Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai

by Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01]

  And then I thought about that vague crease of irritation that had crossed Toshtai’s face at the thought of the murder of Enki Duzun interrupting his entertainment, and I smiled into her hair, and I said, “We shall see about that.”

  Because of the storm, we were performing indoors for the two lords and their entourages; for the same reason, Crosta Natthan had arranged for us to be quartered in the donjon, even better rooms than I had expected—we were to use the room we had been using as equipment room, and the three next to it.

  The room with the doorframe.

  The doorframe that had held the clamp.

  The clamp that had held the cable.

  The cable that Refle had cut through, plunging my sister, Enki Duzun, to her death.

  The top of the doorframe was covered with a plaster, from which several small wires projected, draped down over the clamp. Some of the wires were of gold, some of silver, three of some green metal I couldn’t have named. Several runes had been scribbled over the frame, and the wall beyond it, no doubt thrilling Varta Kedin and the rest of the maids.

  One swordsman stood guard over it. Actually, he sat guard across from it, lolling in an armchair that had been moved there, drumming his fingers against the arm of the chair, alternately singing and humming a complex minor-key scale. But he wasn’t just for show, perhaps; his naked sword was flat on the arms of the chair, and any sound, any movement from either end of the hall got his immediate attention, his whole body tensing into sudden motionlessness until he identified the source of it.

  He eyed me levelly as I walked out the door, closing it behind me. I was late; the others were already downstairs, outside the ballroom.

  “Dinner performances are always difficult,” Gray Khuzud said, as we waited outside the double doors. Inside, the silverhorns had picked up a three-note theme and were tossing it back and forth, occasionally letting the zivver take part of the melody.

  “It’s a simple matter to overpower the food and talk, but it’s higher art to complement it, as we do the music. We do not—” He stopped, swallowed, and started again. “We do not attempt to create the fear in the audience that if they don’t watch at any moment they will miss something forever, but rather we want to create the comfort of knowing that should they look in our direction, they will find something interesting to see.

  “Or, more accurately, we only insist upon all of their attention occasionally, as with the entrance.

  “Similarly, all of the acts are built so that almost all of the interesting moves are repeated, at least once. When Egda tosses Fhilt into the air for a double roll, it comes after a fairly quiet moment, and the attention of many may be on their plates—so, Sala will do the same move next.

  “Is all that understood?”

  “I’m never sure whether a road is Kami Khuzud’s river, or his wall,” Sala said, eyeing me.

  “Some day, Sala,” Fhilt said, “you’ll come up with an aphorism that suits the occasion, and we’ll all faint in astonishment.”

  She raised an eyebrow. “We take what victories we can, Fhilt.” She reached out and laid a hand on Gray Khuzud’s shoulder, and then on his cheek, cupping it. “We understand, Gray Khuzud,” she said. “We understand all of it.”

  He smiled, and just for a moment was the Gray Khuzud that I had always known; and before the dull gray mask slipped back over his face again, he mouthed his thanks to her.

  I never really understood the two of them. I knew that there had been no woman for my father since my mother died, and that he wanted it that way, but that Sala loved him, in a way both complicated and requited, but in a curious fashion, one that permitted but didn’t require they touch each other as lovers.

  Enki Duzun had always said that she understood it, and that the trouble with me was that I thought too much not with my heart and head, but with my phallus, but that that’s not where all love is, not even where all passionate love is, even if you’ll never understand that, Kami Khuzud, not until you grow up, and never mind that I’m younger than you, I understand these things, I—

  Fhilt gripped my arm. “Kami Khuzud, pay attention,” he said, not ungently. “We are on in a moment.”

  “Sorry.”

  Beyond the doors, the two silverhorns were playfully, lightly dueling at the top of their registers, supported below by easy rhythms on the zivver, smooth, heavy notes from the bassskin, an even flurry of drumming and a delicate tinkling from the chimer.

  The doors swung open, and I entered the hall with a simple tumbling run: a quick dash, followed by a pair of handsprings, and then a solid landing. I quickly moved off to the side to pick up my juggling sticks while Fhilt made his entrance, his run the same as mine, except that he finished with a punch-back, to a spattering of applause.

  He took up his sticks, and we each began to juggle three, occasionally banging two together in time to the music, but not loudly enough to distract from Evrem’s entrance—he was using a single watersnake tonight, keeping it spinning straight—and Sala’s.

  It was a banquet in the traditional style of our beloved ruling class: a forty-person, staple-shaped table that cupped the far end of the room, with all the diners on the outside of the staple, their backs to the wall; members of our beloved ruling class were always nervous about leaving their backs to the open room. Near the legs of the staple, two serving tables stood, one holding a rosette of golden-roasted capons, another a single roast kid, white-clad servitors slicing to order.

  The diners at the table itself were broken into eight or so smaller groups of four and five by interposed islands of serving foods, each similar, but variations on a theme: the soup bowls were all up on legs, heated by candles beneath, but one had bits of bright carrot and dull chard floating on its surface, another was clear; on yet another, three carved turnips, each shaped like a coil of a seadragon, poked out of an oil-slick bowl.

  It was a magnificent spread, from the traditional first course, the pyramid of roasted aborted piglets, each the size of a small chicken, to the finale: a spiced potato pie, a wall of cinnamon sticks arranged around its edge like logs in a stockade.

  The only foul note in the room was Refle. He and his brother sat with the group at the far end of the table, the farthest from Lord Toshtai, with Dun Lidjun’s group in between him and the lord. I wished that it had been a place of dishonor, but It wasn’t: all seats with the lord are a place of honor; this was only one of lesser honor.

  His face studiously blank as he watched me, he toyed with his food and he kept from looking over toward Narantir.

  Felkoi didn’t have as much self-control: he kept glancing over to where the wizard was busy staining his beard with the juices of an aborted piglet.

  Lord Toshtai and Lord Orazhi, each with the traditional counselor at his side, were the center foursome. They chatted amiably, occasionally gesturing with their eating sticks, Toshtai politely tasting from Orazhi’s plate and vice versa. Arefai, arrayed in black and silver, sat at his father’s side, and in a bit of typical D’Shaian hypocrisy, Orazhi had chosen Lord Edelfaule, the older of Toshtai’s two resident sons, as his counselor, and even dipped his head toward Edelfaule every now and then, nodding as though receiving a confidence.

  Where Toshtai was magnificent in his rotundity, Orazhi was quiet in his compactness: a lean, beardless man, thinning yellow hair slicked back neatly across his head and glossed to a high shine, formal black and gold tunic cut tightly across his shoulders.

  His movements were both quick and sudden, even as he reached out an eating prong to spear a marinated mussel from the serving tray in front of them; Dun Lidjun, part of the group to Orazhi’s left, eyed the younger lord with unconcealed suspicion.

  The food looked marvelous, and smelled wonderful; it filled the air with the scent of roasting meat, and of garlic, and a distant tang of firemint, probably from the hot apple stew. I paid particular attention to a plate of roast turkey legs, each one beautifully crisped on the outside.

  While the crowd was watc
hing Sala, Large Egda and the Eresthais quietly entered the hall, picking up their own equipment as Fhilt and I reclaimed the crowd’s attention with a flurry of exchanges, the wands first tumbling once around as they flew through the air between us, and then one and a half times.

  Kneeling next to Fhilt, Sala opened the large oaken box containing the juggling knives. The appearance is part of the effect: the box was of deep rubbed oak, lined with crimson silk; the knives were polished to a high gloss.

  She picked up one, and all eyes fell on her as she walked to the horseshoe-shaped dining table and took an apple from a fruitbowl, smoothly moving the knife through the air, slicing the apple a dozen times as she walked back to Fhilt’s side, and then cleaned the knife.

  It’s a fool-the-mind trick: deep inside, the audience knows that we’re flipping the wands over one and a half times, and knows that if we do that with the knives, we’ll be cut to ribbons. So all eyes were wide and upon us as, one by one, Sala reached up and took one of Fhilt’s juggling wands from his hand, replacing it with a knife.

  I wondered about that, too.

  Fhilt, effortlessly, as though it didn’t affect his timing at all, quickly worked the knives into the stream, careful to give each knife only a half-turn flip as it flew across the air to me.

  We picked up the exchange pattern: throw-throw-exchange instead of throw-throw-exchange-throw. The crowd broke into a polite patter of applause. Perhaps Refle paid more attention, wondering if he would be quick enough should I turn one of my throws to Fhilt into a throw at him.

  The door again opened: it was Gray Khuzud, carrying three juggling sticks, and he was weaving as he walked.

  He was quite obviously drunk.

  Gray Khuzud threw one of the sticks in the air with his right hand, and then hesitated, as though unsure when to throw the next, but he barely got it out of his left hand in time to catch. The flipping pattern was almost random; some sticks flipped half over, some all the way, some one and a half times, and every once in a while one wouldn’t quite rotate out of the way, and he would snag a horizontal stick, and barely throw it in time.

  Gray Khuzud kept walking forward, though, approaching Fhilt and me almost blindly. One stick dropped from his shower, but it bounced on its end off the hard marble, and Gray Khuzud snatched it and worked it back into his rough shower as he walked.

  He caught himself barely an armslength from our exchanges, and bowed to Lord Toshtai as he continued his staggered juggle.

  And then it happened: another stick fell and bounced off the marble, but this time it bounced forward, directly beneath where Fhilt’s and my knives were whipping back and forth, through the air.

  Any sane person, any sober person would have let it fall, but Gray Khuzud leaned forward, through the path of our knives, a pair of knives barely missing his head.

  And then he rose, the juggling stick firmly in his hands. The knife I had just thrown to Fhilt passed barely in front of his naked chest, and the one from Fhilt to me barely behind his back, but Gray Khuzud juggled through our exchanges, the knives and sticks coming close together, but never quite touching, the applause of the audience almost deafening as he dove through the space where, only half a heartbeat before, a knife had been flickering through the air.

  Those of the audience who hadn’t seen my father’s drunk act before sat stunned, while those who had grinned.

  The knives still flickering through the air behind him, Gray Khuzud took a step forward.

  And his right heel came down firmly on a slippery apple slice, and he fell backwards, toward the exchanging knives—

  —and through the turning, flying knives, as his fall became a backwards handspring, and then a forward handspring back yet again through the shower of knives, a handspring that brought him almost to the table and into yet another handspring that turned into a leap to the surface of the dining table.

  Dun Lidjun was already on his feet, a sword in his hands, but Gray Khuzud had cartwheeled away in the opposite direction down the surface of the table, his flying hands and feet avoiding plates and bowls and cups and fingers as they had planted knives in our entrance act, and then he was again on the floor, but he had somehow seized six turkey legs, and had them in the air in an intricate shower.

  Fhilt and I caught our knives, and bowed in his direction, as the applause thundered.

  Gray Khuzud smiled as he tossed the turkey legs off in different directions, one toward Fhilt, another toward Sala, and three others to the Eresthais and me. He flipped the last turkey leg through the air, end over end, then caught it and took a bite.

  “The Troupe of Gray Khuzud is with you,” he said, with a bow to where Toshtai and Orazhi sat, and then another, perhaps deeper bow, toward Dun Lidjun.

  The old warrior eyed him blankly for a moment, then sheathed his sword with a smooth motion ...

  And bowed to Gray Khuzud.

  After a performance is a special time, always; nothing can take away from that. I’ve never known much about mahrir, wizard-magic, and I doubt I ever will, but there is some sort of magical energy that passes between the audience and the troupe, draining one kind of energy, leaving us charged with a different sort.

  Usually you just know what to do—usually, when you’re both charged and drained, you find the nearest place to sit down, to lie down, not to rest. But sometimes you don’t. The banquet was over, but the servitors had gone to bed, leaving the cleaning for the morning and what leftovers we -wanted to the seven of us.

  A quarter of the leavings wouldn’t have fed more than a troop of famished soldiers; the troupe of Gray Khuzud could barely finish half. Outside, past the half-open glass-paneled doors, the rain beat down with a steady patter, punctuated only occasionally by the crash of thunder or a distant flash of its cousin, lightning.

  “I’m not sure,” Fhilt finally said, sprawled on a rug runner, “that this is the way things would be done if it was my castle, my banquet.” He toyed with a plate on the rug next to him, dipping a piglet haunch in raspberry sauce, then taking a delicate bite before offering some to Sala.

  She smiled. “For some reason old Crosta Natthan didn’t think to ask you.”

  “Foolish man.”

  “Every problem its own solution; every solution its own problem,” she said.

  I looked over at Large Egda. “Good food?”

  “Mm.” Large Egda had piled his plate high, and was working from the top down, stoking himself without concern for how the flavors mixed. “Very good food,” he said, when his mouth cleared.

  Evrem, despite the fact that he had been the last to start eating, was already on the potato pie—the snake-handler was like one of his snakes, I guess, tucking away immense quantities of food, figuring that he could digest anything he could squeeze down his throat.

  The Eresthais, Josei and Eno, just ate.

  I wasn’t hungry, although I had a bowl of apple stew in front of me, and had tasted some. The firemint had been laid on with too heavy a hand for my taste, although perhaps it was less intrusive when the dish was hot.

  But I tried to talk anyway.

  Gray Khuzud sat alone, eating without tasting whatever Sala set in front of him, chewing with an even rhythm, like a machine. We hadn’t exchanged any words at all, not privately. Not since Enki Duzun died.

  Fhilt pitted a cherry, so purple it was almost black, and with a quick, “Egda, open wide,” thumb-flicked it into the air and into Egda’s mouth.

  The big man smiled as he chewed and swallowed.

  “I will see you all in the morning, in the courtyard, at the hour of the hare,” Gray Khuzud said, rising. He walked out of the hall.

  Sala made as though to get up and go after him, but she looked to me for confirmation, first, as though I had the slightest idea what was right.

  I didn’t understand Sala. I spread my hands.

  Enki Duzun was dead, and nothing said or done right or wrong would ever change that. Everyone was silent for a long time.

  Fhilt fina
lly broke the silence with a loud sigh.

  “I miss her, too, Gray Khuzud,” he said to the air in front of him. “And were there anything that could bring her back, I would do it. Failing that, I’d do anything that would expose her murderer.” He looked steadily at me. “But it appears that you and Narantir have that well in hand, doesn’t it, Kami Khuzud?”

  “I hope so. If you put too much strain on a cable, it breaks,” I said, then realized what I’d said.

  Sala didn’t like that. “The spell, though, will tell who did ... oh.”

  I didn’t answer.

  Evrem stroked the rug, his fingers moving sinuously. “I watched Refle. He worries. He tries not to show it, but he worries.”

  “I don’t understand all this,” Large Egda said. “Too complicated for me.”

  Fhilt started to say something, but I interrupted. “Just leave it to me, Egda. I’ve got it well in hand, I hope.”

  Egda grinned, his smile a yellow gash in his porridge face. “Whatever you say, Kami Khuzud.”

  Fhilt twisted an eating stick between his fingers. “If you put too much strain on anything,” he said, “it breaks.” He snapped the stick cleanly. “But if not?”

  Lightning crashed outside; I picked up my juggling sticks and left.

  When you don’t know what else to do, you go back to the beginning, the basics. The root of acrobatics is juggling.

  I stood in the courtyard and the rain and the thunder, the rain beating down so hard at times that I couldn’t even see.

  One ball; the most basic juggle. Never mind that the rain beats down hard, never mind that your sister is dead, never mind that crash of thunder or this flash of lightning; you can’t control that. What you can do, the only thing you can do, the thing you have to do is throw one ball up into the air and then let it fall into your hand.

  You have to get at least one thing right.