“If we may sit,” Vasker went on, “I believe we have a proposal that will profit you.”
“Sit if you like,” said Thiago. “I was preparing to order glace and perhaps a pot of mint tea. You have my ear for as long as it will take to consume them. But I am embarked upon a mission of some urgency and cannot listen to distractions, no matter how profitable.”
“And would it distract you to learn…” Archimbaust paused in his delivery to scratch at his elbow. “…that our proposal involves your cousin. The very one for whom you are searching?”
“Cugel?” Thiago wiped his mouth. “What of him?”
“You seek him, do you not?” asked Disserl. “As do we.”
“Yet we have an advantage,” said Vasker. “We have divined his whereabouts.” Thiago wiped his mouth with a napkin and glared at him. “Where is he?”
“Deep within the Great Erm. A village called Joko Anwar. We would travel there ourselves and secure him, but as you see we lack the physical resources for such a task. It requires a robust individual like yourself.”
The young man made a sound—of disgust, thought Thiago—and looked away.
“It is possible to dispatch you to the vicinity of Joko Anwar within minutes,” said Archimbaust. “Why risk a crossing of the Wild Waste and endure the discomfort and danger of a voyage across the Xardoon Sea?”
“Should you travel by conventional means, you may not achieve your goal,” Disserl said. “If Sylgarmo’s recent projections are correct, we might have as little as a handful of days before the sun quits the sky.”
The wizards began debating the merits of Sylgarmo’s Proclamation. Vasker adhered to the optimistic estimate of two and a half centuries, saying the implications of Sylgarmo’s equations were that there would soon be a solar event of some significance, yet not necessarily a terminal one. Archimbaust challenged Sylgarmo’s methods of divination, Disserl held to the pessimistic view, and Pelasias offered a vocabulary of dolorous hums and moans.
To silence them, Thiago banged on the table—this also had the effect of summoning the serving girl and, once he had given her his order, he asked the magicians why they sought Cugel.
“It is a complex issue and not easily distilled,” said Vasker. “In brief, Iucounu the Laughing Magician stole certain of our limbs and organs. We sent Cugel to retrieve them, armed with knowledge that would put an end to Iucounu for all time. Our limbs and organs were restored, but they were returned to us in less than perfect condition. Thus we limp and scratch and shake, and poor Pelasias is forced to communicate his dismay as might a sick hound.”
It seemed to Thiago that Vasker had summarized the matter quite neatly. “And you blame Cugel? Why not Iucounu or one of his servants? Perhaps the manner in which the limbs and organs were stored is at fault. It may be that an impure concentrate was used. Your explanation does not ring true.”
“You fail to comprehend the full scope of Cugel’s iniquity. I can…”
“I know him as well as any man,” said Thiago. “He is spiteful, greedy, and uses people without conscience or concern. Yet never has he acted without reason. You must have done him a grievous injury to warrant such vindictiveness.”
Led by Pelasias’ groaning commentary, the magicians vehemently protested this judgment. Archimbaust was eloquent in their defence. “Our last night together we toasted one another with Iucounu’s wine and feasted on roast fowl from his pantry,” he said. “We sang ribald tunes and exchanged amusing anecdotes. Indeed, Pelasias performed the Five Amiable Assertions, thus consecrating the moment and binding us to friendship.”
“If that is the case, I would counsel you to think well before you dissemble further.” The serving girl set down his tea and Thiago inhaled the pungent steam rising from the pot. “I have little tolerance for ordinary liars and none whatsoever for duplicitous magicians.”
The four men withdrew to the doorway and talked agitatedly among themselves (Pelasias giving forth with plaintive whimpers). After listening for a minute or so, the young man hissed in apparent dissatisfaction. He doffed his hat, releasing a cloud of dark hair, and revealed himself to be a young woman with comely features: a pointy chin and lustrous dark eyes and cunning little mouth arranged in a sullen pout. She would have been beautiful, but her face was so etched with scars, she resembled a patchwork thing. The largest scar ran from the hinge of her jaw down her neck and was wider than the rest, looking as though the intent had been not to disfigure, but to kill. She came toward Thiago and spoke in an effortful hoarse whisper that he assumed to be a byproduct of that wound.
“They claim that while taking inventory of Iucounu’s manse, Cugel happened upon a map made by the magician Pandelume, who dwells on a planet orbiting a distant star,” she said. “The map marks the location of a tower. Within the tower are spells that will permit all who can master them to survive the sun’s death.”
“Cugel’s behavior becomes comprehensible,” said Thiago. “He wished to disable his pursuit.”
The magicians hobbled over from the door. Vasker cast a sour glance at the young woman. “This, then, is our offer,” he said to Thiago. “We will convey you and Derwe to a spot near Joko Anwar, the site of Pandelume’s tower. There you will…”
“Who is this Derwe?”
“Derwe Coreme of the House of Domber,” the woman said. “I ruled in Cil until I ran afoul of your cousin.” She gave the word a loathing emphasis.
“Was it Cugel who marked you so?”
“He did not wield the knives. That was the fancy of the Busacios, a race vile both in form and disposition who inhabit the Great Erm. Yet Cugel is responsible for my scars and more besides. In exchange for information, he handed me over to the Busacios as if I were a bag of tiffle.”
“To continue,” said Vasker in a peremptory tone. “Once there you will enter the tower and immobilize Cugel. He must be kept alive until we have questioned him. Do this and you will share in all we learn.”
The serving girl brought the glace—Thiago inspected his plate with satisfaction.
“When we have done with him,” Vasker went on, “you may extract whatever pleasure you can derive from his torment.” He paused. “Can we consider the bargain sealed?”
“Sealed?” Thiago hitched his shoulders, generating a series of gratifying pops. “Our negotiation has just begun. Is that a spell sniffer I observe about Archimbaust’s neck? And that amulet dangling from Disserl’s hat, it is one that induces a sudden sleep, is it not? Such trinkets would prove invaluable on a journey such as you propose. Then there is the question of my fee. Sit, gentlemen. You may pick at my glace if you wish. Let us hope by the time the meal is done, you will have succeeded in satisfying my requirements.”
The forest known as the Great Erm had the feeling and aspect of an immense cathedral in ruins. Enormous trees swept up into the darkness of the canopy like flying buttresses and from that ceiling depended masses of foliage that might have been shattered roof beams shrouded in tapestries ripped from the walls, the result of an ancient catyclysm. Occasionally Derwe Coreme and Thiago heard faint obsessive tappings and cries that could have issued from no human throat; once they saw an ungainly white shape drop from the canopy and flap off into the gloom, dwindling and dwindling, becoming a point of whiteness, seeming to vanish ultimately into a distance impossible to achieve in so dense a wood, as if it had burrowed into the substance of the real and was making its way toward a destination that lay beyond the borders of the world. The hummocky ground they trod broke into steep defiles and hollows, and every surface was sheathed in moss and lichen, transforming a tallish stump into an ogre’s castle of orange and black, and a fallen trunk into a fairy bridge that spanned between a phosphorescent green boulder and a ferny embankment beneath which long-legged spiders with doorknob-sized bodies wove almost invisible webs wherein they trapped the irlyx, gray man-shaped creatures no bigger than a clothespin that struggled madly against the strands of silk and squeaked and thrust with tiny spears as the hairy a
bdomens of their captors, stingers extruded, lowered to strike.
It was Derwe who first sighted Pandelume’s tower, a slender needle of yellowish stone showing the middle third of its height through a gap in the foliage. From atop a rise, they saw that beyond the tower, the land declined into a serpentine valley, barely a notch between hills, where several dozen huts with red conical roofs were situated on a bend in a river; beyond the valley, the Great Erm resumed. They hastened toward the tower, but their path was impeded by a deep gorge that had been hidden from their eyes by vegetation. They walked beside it for half an hour but found no spot sufficiently narrow to risk jumping across. The walls of the gorge were virtually concave and the bottom was lost in darkness, thus they had no hope of climbing down and then up the opposite side.
“Those fools have sent us here for nothing!” Derwe Coreme rasped.
“Patience finds a way,” Thiago said. “Soon it will be dark. I suggest we camp by the stream we crossed some minutes ago and wait out the night.”
“Are you aware what night brings in the Great Erm? Bargebeetles. Gids and thyremes. Monstrosities of every stamp. A Deodand has been trailing us for the past hour. Do you wish to share your blanket with him?”
“Where is he? Point him out!”
She gazed at him quizzically. “He stands there, in back of the oak with the barren lower limb.”
Thiago strode directly toward the oak.
Not having anticipated so bold an approach, the Deodand, upon seeing Thiago, took a backward step, his silver eyes widening with surprise. His handsome black devil’s face gaped, exposing an inch more of the fangs that protruded from the corners of his mouth. Thiago gave him a two-handed push, adding to his momentum, and sent him sprawling. He caught one of his legs, stepped over it, dropped to his back and, holding the foot to his belly, he braced against the creature’s body and rolled, wrenching the knee from its socket and—though the flesh felt like petrified wood—fracturing the ankle. The Deodand emitted a throaty scream and screamed again as Thiago stood and drove a heel into his other knee. He repeated the action and heard a crack. Unable to stand, the Deodand crawled after him, his breath hissing. Thiago nimbly eluded his grasp and snapped the elbow joints with deft heel-stomps. He kicked him in the head, to no visible affect. However, he kept on kicking and at last a silver eye burst, cracks spreading across it as they might in a sheet of ice, and fluid spilled forth.
The Deodand thrashed about, keening in frustration.
“How can this be? That you, a human, could have bested me?”
He spoke no more, for Derwe Coreme kneeled at his side and pricked his throat with a thin-bladed knife, causing him to gag, whereupon she sliced off his carmine tongue and stuffed it into his mouth. Within seconds, he had drowned, choking on the blood pouring into his throat.
“I could have dealt with the Deodand,” Derwe Coreme said as they retraced their steps toward the stream. “And with far greater efficiency.”
Thiago made an impertinent sound with his tongue. “Yet you gave no sign of doing so.”
“An auspicious moment had not offered itself.”
“Nor would it have until the Deodand pounced.”
She stopped walking and her hand went to the hilt of a hunting knife. “You fight well, but your style is not one that will allow you to survive long in the Great Erm. I, on the other hand, survived here for three years.”
“Under the protection of the Busacios.”
Her hand tightened on the hilt. “Not so. I escaped after eight months. The remainder of those years I spent hunting Busacios.” She shifted her stance the slightest bit, easing back her left foot and resting her full weight upon it. “Do you know why Vasker hired you? They expect you to control me. They are afraid I will be so inflamed by the sight of Cugel, I may not be able to restrain myself from killing him and all the knowledge that can save them will go glimmering.”
“Are they correct in that assumption?”
“Only in that I will not be controlled.” With her left hand, she brushed a stray hair from her eyes, carefully laying it in place behind her ear. “It is impossible to discern the depths of one’s own heart. My reaction to meeting Cugel again is thus unknowable. If you intend to thwart me, however, perhaps now would be the time.”
Thiago felt the push of her anger; her pulse seemed to fill the air. “I will await a more auspicious moment.”
He began walking again and after a second or two she ran to catch up.
“What are your intentions toward Cugel?” she asked. “I must be the one to kill him.”
“A seer of peerless reputation in Kaiin has assured me that Cugel will not die by my hand, but by his own.”
“He said that? Then he is a fool. Cugel would never take his own life! He defends it as a pig his last truffle.”
Thiago shrugged. “The seer is not often wrong.”
A frown notched Derwe Coreme’s brow. “Of course, if I were to force suicide upon him, if I were to torture him and then offer a choice of more pain, unbearable pain, or the use of one of my knives to end his suffering…That would be delicious, would it not? To watch him slice into his body, seeking the source of his life’s blood, his hands trembling, almost too weak to make the final cut?”
“It would serve a purpose,” said Thiago.
She went with her head down for a few paces and then said, “Yes, the longer I think about it, the more certain I become of your seer’s acumen.”
At Twilight Thiago built a fire that illumined a ragged clearing some fifteen yards in diameter. The stream cut through the edge of the lighted area and, after staring at it yearningly for several minutes, Derwe Coreme stood and removed her jacket.
“I intend to bathe while the warmth of day still lingers,” she said. “There are scars on my body as well as my face, but if the urge to see me at my bath persists, I cannot prevent you from watching. I would caution you, however, against acting upon whatever attendant urges may spring to mind. My knives are never far from hand.”
Thiago, who was eating parched corn and dried apples, grunted to signal his indifference. Yet though he determined not to watch, he could not resist. At that distance the scars resembled tattoos. Kneeling in the stream, the water running about her waist, she was lovely and clean-limbed, an image from legend, the nymph unmindful of a spying ogre, and he wondered at the alchemy that had transformed her into such a hate-filled creature…though he had witnessed such a human result on many previous occasions. Cupping her hand, she sluiced water across her shoulders. He imagined that a woman’s back must be the purest shape in all the world.
Darkness fell. She stepped from the stream, dried herself, probing him with glances as though to know his mind, and then, wrapping herself in a blanket, came to sit by the fire. He maintained a stoic reserve and thought to detect irritation in her manner, as if she were annoyed by his lack of reaction to her nudity. Her scars were livid from the cold water, but now he saw them as designs and irrelevant to her beauty. The fire spoke in a language of snaps and crackles, and a night thing quarreled with itself, its ornate chortling echoing above a backdrop of lesser hoots and trills. She asked why he had chosen fighting as a profession.
“I liked to fight,” he said. “I like it still. In Kaiin there is always a call for fighters to fill Shins Stadium. I did not enjoy hurting my opponents as much as some of the others. Not in the beginning, anyway. Later…perhaps I did. I became First Champion of Kaiin for six years.”
“Did something happen?” she asked. “To make you better or more fierce.”
“Cugel.”
She waited for him to go on.
“It’s an old story.” He spat into the fire. “A woman was at issue.”
When he did not elaborate, she asked why he had waited so long to even the score.
“I lost sight of the matter,” he said. “There were other women. I had money and a large house and friends with which to fill it. Then Sylgarmo’s Proclamation alerted me to the fact that time was gr
owing short. I began to miss the woman again and I recalled the debt I owed my cousin.”
They were silent a while, each absorbed in their own thoughts. Something stirred in the bushes; then a feral outcry, the leaves and branches shook violently; then all was quiet. Derwe Coreme shifted closer to Thiago, reached out tentatively and touched the tip of her finger to a scar that transected his eyebrow, turning a portion of it gray.
“Mine are deeper, but you have more scars than I,” she said wonderingly.
She seemed animated by something other than her usual sullen fury. Her hand lingered near his cheek and in the unsteady light of the fire her expression was open and expectant; but she snatched back her hand and, like an old sun restored for an instant to youthful radiance, its burst of energy spent, she lapsed once again into a funereal glow.
Thiago’s imagination peopled the avenues among the trees with sinister ebony figures whose eyes were the color of fire. Dark spotches the size of a water-shadow filtered down through the canopy. He blinked them away and fought off fatigue. Some time later Derwe Coreme shook him awake. He was dazed, mortified, sputtering apologies for having fallen asleep.
“Keep quiet!” she said.
He continued to apologize and she flicked her hand at his cheek, not quite a slap, and said, “Listen!”
A sound came from the direction of the gorge. He thought initially it was that of a large beast munching greenery, smacking its lips and making pleased rumbles between bites; but as it grew louder and more distinct, he decided this impression had been counterfeited by many voices speaking at once. It grew more distinct yet and he became less certain of its nature.
The gorge brimmed with a night mist. Three pale lights, halated by the mist, rode atop an immense shape that moved ponderously, sluggishly, surging forward one plodding step after another, as though mired in mud. Peering into the murk, Thiago heard laughter and chatter, such as might be uttered by a great assemblage; then a piercing whistle came to his ears. The beast rumbled in apparent distress and flung up its head so that it surfaced from the mist. The sight of its coppery sphinx-like face, bland and empty of all human emotion, struck terror into his heart. A gid!2 Beside him, Derwe Coreme let out a shriek. The gid halted its progress, its cavernous bleak eyes fixed on the thicket where they were hiding. Its nose, the merest bump perforated by two gaping nostrils, lent it a vaguely amphibian aspect, and the lights (globes affixed to its temples and forehead) added a touch of the surreal. Mist obscured its wings and sloping, muscular body.
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