“The men in front of you will now perform the Stance of Life, a series of moves designed to protect.” O'Bellah's voice rang false with every word that dripped from his acid tongue, and Ju wanted none of it. The rest of the crowd was totally taken in by the spectacle, and murmured in amazement as the gathered men in front of them shifted into different patterns of sinuous movements. Each time they moved it was in direct response to a word shouted by a leather-clad man with his hair tied in braids. He was obviously related to the men, partway between the biggest and smallest, but showing the traits of both. These were not a local people. The hall was silent in response to the strange shouts and smoothly flowing responses. The commands were less recognisable than the shouts by the fighters, and only understandable by just those people. As he watched them, it became obvious to Ju that these were no longer just another brand of mercenaries. This was a closely-knit group of deadly killers who did not even have to use weapons to kill. The families observed from all sides, but it was not the loudly voiced man that Ju found himself watching, but another man that sat quietly in the midst of O'Bellah and the various mercenary leaders. He raised his hand and the braided man called in the unintelligible language an order that must have meant 'stop'.
“Now is the time for you to come and try my friends.” O'Bellah said invitingly as he forced a warm smile to his lips of ice. “For you too can be one of these magnificent warriors, that dance across the floor to protect their friends from their enemies. You will one day be able to dance the dance, and save the city. Come now, and try.”
This time the children did not need asking. It was obvious that from whatever bewitchment O'Bellah had used before, the spell had been magnified. The robed man next to him had not moved, but under his clothes his hands gripped something spherical, and his mouth moved in near-silent whispers under his tightly fitting hood. Ju leaned back against the wall, and his bow got in the way for once. Reaching back to adjust it, as soon as his hand came in contact with the wood Ju was given an electrifying contact. His awareness magnified, and he felt and almost saw the power coming from the shadowed man and surrounding the families, the children especially. He tried to shrink down in case anybody else could feel him sensing the wizard, but everybody was looking at the children and their awkward attempts at the fighting stances of the foreigners. Removing his hand from his bow, Ju took another look around. Nothing had changed, and the class went on. He tried it once more, and without the element of surprise he watched as the power spread out from what was surely a focus stone. The object was clear in the eldritch vision that was granted him, a focus stone that was tiny but powerful in the hands of the wizard at the front of the hall. Ju recalled what Zya had told him in the almost-distant past. His bow and her dagger had a connection, but what it was they did not know. Zya had been rid of the compulsion that had been lain upon her when she received the weapon, but no such magics had been performed on Ju. He wore the bow that once he had used to kill a deer as if it were a part of his body, another limb perhaps, but this was the first time that it had been of any use to him since that day. On an impulse he removed the bow from his shoulder, feeling a keen pang of loss at doing so. This was too important. He looked at the weapon. It was still shiny as if brand new, with its recurved wood and horned tips gently holding the string taut. He had never unstrung it, nor had he any inclination to do so now. Something told him that it would make no difference and he liked to be prepared. All the time he held it he witnessed the world through different eyes, and wondered if this was how Zya saw it when she was focussing. In the distance a bell tolled, and this brought Ju back to his senses. How was he to escape from the middle of a great hall of warriors without being seen? The bell tolling must have been at least one watch since the last, and the time he had left to find out for Zya what was actually going on here was running short. He had to get information and get out, and then make it all the way across town to the underground wharf, and that was before the ships sailed. Shifting in his place near the column, Ju decided to make for the door and trust to luck.
It was at that time the well-dressed blonde-haired woman stood up. “Come call out to me, my children. Show me how you would shout at those that tried to get your mothers and fathers.” Oddly, Ju found himself turning around and wanting to call out, just as more and more children did. Ju retained enough concentration and self-possession to reach behind and touch his bow once more. The air cleared, and he saw a vastly different sight. It was not the beautiful duchess that stood before him but a woman whose clothes fit too tightly around her over-ample frame, causing her midriff to stick out in several places where fat rippled through. Her chin hung in several loose jowls, and she had put much too much make up on. Ju was amazed, but he could see the magic being directed from the wizard. He was the source to it all but she was the one encouraging the children to reciprocate, and he could see something going out of them and towards the wizard. To make things worse the fighters returned, and added their howling to the noise. Even the parents of the children that had stepped forward were adding their yells to the cacophony. Ju was afraid to put his hands over his ears, as he did not want to lose the only thing keeping his mind clear. He saw this time as the best opportunity to make a break as the attention of all the other people were focussed on the scene in front. He backed away from the family he had followed in and edged his way around the hall, his back to the wall and his eyes fixed on the howling mass in front of him. He reached a point in the hall where the people ahead of him were no longer visible, hidden as they were by all of the columns and buttresses. Ju breathed a sigh of relief, and wiped the perspiration from his young forehead with his free hand. Before he knew what was occurring, he felt himself being yanked backwards. A bony hand clamped over his mouth and he could feel the bones in the narrow fingers keeping his yells in. He gave up struggling very quickly when it became apparent that he was getting nowhere, and found that he had been drawn into another room. This did not match the splendour of the rest of the inner guild, and was instead lit by a series of smoky candles. The wooden walls were rough and uneven, and there were crates scattered about, gnawed into splinters by generations of flea-infested vermin. It was onto one of these crates that Ju was carefully placed. Ensuring that he was still quiet, his captor manoeuvred around him so that his face was visible in the flickering shadows. Making a motion with his free hand that implied caution, he warned the young boy. When he saw who it was, he nodded his head, and the man removed his hand. Moving his head in several different directions to check that his neck had not been injured in the event, Ju took stock of his surroundings. “Foster, what are you doing in here? In fact where is here?”
The man known as Foster sat down on a crate against the opposite wall. Foster the guard had once been one of the few fellows within the mercenary guild that Ju had almost gone as far as to be fond of. A member of a small band of mercenaries known as Torquil's McDougalls, he had been one of an elite few that had actually guarded the guild itself. Normally a man with a barrel chest and a hearty laugh, he looked as gaunt as Ju had ever remembered him. It was clear that he had not eaten in quite a while. His face was unshaven and patchy, his eyes hollow with fatigue and worry. He had lost his smile.
Foster leaned forward to minimise the sound he would make, and Ju leaned in also. “You have seen with your own eyes what is going on out there, boy. It ain't right I tell you, it ain't right not at all, boy. Have you seen all that they have to show you boy? They got monsters running around this place. Flipping MONSTERS!”
“Are you sure that is what you saw?” Ju was normally one to take a man at his word, but he had seen no such creatures.
“They have got men the size of boys who fight like demons, boy. They have got men twice the size of normal men who can pick you up and crush you with their bare hands. They have got wizards, boy. It ain't natural. Ain't natural at all. Worst off, they got some great hulking creature that prowls the halls, well the halls it can fit through at any rate. I have been safe in he
re as it can't fit inside.”
“Why are you in here at all?” Ju asked, as this was the question that perplexed him most of all. “What happened to your band of mercenaries?”
“They have gone. Gone to some place through some kind of doorway. They touched the creature and went through. I wasn't going to have none of that, but they was hunting down all the mercenaries as wasn't going along with the plan and forcing them to go or outright killing them. It all came down to what the man who led them wanted, the one as calls himself 'O'Bellah'. Boy, I have been a mercenary for more years than you have lived, and I have never seen nothing like this.” Foster leaned back, clearly miserable.
Ju had not moved an inch. This was what he supposed Zya had sent him to the guild for. “I would like to hear what happened, Foster.”
Foster smiled. “I bet you would at that, boy. Back in the day, me and Boulter joined up for the chance to make a decent wage, the type of wage that someone without many hopes could only earn by stealing. Me and Boulter, we had standards. We had dreams. One day we would both retire and run farms next door to each other in a village someplace. Oh we found many villages that looked just right for us, full of comely wenches.” As he said this, he looked at Ju and cut himself short. Ju wondered what it was about comely wenches that he did not already know that Foster would not speak about, but he did not press it. “Anyway, we had found many a place as would suit us, and plenty of gold to buy the rest of our lives comfortably when we were taken off of the road and given the honour of guarding the guild. Now you have been here as much as any person not of the guild, so I am guessing you knows your way about. Eighteen months we been guarding this place, and the stories we heard would keep you from sleeping, lad. Very nearly has had me awake for days on end. Stories we heard about people losing their souls and such. Terrible stories where the bands as have passed through here have been rapin' and stealin', and murdering people by staking them. Just like the bloody Night of Spears and everything boy! Like a bloody nightmare come true. Well the worst starts to happen when this here O'Bellah turns up out of nowhere. Now we've been told from up on high that we got to be real accommodating and the like to him, so we let him have the run of the mill, so to speak. He comes and goes, sometimes not appearing for ages. He is nothing special to us. But then all of a sudden things changed. He starts appearing with other mercenaries, men and bands that we have never heard of, savages from far away. Except they got the look of military men. There are those as are clearly in command, and they won't speak to any but their men. We might as well not exist as far as they are concerned. They bring other bands of mercenaries in here as I have heard of, but we never get to come into here, into the heart of our guild. Now I have seen why. One day, they call us in, into the very room I dragged you from.”
Ju looked over at the wall. There was a door there, but there had been no sign of a door on the other side.
“How did I get here? Well I shall tell you that in a while, lad.” Foster reached down to pull at something and chew on it. “Rat,” he said around a mouthful, “not nice, but I've eaten far worse in my time, boy.”
“That's disgusting,” answered Ju, and he rummaged around in a pocket, bringing out a small flask he kept and a dried cake wrapped in paper. “Take these, Foster. I think you need them more than I.”
The big guard looked down at the morsels in Ju's hands, and took them carefully. Then he wept. “You don't know what this means, boy. I'm gratefuller than I have ever been for anything.”
Ju sat and watched while Foster carefully devoured the cake, swallowing every last crumb. Then he took a few sips of water. “That's the first time in days I felt less than starving.” Ju listened for the howling cries of the families beyond the wall. They were still there but they had changed somewhat, becoming shriller in pitch, and also further removed though that could have been because of the wall.
“Anyway we got brought to that room and that there O'Bellah, he says things to us. 'You all got a choice,' he says to us, 'to join us voluntarily, or to suffer the consequences.' Now Boulter and me, we follow orders as well as the next man but the tone in his voice, it was like we had no choice anyway and he was just amusing himself. Well as it happens, me and Boulter be at the back of the room when this is going on. We watched as some of our band 'volunteered'. They stepped up and this Gods-awful great hulking creature turns up out of nowhere. They touch its skin, if it can be called such; looked more like rock to me. Anyway, they touch it, and start screaming! Screaming in such pain as has never been described before. They calm down and the rest of us are practically soiling ourselves about what might happen next. We look towards them, and they just stare back, all blank like. Then O'Bellah whispers something and the creature makes a movement, and suddenly them as have all touched it suddenly come at us, and the fighters block the doorway. Well me and Boulter, we know the guild inside and out, like. We knew of these here tunnels. Makes the place right like a rabbit's warren it does. We slipped into a hidey-hole that we knew of, and waited for the commotion to die down. 'Slip into the tunnels', he says, 'and I'll hide the way'. Well Boulter was always senior to me, so I took his orders without question and just as I was out of the way and hidden they came into the hole and got him. I watched from the darkness. They took him right up to the creature and threw him against it. He screamed as if there were no tomorrow, almost split the walls and shattered the windows. Well there was nothing that I could do to help him. He was a lost soul to be sure, and he had ordered me to hide. I was only following orders.”
As he said this, Ju realised that it was the one truth that he was clinging to. It was the one thing allaying his guilt at not helping his friend. Beyond it all was the overpowering stench of evil coming from the creature nearby. The evil, the darkness that had been ever encroaching from the East, it was now here. Ju could feel the presence of it under his very feet. It was not just the evil that had arrived, but a sense of loss, of hopelessness, of utter desolation. The time had come to leave the mercenary guild, certainly for good. “Is there any way out of these tunnels?”
“Sure there is, if you got the guts to take the long walk outta here.” Foster showed no sign of the inner fear that had blighted him since he had taken Ju from the hall. “Problem occurs when you cross one of the main corridors, the place where most of these fighters and monsters gather close to the black creature. These tunnels are a maze if you get disoriented but to the canny man they are much, much easier. Just don't turn off the path no matter what, and you shall reach the hallway. If you can get across without being seen, get into the tunnel on the other side and you are home free. It runs parallel to another tunnel that the Duchess uses.”
“That's where I have seen her before!” Ju exclaimed. “She is the Duchess Deborah, formerly the Lady Langley, mistress of one of the biggest brothels in the city.”
“How do you know of brothels, boy?” Foster asked with a disapproving stare.
Ju grinned cheekily. “The people I have been running messages and errands for do not always live in palaces and guilds. I have been all over this city. I know that the Duke spied Lady Langley when returning from a hunting trip, and word has it that she bewitched him with her umm… skills.”
Foster shook his head in disbelief. “In my day, children were innocent. It is sad that is no longer the case.”
“When you have lived most of your life in the courtyard of an inn, innocence is an overrated thing.” Ju replied, wise beyond his years, and still fuelled by the contact with his bow, and by default Zya's essence.
“Perhaps you are right, boy,” Foster conceded. “But anyways, that Duchess. Right strange creature she is, always traipsing in and out of here like she owns the place and only ever talking to that O'Bellah. Foul as they are they make a fouler couple, for I am sure that words are not all they are exchanging.” Foster had evidently taken Ju at his word with regards to his lack of innocence, and spoke to him man to man instead of man to boy. “She has her own agenda though. If I were to think
long and hard I would probably say that she is trying to do away with her husband and get someone else in there. I don't wish the tunnel to the palace on anybody though.”
“Why not?”
“Coz they are bound to have it guarded tonight of all nights, what with the feast and all. You would be foolish to go there, boy.”
“Maybe,” Ju replied, “but it is there that I have to go. I have a friend there, a friend who will need me to help her tonight of all nights. Will you come with me?”
Foster chuckled. “Why would you want the help of an over-the-hill guard who sells himself for gold?”
“Because you are worth more than that. You have a sense of honour in what you do, and intent rules a man even if the outcome doesn't.”
Foster stared at him hard for a moment, as if deciding something. “Boy, you got a real strange way with words,” he said finally, “but they are most often the right words. Ol' Boulter would never forgive me if I were to sit here and rot like a rat in a trap without trying to carry on.” He stood, and motioned Ju behind him as he grabbed at a torch. Walking into the gloom of the tunnels Ju at first became wary, listening hard for the screaming which had died away so suddenly. His fear was quelled by two things at once. First came the realisation that he had no other choice but to reach Zya, for the hour was too late and he would never have reached the other side of the city let alone the underground wharves of the pirates. The second source of calm came from Foster himself, as he sang in a low, mournful voice:
The Path of Dreams (The Tome of Law Book 2) Page 57