Storm Season tw-4

by Robert Lynn Asprin

And yet he had painted the walls of the Temple of the Rankan gods, he had decorated this hall, and the Prince himself had complimented him. Why could he not be satisfied? Once my dream was to paint the truth beneath the skin, he thought then. What do I want now?

  The air pulsed with polite conversation as rich merchants of Sanctuary pretended they were accustomed to such affairs, the Rankans tried to look as if they were enjoying this one, and the Prince and his officers uneasily enjoyed the Empire's belated recognition while wondering whether it was to their advantage.

  Except for Coricidius-Lalo reminded himself. Rumor had it that the Vizier would stop at nothing to spend what remained of his old age back in the capital.

  A wave of scent set Lalo to coughing, and he turned to confront Lord Raximander's beaming face.

  "Why not return to the Capital with me?" the Commissioner said expansively. "A new talent! My wife would be so pleased."

  Lalo smiled back, his vision expanding in images of marble columns and pavements of porphyry that far outshone the face-lifted splendors of Prince Kittycat's hall. Would Gilla like to live in a palace?

  "But we need not waste the few weeks I have to spend here-"

  Lalo's skin chilled as Lord Raximander went on.

  "A picture of me, for instance-you could do that here in the palace as a small demonstration of your skill."

  Before Raximander had finished, Lalo was shaking his head. "Someone must have misinformed you-I never do portraits!"

  Some of the others, attention attracted by the raised voices, had drifted toward the mural again. Zanderei was watching with a faint smile.

  Coricidius motioned towards the wall with a bony finger. "Who poses for all your pictures, then?"

  Lalo twitched like a nervous horse, trying to find an answer that would not alienate them... Anything but the truth, which was that a sorcerer's spell had enabled-nay, compelled him, to portray the true nature of his sitters' souls. After a few disastrous attempts to paint Sanctuary's wealthy, Lalo had learned to choose his models from those among the poor who were still uncorrupted.

  "My lord, that one was done from imagination," he said truthfully, for the Ilsig King had been inspired by his memories of fleeing through the Maze just ahead of local bullies when he was a boy. He did not tell them that he had got the Hell Hound Quag to boast of his feats on campaign while he posed for the figure of the Rankan Emperor.

  One of the eunuch pages scurried towards them and Coricidius bent to hear his message. Released from his gaze, Lalo stepped backward with a sigh.

  "You are too sensitive, Master Limner," Zan-derei said softly. "You must learn to accept what each day brings. In these times, ideals are an expensive luxury."

  "Do you want a portrait too?" Lalo asked bitterly.

  "Oh, I would not be worth the trouble-" Zan-derei smiled. "Besides, I know how I appear to the world."

  Cymbals crashed, and as Lalo's startled pulse began to slow he realized that the other end of the room was flaring with the colored silks of the dancing girls. He should have expected it, having watched them rehearse almost every afternoon while he worked on the paintings here.

  Such a commotion, he thought, for a few strangers who will make notes on Sanctuary as most artists make portraits-recording only the surface of reality and then will be gone.

  Happily abandoning their conversations, the Commissioners let the purple-clad pages usher them to couches below the dais on which the Prince was already enthroned. The dancers, chosen from among the more talented of Kadakithis' lesser concubines, moved sinuously through the ornate topography of their dance, pausing only from time to time to detach a veil.

  Trembling with reaction, Lalo drifted towards the row of pillars that supported the vaulted and domed ceiling. Someone had left a goblet on the marble bench, nearly full. Lalo took a long swallow, then made himself put it down again. His heart was pounding as loudly as the drums.

  Why am I so afraid? he wondered, and then wondered how he could be anything else, in a town where footpads dogged your steps by day, and if you heard a scream after dark you ran not to help but to bar your door. It must be better in the Capital... there must be somewhere Gilla and I could live in safety.

  He lifted the goblet once more, but the wine tasted sour and he set it back half-full. Coricidius would not care if he left the celebration now that he had exhibited both the pictures and their creator. Lalo wanted to go home.

  He got to his feet and stepped around the pillar, then halted, startled as something in front of him seemed to move. After a moment he laughed, realizing that it was only his reflection in the polished marble that faced the wall. Dimly he could see the glitter of embroidery on his festival jerkin, and the sheen on his full breeches, but they could not disguise the stoop of his narrow shoulders or the way his belly had begun to round. Even the thinning of his ginger hair was somehow mirrored there. But through some quality of the dark marble or some trick of the light, Lalo's face was as shadowed as that of the Ilsig King.

  * * *

  Lalo worked his way around the outside of the Presence Hall to the side door. The corridor seemed quiet after the clamor of music and the wine-fueled babble of conversation, and the government offices that occupied the spaces between the Hall and the outside of the Palace were empty and dark. As he had expected, the side-door leading to the courtyard was bolted tight. With a sigh he went the other way, passed through the Hall of Justice that fronted the Palace as quickly as he could, and out through one of the great double doors that led onto the porch and broad stair.

  Torches had been fixed in the pillars at the top and bottom of the stair, and their fitful light gleamed on the armour of the guards who stood at attention on each of the four wide steps, and glowed on the purple pennon tied to each spear, then rayed out across the inner courtyard in uneven ribbons of brightness and shadow, as if the soldiers had become part of the Palace architecture.

  Lalo paused for a moment, noting the effect. Then he saw that the first guard was Quag, nodded, and received in answer the flicker of an eyelid in the wooden patience of the Hell-Hound's face.

  Lalo's sandals crunched on grit as he crossed the flagstones of the inner courtyard, punctuating the patter of applause that drifted from the Palace, at this distance as faint as the sound of wavelets on a shore. He supposed that the concubines had stripped off their final veils. He must remember not to show Gilla the sketches he had made of them practicing.

  One of Honald's many nephews was on duty in the guardbox set into the massive archway of the Palace Gate. Tonight the double doors were opened wide, and Lalo passed through unquestioned, though he remembered a time when all he owned would not have been enough to bribe the Gatekeeper to let him enter here. He felt dizzy, although he had hardly had any wine.

  Why can't I be satisfied with what I have? he wondered. What is wrong with me?

  He crossed the expanse of Vashanka's Square more quickly, heading diagonally towards the West Gate and the Governor's Walk. For a moment the east wind brought him the rank, fuggy smell of the Zoo Gardens, then it shifted and he felt on his face the cool breath of the sea.

  He halted just outside the Gate and with a sigh reversed his cloak so that its dull inner lining concealed his festival clothes. It was well known in the appropriate places that Lalo never carried money-in the old days he had never had any, and now Gilla controlled the family treasury- but he would not want anyone to make a mistake in the dark.

  A waxing moon was already brightening the heavens, and the rooftops of the city made a jagged silhouette against the stars. Not since he was a boy, slipping from his pallet behind his father's workbench to join his friends' adventur-ing, had Lalo seen Sanctuary at this hour with sober eyes. Just now, with all its sordidness obscured by shadow, it seemed to him to be possessed of a kind of haphazard but enduring integrity.

  His feet had carried him almost to Shadow Lane without his attention when they encountered something soft. He leaped awkwardly aside to avoid stepping into the co
ntents of a honeypot which someone had emptied into the street to stink and steam, until the rain washed it into the city's underground maze of sewers and it was carried off by the tide. He had been into those tunnels once, on a dare, through an entry shaft near the Vulgar Unicorn. He wondered if it were still there....

  What am I doing, getting sentimental about Sanctuary/ thought Lalo as he inspected the sole of his sandal to see if any ordure remained. I must have had more wine than I thought! He had heard that in Ranke, armies of street cleaners scoured the streets every night to rid the city of the refuse of the day. ...

  He remembered the flatteries of Lord Raxi-mander and that strange man, Zanderei, and he remembered the days when his one desire had been to get out of Sanctuary. It seemed to him that his life had consisted of cycles in which he dreamed of escape, found new hope for life in Sanctuary, discovered that his hope was unjustified, and began to plan flight once more.

  This last time, when he had found that if he stuck to mythological subjects and chose his models carefully he could turn Enas Yorl's gift to a blessing, he had been sure that his troubles were over. But now here he was, bewailing his fate again.

  I should have learned better by now ... he thought morosely, but what is there to Jearn? Wii] anything but death stop this wheel or make it take a different path?

  Houses leaned close together above him now, cutting off the sky. In some of the windows lamplight glowed, though most of them were tightly shuttered, edged and chinked with light that dappled the worn cobbles below. Lalo winced as a murmur of voices exploded into abuse. A mangy dog that had been nosing at something in the gutters looked up at the noise, then went back to its meal.

  Lalo shuddered, visualizing death as a starving jackal-hound waiting to spring. There must be some other way-he told himself, for however much he hated his life, he feared death more.

  Human shadows slid from the shadows behind him, and he forced himself to walk steadily, knowing that at this hour, in this part of Sanctuary, it was indeed death to be visibly afraid. By daylight the area shared in the quasi respectability of the Bazaar, but by night it belonged to the Maze.

  From ahead came the sound of drunken song and a burst of laughter. Torchlight danced around the corner followed by the singers, a group of mercenaries emboldened by numbers to make the pilgrimage to the ale casks of the Vulgar Unicorn.

  As the light reached them, the shapes that had followed Lalo slipped back into alleys and doorways, and Lalo himself edged beneath the overhang of a tenement until the soldiers had gone by. He had almost reached Slippery Street now, and the cul-de-sac which for twenty years had been his home.

  Now, at last, Lalo allowed himself to hasten, for in all the ups and downs of his fortunes there had been one constant, and that was the knowledge that he had a home, and that Gilla waited for him there.

  The third step of the staircase squeaked, as did the seventh and the eighth. When Lalo had become fashionable and had, for the first time in his life, had money, he and Gilla had bought the building in which they lived and repaired, among other things, the staircase. But the stairs still squeaked, and Lalo, hearing the lullaby Gilla was singing to their youngest child halt a moment, knew that she had heard him coming home.

  Breathing a little faster than he would have liked after the climb, he opened the door.

  "You're home early!" The floor quivered beneath her steps as Gilla came through the door of what had once been the adjoining apartment. Lalo saw beyond her the curly head of their youngest, whom they still called the baby even though he was now nearly two years old, and the outstretched arm of an older child.

  "Is everything all right?" Lalo unfastened his cloak and hung it on the peg.

  "It was only a nightmare-" softly she closed the door. "And what about you? I was sure you would be at the Palace all night, imbibing the wine of paradise with all the great ones and their gilded ladies." The carved chair groaned faintly as she sat down and lifted her massive arms to pat the elaborate curls and coils of her hair.

  "There weren't any ladies-" tactfully he passed over the dancing girls, "just an unlikely mixture of military and priests and government men, like a stew from the Bazaar!"

  She set her elbow on the table and rested her head on her hand. "If it was such a bore why did you stay so long? Don't tell me they wouldn't let you go?" Her eyes narrowed and he flushed a little beneath the acuity of her gaze. Deliberately he began to unhook his vest, waiting for her to speak again.

  "Something happened-" she said then. "Something's troubling you."

  He draped his vest across another chair and sat down in it with a sigh.

  "Gilla, what would you say to the idea of leaving Sanctuary?" Beyond her he could see his first study for the picture of Sabellia which graced the great Temple now. Gilla had been his model, and for a moment he saw a double image of woman and Goddess, and her bulk took on a monumental dignity.

  She put down her arm and sat up straight. "Now, when we are secure at last?"

  "How secure can anyone be, here?" He hunched forward, running stubby craftsman's fingers through his thinning hair. Then he told her how they had praised his picture, and what the future Lord Raximander had offered him.

  "Ranke!" she exclaimed when he had finished. "Clean streets and quiet nights! But what would I do there? All the fine ladies would laugh at me...." For a moment she looked curiously vulnerable, despite her size. Then her eyes met his. "But you said he wanted a portrait-Lalo, you can't do that-you'll end up in the Imperial dungeons, not the court!"

  "Even there? Surely there must be some honest men and virtuous women at the heart of the Empire!" Lalo said wistfully.

  "Will you never grow up? We are doing very well as we are-you have a position, people like what you do, and the children will be well-apprenticed and married when the time comes. And now you want to go chase some other dream? Why can't you make up your mind?"

  He put his hands over his aching eyes and shook his head. If only he knew-there was something missing in him, something that he sought in each new thing he tried to do ... What use has it been to have my heart's desire? he thought, if I myself am still the same?

  After a little he heard the chair scrape and felt her coming to him, and sighed again, more deeply, as the strength and softness of her arms enclosed him. She had scented her skin with oil of sandalwood, and he could feel the opulence of her body through the thin silk of the night-robe she wore.

  It changed nothing, but in her arms he could forget his perplexities for at least a little while. Gilla kissed him on his bald spot and drew away, and with a sense of having made a truce with fate he followed her into the other room.

  * * *

  "Thieves!"

  Lalo jerked upright, shocked from sleep by Gilla's scream and the crash that had shaken the room. Was it morning? But everything was still dark! He rubbed his eyes, still half-drugged by dreams of marble terraces and applause.

  Shadows moved and feet that no longer troubled to be stealthy thudded on the floor... hard hands grasped Lalo's shoulders and he cried out. Then something hit the side of his head and he sagged against the hard hands that prisoned him.

  "Murderers! Assassins!"

  His head still ringing, Lalo recognized Gilla in the voice, and in the dark bulk that heaved upward from the bed to fling another assailant against the wall. Water spattered his cheek and he smelt roses as the vase that had stood on the bedside table flew past him and shattered against someone's skull. Men caromed into each other swearing as Gilla groped forward. There was no sound from their neighbors-he had not really expected it-they would ask their questions when morning came.

  "In Vashanka's name, somebody silence the sow!" In the half-light a drawn sword gleamed dimly.

  "No!" he croaked, gasped in air and cried out, "Gilla, stop fighting-there are too many-Gilla, please!"

  There was a final convulsion, then silence. Flint rasped steel and a little light sparked into life. Gilla lay sprawled like a fallen monument. F
or a moment Lalo felt as if a great hand had closed on his chest. Then there was movement in the tangle of limbs. Gilla rolled over and levered herself to her feet without spending a glance on the man who had cushioned her fall.

  "Savankala save me, she's squashed me flat . . . Sir, help me-don't leave me here...."

  Sir? But the man on the floor was a Hell-Hound-Lalo recognized him now.

  "I don't understand..."he said aloud, and as he turned the light was quenched and he blinked at darkness again.

  "Carry him," said a deep voice. "And you, woman, be still if you want to see him whole again."

  Sick from the blow and aching from rough handling, Lalo did not resist as they shoved his sandals onto his feet and thrust an old smock over his head and marched him along the empty streets back to the Palace. But instead of rounding the outer wall to the dungeons, as Lalo had dismally expected, they hustled him through the Palace Gate and along the side of the building and down a little staircase to the basement.

  Then, still without a word of explanation, he was thrust into a dank hole smelling of dry rot and full of things to stumble over to shiver, and wonder why they had brought him here, and gnaw his paint-stained fingers while he waited for dawn ...

  * * *

  "Wake up, you Wrigglie scum? The Lord wants to talk to you-"

  Lalo surfaced, groaning, from a dream in which he had been taken prisoner and dragged through the night until... Something hit him hard in the ribs and he opened his eyes.

  It was morning, and it had not been a dream. He saw flaking white-washed walls, and splintered crates and furniture heaped on the bare earth of the floor. It was not a prison then. A little pallid light filtered down to him through one barred window set high in the wall.

  He forced himself to sit up and face his tormentors.

  "Quag!"

  At Lalo's exclamation, the Hell-Hound's pitted-leather face became, if possible, a richer shade of terra cotta, and his eyes slid away from the painter's gaze. Lalo followed the look to the doorway, and suddenly began to understand what power had brought him here, though he was as far as ever from comprehending why.