by Glen Cook
Yoseh fumbled the story out.
“Would you recognize the man again?”
“Yes sir.”
“Describe him.”
“He was short, even for the veydeen. And very wide. Very muscular. Not a young man. Middle thirties to early forties. Dark for veydeen. Very quick, and I think very strong. His nose was flattened, like somebody smashed it in. Wide mouth and heavy lips.”
“Beard?”
“No sir.”
“Obvious scars?”
“Well... I can’t be sure. His lip curled up, like this, a little. There was a man back home with a lip like that from a knife wound.”
“Uhm.”
Nogah asked, “You know the man, sir?”
“No. But I’d like to meet him, Yoseh, how did he make the fire?”
“He just reached down and got something out of his belt
“An envelope? A packet? A sachet?”
Yoseh glanced at Nogah, back. “Yes sir. One of those.”
“Hunh! Do what he did, as closely as you can ape it. Slowly.”
Yoseh did so, puzzled by Fa’tad’s interest and cowed by the intensity of his scrutiny.
“He reached across his body with his left hand and emptied the packet at you backhanded?”
“Yes sir.”
“And the stuff he threw. Did you get a good look at it before it caught fire?”
“It was dust, sir. Yellow, I think. Yes. Almost saffron.”
Nogah asked, “Sir, is this important?”
“The gestures probably not. He had one hand busy holding a child. But I’m very interested in the powder. What sort of powder is inert in an envelope open to the air but bursts into flames when it’s thrown?”
“Sorcery?” Nogah suggested softly.
“Certainly a possibility. I’m very interested in such a dust.”
“Yes sir.”
“I’m also interested in that maze of passages in the Shu. We have more trouble with the Shu than any other quarter. Because the villains can use that maze to come and go as they please.”
Yoseh had a feeling Fa’tad was leading up to something. His suspicion was confirmed immediately.
“I want you to go up there tomorrow, Nogah. Start exploring. Start mapping. There is no map of that area. Even people who live there don’t know what’s going on out their back doors. Starting tomorrow everyone not on duty for the ferrenghi will be up there exploring. We’ll go in there and stay. We’ll take the maze away from Qushmarrah’s bad men.”
Nogah said, “Yes sir.” Yoseh echoed him hastily.
“That will be all for now. Yoseh, if you recall anything significant, I want to know right away.”
“Yes sir.” Yoseh got out as fast as youthful dignity would allow. His legs almost betrayed him returning across the compound.
Zouki sat inside the door of the cage, leaning against the cold iron bars, motionless, for a long time. He was so scared he had wet himself.
There were thirty other kids in the cage. They were scared, too. They seemed to have spaced themselves out. Only two, who looked like twins, were close to each other. The kids all seemed to be about his age. They all stared at him.
They did not seem starved or abused. They were clean and clothed. But they were scared and Zouki thought they must cry a lot.
He wanted to cry. He wanted his mother.
He looked at all those kids looking back at him and didn’t know what else to do. So he did cry.
Azel had just finished a meal for which the cook ought to be convicted. He could not guess what he had eaten.
Torgo walked in. “She’s ready for you now.” He sounded like a man talking to a cockroach.
“Yeah? Good. Who cooks this slop? They ought to be staked out on an anthill. The brats get fed better.”
“The children are valuable. Come.”
Following Torgo, staring at the eunuch’s huge, broad back, Azel said, “Torgo,’I like your attitude so much I think I’m going to kill you. You ball-less wonder. Maybe pretty soon now.” He looked at the eunuch’s bare feet and knew just how he would start.
Torgo glanced back, for a moment the expression on his big round flabby face more puzzled than anything. Then a slow smile spread. “You’re welcome to try. But you’ll be disappointed.”
“You bad, Torgo? You think you’re bad? You ain’t never been out of this dump. You ain’t never seen the real world. Out there is where the bad boys play. You don’t know bad from dog turds. You ain’t bad. You ain’t even hard. You’re just pig-stupid and mean.”
And pretty good at keeping his temper, Azel reflected.
Few who lived in the citadel went in or out. The Herodians knew who they were. If any got recognized those bastards would realize there was a way through the barrier, after all. Only Azel and a few other trusted agents came and went through what the barrier’s creator had nicknamed the Postern of Fate.
Two of those agents were women who busted their butts doing the grocery shopping and whatnot.
Azel wondered if he really would get aggravated enough with Torgo to take him out. Maybe. If the eunuch kept on with his airs.
Well, whatever. He shut the eunuch out of mind and scanned his surroundings. An ordinary hallway. Except that it was decked out in enough treasure to ransom a platoon of princes. The whole damned citadel was like that. But old Nakar, he was the boss wazoo around Qushmarrah for a long time. And when they knocked down the temples and busted up the idols he was the kind of guy who made them pay for the privilege of replacing Gorloch with their candy-ass Aram the Flame. When they had done that he started taking any damned thing he pleased.
Azel could not figure out why the old boy had let them get away with dumping Gorloch. He knew Nakar had claimed there was no point imposing on jerks who refused to believe. But he never quite figured out why that mattered.
He had been around, up and down the coast, and even across the sea, out where the gods were really bizarre, and he thought he knew one thing about religion: the fact of actual belief did not matter. You had to know how to go through the motions and you had to be able to say, “How much?” whenever a priest stuck out his hand and said, “Gimme.” That was all.
Azel did not know if he was a believer or not. He had been doing all the right things for so long it was all habit. He did know he found the ferocious Gorloch a more satisfying deity than Aram with his softhearted, softheaded, otherworldly love and forgive-thy-neighbor crap.
He irked Torgo by chuckling. If he wanted a stand-up, he-man god he ought to go with the Herodian’s anonymous deity, who had no other name but God. That one was all thunder and lightning and kicking ass. But a goddamned psycho, too. His doctrine was all do what I tell you or die, sucker, and the hell with it’s something stupid, or it conflicts with something you’ve already been told to do.
Herod had not pressed religious issues in Qushmarrah. Yet. The Herodians were spread thin. If ever they felt secure enough to dispense with the unpredictable Dartar meres it would be Granny bar the door, Qushmarrah you’re going to get the One True Faith. Or burn.
Azel chuckled again, remembering a scheme he’d bounced off the Genera] three, four years back. It involved having kids-so small any Herodian laying a hand on them would get torn apart-go around giving the occupiers chunks of stone with lots of points and sharp edges.
It would have worked. They would have laughed Herod out of town. But the old man had said it was undignified to attack a man through his toilet habits. Crap. You went after your enemies any way you could, and you kicked them when they were down.
Azel chuckled again, because that irritated the eunuch. But he cut it off as they approached the guard at the door of the audience chamber. Time to work himself up.
A hundred years ago she had been the greatest beauty on the coast, and for that alone suitors had come to Caldera from as far west as Deoro Etrain, where Ocean hammered and raged against bleak and rocky shores. They had come from the east, from far Aquira, Karen, and Bokhar. T
hey had come from over the sea, on ships with sails purple and scarlet and blue the color of heavenstone, from Cathede and Nargon and Barthea. Those princes and lords could have swooned when they saw the reality. They would have taken her with her beauty alone for dowry.
But there was more. Much more. It made them bring great treasures with which to gift Caldera.
She had been that one girl child in a generation born with a talent for sorcery. That one in a generation whose talent could become a tool more potent than the genius of any general.
She had had the world at her feet then. And young as she had been, already they had begun to call her the Witch-more because of the way she had toyed with them than because of her talent. She had led them around, taunting them into escalating their offers, with no real intention of selling herself off, or of allowing the lords of Caldera to auction her...
That had been their plan and wish. Gold, power, alliances. Her father himself had been one of those she had made excruciatingly uncomfortable, with a cruel case of boils, when the attempt to sell her was made.
Then the Archimage of Qushmarrah, Nakar, had come to Caldera.
He had not come in style or state. He had brought no gifts or promises. Already his dread god had been shorn of significance by the fickle Qushmarrahan mob. He had only his unassailable citadel and his ruthless deathgrip on the political power in Qushmarrah.
He had been half as old as the world even then, though he had looked a fit, lean, virile forty. He had been a darkly handsome man with wavy black hair spotted by a hen’s egg of silver above his right eye, an inch and a half behind his hairline. His eyes had been dark and magnetic and afire with intrigue.
She had known the moment she met his smoldering gaze.
Dark tales clustered around him like moths fluttering around a lamp. They said this. They said that. They said he lived on, young, not because of his sorcery, nor because he was first acolyte to, and favored of, his god, but because he had become one of the undead, the devourers of blood and souls.
None of that mattered after that first meeting of eye with eye. None of that mattered now.
She had aged, but not her hundred years. She looked a well-preserved thirty-five. Little of the impact of her beauty had faded. It remained her most potent tool.
It was a tool without a handle or edge when she dealt with Azel. Azel seemed blind or just plain indifferent.
He pushed inside behind Torgo. Torgo’s jaw was tight. Azel’s taunting had begun to reach him.
She steeled herself. Azel would be brash and crude and raw in an effort to put her on the defensive. He would succeed, probably. Because of that absolute, deadly confidence with which he faced everyone-even those able to swat him like a fly.
She did not know his true name. Her husband had called him Azel, after Gorloch’s demonic messenger. Nakar had trusted Azel. Azel was, she believed, the only living being Nakar had trusted without reservation. And even he, majestic and dauntless as a storm in his power, had been a little afraid of Azel.
The trouble was, Azel never failed to accomplish what he set out to do. That made you uncomfortable when you tried to push him a direction he did not want to go.
“Good evening, Azel. I understand you have a problem.”
“We all got a problem, woman. They’re closing in. I had to use my flash packet to get a gang of Dartars off my back today.”
She knew where he was going. He’d hinted before that he thought she was pushing the project too hard, that gathering too many subjects too fast would catch the eye of the Herodian commander. “Tell me the circumstances, Azel.” She wanted to stall.
But she had had time to think already, since Torgo had told her Azel insisted on an audience. She had not gotten her mind ordered.
Why did he rattle her so?
Azel told it in his clipped, raw way.
“It was a coincidence, then. Not something to worry about, after all.”
“You missed the point, woman.”
“Torgo!” Offended by the man’s tone, the eunuch had started to move. Azel grinned. “If I’m blind, Azel, open my eyes. Show me the point I missed.”
“I had to use flash to give Dartars the slip. If I wanted to hang on to the kid. I should’ve killed them. But I couldn’t do that without letting go of the brat.”
“I still don’t see...”
“Flash, woman. Flash. You think every guy that hangs out in alleys has got a pocket full of flash to throw when the heat closes in?”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. It’s going to start them wondering. Maybe even wondering why it was so damned important to hang on to the kid. They’re going to start asking questions. If they get any honest answers they might start seeing patterns. There’s plenty of clues if they pay attention.”
“So what would you suggest?”
“Back off awhile. Don’t give them anything more to check out. You got thirty kids down there and don’t have a notion if one of them isn’t the one you want. Let it ride till you find out.”
“No. There are nineteen more on the list, Azel. And it’s mathematically certain that between five and ten remain unidentified. That’s almost as big a group. Another third of the whole. Every hour we delay is an hour of risk. It’s been a lucky group of children. Only six have died between birth and the present. But if the one we want is one that had died or will die before we get hold of him, we end up starting all over with a new group. A group, in fact, for every one that died. How much greater the risks, then, with groups of younger children? The thing grows monstrous, Azel.”
“How much chance you got of pulling it off if the Herodians figure it out? If you keep us on the street and one of us gets caught? Zippo, woman. Zero. Zilch. They figure out what’s happening they’re going to be on you like a snake on shit.”
“That terror is less fearsome than the mathematical horrors that come of each additional death, Azel. We will continue the current program.”
“The hell we will. I’m not getting myself torn apart by the mob or put to the question by Herod. I’m off the case until I decide it’s safe to work it again.”
“You’ve said you believe in the project.”
“I do. It’s Qushmarrah’s last hope. But what does believing in something have to do with walking off a cliff to hear the splat when you hit bottom? Back off. Take it easy. Let it cool down. And when you go on, give us better tools.”
The anger, born of frustration, grew in her. She fought it. Argument would do no good. Azel never did anything he did not want to do. “Very well. I’ll go on without you. When you’re
ready to continue your work Torgo will give you your next assignment.”
Azel stared at her till it was impossible to meet his gaze. Then he shook his head in disgust and walked out.
Torgo stepped closer. “Did you watch us as we came to the chamber, my lady?”
“I caught part of it, Torgo. You have to ignore it. Don’t let him get to you.”
“He made threats.”
“That’s his nature. Forget it.”
“Then you don’t want anything done about him?”
“Not yet. He could be useful still. We have a long way to go.”
“But...”
“If it becomes necessary to remove him I’ll let you know.”
Torgo bowed, satisfied for the moment.
She would not send Torgo after Azel. Not unless it was Torgo she wanted dead.
Azel stepped into the vast dark hall that was Gorloch’s last bastion in the world. Rites continued to be held there-attended only by the few believers who lived in the citadel. Last rites. A wake for a lost, majestic fury.
The appropriate candles were burning but, it seemed, they could not beat back the darkness as they had in earlier times. The only real light glowed around the great altar where the sacrifices had been given up to Gorloch. But even that light had faded. It had not been fed for six years. The glow no longer beat back the night enough to reveal the great idol that looked do
wn upon all.
Azel stirred himself, strode forward. His heels clicked upon the basalt floor. Echoes bounded and rebounded and mixed till they sounded like the noise made by the wings of a flight of bats.
Azel paused beyond the glow, considered the tableau frozen before him.
Nakar still lay arched backward over the altar, Ala-eh-din Beyh’s enchanted dagger in his heart. One hand gripped the altar for leverage. The other was a claw at the end of an extended arm, now clamped upon air as once it had been clamped upon the Herodian sorcerer-hero’s throat. Ala-eh-din Beyh lay on his side at Nakar’s feet, still locked in the stance of a man using both hands to drive a blade into an enemy’s heart while trying to lean back from a hand tearing at his throat.
All the Witch’s power had been able to do only that much to separate them. The enchantment into which she had put them at death was that powerful.
Azel came to view the tableau each time he visited the citadel. Each time he came the darkness seemed to have closed in a little more.
If it devoured the glow entirely would it be too late for the project? Too late for Qushmarrah?
Was the Witch so driven because she was racing against the darkness?
As he did each time he came, Azel genuflected slightly-but whether to Nakar, the altar, or to the god in the darkness beyond, even he could not have said. Then he turned and left that place, and went out through the Postern of Fate into the real world of a Qushmarrah sprawled helpless at the feet of her conquerors.
Bel-Sidek got the General seated at his table only moments before the first of the “nephews” arrived. The old man had called forth surprising reserves of will and had banished the appearance of ill health. He almost looked like the General of old.
That first to arrive was “King” Dabdahd, who ran the Astan quarter. King was the least important of the guests expected. No trouble came out of the Astan. King was the General’s man.
Qushmarrah within the wall was divided into seven “quarters”: the Shu, the Shen, the Tro, and the Hahr (the original four quarters of the “Old City”), the Astan, the Minisia, and the waterfront. Bel-Sidek and the General ran the waterfront and the Shu. The troublesome quarter, the Hahr, belonged to one Ortbal Sagdet.