All this was mere bravado, but it made her feel better to formulate the secret declaration.
"I shall send an ambassador to the prince of Shaminzara," Belin announced.
"I think you might like the prince, and he will certainly like you, for the firmness of your flesh and that cunning snaky sheen you have learned to impose on the liquid gold of your hide. A Serpent's granddaughter for a scion of the Slithery Sea- a rare, precious and propitious union.
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"In the meantime, you may have your dark land brawler, as skilfully castrated and broken in the limbs as the best of my surgeons can contrive...
for just as long as you need him, and not a day longer."
"Thank you, majesty," she said insincerely. She couldn't help feeling that she had been cheated by her father, her birth, her sex and the way of the world.
How wonderful it must be to be as free as Hyry Keshvara, she thought.
How proud one must be of honest bargains freely struck. How delightful to have a future unconfined by destiny and royal command.
It was good to be out in the corridor again, where even a giantess could stand upright without bumping her head on a ceiling set too low.
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somewhat to andris's disappointment, no word from Princess Lucrezia arrived on the day following his meeting with the merchant- nor, indeed, the day after that. Nor had any message come from Carus Fraxinus by the time night fell on the eve of the Day of Thanksgiving.
"I realise that things move very slowly in these tropic lands," he confided to Belin the spider, who sat patiently in the corner of his or her reconstituted web, 'but I would have appreciated it had someone managed to secure my release before the holiday. Not that I could afford to celebrate in an appropriate style, but it would be nice to have something to give thanks for on the Day of Thanksgiving.
If I were the lorrying kind of man- which, on occasion, I am disposed to be I might begin to suspect that something might have gone wrong. "
What could possibly go wrong? he imagined the spider asking. "Good question," he replied.
"Princess Lucrezia surely ought to be in a position to get her own way, and evert the greatest of kings must be inclined towards granting petitions at Thanksgiving, however little credence they may put in the legend of the ship that sailed the infinite void or the precise date of our ancestors' arrival in the world. Even if she were to fail, the merchant seemed like a very capable kind of fellow the sort who would make things happen, once he put his mind to it. He really did seem to think that I might be valuable ... a prize worth going to some trouble for." Beware of delusions of grandeur, my huge friend counselled the cynical spider, as characterised by Andris's overactive imagination. "I fear, my minuscule companion," he answered mournfully, 'that I gave those up a long time ago, in spire of the fact that there's no delusion about my being a prince in exile. Grandeur is file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (88 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:20 AM]
something I carry in
my bones, but I no longer expect it to affect my treatment by the world. Do spiders celebrate the Day of Thanksgiving at all? I suppose you must- after all, you're not unearthly, are you? If my ancestors arrived in the world from elsewhere, so did yours- and on the very same day. I suppose you have as much or as little reason to be thankful for that as we have.
"Your ancestors must have made their first home in Idun alongside mine, even though they aren't mentioned in the Lore of Genesys. They must have been there, quietly spinning their webs about the windows and the gates, listening in when the old storyteller's Serpents and Salamanders came to call. Did my ancestors bring yours on purpose, do you suppose, or did yours just sneak a ride? Maybe the forefathers liked having your kinfolk around rather more than their decendants tend to do. Maybe you were useful for something then, but all we poor sinners have quite forgotten what it was. On the other hand, perhaps they just thought you'd be good company for all the poor fools their decendants would put in jail . . ."
Andris could have continued in this rambling vein for a long time- and, indeed, already had on more than one occasion in response to the pressure that prolonged solitude exerted upon his idle brain- but he was interrupted in full flight by the scraping of the beam which normally covered the spy-hole in the door. He shut up immediately and swung around to face the door.
The beam was not drawn back, but merely lifted for a moment and then replaced. While the spy-hole was uncovered, something small and round was flipped through it by unseen fingers. It plopped softly into the dark corner of the cell.
Andris immediately went down on his hands and knees to search for it, and eventually managed to locate it. He got to his feet again, holding it up to the window to take full advantage of the starlight.
It was a piece of soft parchment, carefully rolled up into a tiny scroll.
The material was in such an advanced state of decay that it was difficult to unwrap it without inflicting any further injury, but he took great care while straightening it and finally had it spread out neatly on the windowsill.
It wasn't easy to read what was written on the parchment, but 85
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he
patiently deciphered the untidily scrawled letters one by one. The ink had been intended for use on a more smoothly waxed surface, but it had not run too badly.
You are in great danger, the missive informed him. An escape must be arranged. Keep to your cell at all costs. Help is at hand.
Frustraringly, the only part of the message which had blurred so badly as to be ambiguous was the signature. After considering various possibilities he concluded that the second initial was certainly a Z, and that the remainder might well spell out the name Zabio, but that the first name couldn't possibly be Theo, beginning as it almost certainly did with an M. "Now there's a thing," said Andris to the spider, in a conspiratorial whisper.
"What on earth am I supposed to make of this? Has the shipmaster or the merchant managed to find my uncle, or some descendant of his? If so, why hasn't the person in question simply come to visit me? How is it that I'm in danger, and from whom? Why should I need to escape when I have not one but two people willing to save me from the wall- and how on earth can an escape be contrived without the aid of a small army? Even if I were to escape, how could a man of my stature and colouring hope to hide when all the king's horses and all the king's men were sent forth to find me? This is surely not the princess's work . . . but if it's the work of Carus Fraxijius, he's decided to go about things in a very peculiar way."
Belin had nothing to say. , "No good asking you for advice, is it?" Aridris said petulantly.
"You don't even care. You're quite content to stay here, probably imagining that you're as free as a ... well, freer than any man, anyhow. Not that this is spider paradise, of course- the air's hardly humming with the sound of juicy flies- but it's good enough for you. You're lucky you don't know how fragile and meagre your circumstances are. Some human could come along at any time, suffering from a slight case of arachnophobia or simply a desire to clean up, and splat! . . you're gone, web and all. Still, ignorance is bliss, isn't that what they say?"
Idly, he screwed up the piece of parchment and began rolling it between his warm fingers. Within minutes he had reduced it to a ball of anonymous and uninformative pulp. It could no longer be unrolled, let alone read.
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Personally, he had always preferred paper to parchment; it didn't last any longer, but it was cleaner and crisper while it did las
t and it didn't stink as badly when it rotted down.
"Once," he told the uncaring spider, 'that was a bit of animal hide.
Then it became a medium of communication: a vessel of vital knowledge, as rich as any loreful rhyme. Now it's just crap, like fecal matter. That's the whole human life-story in an allegorical nutshell. We begin life as little parasitic worms; we grow to become the vehicles of sacred lore, carrying it over from generation to generation; and when we've handed on our precious stocks of memory to its destined recipients we become nothing but waste-matter. Like everything else, we begin to decay before we're even born, and the ink of thought and knowledge isn't very well adapted to the gloss less parchment of memory and imagination. And yet we must give thanks every year to our beloved forefathers, who brought us out of the vast and empty wilderness of stars, that we might walk again upon a world, rejoicing in the sun, the soil and the silvery sea.
"Don't you wish you were human too, so that you could spin philosophy instead of silken webs?"
It seemed that the spider was no longer listening. Andris couldn't blame the creature; he wasn't really listening to himself. He was distracted by a profound unease, which arose from the suspicion that no one would go to the trouble of sending him a message like the one he had just received unless there was a very good reason. If someone were prepared to. take the risk of coming into a prison in order to inform him that he was in danger, in danger he must certainly be . and the fact that an escape was supposedly being arranged didn't necessarily mean that the rescue attempt would be successful.
"There's been something very peculiar about this whole affair from the very beginning," Andris told the spider.
"I should have known that it was all too good to be true, that my luck couldn't really have taken a turn for the better. For six years things have gone steadily from bad to worse, and my life has just about rotted down to pure unadulterated filth. What do princesses and merchants want with a wreck like me? What does anyone want with a wreck like me?"
Self-pity, observed Belin, will get you nowhere. In my 8?
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experience, there ay^pniy two kinds of entity in the world--those which build webs and those which get caught in them. You 're just one of those who get caught in them. The question is, what are you going to do when the web-spinner comes for its supper?
"One can easily get lost in a maze of spidery metaphors," Andris countered, dutifully setting self-pity to one side.
"The real question's much simpler than that. The real question is ... just what the rotting filth is going on here?"
Once he'd framed the question, however, he couldn't help feeling that the spider had indeed framed it rather more elegantly. He didn't bother to wait for the answer that would never come. He sat down on the crude pallet which was all the bedding he had, wondering whether it was safe to go to sleep- or, indeed, whether he could go to sleep given the discomfort of his circumstances within and without.
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12 jacom came as quickly as he could in response to the summons from the jail but he found it impossible to bound up the steps with his customary easy grace. His knees were still rather sore and the unaccustomed hours he had lately been forced to keep had left him an uncomfortable legacy of lost sleep. His first impulse, on entering the jailer's room, was to curse the man for being a nuisance, but he managed to control himself.
Sergeant Purkin was already present, and so was a guardsman named Kristoforo.
The latter was standing behind a thin, grey- haired man in his twenties, holding tight to both his arms. The sergeant had a hammer in his right hand, whose lumpen iron head he was thumping suggestively into the palm of his left while the jailer looked on.
Jacom closed the guardroom door discreetly behind himself. "What's the trouble, sergeant?" he asked, eyeing the hammer. The head was badly pitted and rusted, but it was still a serviceable tool. He couldn't imagine, though, that Purkin was contemplating some trivial exercise in carpentry- nor could the prisoner, who was looking distinctly fearful.
"No trouble, sir," said the sergeant amiably, squatting down beside the prisoner.
"Except that this poor fellow might he about to stub his toe. Funny how a reluctant tongue often has that effect." The thin man looked nervously down at the speaker, quivering with terror.
"And why, exactly, should he be in danger of suffering such an uncomfortable effect?" Jacom asked, trying to enter into the spirit of the thing even though he didn't really feel like it. "Passed an illicit message to one of the prisoners," Purkin growled. "Very reluctant to tell us what was in it, or who sent it. In my experience, sir, a crushed toe is far the best method of
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refreshing a bad meg wry If it doesn't work the first time, doubling the dose is usually effective. Not many faulty memories can withstand two crushed toes ... let alone ten."
Jacom had to admire the sergeant's gruesomely laconic way with words.
To judge by the thin man's face, Purkin's eloquence was not going to waste.
"What's your name?" Jacom barked at the frightened man. "Seril Sart, sir,"
the prisoner replied.
"But I didn't do anything. It's all a mistake."
"Sart?" Jacom echoed, knowing that he knew the name. "Brother of the man we caught in the grounds last night but one," Purkin supplied helpfully.
"Oh," said Jacom.
"You mean he's here."
"Yes sir," said the jailer.
"Convicted of trespass, fined thirty crowns. Elected to stay in jail while his family attempted to raise the money. His brother supposedly came to give him the news."
"What's illicit about that?" Jacom asked, wondering if he had missed something.
"Nothing, sir," said the jailer.
"But being a dutiful man, sir, I kept a surreptitious eye on him anyway, just in case. He didn't know I was watching him. Whipped lip the top bar on Myrasol's cell he did, sir, and threw somethingin. Quick as a flash he was, sir, but I saw 'im all right." i "Search the cell if you want to," Seril Sart said nervously.
"You won't find anything." ; "No, we won't," the jailer agreed.
"The message was probably written on old parchment, easily pulped as soon as read. Standard method people take us for fools, you know, think we don't know what goes on.
Only way to find out what was in it's to persuade 'im to tell us. "
"Myrasol's the big amber, isn't he?" Jacom said, although he knew perfectly well who Myrasol was.
"The one that. . . the one that's not a dark lander He had been about to say
"The one that isn't guilty' but caught himself just in time.
"Yes sir," said Purkin promptly.
"I always knew there was something' funny about that one. He's into something', sir- him an' Sart both.
Somethin's going' on, sir, and we're only one or two stubbed toes away from findin' out what. "
"I d-don't. . ." the thin man began, but interrupted himself with file:///G|/Program%20Files/eMule/Incoming/Brian%20Stableford%20-%20Serpents%20Blood.TXT (94 of 495) [11/1/2004 12:26:20 AM]
a
terrific howl of pain. Kristoforo gripped him even harder, and held him in place as he tried to hop away.
"Get up, Purkin," Jacom said tiredly.
"The poor chap might hurt himself if he trips over you again."
"That was nothin', sir," said the sergeant, weighing the hammer carefully in his right hand as he brought himself upright.
"Won't even leave a bruise. He ought to be careful, though. Next time, he might really hurt himself."
"That's against the law," Seril Sart gasped.
"This is a civilised country. There are laws . .
. and lawyers. If you think I've done something' wrong you should charge me, lay your evidence before a court."
"We're the king's guard," Jacom assured the man solicitously.
"We wouldn't do anything that was against the law. Unlike you, apparently.
What did the message say, Seril, and who paid you to bring it in? I don't suppose you did it out of the goodness of your heart, did you?"
"Unless, of course, you and your brother and the amber are all in this together," Purkin suggested.
"Maybe that was why your brother was lurking around the citadel two nights ago- planning a jailbreak."
"I don't know any ambers!" Seril Sart was quick to say.
"Zadok got shut in by accident. It's all a mistake!"
Purkin crouched down again.
Jacom put on his best predatory smile.
"Look at it this way, Seril,"
he said.
"You don't have any interest in Andris Myrasol. The only reason you brought in that message was that somebody made a contribution to the fund you're trying to put together to secure your brother's release. We don't blame you for that- and we're not particularly interested in taking advantage of what we know to make it more difficult for you to get your brother out, despicable thief though he may be. All we ask of you is that you stop stubbing your toe. Now, who gave you the message?"
The thin man hesitated, but as soon as Purkin's hand moved he decided that discretion was the better part of valour.
"A g-girl," he said, so hurriedly that he developed a distinct stammer.
"Eight maybe ten.
N-never sawer before. Don't know her name, on est He looked down fearfully as he spoke the last sentence but Jacom suspected that if this were the truth it certainly wasn't the whole truth. 9i
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"I need more," Jacpm said.
"Tell me more."
"I d-d-- . . . she was tall . . . t-taller than me. Mannish clothes, not dirty but well-worn. Looked like a p-pirate, or m-m-maybe a smuggler."
Jacom made a small sound of disgust.
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