The Fox (85 page)

Inda had become sensitive to voices in a way he never had been before. He heard the rage Fox tried to hide under the teasing, how it sharpened the consonants of the words he meant to speak so lightly. Inda forced himself to look up. Saw—lit in the cold moonlight—unguarded worry in Fox’s bony face.

“I don’t understand,” Inda said again, almost inaudibly.

Time to move. Past time to move
.

Fox abandoned the manner. “We need to cause a diversion so they won’t chase us.” He peered in all directions as Inda loosely turned his thumb up. “I figured we’d wreck this place. I’ve laid straw and oil in nooks and rafters and old stairways all over. Want to help?”

“Yes.”

Intensely relieved, Fox said, “Think you can keep pace, or would you rather anchor somewhere while I take care of things here?”

Inda said, “I’ll do. I feel better already.”

Fox hunkered down so he could look into Inda’s face. The distant ruddy glow of torches made his own expression clearer to Inda. For once Fox did not deflect with irony, or derision, or disbelief. He was serious and intent. “I don’t think you are.”

“I want to rip him apart,” Inda said, and when he heard the tremble in his own voice, flushed with heat. He gritted his teeth and concentrated on his breathing until he trusted his internal hold, then said, “Will that turn me into him?”

“No.” Fox’s voice was husky. Inda’s question spurted snowmelt through his veins. “Moral questions aside, he’s not here. That’s why I am. He’s in Jaro, attending on Prince Rajnir, and most of his staff is asleep. There are half a dozen night guards, all right below here, outside your cell. There are a couple others down at the other end, but they’re either asleep, or drinking and gambling. Typical civilian idea of security. So let’s give them enough trouble to make them earn their pay.”

Inda painstakingly got to his feet as Fox looped the rope and slung it over one shoulder baldric-style. They were on the edge of a roof. Below lay a sloping hillside, and far below that the lights of Beila Lana twinkled in a sharp horseshoe curve, the intersecting squares of golden lights in the middle shaping the garrison.

To Inda’s left the jumble of slanting roofs indicated a long palace built around various courts and gardens. There were no guards on the rooftop. On his right was a newly-built wall, the stone pale gray. They were at the extreme end of the palace, then—in Wafri’s playground.

Inda said, “Shouldn’t we stay quiet?”

Fox led the way across the roof to a lower level. He put out a hand, and Inda stopped. “If you vanish,” Fox said, reaching under a wide rain gutter, “Wafri will not only marshal every pair of eyes he can command to search for you, he will also lie to the Venn about the nature of the search. Because they do not know he has you. Had you. Ah, I see you are not surprised.”

Inda flexed his hands. “No. He was proud of it.”

Fox’s teeth showed in his nastiest grin. “I really think the Venn ought to know what their boy is up to, don’t you?”

Inda huffed, almost but not quite a laugh.

Fox pulled out something long and bulky, handed Inda a composite bow, a quiver of arrows, and a couple of knives in sheaths. He helped Inda get the sheaths on his wrists. Then picked up his own weapons.

“Ready?”

Inda found movement difficult—the pain in his joints kept flaring, prickling, then going coldly numb—but he told himself it was not impossible. The only impossible thing was another day, another watch, spent as Wafri’s prisoner.

He was free. And he was going to stay that way, or die. Easy, when you thought about it that way. Move or die. Walk or die. Shoot or die. “Ready.”

In the locked and guarded private suite of the royal residence, the pleasure dancers frolicked around the two young men who comprised their audience, poses enticing and artful, delectable perfumes drifting on the air, hips making slow and provocative circles as the chimes on their low-slung belts rang pleasant chords. For these two they wore nothing above their silken trousers and tasseled chain belts but bangles about their wrists, and diaphanous draperies attached to their headdresses that fluttered about them, revealing and veiling their charms.

Rajnir, Wafri, and the women were long familiar with one another—the dancers were superlative performers, and their two patrons were young, good-looking, responsive. And very, very rich. They were also capricious, as young, rich, good-looking lords tended to be. The leader of the troupe had been observing her patrons as the dance finished, and recognized restlessness in both. Restless patrons soon became bored patrons, who inevitably turned their attentions—and their largesse—elsewhere.

Wafri had been waiting impatiently for the first moment he could make a graceful exit. He loved the veil dances, but they had been familiar since he was sixteen; it was he who had introduced them to Rajnir, who had only been used to those sexless Venn hel dancers.

Dance in the land of the Venn could evoke the senses, but was always part of a larger context; the hel dancers dedicated their entire lives to inspiring their viewers to the golden path of Ydrasal. These dancers’ art was confined to the pleasure of the senses. Rajnir’s first sight of those veils, or rather the entrancing bare curves beneath the veils, had been as electrifying as a lightning strike: in the north, neither men nor women bared their chests in public.

Since then, after several years of summoning them whenever he could get time away from duty, Rajnir’s feelings had dwindled to the ease of familiarity and pleasant anticipation. He had brooded for a couple of days over Erkric’s mysterious request—really almost a command— that he give a series of entertainments as compensation for the hard work everyone had done in the land and sea search for Elgar the Fox.

He still found himself resentful of the mage’s insistence. He’d thought a day of celebration had been enough, but Erkric spoke with conviction: personal attention was due everyone down the chain of command, on a succession of nights. Rajnir had decided he may as well begin with himself, with Wafri there to share in his favorite entertainment. Tomorrow was good enough to begin with the formal rituals in the Venn Hel for all the officers in Jaro, the day after that for those over the hill reorganizing Beila Lana.

He shifted impatiently on his cushion as the thumping drums brought the dance to a close. Why was he still sour? The dancers were good as always, but was Wafri paying attention to them? He kept tapping his fingers in that irritating way—

Having finished in a stimulating pose, draperies shrouding her body to a silhouette, the leader made a subtle signal. The troupe divided, running forward in tiny ringing steps to surround each man, their draperies blowing back.

Ah,
Rajnir thought, attention thoroughly caught now. Hel dancers
never
do anything like
that
—and whyever not?

Soft hands massaged Wafri’s neck and shoulders; someone else stripped off his shoes and stockings to rub his feet, and two others worked on each hand. He lay back and closed his eyes. Indevan could wait a little while, he thought with pleasant anticipation as the tutored hands began working inward toward his body. Indevan would not know when he would arrive . . . really, it was so exciting to contemplate. The man who had defeated Marshig the Murderer, helpless in Wafri’s control. How he flinched when Wafri raised a hand! The thought made him rock hard, and he abandoned himself happily to his dancers, who were determined to sustain the bliss all the night through.

And so, when his scroll-case tapped, there was no one to feel it because the case was in his clothes. Which had been left behind on the performance floor.

There was no hope of making it through the palace undiscovered, not after Inda spied the Limros ancestral portrait gallery. He stumbled to a stop before the larger-than-life paintings, all framed in gold-threaded carved wood, in which Wafri’s face was depicted in variety and multiplicity.

He stiffened. Hands out, fingers tense.

“Inda? We need to keep moving.”

Inda did not hear. Fox touched his arm, to be flung off violently. Then, seizing the rest of the flagons of oil Fox had brought as extras, Inda flung the oil on every single ancestral portrait, tapestry, and wooden carving. He grabbed the hallway oil lamp that Fox had taken up as soon as they’d climbed in through a window. He slung it in a wide circle, breathing in great, shuddering gasps, as the blue flame sprayed outward, igniting tongues of fire.

Ruddy light glowed on his tense profile, head thrown back. Flames twinned and leaped, scattered and blended and roared, radiating withering, killing heat as the entire gallery—all gilt and carved wood, trophy swords mounted between the portraits, two ancient shields, and a banner with the clover leaf worked in gold between two tall windows—fed into the inferno.

Tiny sparks began to fly, drifting crazily around them.

“Inda.” Fox touched his arm.

Inda recoiled, a knife arcing out—to stop against Fox’s blade. Inda stilled, blinking at the crossed blades. Fox watched consciousness incrementally ease Inda’s face, then sheathed his knife, and with his other hand jerked his thumb at the door.

They ran, smoke billowing after them.

There was no hope of slipping through unnoticed now. The smoke rolled down halls, causing panic among the sparse night staff in its wake.

But Fox had planned for that, too. They ignited each of his fire caches as they ran down the length of the old palace.

What he hadn’t planned for were Inda’s inspired additions.

Into the servants’ wing they unloosed crates of chickens cooped for the night. In the main hall, where the minimal night guard converged out of instinct, Inda emptied a sack of dried peas, which sent the booted men slipping and sliding. Dye overturned. A soup tureen poured down a flight of stairs, followed by barrel hoops. Corn baskets waiting for grinding thrown into the ovens, causing a spectacular explosion of corn puffs sending the four bakers beginning to make the day’s bread shrieking for the beleaguered guards, who were already trying to deal with screaming, panicking servants. The chaos accelerated Fox’s succession of untended fires on landings, staircases, and halls into a scale of unsurpassed domestic disaster.

They paused outside the guard hall, where the day shift was asleep, though not for long, as the panic was slowly building in the long palace complex behind them.

Fox indicated the row of neat pairs of boots at the foot of each bed, moved on down the hall as he mourned in a whisper, “Wish we could stop in the stable. These aristocrats! Can’t bear the stink of horse. Stable is as far from their living quarters as possible.”

“Don’t need horse shit,” Inda said, the weakening darkness blurring his features. “Know something better. Kitchen is right there.” He ran back downstairs, Fox on his heels. They dodged the screaming, fire-batting servants and ducked into the larder.

Inda grabbed up two baskets of eggs. Surprised, Fox took the last basket, and they drifted, soundless, down the long barracks, inserting an egg into every boot.

Out the other end. They tossed the baskets away, and were crossing the last distance to the tall gate to the road and freedom, when Inda began to shake and shiver. They dashed across a lit passage; Inda was laughing.

Laughing. First silently, then in gasping crows and whoops. The abandoned laughter of a child of ten.

Behind them, the tide of panic reached the sleeping guards at last. Fox had counted on the lack of any real drill or training other than orderly marching; no one, including the guards, seemed to know what to do other than yell “Fire!” and run about looking for water—thieves—one another, as someone sped to the mage’s chamber and tried without the least success to shake him awake.

But someone knew enough to ring the alarm bells.

And so the guards responded by converging—some of them squishing miserably—on the main court behind the gate, whose massive bar would take ten men to lift.

Inda and Fox hooked fingers and toes into the crosspieces holding together the tall, rough wooden spars that made up the gate, not stopping until they hoisted themselves to the top of the wall. Inda still fizzed with wheezy laughter.

Arrows thunked close by. One hissed a finger’s-breadth from Inda’s ear, as whoever had rung the bell shouted orders in an attempt to marshal the swarming, yelling guards into a defensive line.

Fox glanced outside the wall. The road leading up to the palace was empty, dark, silent.

They unslung their bows, shook out their arrows onto the granite wall top, and began target practice on the half-dressed men down below, neither shooting to kill. Half were mere civs, and as for the guards, it was far more insulting just to drop them with an arrow in shoulder, knee, butt.

“Eggs?” Fox asked as a squad of men lumbered with a peculiar gait into position behind a wagon, driven by a screaming officer. The peculiar gait of men with egg sliming the insides of their boots.

Inda’s wheezing ceased. His grin widened, and then with shocking suddenness his chest heaved on a gulping sob. Once, twice: crashing, lung-deep sobs. Inda whooped his breath in and held it, teeth gritted, as he fought for control.

Fox stared, helpless and appalled. Then swung around and glared down at the empty road as though he could will the last part of his plan into materialization.

“They’re readying for a run,” Inda mumbled, snuffling.

Fox whipped his bow up, smacked an arrow into place.

They loosed arrows in drilled succession, each shooting as the other drew, and each finding his mark.

The advance line staggered, straggled, and as the last arrow whacked into the commander’s left shoulder a palm’s-breadth from his heart, they broke and ran back for cover, despite the cursing and shouting of the staggering officer.

For a moment the court was empty.

“Not my idea, eggs,” Inda said, his words quick, his voice husky. “But I think Dogpiss’d like it. D’you think he’s a ghost? I hope he’s not a ghost. I don’t want him alone, bound to an island where no one goes, I want to think of his spirit in the sun, or beyond the sun, where spirits go out of the world, or the world that holds worlds, but then I wonder if he sees me. N-not—uh.” Inda stuttered to a halt.