Back Under The Stairs - Book 2 in The Bandworld Series

by John Stockmyer

  Grasping the crystal and chain in both hands now, the robber turned and with quiet, gliding steps, crossed the room.

  Cracking open the hall door, listening, the thief was swiftly through the door and gone.

  The sneak-thief departed, there was another pause.

  But not for long, another person slipping into John's chamber, this time through the doorway leading to Platinia's room.

  Sidling along the wall, the second figure reached the dresser where John had put his next day's clothing. There, guided by the hall light's glow under the door, the phantom sifted through John's garments.

  Found ... John's knife ... slipped it from its leather sheath with a nearly imperceptible sigh.

  On cat feet, the person approached John's bed.

  And waited.

  Until John rolled over on his back again, the ghost figure raising the dagger and plunging it in the center of John's chest, John's shriek of agony echoing through the room, the halls, the inn, the sound covering the assassin's retreat through the open portal into Platinia's room!

  Horribly awake, John clutched his chest! In torment, managed to fumble out the knife!

  Around the bright ring of pain, John was aware of shouting and that there was light and noise and ... people.

  Saw, from a receding distance, the worried face of Platinia hovering above him, behind her, taller blurs of faces in the magic flames of many torches, their lights smothered by shadows crawling toward him from the corners of the room .........

  -18-

  It was John's first visit to the "war room" since the assassination attempt, the army doctor, Quezy, sitting nervously by his side, Quezy a fussy little man. Bald, with bushy throat whiskers. A doctor? Or, in this backward place, was he more a barber-surgeon?

  Thank God that bleeding the patient had not taken hold here as the quickest way to reduce fever! (Of course, in the daylight magic of this environment, there was no infection to produce fever, causing John to wonder if he'd have survived a similar attack in his own world.)

  It was not until the second day after he'd been stabbed that John was "with it" enough to look at his chest, John was still chewing a pain deadening plant -- the doses looking suspiciously like poppy buds.

  While everyone in John's immediate "family" was assuring him his life hung by a thread, John was going to live, the knife strike not compromising vital organs.

  John had been most fortunate, Quezy maintained, that the knife had a wide blade. And that the would-be assassin was holding the blade vertically to John's body, the blade jamming between two ribs rather than slipping between them into John's heart. (John realized he'd been lucky. He just didn't want to admit it.) In addition, it had been fortunate that John had been stabbed in a light gravity band. In heavier gravity, he'd probably still be flat on his back.

  Having a small pillow under his robe to hug to his bandaged chest if he had to cough, John was ready to start his first, after attack, meeting.

  They were all seated at the table when he'd arrived. Coluth. Golden. Gagar. Platinia. Zwicia. And Robin. The Army and Navy Heads and their Seconds were also in their accustomed places around the table. In short, everyone who had ready access to John's room in the dead of night.

  First things first. "Any bright ideas about who tried to eliminate me?" Everyone around the rough-hewed table hung his head. Except for Zwicia-in-lavender-robe -- who had probably not understood the question. "No thoughts at all?"

  Though Coluth cleared his throat to speak, Robin got in ahead of him. "It is my belief that it was the Malachite Army Head," the old man purred in his unctuous voice. "The very same that you released, sir. Leet. Trailing after us." John didn't mind receiving respect from those around him. It was just that old man Robin overdid the obsequious bit to the point of satire.

  "And why do you think it was Leet?"

  "He is Malachite. Already almost here, he had only to follow the rest of the way." John wondered if Robin knew that Golden was also a Malachite? Was certain, closed-mouthed as Golden was, that Robin knew nothing of Golden's intent to be King of Malachite one day. "Also, because he had but one arm," Robin continued. "Was weak. The blow that was struck was a feeble one."

  "It seems to me that a man denied the use of one arm strengthens the other by way of compensation."

  "He was also old."

  "So are you," John said, Robin shutting his mouth like a snapping turtle biting at an offending stick. Though normally suffering fools gladly -- John was a college instructor after all -- John was too weak to pursue silly avenues of thought. In addition to John's appraisal of Leet as a man of honor, there was little chance of the one-armed Army Head sneaking past Stil-de-grain's checkpoints.

  "I have the assurance of the guards," Nator put in, "that, on that infamous night, no one entered or exited the inn after down-light." As conscientious as the Army Head had been about following John's orders, John believed him.

  The unmistakable conclusion? That the assassination attempt was an inside job.

  Spending considerable convalescent time thinking about the attack, John had considered -- then discarded -- the inn's personnel as suspects. Even if one of them might have hallucinated a reason for an attempt on John's life, John didn't think anyone working at the inn had the courage to assault a Mage.

  No. The only people likely to have known the location of John's room on the second floor were the people seated around this very table.

  One of his own people. But who?

  Golden? Maybe. Though the young man had a lot of earlier, better chances to take John out.

  Coluth? Jealous of John's superior authority? Unthinkable.

  Philelph, Coluth's Second? Fanatically devoted to the captain, Philelph would die rather than do something that could get Coluth in trouble.

  The Army Head or his Second? Perhaps. Ambitious soldiers were sometimes interested in speeding up promotion by eliminating those above them in the hierarchy. But ... aspiring to replace John as Mage? Surely, that exaltation was beyond the dreams of even the most megalomaniacal of officers.

  Robin? Unlikely, since John was the old man's ticket home.

  Zwicia?

  Platinia?

  Both had opportunities to assassinate John long before this.

  One of the guards? Surely, a man familiar with arms would have made a better job of it.

  What it came down to was: no suspect. The scariest of all possibilities!

  Still a secret -- from everyone except the assassin -- was the theft of John's fake Mage-crystal.

  John smiled to himself, the others at the table waiting patiently for him to restart the meeting. It had to have been a nasty surprise to the thief to find that the "crystal" he'd stolen was a reproduction.

  But .... back to the problem at hand.

  "The assassin's access to me," John continued, his voice already beginning to tire, "leads me to believe he is someone in this room."

  Dead silence.

  "So what are we going to do to prevent another attempt on my life?"

  There was a sudden babble of talk. "One at a time!" At that command, the others shushed like naughty children. "Gagar."

  "I could train a messenger bird to fly to me if a stranger were to approach you, great Mage."

  "And if the assassin is you ...?"

  "But ...." The man sputtered to a halt, his nose bobbing like a pecking chicken.

  "I will double the guard," said Nator resolutely.

  "Guards didn't do much of a job on the night of the attack," John replied dryly. "I'm not sure I'd live through twice as much of that kind of help." The Army Head sagged in his chair. "Putting men outside my door at night might help, though," John said. Unless you are the assassin, John couldn't help but conjecture -- a thought John kept to himself.

  I could be your protection," Coluth said. "Surely you don't suspect me of ..."

  John cut his old friend off with a feeble wave. "You're too valuable arranging the overall defense. The plain truth is that I can'
t spare any of you to nursemaid me." A slight exaggeration. He could spare Zwicia -- for all the good that ....

  As if the old women were aware he was thinking about her, the Weird spoke. "'Tol you. 'Tol you. No knif'. Zwicia 'tol you. No knif'."

  "What was that again?" John asked. Understanding Zwicia was difficult, even when her mental "train" appeared to be on track.

  "In'a Cr'stal. See in'a Cr'stal."

  "You saw something in your crystal?"

  "Knif'. See Knif'."

  Without further explanation, Zwicia screamed, a scream that unnerved General Nator, who scrambled to his feet, sword smoothly in hand! Forsk, Nator's Second, also jumped up, jerking out his sword and whirling the other way to guard Nator's back.

  Seeing his army colleagues draw their weapons, Coluth was up and bolting around the table to throw himself between John and possible treachery, Philelph dashing after Coluth, glancing about wildly for something he could use to defend the Navy Head.

  Gagar, the bird man, looked ruffled. Which was how a bird man should look when startled.

  Golden ... sat.

  Platinia ... sat.

  Zwicia continued to scream.

  "Zwicia," John cried, more fearful of being crushed in the melee than of assassination, "shut up!"

  As if he'd wrung her scrawny neck, the old woman stopped in mid-scream.

  The ersatz crisis over, John waved everyone back to his place at the table, the army men scabbarding their swords, looking smug at having responded so quickly to an apparent threat.

  Which brought John back to Zwicia, the old Weird continuing to be the wild card in the deck. Thinking back, it did seem to John that Zwicia had screamed every time she'd seen a drawn knife. Every time, in fact, she'd heard the word. "You foresaw this would happen, Zwicia?" John said, everyone again in place. "The assassination attempt was revealed to you in your crystal?"

  Zwicia nodded.

  "And you didn't warn me!?"

  "Me warn. Me say, no knif'!"

  "Yes, so you did." A warning, like Zwicia herself, incomprehensible.

  "And what else did you see that's going to happen to me?"

  To that, the old woman fluttered her hands. Began to mumble to herself.

  Too bad. If ever John needed a quick peek into the future, it was now. "That's all right, Zwicia. I don't need your help. I know how to solve this problem."

  If someone around the table interpreted this to mean that John was on the verge of identifying the assassin, let him sweat!

  "Meanwhile, we've got our military situation to get squared away." Drained of oxygen, John took a quick, sharply painful breath.

  "Still of top priority," John continued in a voice he hoped sounded stronger to the rest of them than it did to him, "is defense of the Claws." Coluth nodded. "And while the Navy is doing that," John continued, turning to address the Army Head down the right side of the table, "I want you to set up catapults on the heights along each of the claws. Stake them into fixed positions. Have each throw a few rocks so you know where the rocks will land. Then, should enemy ships row into range, rock 'em. Knowing where the rocks will fall makes this a can't miss deal." Light dawned in Nator's eyes.

  "I will do that, sir. Unconventional, but ..."

  "Effective." Exhaustion was making John impatient. "I'm also going to require something else. Or I should say, someone else. Since it's a good bet that a person seated at this table was in on the plot to kill me ...." John let that sink in again as he eyed each in turn, "I'll need a new security chief. For now, the man I want is the soldier who brought me into camp. I don't remember his name, but he was the officer in charge of the first barricade I ran into on this side of the Mage Mountains of Realgar."

  The Army Head turned to his Head Second. "That would be your perimeter security."

  "Yes," said the young Second, lost in thought. He turned his pale eyes to John at the table's end. "Did you say the first barricade?"

  "Right."

  "That would be Whar."

  "He's the one," John said, remembering. "How soon can you get this Whar back here?"

  "By late this afternoon."

  John paused to think of the proper segue from talk to action. "Other than the little matter of an attempt on my life, is everything running smoothly? The catapults can be hauled into position. Test fired?"

  "Soon," the Head Second said positively.

  "I want to be ready for a Malachite attack no later than next week." Nothing like an irritated Mage to motivate action, all the brass nodding their solemn pledges.

  "For the rest of today, I'll need a squad of soldiers to be with me at all times. I'll do the picking."

  Suddenly, John was exhausted, his wound throbbing. Leaning forward to conceal what he was doing, John hugged the pillow to his chest to deaden the pain, hoping that, since the pillow was under his robe, no one would notice.

  His plans finalized, John dismissed the others, all squeaking back their chairs, standing, the military men saluting, exiting the barren, table-dominated room, the civilians following, Zwicia getting in the way, Robin looking peeved at being sent packing. Platinia slipped out. Golden -- his limp gone -- the last to leave, turning to drag shut the heavy, timber door.

  Leaving John alone to think grim thoughts.

  Like how losing the crystal -- counterfeit though it was -- had changed John's situation radically. Before the theft, he'd been able to fall back on the crystal; show it to prove he was the Mage; use it to threaten people with its power. Trying to play the part of Mage without at least a pretend crystal, was another proposition entirely.

  Sans prop, John felt ... vulnerable.

  The "saver" as John saw it, was that everyone of importance had already seen the crystal. No reason for them to think the gem had been stolen. Continuing that line of thought, even the thief would not be able to advertise that John was now "crystaless" because to do so would reveal the hit man as the robber/assassin.

  Then, too, if the going got really rough, John could don the genuine article. ..... But not yet.

  Not ever if John continued to have his way!

  -19-

  Rather like a parent takes satisfaction in the accomplishments of his children, John was proud of his troops. Proud that, even without him, they had fended off a concerted attack by the Malachite Navy. Though it was the construction of John's defenses in the Claws that had won the battle, his men had to have fought and fought hard. It took men to row the ram-enhanced merchant ships that had finished off the Malachite cutters come afoul of those strategically placed, undersea "mines." Men, to work the catapults that rained down "fire" on enemy ships; on those Malachites sailors unlucky enough to have come within striking range of John's shore battery ballasts.

  Most impressive to the soldiers and mariners -- John was told -- was that the victory had been achieved without the Mage using either magic or "on the scene" support.

  And where had John been during the attack? Though only John's immediate companions knew, fighting for his life. Again.

  While holding a pillow to his injured chest during the last meeting had seemed like a good idea at the time, the pillow had been keeping blood from soaking through, blood that had begun leaking from the dagger wound's newly torn scar tissue. So much blood, on top of what John had lost already, that, following the meeting, John had collapsed. To be found later by a cleaning drudge.

  It was Golden who'd invented the fiction that the Mage was controlling strategy from the palace. Dressing up in John's Wizard clothing, Golden had let himself be seen at the window of the war room from time to time, acting the part of Mage-conducting-the-war-effort from afar. John was told -- and he believed it -- that Golden played the part of John-from-a-distance, perfectly. In effect, Golden's "Mage" performance had given John an idea about the next military idea he intended to spring on his war council today.

  To make a short story even shorter, in the middle of the two weeks John had been incapacitated, the "Battle for the Claws" had been won
.

  It was also during John's convalescence that Leet and his Malachites had come to the Claws to surrender. Learning this, one of the first things John did after gaining back some strength was to "allow" Leet and his men to join the Stil-de-grain Army, giving the order that the Malachites were to be issued the uniforms of a special forces unit attached to the local military.

  John now feeling well enough to assume full command, he'd called this afternoon meeting in the war room.

  The usual group -- plus Leet.

  Introductions made all around -- John's formal congratulations given to the two commanders on last week's victory -- and it was time for new business.

  "Unfortunately, gentlemen, the battle didn't change the power balance." John swept the table with a slow glance, Coluth and Nator nodding, their Seconds reflecting their respective Head's concern. "It's too much to hope, I suppose, that our defensive tactics destroyed a large number of Malachite vessels."

  "Yes," Coluth confirmed.

  "When they failed to force a passage," General Nator added, the Army Head fingering his golden sash while he spoke, "then felt the blows of our catapults, they withdrew."

  "A sensible thing to do," John agreed. "It's always harder to attack fortified positions than to defend them. If I remember right, the formula is something like three to one. It takes three times the force to capture an emplacement as it does to defend it." John paused for dramatic effect. "Which makes our next task a formidable one."

  "Next task?" Coluth asked, surprised. "Are we not in a good position here?"

  "Yes. For now. What I would expect, however, is another Malachite assault, this time by land. Would that be your guess, Leet?"

  Somewhat shorter than the rest of the men at the table, the Malachite Head looked uncomfortable in his cut-down Stil-de-grain officer's tunic. Probably was uncomfortable. "It is not my place to ..."

  John cut him off with a chopping wave. "I didn't ask you to come to this meeting to keep your place. I'm asking for your advice." Leet sat up a little straighter.