The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 (24 page)

Samlor turned, shrugging. 'The price of a four year old girl? That'd run to about four coronations in Ranke, but you know the local market better. Or the profit on the thief you give me. Figure what he'll bring you in a lifetime ... Name a figure, leader. I don't expect you to realize what this giri means to n", but - name a figure.'

'I won't give you a thief,' said the masked man. He paused deliberately and raised a restraining finger, though the Cirdonian had not moved. 'And I won't charge you a copper. I'll give you a name: Hort.'

Samlor frowned. 'A Beysib?'

The mask trembled negation. 'Local boy. A fisherman's son. He and his father got picked up by Beysib patrols at sea before the invasion. He speaks their language pretty well - better than any of them I know speaks ours. And I think he'll help you if he can.' The mask hid the speaker's face, but the smile was in his voice as well as he added, 'You needn't tell him who sent you. He's not one of mine, you see.'

Samlor bowed. 'I couldn't tell him,' he said. 'I don't know who you are.' He reached for the latch of the trap door. 'I thank you. sir.'

'Wait a minute,' called the man behind the desk. Samlor straightened and met the hooded eyes. 'Why are you so sure I won't call down to have you spitted the moment you're through this door?'

The Cirdonian shrugged again. 'Business reasons,' he said. 'I'm a businessman too. I understand risks. You'll be out of this place-' he waved at the dingy room - 'before I'm clear of the alley. No need to kill me to save a bolt-hole that you've written off already. And there's not one chance in a thousand that I could get past what you have waiting below, but -' calloused palm up, another shrug-'in the dark ... You have people looking for you, sir, that's obvious. But none of them so far would be willing to burn this city down block by block to flush you, if he had to.'

Samlor reached again for the latch, paused again. 'Sir,' he said earnestly, 'you may think I've lied to you tonight... and perhaps I have. But I'm not lying to you now. On the honour of my House.' He clenched his fist over the medallion of Heqt on his breast.

The mask nodded. As Samlor dropped through the trap into darkness, the harsh voice called from above, 'Let him go! Let him go, this time!'

There was nothing ugly about the harbour water with the noon sun on it. The froth was pearly, the fish-guts iridescent; and the water itself, whatever its admixture of sewage, was faceted into diamond and topaz across its surface. Samlor sipped his ale in the dockside cantina as he had done at noon on the past three days. As before, he was waiting for Hort to return with information or the certain lack of it. The Cirdonian wondered what Star saw when she looked around her; and whether she found beauty in it.

There was commotion on one of the quays, easily visible through the cantina's open front. A trio of Beysib had been stepping a new mast into a trawler. As they worked, a squad of cavalry - Beysib also, but richly caparisoned in metals and brocades - had clattered along the quay. The squad halted alongside the boat. The men on the trawler had seemed as surprised as other onlookers when the troopers dismounted and leaped aboard, waggling their long swords in visual emphasis of the orders they shouted.

Nine of the horsemen were involved either in trussing the startled fishermen or acting as horseholders for the rest. The tenth man watched coldly as the others worked. He wore a helmet, gilded or gold, with a feather-tipped triple crest. When he turned as if in disdain for the proceedings, Samlor saw and recognized his profile. The man was Lord Tudhaliya, the swordsman who had been demonstrating his skill on an Ilsig animal the other day. The fishermen continued to babble until ropes with slip knots were dropped over their throats. Then they needed all their breath to scramble after the cavalrymen. \ The troopers remounted with a burst of chirruping cross-chat which sounded undisciplined to the caravan-master, but which detracted nothing from the efficiency of the process. Three of the men tied off the nooses to their saddle pommels. Tudhaliya gave a sharp order and the squad rode at a canter back the way it had come. Citizens with business on the quay dodged hooves as best they might. The fishermen blubbered in terror as they tried to run with the horses. They knew that a misstep meant death, unless the rider to whom they were tethered reined up in time. Nothing Samlor had seen of Lord Tudhaliya suggested his lordship would permit such mercy. There were half a dozen regulars in the bar, fishermen and fish-merchants. When Samlor looked away from the spectacle, he found the local men staring at him. He gave a scowl of surprise when he noticed them; but even as the locals retreated into their mugs in confusion, Samlor understood why they had looked at him the way they had. The Cirdonian had nothing to do with the arrests on the docks just now; but he had nothing to do with this tavern, either. He had sat here during three noons and drunk ale ... and on the third day, the Beysibs made an arrest on the dock below. To the vulnerable, no coincidence is chance. These fishermen were unusually vulnerable to all the powers of the physical world as well as those of the political one. No wonder the Beysib counterparts of these men had turned to a god their overlords would not recognize; a personification, perhaps, of mystery and of the typhoons that could sweep the ocean clear of small boats and simple sailors.

Hort slipped into the cantina. He was dressed a little on the gaudy side. Still, he wore his clothes with the self-assurance of a young man instead of a boy's nervous gibing at the world. He raised a finger. The bartender chalked the slate above him and began drawing a mug of ale for the newcomer.

'I'm not sure you want to be seen with me,' Hort muttered to Samlor as he took his ale. 'The fellows they just carried off -' he nodded, as he slurped the brew, towards the trawler bobbing high on its lines with the mast still swinging above it from the sheer legs. 'Kummanni, Anbarbi, Arnuwanda. I talked to them just last night. About what you needed to know.'

'That's why they were arrested?' the caravan-master asked. He tried to keep his voice as calm as if he were asking which tailor had sewn the younger man's jerkin.

'I would to god I knew,' Hort said with feeling. 'It could be anything. Tudhaliya is - Minister of Security, I suppose. But he likes to stay close to things. To keep his hand in.'

'And his swords,' Samlor agreed softly. His eyes traced the path the horsemen had taken as they rode off, towards the palace and the dungeons beneath it.

'Would enough money to let you travel be a help?'

Hort shrugged, shuddered. 'I don't know.' He drained his mug and slid it to the bartender for a refill.

'I'm not afraid to be seen with you,' Samlor said. 'But I'm not sure you want to tell me about the - cult - with so many other people around.' He smiled about the cantina. The men there had just furnished him with a tactful way to prod the frightened youth into his story.

Hort drank and shuddered again. He said, 'Oh, I was raised with everyone here. Omat's my godfather. They won't tell tales to the Beysib.'

It wasn't the time for Samlor to comment. He assumed it was obvious anyway. Anyone will talk if the questions are put with sufficient forcefulness. But Hort must have known that too. The local man was not a coward, and he was not the worse for never having asked questions the way Lord Tudhaliya would. The way Samlor hil Samt had done, when need arose, might Heqt wash him . with mercy when she gathered him in ...

'There's a boat went out last month at the new moon,' Hort said beneath a moustache of beer foam. 'A trawler, but not fishing. Do you know what Death's Harbour is?'

'No.' Samlor had poled a skiff as a boy, when he hunted ducks in the marshes south ofCirdon. He knew little of the sea, however, and nothing at all of the seas around Sanctury.

'Two currents meet,' Hort explained. 'Any flotsam in the sea gets swept into the eye of it. Wrecks, sometimes. And sometimes men on rafts, until the sun dries their skin to parchment shrouding their bones.' He laughed. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I forget what sort of story I meant to tell you.' The smile faded. 'Nobody fishes in Death's Harbour. The bottom is deeper than anyone here ever set a line. Scooped out by the currents, I suppose. The fish won't shoal there, so it's no use to us. But a Beysib trawler went there last month, and it's coming back now slower than there's any reason for. Except that it's going to arrive tonight, and the moon is new again tonight.'

'Star's aboard her, then?' Samlor asked and sipped more ale. The brew was bitter, but less bitter than the gall that flooded his mouth at the thought of Star in Beysib hands.

'I think so,' Hort agreed. 'Anbarbi didn't approve. Of any of it, I think, though none of them said what was really going on. We'd seen the boat at sea, my father, all of us from Sanctuary that go to sea ourselves. That's what we talked about, though they didn't much want to talk. But from what Anbarbi let drop, I think there was a child on the trawler. At least when it put out.'

'And it'll dock here this evening?' the Cirdonian said. He had set down his mug and was flexing his hands, open and shut, as if to work the stiffness out of them.

'Oh -' said Hort. He was embarrassed not to be telling his story more in the fashion of an intelligence summary than of an entertainment with the discursions which added body to the tale and coin to the teller's purse. 'No, not here. There's a cove west a league of Downwind. Smugglers used it until the Beysib came. There are ruins there, older than anybody's sure. A temple, some other buildings. Nobody much uses them now, though the Smugglers'11 be back when things settle down, I suppose. But the boat from Death's Harbour will put in there at midnight. I think, sir. I tell stories for a living, and I've learned to sew them together from this word and that word I hear. But it doesn't usually matter if my pattern is the same one that the gods wove to begin with.'

'Well,' Samlor said after consideration, 'I don't think my first look at this place had better be after dark. There'll be a watchman or the like, I suppose

... but we'll deal with that when we find it. I -' he paused and looked straight at the younger man instead of continuing to eye the harbour. 'We agreed that your pay would be the full story when I had it to tell ... and you'll have that. But it may be I won't be talking much after tonight, so take this,' his clenched hand brushed Hort's flexed to empty into the other's palm, 'and take my friendship. You've - acted as a man in this thing, and you have neither blood nor honour to drive you to it.'

'One thing more,' said the youth. 'The Beysib - the Setmur clan, I mean - are real sailors, and they know their fishing, too ... But there are things they don't know about the harbourages here, around Sanctuary. I don't think they know that there's a tunnel through the east headland of the cove they've chosen for whatever they're going to do.' Hort managed a tight smile. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The risk he was taking by getting involved with the stranger was very real, though most of the specific dangers were more nebulous to him than they were to Samlor. 'One end of the tunnel opens under the corniche of the headland. You can row right into it at high tide. And when you lift the slab at the other end, you're in the temple itself.'

Hort's coda had drawn from his listener all the awed pleasure that a story well told could bring. The local man stood up, strengthened by the respect of a strong man. 'May your gods lead you well, sir,' Hort said, squeezing the Cirdonian's hand in leave-taking. 'I look forward to hearing your story.'

The youth strode out of the cantina with a flourish and a nod to the other patrons. Samlor shook his head. In a world that seemed filled with sharks and stonefish, Hort's bright courage was as admirable as it was rare. To say that Samlor felt like an idiot was to understate matters. It was the only choice he could come up with at short notice, however, and which did not involve others. At this juncture, the Cirdonian was not willing to involve others. He had rented a mule cart. It had provided a less noticeable method of scouting the cove than a horse would have done. The cart had also transported the punt he had bought to the nearest launching place to the headland that he could find. The roadstead on which Sanctuary was built was edged mostly by swamps, but the less-sheltered shore to the west had been carved away by storms. The limestone corniche rose ten to fifty feet above the sea, either sheer or with an outward batter. A lookout on the upper rim could often not see a vessel inshore but beneath him. That was to Samlor's advantage; but the punt, the only craft the Cirdonian felt competent to navigate, was utterly unsuited to the ocean. Needs must when the devil drives. Samlor's great shoulders braced the pole against the cliff face, not the shelving bottom. Foam echoed back from the rocks and balanced the surge that had tried to sweep him inward with it. In that moment of stasis, Samlor shot the punt forward another twenty feet. Then the surf was on him again, his muscles flexing on the ten-foot pole as they transferred the sea's power to the rock, again and again. Samlor had launched the punt at sunset. By now, he had no feeling for time nor for the distance he had yet to struggle across to his once-glimpsed goal. He had a pair of short oars lashed to the forward thwart, but they would have been totally useless for keeping him off this hungry shore. Samlor was a strong man, and determined; but the sea was stronger, and the fire in Samlor's shoulders was beginning to make him fear that the sea was more determined as well. Instead of spewing back at him, the next wave continued to be drawn into the rock. It became a long tongue, glowing with microorganisms. Samlor had reached the tunnel mouth while he had barely enough consciousness to be aware of the fact.

Even that was not the end of the struggle. The softer parts ofth& rock had been worn away into edges that could have gobbled the skiff like a duckling caught by a turtle. Samlor let the next surge carry him in to the depth of his pole. The phosphorescence limned a line of bronze hand-holds set into the stone. The powerful Cirdonian dropped his pole into the boat to snatch a grip with both hands. He held it for three racking breaths before he could find the strength to drag the punt fully aground, further up the tunnel. The tunnel was unlighted. Even the plankton cast up by the spray illuminated little more than the surfaces to which it clung. Samlor spent his first several minutes ashore striking a spark from flint and steel into the tinder he carried in a wax-plugged tube. At first his fingers seemed as little under his control as the fibres of the wooden pole they had clutched so fiercely. Conscious direction returned to them the fine motor control they would need later in the night.