A light enveloped the strand, an eerie radiance that seemed to course along its individual fibers. It was not a fiery glow, not in any way especially dazzling or brilliant. The thin cord simply metamorphosed into a kind of coruscating brownness that transcended its lowly origins.
Like a snake emerging from its hole, it lengthened and grew. It whipped around Lohem En-Qaun and snapped all four of his arms to his sides, pinning them to multiple ribs and freezing the would-be slayer in his tracks. Bin Grue gaped, but wore the mask of disbelief for only a moment. He was a hardened man, was the merchant, and in his time had seen much that had toughened him against surprise.
“Kill them.” Raising a hand that did not shake, he pointed straight at the two intruders. “Kill them now!”
Unintimidated by their compeer’s consternation, the rest of the murderous throng rushed forward—only to be met by the darting, writhing, sinuous length of twine. It caught the ankles of Brorunous the Destroyer and brought the hulking body crashing to the floor, as if binding a mountain. Singing through the night air, loops of glowing strands enveloped and secured Yoloth the Assassin, preventing him from wielding so much as a single knife or throwing star. It fettered the hands and constrained the claws and locked the feet and shuttered the jaws of a dozen of the most vile, proficient killers who had ever lived, and bound them all up together in a single howling, raving mass of impotent destruction.
And then, having done this, it looped and twisted and coiled and curled until it had squeezed them right back down into a strangely imprinted and inscribed box small enough to fit in the palm of a man’s hand. Around the box was fitted, snugly and with no room to slip a querulous finger beneath, the original length of string Etjole Ehomba had removed from his pack. No insult was intended, no dry humor contrived, but the little bow with which the binding was finished was far more suggestive than any knot could have been.
Haramos bin Grue was gone. Having finally acknowledged the reality of what he was seeing, he had fled through the back door before the graceful compacting of his terrors could be completed. Simna approached the box and, with gathering boldness, picked it up. Marveling at the simple, six-sided wonder, he rolled it over in his fingers, glanced sharply back at his friend.
“Is it harmless now?”
Ehomba had walked over to the sturdy cage and was gazing at the black, furry mass within. Ahlitah had slept through it all. “So long as you’re careful not to loosen the bow.” Swinging his pack around, he began to search its depths.
Keeping his fingers well away from the simple twine that secured the box, the swordsman looked around until he found a tall amphora full of fine olive oil. Removing the lid, he dropped the box inside and watched as it slowly sank out of sight in the viscous, aromatic liquid. It would not be among the first places the merchant would think to search. Satisfied, he replaced the cover and moved to rejoin his friend.
As he did so, he kept glancing worriedly at the rear door through which the trader had disappeared. “I know bin Grue’s type. He won’t give up something this important to him, even in the face of superior sorcery. We’ve got to get out of here.”
Ehomba glared at him and the swordsman was taken aback. The herdsman rarely showed much emotion. “You talked me into this. We are not leaving here without what we came for.”
“By Gittam’s eyelashes, that’s fine with me, Etjole—but we’d best hurry.” He indicated the massive padlock. “I can try my hand at that again, but the risk remains the same. Or is there some alchemy you can use on it?”
“I know no alchemy.”
“Right,” the swordsman retorted sardonically. “You only know twine.”
“That was not my doing. In the village there is a man called Akanauk. He is—simple. Here.” He tapped the side of his head. “The Naumkib are a tolerant folk, and he is left to himself, to be himself. When he needs food, it is given to him. Sleeping in a house makes him cry out in the night and wake the children, so some of us built him a platform high up in one of the village’s few trees. He climbs up there at night and there he lies and gurgles happily, like a baby.
“Akanauk does not farm, or help in the watching of the herds, or gather shellfish on the shore.” As he studied the cage and its single heavily drugged occupant, Ehomba again touched finger to temple. “He does not have the ability to do so. What he does is sit by himself and make things. Simple things. A necklace of colored beach pebbles like those I carry with me in my pocket, or a crown of mint leaves, or armlets of woven palm frond, or lengths of strong cord.”
Still watching the back door, Simna indicated that he understood. “So the village simpleton gave you a piece of his homemade string and you took it just to please him, and to remind you of home.”
“No,” the herdsman replied blandly. “I took it because a traveler never knows when he might need a piece of cord to tie something up.”
“Gellsteng knows it’s so. Now, use your wizardry to pick this lock so we can get out of here. Even as we speak, that slug bin Grue may be raising arms against us.”
“I cannot do anything with that lock. I do not have your skill with such things. And I am no wizard, Simna. You should know that by now.”
“Hoy, the evidence is all around me.” His gaze narrowed as his friend revealed a small bottle cupped in one hand. It was very tiny. Even when full, the swordsman estimated it could hold no more than a few drops.
The sound of running feet, striking distant stone like gathering rain, made him turn sharply. “If you’re going to do anything, you’d better do it quickly. They’re coming.”
Kneeling by the side of the cage, Ehomba put an arm between the bars and held the little bottle as close to the anesthetized Ahlitah’s head as possible. Laying his spear carefully by his side, he reached through the close-set bars with his other hand.
“You might want to step back a little,” he advised his companion.
Sword once more in hand, Simna was trying to watch the back door and the cage at the same time. “Why?” he asked pointedly. “Is some djinn going to burst from the phial? Are you going to use a special acid to dissolve away the bars?”
“Nothing like that.” The herdsman carefully loosened the bottle’s minuscule stopper. When it was almost free, he placed the thumb of his left hand against it and removed his right hand from the cage. This he used for the prosaic and decidedly unsorceral purpose of pinching his nostrils together.
Feet came pounding down unseen steps and the voices of alert, angry men could be heard shouting. “Hurry!” the swordsman admonished his companion. Even as he sounded a final warning he was backing away. Not from the door, nor from the cage, but from that tiny, undistinguished phial of cheap trade glass. Anything that made Etjole Ehomba want to hold his nose suggested strongly that others in the vicinity should be prepared to beat a hasty retreat.
As the back door was flung wide to reveal the stocky figure of Haramos bin Grue backed by a bevy of armed servants and soldiers, the herdsman’s thumb flicked the loosened stopper free. Simna saw nothing, but most perfumes are invisible to the eye. What wafted from the interior of the tiny bottle, however, must have been somewhat stronger than attar of roses or essence of myrrh.
As bin Grue’s disciples poured in, Ahlitah’s nostrils flared wide enough to accommodate a pair of ripened mangoes. Startlingly yellow eyes burst open, a snort louder and higher than that of a breaching whale rolled through the storeroom, and the big cat leaped straight up until its black-maned head banged against the top of the cage. Startled by this sight, the first men into the chamber were brought up short.
The trader harried them onward. “It’s only a cat safely secured in a cage. Where is your manhood? Get them!” He thrust an accusing hand at the pair of intruders.
With an invigorated roar that must have been heard aboard sailing ships well out to sea, the black litah whirled within the trap, parted its mighty jaws, and bit down on both latch and attached padlock. Caught within that single massive bite, the lock explode
d, sending bits of tumbler and spring and pin flying in multiple directions. As Simna warded off blows from two assailants simultaneously and Ehomba blocked a lance thrust with his spear, the litah pressed its huge skull against the door of its cage and snapped it open.
“Get them, quickly—kill them both!” bin Grue was shouting with mounting concern.
His servitors were no longer listening. No amount of guaranteed remuneration or personal loyalty could compel any man to face the raging quarter-ton Ahlitah. Freed from its stoned slumber, the cat was not only ablaze with a desire for revenge, he was hungry.
Bin Grue was courageous and even fearless, but he was not stupid. Beating a retreat back through the doorway, he vowed to regain possession of the emancipated feline and extract a measure of retribution from its liberators. Between the energized roars of the litah and the screams of men trying to get out of its way, the merchant’s audacious affiances went unheard.
The storeroom emptied in less than a minute. The litah would have settled down to eat, but Ehomba was at its side, fingers tugging on the thick mane. “We need to leave. The man who abducted you is no coward. He will try again.”
“Let him,” snapped Ahlitah, one massive forepaw resting on the back of an unfortunate fighter who had been too slow in fleeing. “I’ll deal with any humans who come back.”
“We don’t want trouble with the city authorities.” Breathing hard and still watching the back door, Simna stood on the cat’s other side. “If I were bin Grue, that would be my next step. Try to inveigle the local law into helping by telling them that there’s a dangerous, crazed animal on the loose in a populated area. A threat to the general citizenry.”
“I’m no threat to anyone but that muck master.”
“You know that, and I know that, and Etjole knows it too, but it’s been my experience that nervous humans tend to throw arrows and other sharp objects at large carnivores long before they’ll sit down to discuss events calmly and rationally with them.”
“Simna is right.” Straightening, Ehomba prepared to depart, spear in hand. He had restoppered the diminutive phial and replaced it in his pack. “We need to go.”
Still the furious predator hesitated. Then it turned and, with a parting snarl, followed the two men toward the front doorway. But not before pausing several times along the way to spray the interior of the storeroom with essence of large male cat, thereby ruining for good a succession of exceptionally rare and valuable commodities.
No one was waiting for them out in the street and there was no confrontation as they raced not back toward the waterfront, but in the general direction of the rolling, heavily forested hills that marked the landlocked side of the city.
“Bin Grue’s people probably haven’t stopped running.” Simna jogged effortlessly alongside his taller friend.
Ehomba ran with the supple, relaxed lope of one used to covering long, lonely distances by himself. “If we are lucky. What you told Ahlitah makes sense to me, too, but I think it may take the merchant some time to convince the authorities that there is real urgency to the matter.” The herdsman glanced at the sky. “It is still several hours to sunrise. At this hour he may have trouble finding anyone to listen to him, sympathetic or skeptical.”
Simna nodded agreement. “Tell me, bruther—if it wasn’t sorcery, what did you use to rouse our four-legged friend from his trance? I’ve never seen anything, man or beast, released so quickly from the bonds of heavy sedation.”
“It was a potion made for me by old Meruba. To wake a man unconscious from injury, so that he may have a chance to walk away from a place of danger.”
“Ah,” commented the swordsman knowingly. “Some kind of smelling salts.”
The herdsman looked down at him. “No salts, my friend. In the sheltered river valleys of my country there is an animal we call the oris. It is the size of a mature, healthy pig, has four short horns and long black fur that it drags upon the ground. Three red stripes run from its head along its back and down to the tip of its tail. The female defends itself against those like Ahlitah that eat meat by spraying from glands above its hind parts a scent that is God’s own musk. This is the same stink it uses to attract males of its kind, but it will also attract any other warm-blooded male animal in the vicinity. It can only hope that a male of its own kind reaches it first. When employed as a defense, it works by altering the intention of any male meat-eater that threatens attack, and by confusing any female predator.”
“I see.” Simna grinned as he ran. “So the perfume of this oris is irresistible to any male, and you roused our four-legged friend by letting him have a whiff of the stuff.” He found himself eyeing the herdsman’s pack. “When we again find ourselves in more accommodating surroundings, I might ask you to let me have a quick sniff. Just out of curiosity’s sake, you understand,” he added hastily.
“You do not want to do that.”
“Why not?” The swordsman nodded in the direction of the black litah, who was leading the way through darkened city streets. “He handled it without trouble.”
“The capacity of his nose is many times yours, or ours. But that is not the problem.”
“Hoy? Then what is?”
“Meruba’s bottle holds only a couple of drops, but they are not drops of oris musk. They are drops concentrated from musk taken from the glands of fifty oris.”
“Oh.” Simna frowned uncertainly. “That’s bad?”
Ehomba looked down at him. As usual, the herdsman was not smiling. “If need be, you will attack yourself.”
Simna ibn Sind considered this. He contemplated it from several angles, eventually coming to the conclusion that he fervently disliked every one of them.
“That’s nasty,” he finally confessed to his friend.
“Indeed it is.”
Again the swordsman indicated the big cat, pacing along in front of them. “Greater capacity or not, our swarthy friend seems to be managing the aftereffects with no difficulty.”
“So far,” Ehomba agreed. “Still, with oris musk one can never be too careful.” He met Simna’s eye as they ran, racing to reach the outskirts of sleepy Lybondai before sunrise. “Why do you think I am making sure to run behind the litah?”
V
Everywhere they paused for breath they asked if anyone had news of one Haramos bin Grue, but the people who lived on the outskirts of the great port city had little to do with sailors and traders and those who haunted the waterfront. These craftsfolk survived beneath the notice of the wealthier merchants and traders who dominated the commerce of the south coast of Premmois. At least the wily merchant had not lied about Hamacassar: those they questioned confirmed that it was indeed a real place, and the port most likely to harbor ships and men willing to dare a crossing of the vast Semordria.
In the hilly suburb of Colioroi they did find several local greengrocers who had heard of bin Grue. He was known to them only by reputation, as an influential trafficker in specialty goods whose wealth placed him somewhere in the upper third of the merchant class, but who was by no means as celebrated or affluent or powerful as the famed Bouleshias family or Vinmar the Profuse.
Given the choice, Ahlitah would have scoured the city in search of the man who had briefly reduced him to the status of merchandise. “He not only stole my freedom, he pocketed my dignity and put a price on it.” Yellow eyes gleamed as the big cat’s words were subsumed in snarl. “I want to eat him. I want to hear his bones break between my teeth and feel the warm flow of his blood running down my throat.”
“Maybe another time.” Marking step and hour with his walking stick–spear, Ehomba led the way along the narrow road that wound through the low forested hills. With each stride the milling masses of Lybondai fell farther behind, and distant, fabled Hamacassar came a step nearer. “First I must fulfill my obligation.”
The black cat paced him, the top of its mane even with the tall herdsman’s face. “What of my dignity?”
It was always a shock when Ehomba lost his c
omposure. Usually soft-spoken to the point of occasional inaudibility, it was doubly startling on those rare occasions when he did raise his voice. He whirled sharply on the litah.
“To Hell with your dignity! I am unlucky enough to be beholden to a dead man. That is a real thing, not an abstraction of self.” He tapped his sternum. “Do you think you are the only one with such worries? The only creature with personal concerns?” Making a grand gesture with his free hand, he took in the sloping seacoast valley behind them and the glistening blue sea against which it snuggled like a sleeping dog by its master’s side.
“My wife, my mate, lies uncounted leagues to the south, and my two children, and my friends, and none of them know at this moment if I live or am food for worms. That is a real thing, too. I would just as soon not be here as fervently as you!” Aware that he was shouting, he lowered his voice. “When we reached the southern shore of the Aboqua I was happy, because I thought we could find a ship in the trading towns of the Maliin to carry us across the Semordria. When we reached this place I was happy, because I thought the same thing.” His attention shifted back to the path ahead.
“Now I find that we must once again travel an uncertain distance overland to this place called Hamacassar before that will be possible. And who knows what we will find when we get there? More frightened seamen, more reluctant captains? Will we have to cross the river where this city lies and keep marching, keep walking, because in spite of what we have been told its ships, too, will not dare the ocean reaches? I do not want to have to walk across the top of the world.”
They strode on in silence for a while, ignoring the stares of farmers tending to their crops or children with sticks herding pigs and fowl, armadillos and small hoofed things with fluttering trunks and feathery tails.
Having inititated the silence, it was Ahlitah who broke it. “You have a mate and cubs. I have nothing but my dignity. So it is more important to me than to you.”