Eliar laughed. “She has bested you, Calon. Take that!”
The merchant shook his head, giving a slow smile. “I am impressed. And I am also desperate, although it appears to me that while your desperation is equal to my own, you are not undone by it, as I am. I agree, as spokesmen for this consortium, as you term it. The rest of the payment to be delivered upon completion of the tasks.”
Anji stepped forward to shake hands with Master Calon in the traders’ manner, each man’s right hand grasping the elbow of the other as a seal to their agreement. After a hesitation, Mai stepped forward as well. In Kartu, only widows without husband or son to act for them dealt in public legal contracts. Master Calon grasped her elbow, squeezed, and let go without any surprise or answering hesitation; it seemed he considered her presence perfectly natural in a transaction of this kind.
“Let Sapanasu, the Lantern of the Gods, give Her blessing,” he said in the cadence of a ritual utterance, “and Her curse to any who turn their back on what they have sworn in Her name. Let it be marked and sealed.”
“Let it be sealed,” repeated Anji.
“Let it be sealed,” said Mai.
Lights scattered and flared along the outer wall as a swarm of torches moved out from the gates to engulf the singleton and escort it toward the walls.
“An irrevocable step for all of us,” said Master Calon. He blew out his breath. “I need a drink!” He gestured toward the darkened city and the distant torchlight. “I wonder what that is all about.”
40
He was dreaming, walking along the shore near Haya that he knew from his childhood. The strand ran for mey ahead in a curve that faded at length into distant hills whose heads were shrouded in rain clouds, although here where he walked the sun shone, its light winking on smooth waters. His feet crunched on coarse sand. The rhythmic shush and suck of waves along the shore and the shrill cries of seabirds overhead kept him company.
A mist rose off the surface of the wide bay. It boiled into a silver fog that rolled toward the land like a watery beast shouldering up out of the depths. On the crest of this fog, as on a wave, lifted a rider mounted on a winged horse, and it surely was Marit riding that horse because even at this distance he would know her anywhere. He ran toward the water, to meet her. The foam of the cresting wave broke over the form of rider and horse, obliterating it; he was left behind with wavelets lapping his toes and his hands grasping air.
“Reeve! Reeve Joss!”
The low voice woke him, or possibly he woke himself, moaning aloud. He stirred and sat, and found that he could sit. The bit of rice and water taken earlier had strengthened him. His head ached, but he could blink without wanting to pass out.
After all, he was only hearing things. He could see nothing in the blackness. The air smelled of rotting things and sickness and worse, a foul smell lightened only because it was rather dry, not at all fresh. Thank the gods.
“Reeve Joss!”
The hatch scraped open to reveal a light lowered through to dangle, swaying back and forth on a line. A hand appeared, fingers slender and strong. It fastened the lantern’s looped handle to a hook set in the ceiling off to one side, too high for him to reach. He blinked back tears as his eyes adjusted, and when he was able to look up past the light, he saw a face looking down at him through the hatch as hands lowered a rope until its end curled on the floor.
“Hurry up,” she said. “Are you strong enough to climb?”
The rope had been knotted at intervals to provide footholds and handholds.
“Very thoughtful,” he said, for it took him a moment—he was thinking slowly—to recognize her. “But I’ll take my chances with someone who hasn’t already tried to kill me.”
“As usual, you men always jump to conclusions about what we women intend. It’s quite tiresome.”
“When I met you last, you tried to kill me.”
“Are you sure?”
“Hmm. Let me think. A naked knife. A mostly naked woman. I admit that part was appealing.”
“Why in the hells would I come to kill you stripped to the waist?”
He chuckled, although it sounded exceedingly like rolling pebbles in his mouth, a trick he had tried when a lad with predictable results. He felt now, too, as though he had swallowed something small and hard that wedged in his throat. There was still a little water left in the cup, and he sipped at it and recovered and could speak.
“I thought it was a clever ploy to distract my attention.”
She laughed as she grinned down at him. The flame of the light gave her complexion a glowing cast, bathing it in gold. Her eyes were very dark, heavily lidded. Her mouth was lush and very red. Delectable.
“Aui! The hells,” he muttered. “I’m delirious.”
“No doubt. All the better reason to climb that rope and escape your prison.”
“With your help?”
“I’m the one with the rope.”
He lifted a hand and was pleased he had strength enough to gesture in a casual way, reflecting a degree of unconcern he did not, in fact, feel, not with her hanging over him in such a position that he got a look right down her vest to the rounded shadows beneath. He remembered—very well—the curves she had on her.
“I’ll pass.”
“You’ll wait for the justice of this corrupt council? I think you’d do best to be well shed of them, for they’ve been colluding with all manner of folk who will be happy to kill you once they have conquered Olossi. Which they are like to do if you can’t get a message to the northern reeve halls, which I wish you would do by climbing this rope, calling your eagle, and leaving this place as soon as ever you can.”
“Oh. Slow. I beg you. That was too much and too fast, my sweet.”
“I’ve not given you permission to call me your ‘sweet.’ ”
“Maybe not, but you ask me to trust you. That should give me a few privileges, don’t you think?”
“Why shouldn’t you trust me? You’re such an easy target now that had I wished to kill you, you’d be dead already.”
“It is a great comfort, knowing that. Why did you try to kill me before?”
“As I said, you misread the signals.”
“A knife thrust at my guts is a strange way to signal something other than murderous intent.”
“I had to protect myself. I wasn’t sure who had sent you. You might have been on the side of our enemies.”
“Who did you think had sent me? Who are your enemies? And who are you?”
She looked away, over her shoulder, then back down at him. “Best we get you out of here before we’re interrupted, then I’ll tell the tale.”
“So, again, you’re saying I must trust you.”
“Or stay here. Your choice.”
“How did you get here? Where are the guards?”
“Aui!” She had a very attractive way of setting her jaw when she was exasperated. “You talk too much, after all. Just like other men. Here I hoped you were different.”
“Oh! Eh!” He laughed, although it hurt his head and his ribs to do so. “Now you’ve appealed to my vanity. I can’t bear to be ‘just like other men.’ ”
He tried to stand but found he was too weak to do it easily. Setting a hand against the wall and one on the ground, he managed to lever himself up, but he had to lean against the wall lest he collapse. He was cold, and then hot, and then cold again, in waves that made him sweat and shiver. “Whew. I’m sorry to say, it’ll be hard for me to climb that rope.”
She withdrew. A second rope slithered over the lip and its end dropped to the floor. Two bare feet appeared, gripped the rope as she eased her body over the lip. She shinnied down hand over hand at a speed that should have burned her thighs, landed softly, and paused with a hand still on the rope to fetch a tiny globe from her cleavage. It was glass, of a kind. With it balanced in one palm, she blew into it, and it lit with a pretty flame that cast an aura of light before her.
“I’ll help you up,” she said.
br /> He stared at her tight sleeveless vest and short kilted wrap. The rig showed her figure to advantage, and she knew it. She smiled, amused by his stare.
From above, a snap like the sound of a door slid hard shut cut the quiet.
Her smile vanished as quickly as it had come. She stepped forward to examine him, and the floor of the cell, under the glow of the globe light. He became aware of what he must look like and how he must reek. For the first time, he got a good look at the coating of dried grime that had slicked the floor, every possible thing he could disgorge from his body: blood, vomit, diarrhea, urine, the worst sort of spume.
She lifted the globe to the level of his eyes. “Did they try to poison you?”
“I don’t know. I ate a little rice earlier. It—stayed down.”
“Follow the light.” She moved it slowly from side to side, but she watched his eyes. “Did you take a hard blow to the head?”
“That I did.”
“Ah. Sometimes that will make you cast out your stomach. Yes, you’ve quite a few signs of that illness. You’ll want a bath and your clothes washed. We best hurry, for this is taking longer than I had planned for. Can you walk?”
“I don’t know.”
By the way she tilted her head just a little to the right and then back a little to the left it seemed she was considering options and discarding them.
She touched the globe to those rich lips. Its light extinguished immediately.
“I’ll put it back in its warm setting, my sweet,” he said hopefully.
She looked at him sidelong in a way that would have set him aflame if he wasn’t feeling and smelling and looking like a dead rat well run over and left in the dank to get really ripe. Then she tucked away the globe, slung a strong arm around his waist, and helped him over to the rope. There was nothing seductive in the action. She tied him up in the rope to make it a seat around his hips. He was so dizzy from moving that he couldn’t even say what he would like to say about where her hands were working because the words went awhirl and he had enough to do to stay on his feet as she rigged him up and left him standing there. She climbed swiftly up the knotted rope and eased herself gracefully out of the hatch. A moment later, the rope drew tight, strained, and he grasped with all his strength to avoid pitching backward as she hauled him up. He rocked. He shut his eyes, but decided that was worse. His knee rapped the hot surface of the lantern, but not hard enough to shatter anything, by Ilu’s mercy.
The room above, which he did not remember, was a holding cell with rings along the far wall where folk could be chained up until ready to be moved. She had used one of these rings as her lever, with the rope pulling over it, and when his head came up past the opening she tied it securely, crossed back to him, and used main force with her arms hooked under his armpits to drag him up and onto the floor. There he sprawled. While he panted, trying not to sway although he wasn’t moving, she cut him loose from the rope now tangled around his legs.
“You’ll have to walk the next part.” She stepped back and pulled up the lantern.
“Where are the guards?”
She knelt beside him. There was a pleasant smell to her, like jasmine, but under that a scent he recognized with a kind of delayed shock: She smelled of eagles.
“You’ll need this.”
Her hands were cool as she lifted his head enough to slip a leather thong over it, settling it at his neck. He groped at his chest, found the bone whistle. He groaned, would have wept had he retained water enough for tears. “What bell is it?”
“Middle night.”
“I can’t use this until daybreak. Once they discover I’m gone, they’ll search for me.”
“Which is why we must hurry.” She got an arm under him, and with her help he stood. The whistle gave him strength.
“I can walk on my own.” That he was so helpless, and she so competent, irritated him enough that he nudged her away. “Where do we go?”
After all, she was not immune. A smile chased across her lips. Her eyelids drooped, and for a moment she had the sleepy look of a woman woken after a night of passion, smug and certain and well pleased. “Does this mean you trust me now?”
He’d be a fool to try to walk unaided, this close to freedom. He grasped her arm just above the elbow. She had satiny skin, and taut muscle under it.
“I’m Joss, but you already know that. What’s your name?”
“Zubaidit.”
“Ah! Such poetry! ‘Where the axe hewed, the man was stricken.’ ”
Now she was amused. “Not everyone knows the story of the woodsman’s daughter.”
He would have leaned in to speak intimately close beside her ear, had he been clean and sweet-smelling, but he was not, and although she had as yet made no slightest sign of finding him foul in his current state, he didn’t care to chance seeing a grimace of disgust cross her face. After all, if he survived this, he would recover his strength, and take a bath, and then she would see what it meant to meet her match.
So he smiled at her, as well as he was able. “It’s one of my favorite stories from the Tale of Fortune. Especially the ending.”
She laughed, a clear sound that she made no effort to muffle or disguise. What in the hells had happened to the guards? But he didn’t ask again. It was time to take his chances, and see where this tale of fortune led him.
“You would say so,” she said with a smirk. “Come, now. We have to go see someone.”
She doused the lantern, led him down the corridor, helped him up a set of stairs and through an open door into a spacious hall swallowed in night but which he recognized by the carved railings at one end as Assizes Hall. She moved smoothly, graceful despite the darkness, and he, leaning on her, was able to stumble alongside creditably. No one was about. It was weird how very quiet it was, all the guards lost. Murdered, maybe. And who in the hells were they going to see?
“It’s a strange way to murder me,” he muttered, unable to help himself. “Or have you some other more convoluted plot in hand?”
“I do, but you’ll need all your powers of persuasion to help me. Now, hush.”
They came to the wall of screen doors, all closed. A faint, wavering light could be seen through the papered screens. Nimbly, she slid a door halfway open and eased him onto the wide front porch that ran the length of Assizes Hall. A stocky man carrying a small lantern was waiting at the foot of the steps. Beyond him, Assizes Court was empty, all in shadow, no lamps at all.
“What of the eagle?” she whispered, dropping her voice now that she was outside.
“Without me, he won’t fly until it’s day. I can’t call him until dawn.”
She helped him down the steps. The man who waited was master of a handcart, which was empty except for a cloak bundled in the bottom.
“This is my friend Autad,” she said. “He owns the Demon’s Whip, a tavern in Merchants’ Walk. He’s agreed to cart you, since I wasn’t sure how far you’d be able to walk on your own.”
“You’ve thought of everything. Where are we going?”
She tilted her head back as if she’d heard something, and sprang up the steps to vanish into the hall, sliding shut the door behind her. She was gone as quickly as if he had only dreamed her.
“Get in, ver,” said the man in a genial voice, pitched low. “Hurry. I’ll cover you with the blanket.” He moved up beside Joss, and even in the night Joss could sense that terrible grimace. “Whew! Begging your pardon!”
“Where did she go? Where are we going?”
“Where she tells me, ver.”
“Do you trust her that much?”
“She’s a true servant of the gods, that one. Very pious.” The man hesitated. “If you wouldn’t mind, ver.” He indicated the cart, coughed, gagged a little. “Geh. Well. Best if we do this quick. If you don’t mind.”
Once in Haya, one summer when he was a lad, he’d been out swimming with his friends and been grabbed by a rip current that had dragged him out into the sea. But you learned
growing up on those shores to let go instead of fighting what you could not resist, because fighting would kill you. Eventually, of course, the rip current had slackened, and he had worked free of it and swum back to land.
“Thanks, ver,” he said to Autad. With the man’s help, he clambered into the belly of the cart. Autad flipped the cloak over him. The cloth smelled of hay, but it was a good, honest, clean smell, one he appreciated. The cart rocked beneath him as Autad lifted and pushed and began walking. The wheel rumbled over stone. The movement jostled him.
For a long way Joss just lay there, thinking of nothing, really, too drained to fret or scheme. The streets were quiet around them. Evidently in Olossi people did not commonly walk out at night, while he was accustomed to the streets of central Toskala, which were more or less awake at all hours. Sometimes it seemed they rattled up a hill, and sometimes it seemed they rolled down one, and only once in that journey did Autad speak, in the manner of a man who has been mulling deep thoughts in his mind and finally found words to express them.
“I’d do anything for that girl. I do owe her, for saving the life of my sister. She had that rash that eats the skin. Poor thing, suffering so. Zubaidit spent her own coin to buy the oil of naya, which is the only unguent that cures it. I couldn’t afford such a luxury.”
“But—”
“Hush! Now we’re coming to where folk are about. I don’t want anyone suspecting. I’d lose my license, and be subject to exile. Or worse.”
They moved into a neighborhood where there were, indeed, a few folk out even at this late hour, judging by the sounds of footfalls and soft conversation and the occasional clink or clatter of unseen objects changing position. Joss’s hip was bruising where it pressed against the bottom of the cart, and every time they lurched forward his right shoulder knocked against wood. Autad hadn’t brought any padding, more’s the pity.
Abruptly, the cart rocked to a halt and Autad pulled the blanket off. “Can you get out?” He stood back, not offering a hand.
Joss got first to his hands and knees, and then awkwardly clambered out by levering his legs out first and following with his body. He was weak, but damned if he would inconvenience the man with his stink, when it was so obvious how appalling it was. They stood in an alley of towering white walls, both ends lost in shadow. A lit lantern hung from a hook protruding from one of the walls above doubled doors. These were broad and high enough to admit wagons, and a smaller “walking” door for foot traffic was set into the larger door. All around, the cobblestone pavement had been swept clean; there was no trace of litter or noisome debris. Indeed, it was pretty obvious that the only nasty thing in this tidy alley was Joss himself.