The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 (28 page)

Read The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5 Online

Authors: Debra Doyle,James D. Macdonald

BOOK: The Long Hunt: Mageworlds #5
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Probably never threw a Highest from a golden tower before
, Jens thought.
“Whatever happens,” he said, still quietly, “I have no grudge against you for this.”
The two nodded, showing that they heard, but they wouldn’t meet his eyes. The Presenter leaped up onto a stone platform at the right of the archway and turned to view the top of the Tower.
“Watching for the light?” Jens asked.
“Yes,” the Presenter said.
Jens craned his neck around to look at the Tower. The golden tip of the spire was brightening, catching the rising sun and throwing it forth again in a dazzle of reflected light.
“Are you ready?” the Presenter asked.
Jens considered. “I suppose I am.”
“Then it’s time.”
The Presenter turned to the crowd below, and in a voice of iron, so loud that Jens could scarcely believe it came from so small a man, he called, “Behold the Highest!”
And from below came a sound, a growl at first, unintelligible. But it grew louder, and the voices began to chant in chorus, so that the words were plain.
“Bring him low! Bring him low!”
 
F
ARAL STOOD at the window of Caridal Fere’s apartment overlooking the Plaza of Hope, his shoulder braced against the embrasure. The sky was dark in the west, behind the Golden Tower. The plaza below was filled with a mass of humanity, shoulder to shoulder, jammed together. A low muttering rose from them, the combined sound of hundreds—thousands—of whispered conversations.
Miza stood at the other side of the window, looking miserable. She wore a long white gown that Faral would otherwise have thought was becoming. He was still angry with her, and there was a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach whenever he looked in her direction.
“I was apologizing to him,” she said into the silence. It was the first thing she’d said to Faral since the servants of Caridal Fere had left them alone at the window.
It wasn’t what Faral had expected to hear. “You were …”
“I didn’t think I’d get another chance.” She drew a shaky breath, and he realized that she had been crying not long before. “So I went to say I was sorry for naming Errec Ransome’s ghost and sending it away, and for … well, for me and you.”
Faral shook his head, not understanding. “For me and you?”
“Because I’d come between him and one friend already.” Faral glanced at her. She gave a wavery half-smile. “And he said he was sorry for being jealous, and we agreed to forgive each other. And we shook hands on it.”
“Oh,” said Faral, feeling numb. Now it was too late.
He turned back to the window. The sky had grown noticeably lighter in the last few minutes. He could see, a long way off at the other side of the plaza and hundreds of feet above him, some motion amid the shadows under the golden dome.
The people below saw it too. The crowd quieted. Faral could feel the tension as they looked up at the little group standing so high above.
Then the spire at the top of the Golden Tower blazed with the reflected light of the rising sun. At the same moment, a voice cried out, echoing off the housefronts, ringing out in spite of the distance:
“Behold the Highest!”
“Huzzah!” Faral shouted in reply. The servants of Caridal Fere had explained the ritual to him—the words of the Presenter and the words that the crowd would shout in reply. “Huzzah!”
He shouted as loud as he could. He could hear Miza shouting huzzah as well. But then it came to him, the people in the crowd weren’t shouting huzzah at all. They were crying out, in rhythmic chorus, “Bring him low!”
Miza drew a sharp breath and turned to Faral. She took a step toward him, holding out her arms. At that same moment, a figure fell from the tower, four hundred feet down, and landed with a sodden crack on the stones below.
Faral was already moving, leaving Miza to follow after him. He strode back through the private apartments, to the inner rooms, then across to the other windows.
He stepped through the door. There was Rhal Kasander, there was Caridal Fere, there was Gerre Hafelsan in another of his highly colored morning-robes.
“You!” Faral said, seeing Gerre.
“Yes,” Hafelsan replied. “That
was
well done, wasn’t it?”
 
The voices from the Plaza of Hope sounded in Jens’s ears like the roar of the sea.
“Bring him low! Bring him low!”
The two men in the livery of the Council of Worthies stepped forward. Jens waited, expecting at any instant to feel the grip of their hands on his body, and then the lifting and the sudden descent … .
I wonder if Cousin-once-removed Rhal was lying all the time about the bribes?
…
Then, like an arrow of fire, a blaster bolt came sizzling out of the archway at the top of the stairs. It struck the nearer of the two men in livery, dropping him with his hand only an inch away from Jens’s shoulder. Before the body hit the floor of the tower, another bolt took out his fellow.
The shooter stepped forward. “I have my orders,” he said to Jens, “and they’re to bring you back.”
Jens stared. If this was a reprieve, it was like nothing he could have imagined. “And who the hell are
you
?”
The man stepped forward and grabbed Jens’s shoulder. “I’m Kolpag. My partner’s Ruhn. And we’ve got orders.”
Before he had finished speaking, the Presenter leapt from his platform out of sight beyond the stone archway, and came down with all his weight on Kolpag’s back. Kolpag twisted under the smaller man and heaved him outward, over the railing, to fall into the crowd below.
Then Kolpag turned back to Jens. “You’re coming with us to Ophel,” he said, and shoved him through the archway.
Jens fell awkwardly onto the landing at the top of the spiral stairs, where another man was waiting—
This one must be Ruhn,
he thought.
But why do they want me on Ophel?
“Everything arranged below?” Kolpag asked.
“I sure hope so,” Ruhn replied. “Let’s get this little bastard out of here. The longer I stay on this planet the more it makes my teeth hurt.”
Kolpag turned to Jens. “Stand up. I’m going to take those leg irons off of you, so you can move quicker. But if you do anything at all besides what we tell you, I’ll stun you and carry you. It’s all the same to me. Ready to go?”
Jens pulled himself to his feet, encumbered by the wrist binders and the hobble chain. Kolpag worked on the locks of the hobble briefly, and took it off.
As soon as Jens felt the links fall away from him, he turned and sprinted for the stairway. If he could only get out of sight around the first curve … A stinging blast took him in the spine and he fell limp to the stone floor.
“That’s a quarter stun,” Kolpag said. “Higher power hurts more. Don’t do anything stupid again.”
No one is going to believe that I didn’t arrange for this myself
, Jens thought as he was dragged backward down the stairs, the heels of his slippers bouncing on each tread as they went.
 
“I think we’ve lost them,” Bindweed said.
She and Blossom stood at the edge of Ilsefret’s main plaza, beneath the historic Golden Tower. They had been waiting there, blasters fully charged and discreetly concealed, ever since watching the two men from the Green Sun enter the Tower some hours earlier. That had happened while the streets were still dark, before the plaza had started to fill with pedestrians, and neither of the two operatives had come out again later—though there was no telling, Bindweed had to admit, about things like back doors and underground passageways.
“Maybe,” said Blossom. “But whatever’s going to happen here looks like it might be interesting—I think this is the Acclamation of the Highest that we saw mentioned.” She broke off and pointed. “Look there.”
“Where?”
“Behind us—see that window, third from the right, past the arch? Who does that look like?”
Bindweed looked. “Hard to see with the light behind them, but from the shoulders on him I think it’s Faral Hyfid-Metadi.”
“And the other one is Miza from Huool’s,” said Blossom. “But no Jens. I don’t like
that
at all. Not when our friends from the Green Sun were trying their clumsy best to snatch him and his cousin both out of our shop.”
“No,” said Bindweed. “It isn’t good.”
She and her partner remained silent, watching. After a few minutes she glimpsed what might have been movement up at the top of the Golden Tower. A figure in white and black, his fair hair showing plainly in the predawn light, stepped into view above the tower railing.
“Blossom,” said Bindweed quietly. “I think I’ve got a fix on Jens.”
The crowd fell silent in anticipation. The sun rose, the first spear of light passing high above and striking the tip of the Tower. A voice lifted above the plaza, calling out a phrase in Khesatan.
A low grumble rose from the crowd, a steady, rhythmic chanting, growing louder and louder. Then there came another sound, in a language that Bindweed knew very well indeed.
“Karpov ’75 blaster,” she shouted at Blossom over the noise of the crowd. “Open-bell model, firing full-power bursts!”
“That’s what I thought,” her partner shouted back. “It’s coming from the Tower. Let’s go.”
They started forward. The crowd slowed them—nobody was moving out of the way of a pair of elderly tourists, not today. Before they could reach the foot of the tower the crowd roared out, and a white-clad figure came hurtling from the balcony. Then, in spite of themselves, Bindweed and Blossom were surging forward with the rest of the crowd toward the point of impact.
Soon enough they came in view of the body. The white robes it had worn were crimson now. Members of the crowd were lining up to dip their handkerchiefs in the rivulets of blood that flowed from the broken body. The partners looked at each other.
“That’s not Jens,” Bindweed said.
“Right. Which means that he needs a backup.”
“No.” Bindweed put her hand on her partner’s arm. “We can’t go inside the Tower. We’d be trapped, and in no position to help anyone.”
Blossom’s cheeks were bright red with frustration. “Where then?”
“The Green Sun men spent most of yesterday stashing hovercars near this plaza,” said Bindweed. “You cover one, I’ll cover another, and we’ll see what comes of it.”
 
The underground parking area near the Golden Tower was large and echoing, its roof supported by stout pillars and lit with overhead tubes. The walls were made of stone, intricately carved in arabesques and patterns of stylized fish and worms. When Jens had seen them for the first time that morning, arriving by hovercar from the town house of the Exalted of Tanavral, he’d thought the carvings a gruesome conceit. Now, as he was dragged past them with the effect of the quarter stun barely starting to wear off, he found them even less appealing.
He had no illusions about his future. He might have been saved from a collision at high speed with the plaza’s historic bloodstained marble, but his time was limited none the less. His captors had made no attempt to hide their faces, or to conceal their names—they knew, then, that he would not be living long enough to identify them. Whatever fate awaited him on Ophel would not be pleasant.
They were dragging him to a parked hovercar. One of them—Kolpag, the blaster man—slid into the driver’s position and switched the machine on. It rose, humming, on its nullgravs, and hung there vibrating gently.
The other man shoved Jens into onto the front seat beside the driver. Jens fell heavily backward onto his bound wrists, and the man who had dumped him—Ruhn, if the driver was Kolpag—started to walk back to the rear passenger compartment, where he would sit behind Jens.
Time to go out with style
, Jens thought;
now or never
—and smashed his left foot sideways into the driver’s ribs.
Kolpag lost his breath in an explosive whuff and fell partway out of his still-open door—twisting the hovercar’s control yoke to the left and dragging it all the way out to reverse as he went down. The car spun backward and to the right with startling speed, increasing its angular velocity as it pivoted. The side of the hovercar took Ruhn in mid-body, crushing him between the vehicle’s mass and the unyielding granite of the wall. An explosion of blood flew from the man’s mouth and spattered the window above Jens’s head.
Jens drew back his legs and kicked again. This time he knocked Kolpag entirely out of the vehicle. Jens kicked the control yoke with the right side of his foot to put the hovercar back into forward motion.
His hands were bound behind him, which wasn’t going to make controlling the vehicle any easier. At least the car was powered up and hovering, or he’d never be able to make it.
He squirmed and twisted to get himself up and sitting in the driver’s position. He raised his knees. By hitting the bottom edge of the control yoke he could steer the hovercar to right and left.
A blaster shot took out the rear windscreen, and a second shot plowed up a furrow along the roof.
So his captor was up and moving—and, more important, shooting. Jens snapped his left knee up to hit the bottom left side of the control yoke. The vehicle twisted right, but with plenty of forward momentum still on it. A pillar loomed up—the hovercar slipped by, but the pillar clipped the open door, ripping it off with a loud bang. The car shuddered but continued on.
Wind whipped through Jen’s unbound hair. He’d lost the ribbon that held it somewhere on the stairway going down, at about the same time as he’d acquired a cut on his face that stung and dripped salty fluid past his mouth. He wanted to slow the hovercar—or at least to have that option—but without the use of his hands he lacked the leverage needed to pull back the yoke and decrease speed. He could lean forward, perhaps, and increase his velocity, but other than that his choices were limited.

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