The Red Wolf Conspiracy (25 page)

“I stationed Jasani at a speaking-tube. They're remarkable, Master, these hide-wrapped pipes: you can hear most anything the ambassador says from his reading chair, for instance. Last night Jasani heard Hercól say that a man whose sword is rarely sheathed will one day trip and fall upon the blade. Isiq said nothing to this, but another spoke up—an elder and a foreigner, by his voice. ‘Indeed, friend,’ he said. ‘Many are the kingdoms reduced to dust by their own fears, and the folly fear inspires, when no power on earth could break them else. Let Arqual beware Arqual.’”

“Who is this foreigner, who speaks thus?” Ott demanded.

“The others called him Ramachni. We are making inquiries even now.”

“See that you do. What is Hercól's position aboard?”

“He is Ambassador Isiq's private servant, Master. His valet, as it were. And he is the girl's … dance tutor.”

“Thasha Isiq's tutor? Lucky girl; she'll have learned a great deal more than dance. But Hercól must never see me, lad.”

“No, Master.”

“And yet we cannot kill him—yet. If he should die on my watch, this ship would be flooded with talk of my incompetence as protector of the Isiq household. They might even wish to replace me.”

He fell silent, feeling the wheels within his mind, the old, flawless mechanisms of deceit.

“A fever,” he said at last. “I will develop a slight fever tonight. And out of concern for others I shall keep to my cabin until we touch land in Ulsprit. There I shall disembark and make my own way west, rejoining you at Tressek Tarn. Before that time, you personally will rid us of Hercól. The task is essential. Can I trust you with it?”

“You can,” said Zirfet.

Too quick, Ott decided: the lad's bravado masked fear. He raised a warning finger.

“Bloodstains will not do. Use your head before you use that knife I gave you. Consider: Hercól is not listed among the servants. Isiq must have recruited him quite late. But by the Emperor's decree every sailor, servant and marine has to meet with my approval. He is illegal, technically—a stowaway.”

“Of course, sir!” whispered Zirfet. “I'll see him put off the ship!”

“Fool,” said Ott. “You'll see him drowned.”

As darkness fell the captain sent word to Elkstem to turn the ship south, out into the Nelu Peren. The east wind that had borne them quickly to Etherhorde now forced them to cut sharply away from the city to avoid the great peril of drifting sidelong against the shore. The lamps of a fishing village dimmed, then vanished altogether. Minutes later the coastline melted into the gray-black seam where sky and water met.

Dinner that night was a grand affair, with the captain and the ambassador joining the wealthy passengers in the first-class dining hall, which had the largest table aboard. Lamb and roast partridge, pepper vodka, mints. After drinking rather more than she was allowed at home, Lady Lapadolma's niece stood up and belted out one of her aunt's poems:

Regal traveler on the waves, over heroes' watery graves,
Peaceful palace of old wood, whither sails thy country's brood?
No answer gives she, yet we hear, as in a shell against the ear,
A thousand voices, living, lost, whispering their only trust:
“Over sea and under stars, noble
Chathrand'
s fate is ours!”

“Drivel!” escaped from someone, but he was elbowed sharply and drowned out by claps and cheers.

In a box-like room on the orlop deck, the steerage passengers lined up for soup and bread. The soup had generous salt, if little else; the bread was hard but wormless. They ate with quiet concentration and left not a crumb.

The bells rang on the half hour, the watches changed, the cries of “Steady-on-the-fore” and “Two-points-off-the-lee” ricocheted from mast to mast. By midnight the last gentlemen in the smoking salon departed, surrendering their pipes and matches as they went—fire was such a danger that open flames were not permitted outside that room—and bit by bit the
Chathrand
fell asleep.

Only then did Sandor Ott leave his cabin. He moved silently along the row of officers' berths (Mr. Fiffengurt snored like a laboring cow), climbed the aft ladderway and crossed the main deck. A moment later he knocked softly at the captain's door.

The door opened a crack, and a nervous, bloodshot eye peered out. Swellows, the bosun. His breath stank of garlic and rum. Ott disliked the man, Rose's most loyal bootlicker, a partner in the old rogue's career of swindling and lies. Swellows (his spies informed him) wore a necklace of ixchel skulls: fifteen or twenty little bird-sized bones, strung through the eye sockets on a greasy string. Good luck, some said—but luck was a thing Ott disdained. He put his shoulder to the door.

Swellows fell back with a whimper: “Quietly, sir, quietly!”

Rose's cabin was dark: black curtains shut out the stars. No one sat at the desk or dining table; but along the port wall, as far from the door as possible, figures huddled around a dim red lamp on a smaller table. Swellows beckoned, but Ott did not wait to be led: he crossed the dark cabin in four strides and rested his hands on the back of the one empty chair.

“You're late, Commander Nagan,” said Rose, looking him over.

“I think you may call me Ott here, Captain,” said the spy. “Men have killed to learn my true name, others to help me hide it. But in this room it is the least of the secrets we must swear to guard.”

“You're still late.”

Ott smiled, offering no explanation. He took in the others at a glance: Oggosk the witch, smirking and mumbling as ever. First Mate Uskins, terrified, sweating profusely at the captain's elbow. Beside him, a savage-looking man with small, cruel eyes, his white hair pulled back in a braid. Ott knew him well: Sergeant Drellarek, “the Throatcutter” in military circles, head of the elite Turach warriors brought aboard to guard the Emperor's gold. Drellarek nodded to him: the slow nod of a pit viper coiled to strike. Ott took pleasure in the man as he would in a fine blade or hammer, any tool worn by use to smooth perfection.

There were two others: Aken and Thyne. Neat little men with the soft skin of children and the nervous twitches of a pair of squirrels. Loose paper before them on the table, quill pens in their hands. They were agents of the Trading Family.

“Put those away,” said Ott, pointing at the quills. “We want no records here.”

Aken, the quieter of the two, wrapped his pen hastily and hid it away. Thyne merely set his on the table, beside a jar of ink.

“We do want answers, however, Mr. Ott,” he said. “Now that you've deigned to join us, perhaps we'll get a few. Won't you be seated?”

Ott remained standing, hands on the back of his chair. “We have not met, Mr. Thyne, Mr. Aken,” he said. “Still, I believe you know the essence of our plan. The Mzithrinis have a rebellion on their hands, and we shall profit by it. The followers of the Mad King, the Shaggat Ness, have risen on Gurishal, where they were driven by the other Kings forty years ago, after the Shaggat died at sea.

“I say
followers
, but
worshippers
is closer to the truth, for the Shaggat took the Old Faith of the Mzithrin and hammered it into a weapon. The Five Mzithrin Kings, as you know, each guard a fragment of the Black Casket: the stone coffin wherein, ages ago, devils from the Nine Pits were burned to ashes, cleansing the people of their darkest sins. The Book of the Old Faith tells how those devils had to be lured into the Casket, and how at last the Great Devil guessed the trick and fought to escape, and the Casket broke asunder in his death-throes.

“The Kings took the shards of the Casket to their palaces and set them in high towers, to keep the remaining devils from their lands. Under their shadow the five dynasties have ruled together for a thousand years.

“But forty years ago something changed. One of the Kings went mad—or became a God, if you ask his believers. He named himself
Shaggat
, God-King, and declared that the hour had come to drive all devils from the hearts of the Mzithrini people—to make them perfect, as it were. He alone could do it, he said, for in a vision he had come upon a rope ladder dropped from heaven, and he climbed it and learned the tongues of the Gods, and many secrets, including how the Black Casket might be rebuilt.”

“Nonsense! Lunacy!” hissed Thyne.

“But of course, sir,” said Ott dryly.

Rose leaned back in his chair, frowning. Oggosk twisted her rings.

“And a history lecture, to boot,” Thyne went on irritably. “The dead history of a lunatic cult. What of it? I find it hard to believe that we have gathered here, gentlemen, for this review of the heathen myths and squabbles of our enemies.”

“But we are here,” said Drellarek, glancing sidelong at Thyne. “Let him speak.”

Thyne looked at the sergeant and decided to close his mouth.

Ott continued, “Lunacy or not, the Shaggat persuaded tens of thousands to his cause. The other Kings named him Enemy of the Faith, but he had already vowed to sweep them aside. And now I will tell you something that does
not
appear in the history books: Arqual owes its very survival to that madman. Do you understand, Mr. Thyne? We were losing the Second Sea War. The bulk of the Nelu Peren was already under the Mzithrini flag. The whole Empire might have been conquered within the year, and Etherhorde burned, and Magad's head hoisted on a stake, if the Shaggat Ness had not appeared. Soon the Kings were too busy fighting him to win the war against us.
That
is why His Supremacy rules the greatest spread of territories on earth. Because of one holy madman in the west.”

Thyne snorted, as if he did not believe a word.

Rose stood up from the table. “I will bring wine,” he said.

“The Mzithrin,” Ott went on, “could not win two wars at once. Wisely, they chose to defeat the Shaggat, but to do so they had to pull all their forces back from the Inner Lands. We chased them west, island by island, ship by ship. And meanwhile the Four Faithful Kings crushed the army of the Shaggat in a terrible battle that laid waste to the Mang-Mzn and the Cities of the Jomm. But the Shaggat escaped.”

“We know all this,” said Aken, the other Company man. “He fled the Mzithrin in a fast ship—he and his sons, and the sorcerer Arunis. The so-called Horrid Four. But their flight from the Mzithrin brought them straight into the path of our fleet. We cut that ship to ribbons—the
Lythra
, wasn't it?—and she sank with all hands.”

“Not all,” said Sandor Ott.

Silence: the low slap of waves suddenly audible, and the oil lamp sputtering. Thyne looked startled, even afraid; Uskins gaped like a fish. Motionless between them, Aken looked like a man who has just realized, very soberly, that he is seated among ghouls and vampires.

A grin spread over Drellarek's face.

Thyne rose from his chair, steadying himself with a hand on the table. “What are you saying?” he whispered.

“He did not drown, Mr. Thyne,” said Ott. “We plucked him from the wreckage. And he awaits us on His Supremacy's prison isle of Licherog.”

“Awaits us?” cried Thyne suddenly. “The Shaggat Ness, that murdering thing, that … creature, alive?”

“And his sons.”

“But we told the world they drowned!”

“Lower your voice, Thyne,” rumbled Rose, closing the wine cabinet.

Thyne did not seem to hear him. “Mr. Ott! Mr. Ott!” he cried. “The Shaggat was an animal, a beast!”

“He is that,” said Ott. “And much more. In the eyes of ninety thousand rebel Mzithrini, he is a God, descended to Alifros to lead them to glory.
They
have never believed him dead. Forty years they have fought the other Kings, and prayed for his return. Exactly when they expect that miracle to occur is a great secret, and one still unknown to the Mzithrin Kings. Shall I tell you, gentlemen? Oh yes, I know their prophecy. I wrote it, you see. My spies have whispered it in Gurishal these four decades, spread it like a sweet pox of the mind. He shall return, they all now believe,
when a Mzithrin lord marries his enemy.”

“Rin's blood!” blurted Uskins. “You arranged it! The admiral's daughter and the Sizzy prince! You set the whole thing up!”

“Very good, Mr. Uskins,” said Ott. “And now you will appreciate just how vital it is that word of our plans never reaches Lady Thasha's father. For when the Mzithrin Kings grasp that young bride's place in the prophecy, they will kill her in a heartbeat. Of course, by then it will be too late. Is it not beautiful, gentlemen? Ninety thousand rebels still worship the Shaggat as a God. And we have a chance to prove them right. We shall raise him from the dead.”

“This is monstrous!” said Thyne.

“It is genius,” said Drellarek. He rose and bowed to Sandor Ott. “A weapon forty years in the smithing. My compliments, sir, on the tactic of a lifetime.”

“Except,” said Aken, “that the entire White Fleet lies between us and the Shaggat's worshippers. How do you mean to get him to Gurishal, on the far side of the Mzithrin lands?”

“Wait and see,” said Ott.

“They put a new King on the Shaggat's throne, didn't they?” asked Drellarek.