by Paul Kearney
They nodded, but as the manservant turned to go, Rol detained him, smiling. “I almost forgot. I have something for you.”
Fleam flashed out of the back-scabbard and settled at Quare’s throat. His Adam’s apple scraped the tip as it moved up and down convulsively.
“Master, Mistress, I do not know what—”
A slight push, and the strange-colored steel parted his skin, sliced through his esophagus, and halted, scraping in the vertebrae of his neck. He looked down in disbelief at the bar of bright metal under his chin, and then his weight grew heavier on the blade until Rol turned it to one side and he slid off, to crumple on the floor.
“No more beaten maids,” Rol said with a satisfaction that was somehow hollow.
He caught Rowen’s eyes and was chilled by them. Before he could say anything else she went to the postern and opened it again. A low whistle, and then she stepped back to allow Canker and six other Feathermen to enter. The King of Thieves and his followers had donned metal-studded byrnies of hardened leather. Three of them wielded small hand-crossbows, the rest swords of one kind or another and many knives in scabbards strapped all over their torsos.
“I am glad to see you well prepared,” she told Canker dryly. “Follow us, but remain outside the door until I give the word.” The King of Thieves nodded, his lips drawn back from his teeth in what might have been a smile.
Rol and Rowen led them up the stairs, checking their weapons as they went. There was a peculiar quiver in Fleam’s hilt, like anticipation. Rol could only marvel at Rowen’s composure. She was as calm and collected as if she were going to dinner.
“Do you think he knows?” Rol asked her.
“He knows this is one ending, else he would not have promised you that key. By now he will have received word of Canoval’s death, and Canker’s. I hope that will persuade him we have come round to his way of thinking. It is our only edge.”
“That, and seven Feathermen,” Canker said behind them.
“They barely even the odds,” Rowen retorted.
Canker and his followers fell back after that. Passing a maid on the stairs, Rowen knocked her senseless with the butt of a dagger and laid her down carefully. Then the little group continued, until at last the door was before them. Rowen knocked smartly upon it.
“Enter.”
Rol and Rowen looked at each other, faces expressionless but for the light in their eyes. It was Rowen who opened the door, Rol who closed it behind them.
The familiar firelit room with its leaping shadows, shelves of books about the walls, wing-backed chairs and gleaming decanters. Psellos was sitting staring at the fire with an opened scroll held in his hands.
“The King is dead. Long live the King. I hear rumors the night went well.”
“It is not over yet,” Rowen told him.
He looked up at that, and smiled. “Join me by the fire, children. Rol, pour us some wine. We have things to discuss.”
Neither moved. After a while Psellos looked up from his scroll. His smile did not waver, but something in his eyes changed.
“So, it is like that, is it? I feared as much. Ah, but it is a pity, you two. We could have had such fun together, playing games with the world.” He bent to his scroll again, and Rol saw his lips move. Then he stood up, dropping it into the chair. He was unarmed, dressed in his customary black hose and velvet.
“You had best kill me and have done with it.”
The oddest reluctance overcame Rol, a sense of waste. He had so many questions still to ask of this man, and if truth were told, Psellos had never done him any harm. Rowen he had debauched and debased, yes, but to Rol he had been firm and generous—even kindly. The very sword at his hip was Psellos’s gift.
“Rowen—” Rol said hoarsely.
She unsheathed her stilettos. “He’s spelling us.” And louder: “Canker!”
She was moving even as the King of Thieves barreled through the door behind her. The white hands whirred in two blurred arcs and the stilettos hissed through the air. They buried themselves in the spines of books above the mantelpiece. Psellos had moved with blinding speed first one way, then another. The chair wherein he had sat came flying across the room. Rowen threw herself flat on the floor and it crashed into the wall above her. Wild laughter filled the place, and a wind whirled ash and smoke out of the hearth. Psellos was a black marionette of shadow moving so fast the eye could barely follow him.
The Feathermen who followed their king into the room appeared to be fighting sparks from the fire, cursing and batting them aside. One of them screamed as a darting glede smote his eye and burned the socket black. He fell clutching his face. Crossbow bolts snapped through the air like mad bats, standing quivering in the wood-paneled walls.
“Stand fast!” Canker shouted. “Don’t let him out of the door!”
The laughter was all about them, as though baying out of the very walls. Rol stood with Fleam naked in his fist, turning this way and that, clinking airborne coals away from his face. Something made him peer upward, and looking down upon him was Psellos’s face, grinning diabolically. He was clinging to the ceiling as lightly as a spider.
“Rowen!” Rol screamed. He threw himself backwards instinctively. Psellos’s tongue shot out like a black whip and cracked the air where his head had been.
“Weren!” Canker bellowed in alarm. “Great gods above, he is Weren! Get out, lads, get out!”
“No!” Rowen shouted. Her hands moved, and a fusillade of gleaming steel stars went out of them. Psellos cried out in pain and anger, and leaped.
Clear across the room he went, turning in midair. He caught a Featherman in passing and the fellow went hurtling backwards with a slashed throat. Psellos landed on all fours by the door and sprang up again as easily as a bounced ball. He came at Rol next, and Fleam jumped into the air between them, a living thing of steel. The metal barely touched him, but blood spattered Rol’s face as he bounced away again, snarling.
They backed away toward the door, swords pointed outward.
Psellos’s tongue flicked out and caught a Featherman round the calf. He slid across the floor and was thrashed into a broken carcass; pieces of him flung up to fleck the walls. The Master careered about the room scattering books, his silver eyeteeth dark with blood. He capered across the ceiling on all fours, laughing again. He feinted, and a flurry of knives buried themselves in the plaster where he had been. But he came at them from the side, a boneless, spinning thing. Another Featherman fell, hamstrings slashed at the back of both knees. Canker dropped his sword, clutching at a hole in his side with a yell of shock and fury. Rowen’s sable leathers were sliced in ribbons from her back. She spun and it was as though her fingers had grown blades. A scream of pain, and Psellos was clear across the room again with the gore of his wounds a dark mist in the air behind him.
Coals came hailing out of the fire in a bright barrage, striking flesh and sticking to those they smote, burning inward. Men shrieked and tried to pick them out of their own smoking bodies. A terrible stench filled the air and the smoke grew thick as fog. Psellos’s insane laughter hurt their ears.
The surviving Feathermen were tumbling over one another to get out of the door. Canker had fallen to one knee and held a single long knife in one fist while the other was pressed to his punctured chest. Rowen’s hair was flying about her face like a banner and her hands were full of the tiny metal stars whose fellows peppered the ceiling.
“What, leaving so soon?” Psellos’s voice said. A shelf-load of books sailed through the air and pelted the fleeing Feathermen, opening up like pale-winged birds, flapping about their heads. The heavily bound volumes knocked them from their feet and fell, opening and closing feebly on the floor about them. The door slammed shut on the last of the Thieves with preternatural force and pinched off his feet at the ankles. They could hear the rest of him shrieking on the landing outside.
Psellos dropped lightly to the floor again in front of Rol.
“I’ll have that sword ba
ck,” he said, and his fingers fastened about Rol’s arm with horrible strength. Fleam jerked back and forth between them and Psellos’s tongue darted out at Rol’s eyes. Rol snapped his head aside and it seared a length of skin from his temple. A light sprang up in Rol’s face, a bright, furious disgust. He released the hilt of the sword, throwing Psellos off balance, and with his scarred left hand clutched the curved blade near the point. It should have sliced his hand in two but Ran’s scar turned the edge. He pulled the blade to one side in one clean movement and the metal sliced clear through the Master’s snaking tongue. A yard of black flesh wriggled to the floor. Psellos gave a great gargling cry, and Fleam clanged to the floor between them. A gush of blood steamed out over the Master’s lips and he staggered backwards, the stump of his tongue flailing.
Rowen came to Rol’s aid. Together the pair grasped Psellos’s kicking body under the armpits and ran it forward as if they meant to batter a door open with his head. They thrust it into the blazing hearth and held it there, seized the Master’s hose at the buttocks in tight fistfuls, and propelled him further into the fire. He leaped and bucked in their hands as they held his face down on the burning coals. Acrid, sickening smoke billowed out of the hearth. His hair took fire and his skin blackened and withered on the bones of his skull. He twitched, the long fingers snapping and curling in spasms, scrabbling at their legs. Finally they dropped to the floor. A shudder went through the Master’s body and he was still.
Rol straightened, retrieved Fleam, and stabbed the bright blade double-handed between Psellos’s shoulders. The blood jetted out smoking and black and Fleam trembled in his hands. A kind of charge went through the weapon, transmitting itself to Rol’s loins in a momentary flash of ecstasy. He groaned, closing his eyes.
When he opened them again the fire in the hearth was obscenely bright, and what was in there seemed shapeless as a hewn log. Rowen was sprawled on the floor with her hair a matted curtain around her shoulders. Beyond the bodies that littered the room Canker sat with his back leaning against the door, his face bloodless and gleaming.
Rol straightened. His foot clicked against the spindle of the scroll Psellos had been reading. He picked it up, but the parchment was blank. Something curled itself about the toe of his boot. Psellos’s tongue, still writhing feebly. Disgusted, he transfixed it with Fleam’s smeared point and it joined the Master’s carcass in the fire.
There was blood in Rol’s mouth. His precious blood, worth so much. He spat it hissing into the fire, his head burning where Psellos’s tongue had stripped the skin from his temple. Rowen raised her head, and he saw the blood pooling behind her back as she sat. But her eyes were clear. She looked up at him and smiled one bright, unclouded smile of pure joy. He wished, then and later, that he could have smiled back.
Twelve
THE KEY
THEY HAD TO HEAL THE OLD-FASHIONED WAY, WITH the help of time and the resilience of their own bodies. The Tower was emptied of its entire staff except for Gibble, who flatly refused to leave when he saw their state, and the fat little cook tended their wounds as one by one Rol, Rowen, and the King of Thieves descended into raving fevers. Some poison had entered them through their injuries and it festered and fed upon their spirits for days, whilst beyond the walls, Ascari descended into chaos.
Rol remained lucid longest, and he helped Gibble tie his companions down on their beds whilst the sweat coursed down their stark faces and their eyes glared sightlessly and they screamed gibberish at the tops of their hoarse voices. He felt the fever rise in him like the nausea of an evil memory but was able to secure the postern against the roaming gangs outside and leave Gibble orders that the upper levels were to be left undisturbed. They had piled the bodies in Psellos’s study and nailed shut the door, but not before Rol had prised a key out of the Master’s black, melted flesh.
The key remained clenched in his fist for the next eleven days as Rol fought the raging fever that Psellos’s venom had kindled within him. He shouted and raged and wept and was tied to the bed in his turn as all reason left him and his mind became a howling wilderness. Gibble’s exhausted and frightened face was the only recurring image in the succession of nightmares that trooped through his brain.
At last, however, another face appeared in his vision, and it seemed to be not some shrieking travesty, but something reassuring and beloved. A white face framed by hair dark as a raven’s wing, a cool hand on his forehead. The foul sweat was wiped from his eyes. He was thirsty and was given water to drink, and he slept a real sleep without the torment of dreams.
There was a pain in his hand. He brought it in front of his face and opened his creaking fist and a key fell out. It had carved a purple divot in his palm.
He sat up and the tall candleflames that lit the room stabbed pain into his aching head.
“Welcome back,” a voice said, and he turned to see Rowen sitting wrapped in a rug near the foot of his bed. At the far wall a shape snored soundly in another, mounded in blankets.
“Canker?”
“His fever broke yesterday, mine the day before. But we are all as weak as half-drowned kittens. I sent Gibble off to get some rest. He’s not had more than a few hours’ sleep in the last fortnight.”
“It’s been that long?”
“We almost died. Psellos was pure poison, or the spell he read had made him so.”
“The scroll, of course. But the thing he became—”
“That was no spell, it was the nature of the Blood in him coming out.”
She stood up, naked under the rug she had pulled about herself, and joined him on the sodden bed.
“Your wounds?” Rol asked. There had been a lot of blood, and his recollection of her hurts was hazy.
“Gibble stitched them up for me. He has had much practice.” She took his hand, her fingers cool and sure. The long fever had pared away every scrap of spare flesh and her face was gaunt, the tendons standing out on her neck like cords.
He kissed her chapped lips. “It’s over.”
“The worst is, yes. But Ascari without a Thief-King is an unpredictable place. Canker has been off the streets too long. I think he will not find it so easy to come back from the dead. Psellos’s reputation is the only thing that has kept the looting mobs from the door.”
“The Feathermen can’t be the only glue that holds the city together.”
“They were the most effective one. The Watch has disintegrated, except where some of the richer Mercanters have hired a company here and there. The militia was chased out of the lower city like pike-bearing rabbits. Another Thief-King should have been elected by now, but Psellos’s bought Feathermen are unaware of his death and are holding things up. So the Feathermen are now fighting amongst themselves like all the rest of the rabble. Gibble has been out for supplies once or twice—the rumor is that Canoval’s mercenary fleet is already at sea, and will be here soon to restore order, whilst inland the council sits and drafts troops from the ranks of the smallholders. Ascari may yet become a battleground.”
“So it was all for nothing.”
“Yes.”
He had murdered a man in his bed for no good reason, left a wife lying asleep beside her husband’s corpse.
“No more training, Rowen. No more knives in the dark and blades in the back. From now on when I fight a man it shall be face-to-face and fair and square.”
Rowen’s mouth twitched. “How very laudable of you. It’s as well the world is such a simple place.”
“I’m sick of murder. Great gods, the way Psellos died! Was he in any way human at all?”
“He was tainted; I never suspected how badly. Do you know what it means?”
“I knew there was something wrong there. That black tongue of his.” And as he saw the puzzlement on her face he asked: “You mean you never noticed it before?”
“Never.”
They looked at one another, both baffled.
“The way he appeared, at the end,” Rowen went on, “means that he could only have be
en of the folk of Cambrius Orr; the Fallen. If his tales of your background are true, then—”
“Then it must run in the family. There is a monster inside me also. Is that what you are saying?”
“No, you fool. Think. The taint that produced the Fallen came from interbreeding with Man, but your blood is astonishingly clean. You are almost pure Were.”
“So?” Rol was sullen. He wanted no more revelations.
“So your bloodline and Psellos’s must be very different.”
“He was my uncle, not my father.”
“Uncle by blood, he said, not marriage. Somewhere along the line, Psellos has lied to you, or at least not told you the whole truth.”
“You surprise me.”
She leaned back with some of her old hauteur. “Now is not the time, I see. But we should use that key of yours to hunt out a few secrets.”
“Very well. But after that we’re taking ship. Ascari can eat itself, for all I care.”
With a bath and a change of clothes, Canker was almost unrecognizable. His burly form was well muscled despite the wastage of the fever, and filled out one of the Master’s tunics to bursting point. When the filth had been scrubbed from his face it was possible to see that he was not out of his fourth decade. Only the black gleam of his eyes was unchanged, as cold as those of a serpent.
“The sooner I get out and about the better for the city,” he said through a mouthful of pickled fish. Reaching for the relish, he winced. Rol passed it to him wordlessly. Canker’s wound had touched the lung.
Rol, Rowen, and Gibble sat with the ex–King of Thieves at the kitchen table, wolfing down the choicest cuts in the pantry and washing them down with the Master’s wine. Since they had recovered their feet, the convalescents’ appetites had seemed bottomless.
“It’s a disaster out there, to be sure,” Gibble said. “Some of the big houses on Cartsway are burning, and they’re lynching nobles at the corner of Grescon Street, where they had the fish markets.”