The Fox

by Sherwood Smith

  Ulaffa, appointed by the king. And Signi, who had been a hel dancer-in-training long enough to see revealed in muscle movement what others tried to hide by artificial stances, tones of voice. When Signi or Ulaffa spoke, Durasnir listened.

  So, it was time to lay aside his work yet again, though he loathed the prospect of more time lost, and the consequent complications, delays, and tempers. He had better investigate this matter tomorrow.

  He turned over and went to sleep.

  One of the many evidences of Wafri’s respect for Inda’s putative abilities was the fact that he was never permitted to sleep in darkness. There were glowglobes installed high on the vaulted ceiling which never winked out.

  So Inda did not know how long he had been imprisoned; he would waken and that narrow window high up would show blue or black, or the gray of cloud, rarely in succession. Sometimes golden light slanted in, stronger than the cool white of glowglobes, when the sun was right. There was no counting days when you fell asleep in dark and wakened in dark, or fell asleep in daylight and woke again in the same.

  For a time he’d watched the window until he found that it made him too angry that it was beyond reach. Early on, when movement was still easy, he’d even wrestled the wooden bed frame up against the wall. He clambered up, despite how dangerously it wobbled, to discover that the edge of the window was still beyond an arm’s length in reach.

  So then he refused to look at it. He did not want to know if he could fit through it. He had no interest in night or day. What he watched was the door. He waited for a single slip on Wafri’s part, such as a visit without a host of guards beyond the door.

  That never happened.

  What did happen was a sudden wakening under weak blue moonlight. Only this time Inda did not gasp, finding himself trembling on the bed in a sweat, his mind gripped in a nightmarish reliving of one of Wafri’s visits.

  Instead he sensed someone with him. It was that same strange sensation that he’d only felt in battle before. It was extraordinarily clear and sharp, like a poke inside his skull; despite the glass shards of pain in every joint when he moved, he sat up, looking carefully around the bright cell.

  Empty.

  He lay back gratefully, as always facing the door . . . and again that insistent mental poke.

  But there was no raised sword behind him, no arrow whiffling through the air. There was nothing behind him except the wall.

  So he looked directly up—and painful prickles ran from his neck down his arms when he saw, dangling from the window, a long rope.

  He blinked. Rubbed his eyes. Opened them. The rope remained. One glance at the cell door. Shut. Locked.

  Inda rolled over cautiously. At least he could move, after the last session with the healer. He climbed slowly up on the bed, trembly as an old man. Stretched up a hand—and his fingers closed around scratchy, twisted hemp.

  Suspicion. Was this rope one of Wafri’s tortures in a new form?

  He didn’t care. He’d go up that rope no matter what was at the other end.

  The rope jerked twice in his hand. He lifted his other hand, gripped the rope, then lifted his feet.

  It held firm.

  So he began to climb, at first rapidly, but very soon he slowed, his hands slick with sweat, muscles trembling. He slipped, the hemp burning until he clutched with a death-grip that halted his descent. He swung slightly, then thumped against the stone wall.

  The weakness made him angry enough for a short burst of strength, and though he weakened again very swiftly, at least he made it to the window, where two strong hands reached through to grasp his wrists.

  He stuck a leg through and turned sideways. Then came the worst part, a pull through the narrow window. But Inda was so thin he squeezed through, though the stone scraped his ears and his chest.

  And he was free. He collapsed onto flat stone, struggling for breath. He was too exhausted to speak, and too dizzy to open his eyes.

  “How bad is it?”

  Fox?

  Holding out a flagon.

  Inda forced himself to his elbows, caught his hair under them and collapsed again. Fox helped him lift his head and held the flagon to his lips; Inda sipped the bitter concoction, choked, then recognized listerblossom and willow among the flavors. Pain ease. He drank it down without stopping, then dropped flat again, eyes open. The blue-white crescent of moon revolved gently opposite Fox’s bony face. “What?” Inda whispered. “No ‘I told you so’?”

  Even in the moonlight Inda looked terrible. “If you haven’t done enough of that on your own, then you won’t listen to any words of mine.” Fox sat back on his heels. “Can you move?”

  Inda gritted his teeth. “If it kills me.” He sat up and clumsily began to braid his hair, but he winced and his hands dropped.

  Fox took over, his touch impersonal. Inda dropped his head gratefully as Fox whipped his hair into a tight sailor’s queue, wondering what kind of torturer made someone look as bad as Inda did, then had his hair washed? The idea made him queasy.

  “I don’t know how long this respite will last. What I’d like to do in departure,” Fox said, “is indicate our royal displeasure. What do you say?”

  Inda breathed in slowly. The dizziness was gone, leaving an almost hysterical euphoria. Fox! Here! How? Inda tried to frame a question, felt his emotions tumble, and shook his head.

  Fox said lightly, “Inda, we are probably the most wanted two fighting men in this half of the world. I feel we owe it to the Sartoran continent to live up—no, really, to surpass— our reputations. After all, we do not want to risk becoming stale.”

  “I don’t understand,” Inda said.

  Fox hung the flagon on his sash. The moonlight painted the bruises around Inda’s jaw black. His visible joints— knuckles, wrists, ankles—were equally black and puffy. Suspecting it must be worse under Inda’s clothing, Fox kept up the light words. A semblance of normality. “While you were loafing about down there, I was busy enough for the both of us. Wafri had a second perimeter on guard just for you when he was down in your cell. So last time he had all his boys at this end of the palace, I was busy laying down some gifts in thanks for his hospitality. And, a while ago, when the extra guard was dismissed to their hard-earned slumbers, I put in my finishing touches and climbed up to invite you out in hopes you’d like to join me in expressing our appreciation of the Ymaran style of entertainment.”

  Inda had become sensitive to voices in a way he never had been before. He heard the rage Fox tried to hide under the teasing, how it sharpened the consonants of the words he meant to speak so lightly. Inda forced himself to look up. Saw—lit in the cold moonlight—unguarded worry in Fox’s bony face.

  “I don’t understand,” Inda said again, almost inaudibly.

  Time to move. Past time to move.

  Fox abandoned the manner. “We need to cause a diversion so they won’t chase us.” He peered in all directions as Inda loosely turned his thumb up. “I figured we’d wreck this place. I’ve laid straw and oil in nooks and rafters and old stairways all over. Want to help?”

  “Yes.”

  Intensely relieved, Fox said, “Think you can keep pace, or would you rather anchor somewhere while I take care of things here?”

  Inda said, “I’ll do. I feel better already.”

  Fox hunkered down so he could look into Inda’s face. The distant ruddy glow of torches made his own expression clearer to Inda. For once Fox did not deflect with irony, or derision, or disbelief. He was serious and intent. “I don’t think you are.”

  “I want to rip him apart,” Inda said, and when he heard the tremble in his own voice, flushed with heat. He gritted his teeth and concentrated on his breathing until he trusted his internal hold, then said, “Will that turn me into him?”

  “No.” Fox’s voice was husky. Inda’s question spurted snowmelt through his veins. “Moral questions aside, he’s not here. That’s why I am. He’s in Jaro, attending on Prince Rajnir, and most of his staff is asleep.
There are half a dozen night guards, all right below here, outside your cell. There are a couple others down at the other end, but they’re either asleep, or drinking and gambling. Typical civilian idea of security. So let’s give them enough trouble to make them earn their pay.”

  Inda painstakingly got to his feet as Fox looped the rope and slung it over one shoulder baldric-style. They were on the edge of a roof. Below lay a sloping hillside, and far below that the lights of Beila Lana twinkled in a sharp horseshoe curve, the intersecting squares of golden lights in the middle shaping the garrison.

  To Inda’s left the jumble of slanting roofs indicated a long palace built around various courts and gardens. There were no guards on the rooftop. On his right was a newly-built wall, the stone pale gray. They were at the extreme end of the palace, then—in Wafri’s playground.

  Inda said, “Shouldn’t we stay quiet?”

  Fox led the way across the roof to a lower level. He put out a hand, and Inda stopped. “If you vanish,” Fox said, reaching under a wide rain gutter, “Wafri will not only marshal every pair of eyes he can command to search for you, he will also lie to the Venn about the nature of the search. Because they do not know he has you. Had you. Ah, I see you are not surprised.”

  Inda flexed his hands. “No. He was proud of it.”

  Fox’s teeth showed in his nastiest grin. “I really think the Venn ought to know what their boy is up to, don’t you?”

  Inda huffed, almost but not quite a laugh.

  Fox pulled out something long and bulky, handed Inda a composite bow, a quiver of arrows, and a couple of knives in sheaths. He helped Inda get the sheaths on his wrists. Then picked up his own weapons.

  “Ready?”

  Inda found movement difficult—the pain in his joints kept flaring, prickling, then going coldly numb—but he told himself it was not impossible. The only impossible thing was another day, another watch, spent as Wafri’s prisoner.

  He was free. And he was going to stay that way, or die. Easy, when you thought about it that way. Move or die. Walk or die. Shoot or die. “Ready.”

  In the locked and guarded private suite of the royal residence, the pleasure dancers frolicked around the two young men who comprised their audience, poses enticing and artful, delectable perfumes drifting on the air, hips making slow and provocative circles as the chimes on their low-slung belts rang pleasant chords. For these two they wore nothing above their silken trousers and tasseled chain belts but bangles about their wrists, and diaphanous draperies attached to their headdresses that fluttered about them, revealing and veiling their charms.

  Rajnir, Wafri, and the women were long familiar with one another—the dancers were superlative performers, and their two patrons were young, good-looking, responsive. And very, very rich. They were also capricious, as young, rich, good-looking lords tended to be. The leader of the troupe had been observing her patrons as the dance finished, and recognized restlessness in both. Restless patrons soon became bored patrons, who inevitably turned their attentions—and their largesse—elsewhere.

  Wafri had been waiting impatiently for the first moment he could make a graceful exit. He loved the veil dances, but they had been familiar since he was sixteen; it was he who had introduced them to Rajnir, who had only been used to those sexless Venn hel dancers.

  Dance in the land of the Venn could evoke the senses, but was always part of a larger context; the hel dancers dedicated their entire lives to inspiring their viewers to the golden path of Ydrasal. These dancers’ art was confined to the pleasure of the senses. Rajnir’s first sight of those veils, or rather the entrancing bare curves beneath the veils, had been as electrifying as a lightning strike: in the north, neither men nor women bared their chests in public.

  Since then, after several years of summoning them whenever he could get time away from duty, Rajnir’s feelings had dwindled to the ease of familiarity and pleasant anticipation. He had brooded for a couple of days over Erkric’s mysterious request—really almost a command— that he give a series of entertainments as compensation for the hard work everyone had done in the land and sea search for Elgar the Fox.

  He still found himself resentful of the mage’s insistence. He’d thought a day of celebration had been enough, but Erkric spoke with conviction: personal attention was due everyone down the chain of command, on a succession of nights. Rajnir had decided he may as well begin with himself, with Wafri there to share in his favorite entertainment. Tomorrow was good enough to begin with the formal rituals in the Venn Hel for all the officers in Jaro, the day after that for those over the hill reorganizing Beila Lana.

  He shifted impatiently on his cushion as the thumping drums brought the dance to a close. Why was he still sour? The dancers were good as always, but was Wafri paying attention to them? He kept tapping his fingers in that irritating way—

  Having finished in a stimulating pose, draperies shrouding her body to a silhouette, the leader made a subtle signal. The troupe divided, running forward in tiny ringing steps to surround each man, their draperies blowing back.

  Ah, Rajnir thought, attention thoroughly caught now. Hel dancers never do anything like that—and whyever not?

  Soft hands massaged Wafri’s neck and shoulders; someone else stripped off his shoes and stockings to rub his feet, and two others worked on each hand. He lay back and closed his eyes. Indevan could wait a little while, he thought with pleasant anticipation as the tutored hands began working inward toward his body. Indevan would not know when he would arrive . . . really, it was so exciting to contemplate. The man who had defeated Marshig the Murderer, helpless in Wafri’s control. How he flinched when Wafri raised a hand! The thought made him rock hard, and he abandoned himself happily to his dancers, who were determined to sustain the bliss all the night through.

  And so, when his scroll-case tapped, there was no one to feel it because the case was in his clothes. Which had been left behind on the performance floor.

  There was no hope of making it through the palace undiscovered, not after Inda spied the Limros ancestral portrait gallery. He stumbled to a stop before the larger-than-life paintings, all framed in gold-threaded carved wood, in which Wafri’s face was depicted in variety and multiplicity.

  He stiffened. Hands out, fingers tense.

  “Inda? We need to keep moving.”

  Inda did not hear. Fox touched his arm, to be flung off violently. Then, seizing the rest of the flagons of oil Fox had brought as extras, Inda flung the oil on every single ancestral portrait, tapestry, and wooden carving. He grabbed the hallway oil lamp that Fox had taken up as soon as they’d climbed in through a window. He slung it in a wide circle, breathing in great, shuddering gasps, as the blue flame sprayed outward, igniting tongues of fire.

  Ruddy light glowed on his tense profile, head thrown back. Flames twinned and leaped, scattered and blended and roared, radiating withering, killing heat as the entire gallery—all gilt and carved wood, trophy swords mounted between the portraits, two ancient shields, and a banner with the clover leaf worked in gold between two tall windows—fed into the inferno.

  Tiny sparks began to fly, drifting crazily around them.

  “Inda.” Fox touched his arm.

  Inda recoiled, a knife arcing out—to stop against Fox’s blade. Inda stilled, blinking at the crossed blades. Fox watched consciousness incrementally ease Inda’s face, then sheathed his knife, and with his other hand jerked his thumb at the door.

  They ran, smoke billowing after them.

  There was no hope of slipping through unnoticed now. The smoke rolled down halls, causing panic among the sparse night staff in its wake.

  But Fox had planned for that, too. They ignited each of his fire caches as they ran down the length of the old palace.

  What he hadn’t planned for were Inda’s inspired additions.

  Into the servants’ wing they unloosed crates of chickens cooped for the night. In the main hall, where the minimal night guard converged out of instinct, Inda em
ptied a sack of dried peas, which sent the booted men slipping and sliding. Dye overturned. A soup tureen poured down a flight of stairs, followed by barrel hoops. Corn baskets waiting for grinding thrown into the ovens, causing a spectacular explosion of corn puffs sending the four bakers beginning to make the day’s bread shrieking for the beleaguered guards, who were already trying to deal with screaming, panicking servants. The chaos accelerated Fox’s succession of untended fires on landings, staircases, and halls into a scale of unsurpassed domestic disaster.

  They paused outside the guard hall, where the day shift was asleep, though not for long, as the panic was slowly building in the long palace complex behind them.

  Fox indicated the row of neat pairs of boots at the foot of each bed, moved on down the hall as he mourned in a whisper, “Wish we could stop in the stable. These aristocrats! Can’t bear the stink of horse. Stable is as far from their living quarters as possible.”

  “Don’t need horse shit,” Inda said, the weakening darkness blurring his features. “Know something better. Kitchen is right there.” He ran back downstairs, Fox on his heels. They dodged the screaming, fire-batting servants and ducked into the larder.

  Inda grabbed up two baskets of eggs. Surprised, Fox took the last basket, and they drifted, soundless, down the long barracks, inserting an egg into every boot.

  Out the other end. They tossed the baskets away, and were crossing the last distance to the tall gate to the road and freedom, when Inda began to shake and shiver. They dashed across a lit passage; Inda was laughing.

  Laughing. First silently, then in gasping crows and whoops. The abandoned laughter of a child of ten.

  Behind them, the tide of panic reached the sleeping guards at last. Fox had counted on the lack of any real drill or training other than orderly marching; no one, including the guards, seemed to know what to do other than yell “Fire!” and run about looking for water—thieves—one another, as someone sped to the mage’s chamber and tried without the least success to shake him awake.