The Jaguar Knights (42 page)

Megan frowned. “You sure of that, dear?”

“Yes, yes! He had to sniff out all our little gadgets in order to break them. We know,” she said with a glance at Wolf that meant he might not, “that a conjurer can never be a White Sister or vice versa. You either push the elementals around or you stand still and watch them. Blacksmiths don’t play lutes, is how Intrepid puts it. But Shining-cloud can do both!”

“I don’t believe it,” Flicker said. “He must just have a general conjuration to release elementals.”

“That has
got
to be impossible!”

“I believe it,” Wolf said grumpily, aware that he never missed a chance to disagree with Flicker. “The sniffing, I mean. Heron-jade told me he detected the eagle knight all the way from Calero’s. ‘Recognized his shadow’ was how he put it.”

“Now you’re saying Heron-jade is a White Sister?” Flicker was rarely so witty. They all smiled.

“He’d look great in the hat,” Wolf said. “But remember he saw the enchantment on our tangle mats? The jaguars didn’t, but he did. They had an unnatural ability to see in the dark and probably other skills. An eagle knight, like his Sky-cactus, can
delegate
the ability to sniff out conjury to his followers. He must
conjure
them to do it! Try telling that to the White Sisters!”

Glum silence. Everything they had been taught about spiritualism had fallen apart in the Hence Lands.

“What does matter,” Dolores declared, “is that the Eagles’ conjuration skills are absolutely incredible and it’s worth
anything
to get hold of them! What do we try next, love?”

“We go home. De Rojas told me to get out of town or he’d skin us completely. He even pointed out that there’s a Chivian ship in port. He was giving us a five-yard start.”

Megan’s needles clicked softly. She was nodding to her knitting. Dolores stared in dismay at the crumbling of her dreams.

Flicker sneered. “You flee from threats, Wolf?”

“I learn from my mistakes, and tonight I learned that what we want to do is impossible. The mission has hit the rocks; all hands to the lifeboats. Firstly, we were relying on the eagle knights to fetch the trade goods. Rojas and Heron-jade both say that’s impossible.” He waited a moment in case his wife wanted to say Rojas had been lying, but she did not. “The Eagles need something to aim for, and without it they can’t find Chivial. To ship arms by sea would take us years. Secondly, the Eagles and Jaguars will never reveal their secrets.”

“They will if they are desperate enough!” Flicker said.

Wolf sighed. “No. I should have listened to my own advice. I told you, all of you, back on
Glorious.
I told you, ‘The Jaguars and Eagles guard their secrets so closely that we could learn nothing if we were free to walk the streets of El Dorado.’ ”

“They were willing to trade tonight if we’d had trade goods ready!” Dolores protested.

“Hummingbird was, love. Shining-cloud wasn’t. He and his flock had orders from their king to cooperate, but he found a way to wiggle out. That will always happen. You can bribe the rulers, or threaten the cities with massacre, but you cannot pressure the knights. Are you suggesting we tie the likes of Shining-cloud to a stump and start pulling out his feathers? You’re thinking of them as conjurers, like old Grand Wizard and his fumbling fog of fogies. I’m telling you they’re fighters, military orders like the Blades or the Yeomen. You could offer a Blade anything in the world for his sword and he would turn you down even if he were starving. Or try bribing a Yeoman to go out in public with mud on his cuirass.
We will never get their secrets out of the knights!
”

He was looking at three disbelieving faces. Even Megan probably just thought it was too dangerous to try, not that it was impossible.

“I should have seen this sooner,” he said. “We all should. We are trying to exchange goods for knowledge and that is never easy. It’s almost impossible in this case, because the
naturales
have no proper system of
writing. They have no spell books we can buy.” More blank looks. Wolf pressed on. “Listen! Suppose we offer a whole wagonload of swords just for one conjuration—say the one the Eagles use to teleport people. That can’t be written down anywhere, because Tlixilians don’t have real writing. But we have the swords, they have the know-how, and we agree to trade. We send them, say, Flicker, and the knights teach him the technique. They may grumble, but they obey orders from their king or emperor and they reveal their mystery. We hand over the swords, and they send Flicker back. Now they have the swords and we have Flicker and
both parties
have the information. You see the difference?”

“Then they kill me.” Flicker’s mind was as fast as his feet. The women were still puzzled but he was smiling, thin-lipped.

Wolf nodded. “With their powers, they could probably do that no matter what precautions we took or where you fled. You might cheat them by writing it all down quick, but I wouldn’t count on even that. You’d be a dead man running. Then they still have the swords and we have nothing.”

Even Dolores was frowning now, still reluctant to believe.

“Suppose we had not been unmasked tonight,” he said. “Suppose I had managed to gull the Conch-flute into believing I did have a shipload of hardware on its way. We make a deal, so what happens? He certainly does not call Shining-cloud down off his perch to give Dolores a few tips in Tlixilian spirituality. No, he whisks her off to Yazotlan with him to learn the skills she wants at leisure. When I am ready to deliver the goods, I get my wife back in exchange. But for how long? I’m telling you that tonight was the luckiest failure of my life. I say we give up and go home.”

Dolores jumped to her feet. “Darling, we can’t! We mustn’t! Chivial needs this. What if Isilond or Distlain gets these powers before we do? They could drop an army in the middle of Grandon. So what if it’s dangerous? We knew this mission would be dangerous. You’re trying to baby me again, Wolf! You are treating us like children.”

“I am not trying—”

“Yes, you are! I did not come all this way just to turn around and run home with my tail between my legs.”

Megan folded her knitting back in its bag. “Let’s talk about it in the morning, Sir Wolf. It’s a big decision and we should sleep on it.”

T
he most important rule in a marriage was
Never take an argument to bed.
But there were times…

“You didn’t listen to Rojas,” Wolf said as he snuffed the candle. “He knows we’re trying to deal with El Dorado. He can guess we have more gold. One night he’s going to send an army here again. He more or less promised! And this time we don’t have jaguar warriors to bash heads.” He rolled over.

“Don’t touch me!”

He rolled back again. “That won’t help.”

“Nor will what you want.”

“It would, you know.”

“No, it wouldn’t.”

“As you wish. Megan was right. We should sleep on it, not talk about it anymore tonight. Go to sleep.”

“You don’t love me.” She saw triumph and fame being snatched away from her. He saw no chance of either. She saw her great adventure cut short for no reason. He saw both them and the people who relied on them dying nastily and soon.

“You think I came to this fever swamp to please Athelgar?” he asked.

Silence.

He was bitter. “Yes, you let it slip tonight, didn’t you? I wasn’t the only one babbling secrets under the Serpent’s Eye.”

“What do you mean?” she whispered, still with her back to him.

“
Put it in writing!
Remember? What you said to Flicker the first time I met him, in the Pine Tree Inn. Then you told me it meant he was to go away. But that’s not what that means! That happens to be one scrap
of Dark Chamber code I know. It means
The plan is going well, targets will be met or exceeded.
I hoped you were telling him we would catch Lynx. But you meant me. Had you slipped something in my food when I wasn’t looking? Or were you just using feminine intuition to know you were going to land your fish?”

Silence.

Wolf sighed at his own folly. “Flicker took the news back to Grand Inquisitor and the Privy Council. Because no matter what Grand Inquisitor may say, the Dark Chamber would never dare launch a major international venture like this without approval from the Council. You confessed that tonight. You manipulated me into taking on the mission by telling me I was deceiving the King. I expect Grand Inquisitor persuaded the King to agree by letting him deceive me. Athelgar would have enjoyed that—not to mention enjoying sending me to somewhere far away and dangerous. They spun me a cock-and-bull story about Vicious threatening to resign.”

Flicker must have been in on the joke too. That rankled.

Dolores’s answer was half-muffled in the pillow. “I don’t know what Grand Inquisitor does.”

“No? Well I’m not interested in risking my life to give Athelgar or the Dark Chamber any more conjury than they already know. We’re going home.”

She rolled over. “No, we’re not! I came here to make my name and fortune and I’m not ready to quit.”

“Fortune? Fool child! You expect Athelgar to make you rich? The man’s tighter than the axle nut on a millstone. If you go home with any Tlixilian conjury, you’ll be locked up in the Bastion as a military secret weapon before you know what happens to you. Trust Athelgar? You’re crazy!”

“And you’re a quitter!” She rolled away from him again.

He lay and sweated in the airless heat. Mosquitoes shrilled in his ears, moths bounced off the windows. Little tropical things moved silently over the floor and walls. He went over the problem a million more times and found no new answer. He had nothing but lies to offer for secrets beyond price. If the inquisitors stayed in Sigisa, Rojas would skin them. Conclusion: Go away.

Eventually he realized that he was scratching. He slid out of bed and went in search of a candle. As he had feared, he was covered in mosquito bites. Shining-cloud had de-conjured more than the tricks in Wolf’s pockets; he had also stripped off his personal enchantments, and that was very bad news indeed. Every advantage the Dark Chamber had given him had been wiped away. The knights’ powers were terrifying.

He had next watch. Giving up hopes of sleep, he dressed and went to relieve Peterkin on guard. Then he could pace the house in silence, still seeking some safe way to keep Dolores’s mad ambitions alive. A couple of times he almost stepped on a tangle mat, which would have wakened the household and exposed him to ridicule.

As the crescent moon rose from the sea to herald dawn, Flicker emerged from his room, fully dressed. He had drawn last watch and prided himself on never needing a wake-up call, but he looked more guilty than sleepy.

He regarded Wolf sourly. “Still planning on running away?”

“If you have a better idea, I’ll listen.”

“You never have before.”

“Your personation is slipping.”

“Not surprising. Go to bed.” Flicker headed for the kitchen.

“I’m going for a walk.”

Flicker spun around to stare at him, suspicion visible even in near-darkness. “Why?”

“Thought I’d hit a few brothels and grog shops. I may be gone some time.”

“Brave of you.”

“Takes one to know one.” Wolf moved the tangle mat away from the front door. “Good chance. You’ll need it.”

Angry at having been transparent, Flicker growled, “Thanks.”

“Don’t forget to spread out this mat again.” Wolf stepped outside and closed the door.

He climbed over the stockade because he could no longer bolt the gate from the outside. Dawn was his favorite time of day in Sigisa. The town
was as quiet by then as it ever was, the insect population less troublesome, the temperature bearable. He headed south along the beach, enjoying the sea’s company and worrying at his problem. By the time he reached the southern end of the spit, where the river emerged from the jungle, the sky was blue and he had still found no way to reconcile love and common sense. (Was that a contradiction in terms?)

He began making his way back through the town, pausing once in a while to chat with drunks still able to speak. He often met interesting characters on his early-morning outings. He met dead ones, too, on occasion, but not that day.

His real objective was
Sea Queen.
He had spoken briefly with the master, Walter Wagge, agreeing on a price for taking mail home to Chivial. Shipping out seven or eight people was a different matter, and Wolf wanted to know more about Wagge, his ship, and his planned itinerary. That problem solved itself, because
Sea Queen
had moved. It took Wolf awhile to find her at anchorage and when he did she was loading slaves. She would not be going home to Chivial with that cargo, and she would not be carrying him or anyone associated with him.

So the urgency had vanished. He might need days or even weeks to find a suitable vessel, and by then he could talk Dolores around. That assumed that Rojas would behave himself in the meantime.

He had to haul on the bell rope to gain admittance and the gate was opened by Dolores herself—Dolores in great distress. She threw herself into his arms so he staggered backwards. He had never known her drop a tear before, and now she was weeping helplessly. Muttering sympathy, he eased her inside the gate and closed it.

“So Flicker’s gone?” he said. “I guessed he was planning it.” In Flicker’s eyes, he had wasted a month of precious time and most of the money. Flicker had always wanted to head straight inland.

Dolores continued to sob into his shoulder, mumbling incomprehensibly.

“You can’t be surprised!” he said. “I think he’s crazy, but he’s young and ambitious and…and
what
did you say?”

It took two more tries before she gasped out, “He tried to rape me!”

Wolf screamed,
“No!”
and pushed her back so he could see her. “You mean that?” There was a swelling red bruise on her cheek.

The very vehemence of his reaction seemed to sober her. She nodded. “Came into…bedroom…say goodbye. I tried to talk him out of it.” She pulled back into Wolf’s embrace again, burying her face against his neck. “He went mad. Said you were…called you terrible things. Wanted me to go with him. Oh, Wolf! Pulled sheet…away…had to fight him off! Really
fight
!”