone directly through the great central rose window of the cathedral. All around him, light exploded into bloom and in that moment, he had felt the touch of God—the direct, intangible presence of the universe and all wisdom, and everything: his sister’s laughter, his mother’s whisper, the priest’s hands, the passage of the smoking censor through the perfumed air, the perfection of its arc and the gleam of its silver shell; and every dust mote and every hint of the last chord of the last hymn and the whispers of the nuns and the gleam of a rich woman’s buttoned sleeve—everything made
sense.

Edmund had never forgotten that moment. It was at the heart of his craftsmanship.

And now he relived it in half the beat of his heart. He was the sword. The sword was in him and over him. And everything, everywhere, made sense.

He regained control of himself—aware of a nearly overpowering urge to use the blade on something—anything—to feel its perfection in culmination, almost exactly the feeling he had when he lay beside Anne and kissed her and wanted more. To finish.

To be complete.

Instead, he laid the sword gradually down on the table.

“Be careful,” he said to Sam. “But you must try it.”

“Can you imagine wearing that every day?” Edmund asked Duke.

Duke sighed. “Oh—aye. I can imagine.” He smiled weakly. “I wanted to cut you in half, just to see if I could.”

Neither laughed.

An hour later, a boy came from Prior Wishart with a note for Ser Ricar. By then the sword was returned to its owner, who seemed profoundly more at ease to have it at his side. He was seated at a table in the yard, writing out words in his odd flowing runes at the dictation of Ser Gerald’s clerk.

The clerk made an odd gesture. “He speaks Etruscan well eno’,” he said. “I’m trying to give him a few words in Alban.”

“Etruscan?” Master Pye asked. He shook his head.

Ser Ricar appeared at his elbow and handed him a note.

Master Pye took the note and read it.

“Christ on the cross,” he snapped. “Boys! On me!”

Long before the King’s Guardsmen came, Blanche was gone, and her bed was stripped and the maids were washing in the yard. The black man vanished as if he had never been, and Ser Ricar vanished with him.

The guardsmen searched in a desultory way. Blanche had friends throughout the palace. The guardsmen were not very interested in finding her, but they had a warrant for her arrest.

When they were gone, Mistress Pye put her arms around her husband. “Bradley Pye,” she said. “I think it is time to get out of this town.”

He was watching the last two guardsmen as they went through his gate.

“Worse ’n you think,” he muttered. “They’re going to suppress the Order.”

His wife crossed herself. “Blessed Saint Thomas,” she said.

Master Pye had tears in his eyes. “My life’s work is here,” he said. “But our secret guards will be gone, now. The prior’s calling his knights away before the King can get to them.”

“So?” his wife asked.

“So we’re naked,” Master Pye said. “And an army of Galles will land in the next day or two. Gerry says the Venike know they’re coming.”

“Gerald Random won’t let us down.” Deirdre Pye shook her head.

“I’d be happy if you were gone,” Master Pye said. “You an’ the maids.”

“Bradley Pye, when will you learn that we’re not hostages? We’re willing hands.” His wife crossed her arms.

Pye pursed his lips. “We’ll see,” he said.

No Galles came the next day, or the next.

Outside the southern walls of the city, the bleachers rose for the tournament, and lists were built. There were lists for foot combat, with oak beams four fingers square that rested on oak posts, so that a knight in full armour, thrown by another, wouldn’t budge the fence. Four feet high, eighteen feet on a side—a bear pit for armoured fighters.