“No threat,” the serjeant said. “Now if this was a sprint, maybe, but it won’t make the distance. There’s money on it to place, though.”
Another, a lustreless tan, followed. Its jockey looked nervously at the shrew.
“He’ll have to be quick, when it’s caught,” the serjeant said, chuckling. “He knows he’s on the slowest roach in the race. Bet he tried to get out of his contract.”
The Duke’s Roachmaster Extraordinary appeared now, leading Magnificence, the stunning dark crimson elytra with their silver inlays gleaming in the sun and the roachifers in their formal livery. It stopped, had to be prodded on, lifted one leg and twitched it. Its elytra lifted as far as possible, and the gauzy wings fluttered; its head jerked from side to side. The jockey, also in the Duke’s livery, played with the lines.
“They’re makin’ it do that, to scare bettors off and get good odds,” someone said from behind Petry.
“I dunno…” said someone else. “Looks poorly to me, it does.”
The serjeant’s fist tightened on Petry’s collar; he said nothing.
The fifth roach, a light brown with green stripes merely painted on, not incised, skittered past the shrew’s cage, half-dragging its roachifers.
Now, in the starting chutes, the roaches waved their antennae frantically and tried to lunge ahead, but each had a stout roachifer hauling on each leg. When the starter dropped his flag, the roachifers released their grips, and two hundred paces back, the shrew’s keepers released the shrew.
The crowd roared. The Harbormaster’s roach shot into the lead, closely followed by Arresting. Magnificence, though equal with Arresting at first, quickly veered to the outside, rubbing against the rail like a hog scratching an itch, despite its jockey’s frantic work on the winches. It was running fast, but a longer distance than the others. By the time the jockey was able to steer it back to the middle of the track, it was last, and the shrew was chittering a bare length behind. Thoroughly frightened, it raced ahead, catching up with the last roach, the dull tan one, and then passing the next before the next turn. Down the backstretch, the Harbormaster’s roach faded, leaving Arresting in the lead. Magnificence continued to gain, passing the Harbormaster’s roach, but even at a distance Petry could see that Arresting had the smoother stride, wasting no energy on popping its elytra. It was also clear that Arresting had more speed in hand, for it flattened out as Magnificence came alongside, opening a lead again. Magnificence challenged again, as they neared the far turn.
Neck and neck the two roaches ran, legs scuttling so fast they were nearly invisible. First the red and then the gold would get a lead. Far behind, the other three roaches were clearly outmatched, and the shrew snatched a leg off the last as it chased the next. The jockey leapt clear and ran for the protection of the inside rail—and made it, somewhat to the disappointment of the infield crowd.
Petry watched all this with interest, as the serjeant’s grip never loosened and he was keenly aware what fate awaited him if Arresting should lose. He had done all that the serjeant had asked of him but that would not be enough to save him. And yet, there in the merchants’ box was his present employer, who would be equally wroth if Magnificence lost. Never mind that Herimar had no idea it was Petry’s doing; he would be angry enough to make Petry’s life hell anyway.
“Get him away,” the serjeant muttered, over Petry’s head. “Get him away from that beast—”
“The shrew, sir?” Petry said. “He’s well ahead—”
“No, you fool! Away from Magnificence! It’s not good to be too close—”
Down the stretch they came now, with Arresting, on the rail, pulling slowly ahead…a handspan, an armspan. Magnificence’s jockey leaned forward, urging him on…when suddenly a glittering cloud lifted from Arresting and settled on Magnificence. The jockey on Magnificence waved his arms like a man threatened by a swarm of bees and nearly fell off.
“May all the devils in all the hells take him!” the serjeant said. “We warned him!”
“Warned who?” Petry said. “What happened?” But before the serjeant could speak, he knew. The cuttlemites, transferred to Arresting, had smelled their born-host nearby, his smell stronger for the race he’d been running and the accumulation of secretions, and transferred back. In an instant, they seemed to disappear, diving into the great beast’s crevices to groom him. Magnificence slowed and stopped as Arresting raced on and crossed the finish line; despite all his jockey could do, he crouched low to the track, antennae outspread. Petry imagined the relief the roach was feeling…all those itches scratched, expertly at once, as blissful comfort overrode fear. But now the Harbormaster’s roach, only slightly ahead of the shrew but far ahead of the two roaches the shrew had crippled, scuttled past Magnificence. Too late, the champion sensed the danger; too late it gathered its slender legs and tried to run…too late and too slow.
The crowd’s cheers for the winner died away as they watched the unthinkable…the Duke’s renowned racing roach losing leg after leg to the shrew; the jockey’s brave attempt to fight it off, until the shrew, annoyed, snapped at the man and bit off his leg. Though a dozen men with weapons ran out to save the jockey, he died before a healer could be found, and the great roach was eaten entire. The Duke’s Roachkeeper Extraordinary had flung his feathered hat on the ground and was jumping up and down on it, screaming; the roachifers huddled together, wailing.
“Well,” the serjeant said, loosening his grip at last. “As I said, boy, it’s time to cut your losses with Herimar and consider other opportunities. If you came to us, the work’s no harder and you might have that chance to become a watchman, when you’ve got some growth on you.”
And when he did not grow, they would begin to wonder why, and when they found out…
Petry fixed a bright smile on his face. “Could I really? But I need to pick up my things at Master Herimar’s, before—”
“Before he comes to himself and takes a billet to everyone,” the serjeant said. “Sure, then. Go on. I’m stuck here—no odds taken that Roachkeeper’s going to enter a formal protest, for all the good it’ll do him. He can’t prove anything. Come by the watch-house after sundown…and here’s a few coppers for you in earnest of the offer. No stealing purses, now…” He counted out five copper slugs.
“No, sir! I wouldn’t think of it.” Petry took the coppers then turned and elbowed his way through the crowd. Not enough for a stake, not enough for a pillow dance or even a good meal, but more than he’d had since Emeraldine ran off with his entire stash. And…neither Herimar nor the serjeant were in their usual places.
He might be able to diddle them both. It was time for him to leave the place anyway—one year without growing could happen to any young boy, but two was pushing it, and anyway he’d like to be someplace he didn’t depend on a magic depilatory to maintain his appearance.
Sure enough, all the watch were out on the streets, leaving the watch-house locked but unguarded. Locked, but not impregnable to a boy-sized man with the right experience. There in a drawer of the serjeant’s desk was the velvet purse and its jingling contents. Petry tucked that away in his vest pocket, scratched Herimar’s initials on one of the wooden house-tokens and dropped it on the floor, nudging it under the serjeant’s desk next to the lock-box. He scratched around the lock, as if trying to pick it, but left it locked. Then he relocked the watch house, and made his way to the Bilge & Belly.
The main room bustled with those returning from the race, downing jugs of ale as they told each other what they’d seen at the top of their lungs. Serving wenches rushed back and forth and half the professional ladies of pleasure from Aunt Meridel’s Treasure House were there, too, including Emeraldine, the cause of all his recent troubles.
Herimar, however, was missing. Arguing with the bookmakers about the extent of his losses, no doubt, for all the good it would do him. With any luck, he would quarrel with the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and be gone for hours.
Petry slipped into Herimar’s priva
te apartment and left the purse, minus two of the gold coins, under his mattress. Then upstairs, to the Roachkeeper’s room, where he found, as expected, that the man had hidden a stash of coins in his chamber-pot. And he’d marked them in the usual amateurish way, scratching his initials into the space between the Prince’s head and the motto. Easy enough to rub out, but Petry had a better idea. He took them all but one, tying half of them into a rag so they wouldn’t jingle, and put them down the back of his vest, under his shirt, with a string. That one, a silver, he held in his hand. The other half joined his earlier stash, inside his vest.
Downstairs again, with a chamberpot in each hand as if he were working, he looked to see if Herimar had returned. Not yet…very good. The rag with the Roachkeeper’s coins in it went under Herimar’s pillow; Petry came out of Herimar’s rooms with three chamberpots, just in case anyone noticed where he’d been, and out the back door to empty them in the pit. While appearing to scrub out the chamberpots, he scoured off the Roachkeeper’s initials from the coins he’d kept and then dirtied them in the quickest way, so they weren’t too shiny.
Still the Roachkeeper did not return; he imagined the man and his roachifers arguing with the serjeant, and smiled. Nor had Herimar returned. Petry’s smile widened. He didn’t need much more time…back inside, he slipped the Roachkeeper’s marked silver into Emeraldine’s sleeve-pocket while she had her tongue down some wormiger’s throat, then made his way to the stable and retrieved his pot of depilatory.
Now to the Duke’s, to apply for the job of fool. He sauntered through the town’s market square, stopping to buy himself a fruit pasty for the journey, trade the jar of depilatory for one guaranteed to speed hair growth, and fill the empty potion bottle from a dyer’s pot, then strolled out the unguarded west gate. When the thefts were discovered and he wasn’t around, someone might try to blame him—but the house-token should result in a search of Herimar’s—where the evidence he’d planted should point to Herimar—his greed and his need both being public knowledge. If not, Petry the boy would soon cease to exist anyway.
By the time the Roachkeeper Extraordinary and his roachifers dared return to the Duke’s court, only to be summarily dismissed, a very hairy dwarf known to that noble lord as Otokar Petrosky might be seen capering about the Duke’s hall each night in motley and a belled cap. With his hair dyed blue and done up in ribboned plaits, and his long braided beard dyed red with a bell on the end for the Duke to pull, he resembled in no way the beardless skinny orphan boy from the Bilge & Belly, and his short stature was in no wise a hindrance to his other ambitions…since not all of him was short.
Afterword:
I discovered Jack Vance while in high school, a few years into my attempt to read every scrap of science fiction I could find. Compared to my previous reading, Vance, like Sturgeon, was exotic—his imagined worlds as different from a small city in south Texas as a dreamer could wish. Later, other writers lured me away from Vance, but he was a bright-colored thread in the tapestry of writers whose work I read. I suspect, though, that he’s the reason I spent one whole summer writing (very bad) stories with purple ink.
—Elizabeth Moon
Lucius Shepard
Sylgarmo’s Proclamation
Revenge is one of the oldest and most primal of human motives, and in the fast-paced tale that follows, it drives a battle-scared warrior to the ends of the Dying Earth—and perhaps to the end of the Dying Earth itself!
Lucius Shepard was one of the most popular, influential, and prolific of the new writers of the ‘80s, and that decade and much of the decade that followed would see a steady stream of bizarre and powerfully compelling stories by Shepard, stories such as the landmark novella “R&R,” which won him a Nebula Award in 1987, “The Jaguar Hunter,” “Black Coral,” “A Spanish Lesson,” “The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule,” “Shades,” “A Traveller’s Tale,” “Human History,” “How the Wind Spoke at Madaket,” “Beast of the Heartland,” “The Scalehunter’s Beautiful Daughter,” and “Barnacle Bill the Spacer,” which won him a Hugo Award in 1993. In 1988, he picked up a World Fantasy Award for his monumental short-story collection The Jaguar Hunter, following it in 1992 with a second World Fantasy Award for his second collection, The Ends of the Earth.
In the mid to late ‘90s, Shepard’s production slowed dramatically, but in the new century he has returned to something like his startling prolificacy of old; by my count, Shepard published at least ten or eleven stories in 2003 alone, many of them novellas, including three almost-novel-length chapbooks, Louisiana Breakdown, Floater, and Colonel Rutherford’s Colt. Nor has the quality of his work slipped—stories like “Radiant Green Star,” “Only Partially There,” and “Liar’s House” deserve to be ranked among his best work ever, and his “Over Yonder” won him the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award. And it may be that he’s only beginning to hit his stride. Shepard’s other books include the novels Green Eyes, Kalimantan, The Golden, and the collection Barnacle Bill the Spacer, Trujillo, and Two Trains Running. He has also written books of non-fiction essays and criticism such as Sports and Music, Weapons of Mass Seduction, and With Christmas in Honduras: Men, Myths, and Miscreants in Modern Central America. His most recent books are two new collections, Dagger Key and Other Stories, and a massive retrospective collection, The Best of Lucius Shepard. Born in Lynchberg, Virginia, he now lives in Vancouver, Washington.
Sylgarmo’s Proclamation
Lucius Shepard
From a second-story window of the Kampaw Inn, near the center of Kaspara Viatatus, Thiago Alves watched the rising of the sun, a habit to which many had become obsessively devoted in these, the last of the last days. A faltering pink ray initiated the event, probing the plum-colored sky above the Mountains of Magnatz; then a slice of crimson light, resembling the bloody fingernail of someone attempting to climb forth from a deep pit, found purchase in a rocky cleft. Finally the solar orb heaved aloft, appearing to settle between two peaks, shuddering and bulging and listing like a balloon half-filled with water, its hue dimming to a wan magenta.
Thiago grimaced to see such a pitiful display and turned his back on the window. He was a powerfully constructed man, his arms and chest and thighs strapped with muscle, yet he went with a light step and could move with startling agility. Though he presented a formidable (even a threatening) image, he had a kindly, forthright air that the less perceptive sometimes mistook for simple-mindedness. Salted with gray, his black hair came down in a peak over his forehead, receding sharply above the eyes—a family trait. Vanity had persuaded him to repair his cauliflower ears, but he had left the remainder of his features battered and lumped by long years in the fighting cage. Heavy scar tissue thickened his orbital ridges, and his nose, broken several times during his career, had acquired the look of a peculiar root vegetable; children were prone to pull on it and giggle.
He dressed in leather trousers and a forest green singlet, and went downstairs and out onto the Avenue of Dynasties, passing beneath several of the vast monuments that spanned it; a side street led him through a gate in the city wall. Swifts made curving flights over the River Chaing and a tall two-master ran with the tide, heading for the estuary. He walked briskly along the riverbank, stopping now and again to do stretching exercises; once his aches and pains had been mastered by the glow of physical exertion, he turned back toward the gate. The city’s eccentric spires—some capped by cupolas of gold and onyx, with decorative finials atop them; others by turrets of tinted glass patterned in swirls and stripes; and others yet by flames, mists, and blurred dimensional disturbances, each signaling the primary attribute of the magician who dwelled beneath—reduced the backdrop of lilac-colored clouds to insignificance.
In the Green Star common room of the Kampaw, a lamplit, dust-hung space all but empty at that early hour, with carved wainscoting, benches and boards, and painted-over windows depicting scenes of golden days and merrymaking through which the weak sun barely penetrated, Thiago breakfasted on griddlecakes an
d stridleberry conserve, and was contemplating an order of fried glace1 to fill in the crevices, when the door swung open and four men in robes and intricately tiered caps crowded inside and hobbled toward his table. Magicians, he assumed, judging by the distinctive ornaments affixed to their headgear. Apart from their clothing, they were alike as beans, short and stringy, with pale, round faces, somber expressions and close-cropped black hair, varying in height no more than an inch or two. After an interval a fifth man entered, closed the door and leaned against it, a maneuver that struck Thiago as tactical and put him on the alert. This man differed from his fellows in that he walked without a limp, moving with the supple vigor of youth, and wore loose-fitting black trousers and a high-collared jacket; a rakish, wide-brimmed hat, also black, shadowed his features.
“Have I the pleasure of addressing Thiago Alves?” asked one of the magicians, a man whose eyes darted about with such an inconstancy of focus, they appeared on the verge of leaping out of his head.
“I am he,” Thiago said. “As to whether it will be a pleasure, much depends on the intent of your youthful associate. Does he mean to block my means of egress?”
“Certainly not!”
The magican made a shooing gesture and the youth stepped away from the door. Thiago caught sight of several knives belted to his hip and remained wary.
“I am Vasker,” the magician said. “And this worthy on my left is Disserl.” He indicated a gentleman whose hands roamed restlessly over his body, as if searching for his wallet. “Here is Archimbaust.” Archimbaust nodded, then busied himself with a furious scratching at his thigh. “And here Pelasias.” Pelasias emitted a humming noise that grew louder and louder until, by dint of considerable head-shaking and dry-swallowing, he managed to suppress it.
Songs of the Dying Earth Page 36