by Paul Kearney
“There’s no one here, it seems,” he told Murad. He lifted the lamp this way and that. There was a stone staircase at the back of the big room. The running water of the pools had stopped except for an occasional drip. Shadows wheeled and flitted everywhere like restless ghosts.
“Now what?”
“We’ll search the other rooms,” Murad said. “Mensurado, see to it. It may be that the imp is lost somewhere upstairs or nearby. And that Kersik woman may still be around.”
Mensurado led a trio of soldiers upstairs.
“I don’t like it,” Hawkwood said. “Why leave us unguarded? They must have guessed we were capable of breaking down the door.”
“They are magicians and sorcerers, every one,” Murad said. “Who knows how their minds work?”
They heard the boots of Mensurado and his comrades clumping above their heads, then snatches of talk, and finally a cry, not of fear, more of surprise.
Hawkwood and Murad glanced at one another. There was a flurry of voices above, the thumping of feet and heavy things scraping across the floor.
Mensurado came running down the stairs. “Sir—take a look at this.” He was holding a handful of coins.
Normannic gold crowns. On one side was a depiction of the spires of burnt Carcasson, on the other a crude, stylized map of the continent. Bank-minted money belonging to no kingdom in particular, but used in the great transactions between kings and governments. Coins such as this bribed princes, bought mercenaries, forged cannons.
“There are chests and chests of the damned stuff up there, sir,” Mensurado was saying. “A king’s ransom, the hoard of a dozen lifetimes.”
Murad bit into one of the coins. “Real, by God. There’s chests of the stuff you say, Sergeant?”
“Hundredweights, sir. I’ve never seen anything like it. The treasury of a kingdom could not hold more.”
Murad threw aside the coin; it fell with a sweet kiss of metal on stone. “Everyone upstairs. Leave Gerrera and the mage here for the moment. I want every pouch and pocket filled. You shall each have your share, never fear.”
He and Mensurado had a glitter in their eyes that Hawkwood had not seen before. As they left the room Hawkwood bent down beside the motionless Bardolin and shook him.
“Bardolin, for God’s sake wake up. Where are you?”
No answer. The old mage’s eyes remained wide open, his face as immobile as that of a corpse.
It sounded as though cascades of coins were being poured over the floor upstairs. Sharp blows as someone attacked a chest, splintering wood. Hawkwood felt no urge to join in the greedy festival. He loved gold as much as the next man, but there was a time and a place for it. As Mihal left his side to chance his luck upstairs, Hawkwood curtly ordered him back. Both Mihal and Masudi looked at him imploringly, but he shook his head.
“You’ll see, lads. Nothing good will come of this gold. Me, I’ll be happy to get out of here with my skin intact. That’s riches enough.”
Masudi grinned ruefully. “You can’t run with your pockets full of gold, I’ll warrant.”
“Nor eat it, neither,” Mihal added, resigned.
The soldiers began staggering downstairs, pockets bulging. They had even stuffed coins down the front of their shirts, giving themselves rattling paunches. Four of them were bearing two wooden chests between them. Murad descended last, holding up a lamp and seeming a little dazed.
“We’ll come back,” he was saying in a low voice. “We’ll come back with a dozen tercios one day.”
“I’d rather we had the tercios now,” Hawkwood rasped. “If you want to leave this place, we’d best be going at once. There’s no telling when that Gosa and his creatures will be back.”
“I am not unaware of the need for urgency, Captain,” Murad snapped. “What we carry away with us here could outfit an entire flotilla of ships, and can you imagine the backing I could call on when it became known that the Western Continent was stuffed with gold? We could bring an army here, and extirpate these monsters and sorcerers from the land for good.”
“It’s gold, yes, but minted in the form of Normannic crowns, Murad,” Hawkwood said. “Did you think of that? What are they using it for, if not to spend in the Old World? We know nothing about what is going on in this land, or how it affects the Ramusian states at home.”
“We’ll find out another time,” the nobleman said. “For now, all I want is to get clear of this place. Mensurado, the door. You men, pick up Gerrera.”
Lumbering, rattling and clinking, the soldiers gathered themselves and prepared to leave.
But the door opened before Mensurado got to it. A black-skinned figure dressed in white stood there. The old man, Faku. His mouth opened.
A shot, amazingly loud in the confined space. Faku was hurled back out of the doorway.
“One less sorcerer,” Mensurado snarled, and reloaded his arquebus with practised speed.
“We must move quickly,” Murad said. “That shot will rouse the city. Out! Bring the chests.”
What with the chests and the limp forms of Bardolin and Gerrera, only Mensurado and two other soldiers had their hands free. The company filed out into the hot night, stepping over Faku’s body as though it were a pothole in the road. Hawkwood closed the old man’s eyes, cursing under his breath.
“This way. Quickly,” Murad said, leading off. The company followed him at a jog-trot, sweating and gasping ere they had gone a hundred yards. Coins slipped out of the soldiers’ pockets to clink at the roadside.
The city seemed deserted. Not a light to be seen anywhere, not a living soul on the streets. But Hawkwood was continually aware of movement, like a flickering at the corner of his eye. The place was so dark that it was impossible to be certain. He looked up to see a disc of star-filled sky above the crater-rim, and was almost sure he saw things moving in that sky, wheeling darknesses which stood out against the stars. He had the uncomfortable notion that the city was not quiet and empty at all, but teeming with invisible, capering life.
The company paused to rest in a narrow side street, the soldiers who carried the heavy chests massaging their bloodless hands. They had come half a mile maybe from the house in which they had been imprisoned, and there was still no sign of a pursuit. Even Murad seemed uneasy.
“I thought the entire city would have been about our ears by now,” he said to Hawkwood.
“I know,” the mariner replied. “Everything is wrong, strange. What happened to Bardolin’s imp, and to Bardolin himself? Why can’t he come back to us? Are we being allowed to escape because—”
“Because what?”
“Perhaps because they have what they want.”
Murad was silent for a long minute. At last he said: “It is a pity about the mage, but if you are right then we may yet get away unscathed. And after all, we bear him with us. His mind may yet return.” He would not meet Hawkwood’s eye, but scanned the massiveness of the buildings, the trees which were beginning to rear up in their midst; they were not far from the crater wall, and the narrow gorge which was their only exit.
“Time to move on.”
The soldiers shouldered their burdens once more, and the company staggered onwards. The attack came so suddenly that they were surrounded before they had seen their assailants. The night was sprinkled with raging eyes, and huge forms charged them. The quiet was broken by roars and screams and wails from a hundred bestial throats. The men at the rear died before they could even drop the chests that weighed them down.
FIFTEEN
A T the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.
Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-nig
ht of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable—it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe—but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.
“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.
Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.
There was a man on the platform. He had come out of nowhere and stood with the starlight playing across his features. He seemed amused.
“An attractive little familiar. We in Undi do not use them any more. They are a weakness as well as an asset. Are they still as hard to cast through as I remember?”
Bardolin’s voice issued out of the imp’s mouth. The creature’s eyes went dull as he dominated it completely.
“Hard enough, but we get by. Might I ask your name?”
The man bowed. “I am Aruan of Undi, formerly of Garmidalan in Astarac. You are Bardolin of Carreirida.”
“Have we met before?”
“In a way. But here—let me spare your trembling familiar. Take my hand.”
He extended one large, blunt-fingered hand to the imp. The creature took it and Aruan straightened, pulling. But the imp did not come with him. Instead a shimmering penumbra slid out of its tiny body as though he had dragged from it its soul. He was holding on to Bardolin’s own hand, and Bardolin stood there on the platform, astonished, glimmering in the starlight like a phantom.
“What did you do?” he asked Aruan. The imp was blinking and rubbing its eyes.
“A simulacrum, nothing more. But it renders communication a little easier. You need not fear; your essence, or the bulk of it, is with your sleeping body down in the city.”
Bardolin’s shining image felt itself with trembling hands. “This is magic indeed.”
“It is not so difficult, and it makes things more . . . civilized.”
Bardolin folded his imaginary arms. “Why am I here?”
“Can’t you answer that yourself? You are a creature of free will, as are all God’s creations.”
“You know what I mean. What is it you want of me?”
The man named Aruan turned away, paced to the edge of the platform and stared out over the city of Undi. He was tall, and dressed in voluminous, archaic robes that a noble might have worn in the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. He was bald but for a fringe of raven hair about the base of his skull, for all the world like a monk’s tonsure. He had a beaked nose and deep-set eyes under bristling, fantastic brows, high, jutting cheekbones strangely at odds with the rest of his rather aristocratic face, as if someone had melded the features of a Kolchuk tribesman and a Perigrainian Landgrave. Hauteur and savagery, Bardolin noted them both.
“This is how I once looked,” Aruan said. “Were you to see my true form now you might be repelled. I am old, Bardolin. I remember the days of empire, the Religious Wars. I have known men whose fathers spoke with the Blessed Saint. I have seen centuries of the world come and go.”
“No man is immortal,” Bardolin said, fascinated and apprehensive at the same time. “Not even the most powerful mage.”
Aruan turned away from the dark city, smiling. “True, too true. But there are ways and means of staving off death’s debt collectors. You ask what it is I want of you, and I am wandering around the answer. Let me explain something.
“In all the years I have been here, we have seen many ships arrive from the Old World—more than you could ever have imagined. Most of them carried cargoes of gold-hungry vultures who simply wanted to claim this, the Zantu-Country, and rape it. They were adventurers, would-be conquerors, sometimes zealots filled with missionary zeal. They died. But sometimes they were refugees, come fleeing the pyres of Normannia and the purges of the Inceptines. These people, for the most part, we welcomed. But we have never encountered an Old-worlder with your . . . potential.”
“I don’t understand,” Bardolin said. “I am a common enough brand of mage.”
“Technically, perhaps you are. But you possess a duality which no other mage who has come here from across the ocean has possessed, a duality which is the very key to our own thaumaturgical hierarchy here in the west.”
Bardolin shook his head. “Your answers only provide the spur to further questions.”
“Never mind. It will become plain enough in the time to come.”
“I want you to tell me about this place—how you got here, how this began. What is happening.”
Aruan laughed, a guffaw which made him sound like a hearty ruffian. “You want our history then, the centuries of it, laid before you like a woven tapestry for your eyes to drink in?”
“I want explanations.”
“Oh—so little you think you are asking, eh? Explanations. Well, the night is fine. Give me your hand again, Brother Mage.”
“A phantom hand.”
“It will suffice. See? I can grasp it as though it were flesh and blood. In the other I will take your imp; it would not do to leave him alone here.”
Something happened which Bardolin, for all his expertise in the field of Dweomer, could not quite catalogue. The platform disappeared, and they were thousands of feet up in the air and still rising. The air was cooler here, and a breeze ruffled Aruan’s hair.
I can feel the breeze; I, a simulacrum, Bardolin thought with a start of fear. And then he realized that it was the imp’s sensations he was feeling. Had to be. A simulacrum could not be given physical sensation.
Or could it? He could feel Aruan’s hand in his own, warm and strong. Was that the sensation of the imp or himself?
They stopped rising. Bardolin could look down like a god. The moon had risen and was a bitten apple of silver which lit up the Western Ocean. The vault above Bardolin’s head, strangely, did not feel any closer. The stars were clearer, but as far away as ever.
The incredible vastness of the world, night-dark and moon-silver, was staggering. The sky was a bright vault which spun endlessly above the sleeping earth, the Western Ocean a tissue of wrinkled silver strewn with the gossamer moonlight. And the Western Continent was a huge, bulking darkness in which only a few scattered lights burned. Bardolin could see the watchfires of Fort Abeleius on the coast, the tiny pricks of light that were the stern and masthead lanterns on the Osprey offshore, and inland red glows like scattered gleeds from an old fire.
“Restless forces of the world, at play amid the earth’s foundations,” Aruan said, sounding as though he were quoting something. “Volcanoes, Bardolin. This country is old and torn and troubled. It stirs uneasily in its sleep.”
“The craters,” Bardolin said.
“Yes. There was a great civilization here once, fully as sophisticated as that which exists upon Normannia. But the forces which create and destroy our world awoke here. They annihilated the works of the ancients, and created Undabane, the Holy Mountain, and a score of lesser cones. The Undwa-Zantu died in a welter of flame and ash, and the survivors of the cataclysm reverted to barbarism.”
“The dark, tall people who inhabit your city.”
“Yes. When first I came upon them, in the year of the Saint one hundred and nine, they were savages and only legends and ruins remained of the noble culture they had once possessed. They called themselves Zantu, which in their tongue signifies the Remnant, and their ancestors they called Undwa-Zantu, the Elder Remnant. Their mages—for they had been a mighty folk of magic—had degenerated into tribal shamans, but they preserved much that was worth knowing. They were a unique people, that elder race, possessed of singular gifts.”
But Bardolin was gaping. “You’ve been here . . . how long? Four and a half centuries?”
Aru
an grinned. “In the Old World I was a mage at the court of King Fontinac the Third of Astarac. I sailed into the west in a leaky little caravel called the Godspeed, whose captain was named Pinarro Albayero, may God rest his unhappy soul.”
“But how—?”
“I told you: the shamans of the Zantu preserved some of the lore of their ancestors, theurgy of a potency to make what we called Dweomer in the Old World look like the pranks of a child. There is power in this country, Bardolin; you will have noticed it yourself. The mountains of fire spewed out raw theurgy as well as molten rock in their eruptions. And Undabane is the fountainhead, the source. The place is virtually alive. And the power can be tapped. It is why I am still here, when my poor frame should be dust and dry bone long since.”
Bardolin could not speak. His mind was busy taking in the enormity of what Aruan was saying.
“I came here fleeing the purges of the High Pontiff Willardius—may he rot in a Ramusian hell for ever. With some of my comrades, I took ship with a desperate man, Albayero of Abrusio. He was nothing more or less than a common pirate, and he needed to quit the shore of Normannia as badly as we did.” Aruan paused for a moment, and his eyes became vacant, as if looking back on that awful expanse of centuries, all gone to ash now.
“Every century or so,” he went on, “there is a convulsion in the Faith of the Ramusians, and they must renew their beliefs. They do so with a festival of slaughter. And always their victims are the same.
“We fled one such bloodbath, my colleagues and I. Most of the Thaumaturgists’ Guilds of Garmidalan and Cartigella became fugitives, for as I am sure you know, brother, the more prominent you are in our order, the less chance you have of being overlooked when the Ravens are wetting their beaks.
“So we took ship, some score of us with our families, those who had them, in the cranky little vessel of Pinarro Albayero.
“Albayero had intended to make landfall in the Brenn Isles, but a northerly hit us, taking us down to North Cape in the Hebrionese. We rounded the point with the help of the weather-workers amongst us, but not even they could help us make up our lost northing. The storms we rode would brook no interference, even from the master-mages amongst us. So we rode them out in our little ship, the weather-workers having to labour merely to keep us afloat. We were driven into the limitless wilderness of the Western Ocean, and there we despaired, thinking that we would topple off the edge of the world and plummet through the gaps between the stars.