The Night Parade h-4

by Scott Ciencin

  Soon they stood before a great set of double doors that had been painted blood red. Figures had been chiseled from the marble door, representations of many gods, including the hawk-nosed lord of the dead, who once had been a man in Myrmeen's employ. Alden used both hands to manipulate the heavy knocker. Only when he had heard an invitation lost to the hearing of all the others did he move to the side of the door and throw a lever. The doors swung inward, revealing a spacious office that contained a gigantic four-poster bed, a wealth of statues, a small kitchen, and a desk, behind which sat a hulking, bald man who rose to greet his visitors with a disarming smile. The Harpers moved to enter the room and Alden's hand shot up.

  "Only her," the young man said. "She will be safe, I assure you."

  Myrmeen entered the chamber and heard the door swing shut behind her. Pieraccinni was not handsome, but his features were bold and strong. He wore a sleeveless teal frock, with an ornate belt made of gold and covered in rubies. Similarly designed bands graced his thick upper arms and wrists. The man was strongly built, but the muscles of his bare arms and partially revealed chest were not meticulously defined. He walked barefoot upon the floor, which was carpeted in a fine, eastern-style weave, and paused before the red silk curtains of his black marble four-poster bed. He wriggled his fingers at the curtains, and a slight, feminine giggle sounded. Myrmeen suddenly became aware of movement behind the silk and the hushed whisper of conversation.

  "Twins," Pieraccinni said proudly, "from the desert of Anauroch. Incredibly talented lovers and highly efficient assassins. Would you like me to bring them out for you?"

  "No," Myrmeen said. "I have other needs." Pieraccinni linked his hands behind his back and nodded with a forced compassion, his smile still in evidence. "I see," he said. "And what might they be?" "Information. On the Night Parade." The bald man's stride did not falter, nor did he seem surprised as he stopped before Myrmeen and crossed his arms over his chest. "I could give that to you, I suppose. Charge you some outrageous fee, so that you feel you've gotten your money's worth. They'll kill you, of course. I'll feel regret for at least a second or two, then go on to my next bit of business. Yes, I suppose I could do that, Mistress Lhal."

  Myrmeen tensed, worried that she had walked into another trap. Sensing her distress, Pieraccinni allowed his hands to fall to his sides, palms forward, in a gesture of acquiescence.

  "There is no harm to be found here," Pieraccinni said. "These hands and my heart contain no malice for you." "You must be mistaken-"

  He raised his hand, his features twisted in distaste. "Please. Don't insult my intelligence. You've been making inquiries in violent and extremely public ways. That gets people talking. I always listen when people talk. Not two months ago, your former husband, Dak, lay on that bed with an acquaintance of mine, a delightful young lady. Some wine, the pleasure of her rather athletic abilities, and he was ready to tell me everything of his plans to extort funds from you for the information concerning your lost child. He was a thoroughly unlik-able man. I hope you don't mind me saying as much."

  "That's fine," Myrmeen said. "Are you aware that Dak was killed in Arabel?"

  "Oh, yes," Pieraccinni said as he looked at her strong arms. "It takes great strength and terrible desire to sever a man's head with a single blow. You seem to possess both, in great abundance."

  "Win you help me find the Night Parade?" "There's no need," Pieraccinni said as he retreated to his desk, drawing Myrmeen deeper into the room as she moved to follow him. She glanced back at the bed and rested one leg on the edge of his desk so that she would not have her back turned to the women behind the curtains.

  "What do you mean?" she asked, suspicious.

  "I have something more valuable. Once I had learned that poor, foolish Dak had been married to you, I urged him to think about anything he knew about the fabled ruler of Arabel that could be used to blackmail her. Not that I would have, you understand, but I enjoy this type of thing. The entertainment value. You understand."

  "Go on."

  "I have found your daughter," he said as he scratched a set of numbers on a sheet of parchment, then slid the paper toward her. "That is my price for what I know."

  Myrmeen let out a deep, ragged breath as she thought about the figure. "You must know that I would not carry this kind of money with me."

  Pieraccinni shrugged. "After you have the girl, come back here and pay me what you can as a show of intent. I will be happy to take payment on the rest after you go home."

  Myrmeen thought about his offer. "How do I know you aren't lying?"

  "Well, you don't, of course. But I think you can see that I am a businessman. I see a need, I fulfill that need-for a price. Your needs are considerably more apparent than you seem to realize. That is why I ask for nothing up front and trust you to follow the terms of our agreement, provided this information proves to be of value."

  She cupped her face in her hands, thinking it over, then she locked her gaze with his. He did not flinch or look away. She would have to wager that he was telling the truth.

  "All right," she said. "Tell me how to find my daughter."

  Six

  Cyric's Hammer was one of the few significant landmarks in the vast Calim Desert. Djimon, the leader of the highly successful band of desert raiders known as the Black Scourge, knew them all. The towering spire of rock was a particular favorite of the short, powerfully built man. His unusual brown hair and soft blue eyes had marked him as a pariah in his own culture, a bastard child who had been abandoned because of impurity in his blood. He did not know his parents and so he did not know if the stigma he had suffered under had been warranted or not. What he did know, however, was that once he had reached adulthood, no man or god had been safe from his wrath.

  During the time of Arrival, Djimon had slain a man who claimed to be the human avatar of Malar, the Beastlord, the god of bloodlust. The man's random attacks along the trade route that Djimon had clearly staked as his private territory had made a challenge inevitable and the man's continued existence extremely bad for business. In truth, Djimon's nemesis was an insane, murderous wizard with delusions of grandeur. Nevertheless, Djimon had earned the name "Godslayer" among his people. His band of killers and thieves had gained a taste of even greater notoriety, for which they were grateful. Keeping his underlings happy had been the single most important aspect of his continued success in an enterprise where death was often the ultimate reward.

  Djimon turned at the sound of the familiar, piercing shriek that he had been forced to put up with for the past week, ever since his last excursion into the city. It was midafternoon, and he was sitting atop Cyric's Hammer, a dangerous perch that boasted only one safe path from its base to its wide, flat head. Rumors had it that a hundred men had died trying to find a nontreacherous route to the top. When they mere inches from achieving their desire, the stones would shift to dislodge all who were foolish enough to challenge the rock, sending them screaming to the sharp rocks at the base. The pillar had earned its name when a wandering sage pronounced the rock accursed by the god of misery and death.

  Djimon had shrugged off all rumors and had scaled the five-hundred-foot pillar without trouble, further adding to his near-mythical standing. He now looked to the horizon and saw the portents of what would be a terrible storm when it finally arrived. A tiny flicker that might have been lightning flashed in the heart of the deep gray clouds, a rare sight in the Calim Desert. He decided that he would give the buyers another half hour to appear, then he would give his men the order to abandon the Hammer. The storm troubled him. Last night he had dreamt of a storm that carried with it a collection of piercing, merciless eyes; there were eyes everywhere in his dream, and they were always in sets of three, groups of six eyes. What did they signify?

  The scream came again. "What?" he shouted impatiently.

  A voice that he instantly identified as belonging to Jurgon Rutsche, his tall, swarthy-skinned second-in-command, called, "She tried to leap off again. The child se
ems to think she can fly!"

  Djimon sighed. A part of him wished she had succeeded, though her death would have been difficult to explain to the buyers. There was no sense in trying to avoid his duties. The girl had lived, and so it was time for his daily speech. He screwed his most nefarious expression into place, spat twice, then gestured for his second-in-command to bring the girl to him.

  The child was young, just past the age where she would have experienced her first bleeding. She wore the traditional wrappings expected of a woman in their nomadic society, though she refused to keep her face covered. He stared into her devastating blue eyes, studying the unusual slivers of gold he found there. The child was a brunette with a trim, athletic build. Her cheekbones were high and strong, and her lips were full, a rich scarlet without augmentation. Jurgon Rutsche had pinned her arms behind her back and was shoving her in front of him with considerable effort. She had lost one sandal by trying to dig her heels into the unyielding stone and was now struggling like a creature possessed to free herself from Jurgon's hold. There were chains around her wrists and ankles, but they barely restrained her.

  The first thing out of her mouth that was not a high-pitched, eardrum-rattling scream, was a curse she had learned in Dji-mon's language, linking his parentage to goats, demons, and whores.

  He struck her with a backhanded blow that caused her head to whip around with a sharp crack. She looked back at him with a wicked, triumphant expression as she licked the blood from the corner of her mouth. "Now I'm damaged goods."

  Djimon forced himself to gain control of his emotions. A large, ugly bruise was already starting to form on the child's face where she had been struck. He moved in close so that she could smell his rancid breath.

  "Know this, child. If we had not found a buyer for you so quickly, I would have allowed my men to take you. They would not have stopped until they had drunk their heart's content of the pleasures your young body has to offer. Then I would have fed you to the vultures for the trouble you have caused."

  "Charmer." She spat and tried to kick him in the crotch. Only his sharp reflexes allowed him to move out of the way in time. He restrained himself and did not strike her again. His buyers had been promised a fourteen-year-old blue-eyed virgin in perfect condition, and, by Cyric's fiery hell, he was going to make good on that pledge. On the other hand, the degradation and shock of being brutally raped by a dozen or so of his men might serve to break her spirit and make her a more docile-and therefore more valuable-commodity.

  He was contemplating this issue when the girl began to scream, "Kill me! Kill me!" at the top of her lungs. The raider marveled at the girl's talent for widening his options. He leaned close and said, "Child, I warn you-" With a howl of delight she brought her knee up to the space between his legs. This time the short desert raider was not able to move out of the blow's path. He squealed as her knee connected, then he doubled over, his face inches from hers. She leaned in and bit at his exposed ear even as Jurgon yanked her away from his master. Djimon screamed even louder as the lower half of his ear was torn away. In alarm, Jurgon relaxed his grip on the child's arm, giving her the opportunity to slip from his hands and launch herself forward, toward the lip of the pillar's flat top. Her chains caught her legs and she tripped, spitting out the bloody chunk of flesh that she had bitten from Djimon's head. She did not allow the bonds to defeat her; the freedom of death was within her grasp, a mere ten feet away. Rolling with her fall, the girl used her momentum and twisted her body until she had covered the ten feet and was about to make one final turn, which would send her plunging to her death.

  She stopped and laughed at the men who were now running toward her. "My name is not 'child,' you ignorant spawn of whores. My name is Krystin!"

  With that, she rolled off the edge and somehow suppressed a scream as she plummeted through the air, the ground rapidly reaching up to meet her.

  At the lip of the flat, Djimon and Jurgon came to a halt, their chests heaving with exertion. Djimon held his savaged ear and issued a stream of curses.

  He stopped only when he heard the sound of laughter from the pillar's base. Kneeling, he looked over the thin, crumbling ledge to see Krystin suspended in midair, her flight impossibly arrested. For once, the child was speechless. She floated gently downward, toward a group of six people that included a tall, gaunt man who was pointing his hands at the girl and gesturing: Magic.

  Djimon ignored the pain long enough to issue yet another curse. His operations had proceeded without the opposition of mages for close to a year. The formerly stringent measures he had taken to protect himself against practitioners of the art had become lax, a seemingly unnecessary burden on himself and his people. He considered himself fortunate to realize his error in this manner. The party below had been shielded by a spell of invisibility, or some type of cloaking incantation that had allowed them to blend with the endless vista of sand as they approached. From Cyric's Hammer, he could see the main route between Calimport and Memnon in the distance. Even now his buyers appeared on the well-traveled road. He thought of the humiliation he would face for the rest of his life when the story got out of how a fourteen-year-old child had taken the legendary Godslayer's ear, and the thought was almost too horrible to accept.

  From the ground below, Djimon heard the group's youngest member, a man close to twenty years in age, howl, "Well, that solves the problem of how to get her down without having to engage all of these louts." The young man rested his hands on his thighs and shook his head in amazement.

  "They actually think this is over," Djimon said as he rose to his feet and barked a string of commands to his people. He could not control the future, but in that moment he swore that he would have his vengeance on the child and her rescuers.

  At the base of the pillar, Lucius Cardoc levitated the girl to the ground, then fell back, exhausted.

  "You've done well, mage," Burke said as he caught the man and helped to steady him. All the Harpers' faces were red and blistered despite the hoods they wore to protect their skin. Varina and Reisz still sat on their mounts, holding the reins of two other horses.

  "Would that all of our quests were completed with such ease," Reisz said darkly.

  "What's that supposed to mean?" Burke asked.

  "Nothing. I hope."

  Several feet away from the party, the girl they had rescued held up her chained hands. Myrmeen broke from the group and approached her tentatively. The sun was in Myrmeen's eyes and she was not able to get a decent look at the child until she was practically on top of her. For an instant she felt as if she were staring at a much younger reflection of herself: The child had her eyes.

  "If you're done gawking, could you break these chains?" Krystin asked impatiently. "We have to get out of here."

  Myrmeen smiled. The strange, deep-blue eyes with slivers of gold were not all the girl had inherited.

  "I'm serious. Djimon keeps guards down here," Krystin said urgently.

  "No more," Myrmeen replied, indicating with a slight nod the trio of bodies lying in the shadows near the pillar's base, where Djimon's route to the top began. She could not keep herself from staring at the girl in adulation, though she knew she must have appeared to be a dull-witted fool from her vacant expression and hesitancy. This was her daughter; it was actually her. Dak had told her the truth.

  "Damn," Krystin said as she slid one of the blades from Myrmeen's waist, then scurried to a rock, where she rested the chains and began to pound at the links with the weapon's hilt. They snapped quickly and she immediately went to work on the chains binding her feet.

  A warm, frothy euphoria filled Myrmeen's heart as she watched her daughter. The logical part of her mind told her that her actions were not those of an intelligent, calculating woman. She was giving Djimon a chance to react, and the operation was supposed to have been a quick, clean slash and grab: take out the opposition, steal the prize, get out as quickly as possible. But for some reason she was completely enchanted and unable to think of givin
g orders.

  Then she remembered her overconfident bearing at the bar in Calimport and the ambush she had blundered into behind the trading house. The memories were sobering.

  The group had stayed close to the pillar's base, underneath the overhanging lip, where the raiders would not be able to fire upon them with arrows or any other weapons they possessed. When they departed, Lucius would have to cast a deflecting wall at their backs until they were out of range of Djimon's archers. Fighting in an environment where any form of exertion could bring about heat sickness, vertigo, and exhaustion was not a desirable option.

  "Don't worry about your captors," Myrmeen said. "We severed their lines with arrows. Young Ord turned out to be an expert marksman. They're trapped up there, with no means of getting to the ground. I'm sure they have archers, but-"

  "It speaks," the girl said as she sprang to her haunches.

  "I'm Myrmeen. My name is Myrmeen-"

  "Fine, I'm Krystin. And, yes, Djimon has archers and a damn shade more than that. Let's get out of here!"

  "What do you mean, more than that? What-"

  "They have magical weapons, too!" she said as they both heard several cries of terror and rage from above. Suddenly a group of four men leapt from the edge of the flat, each holding one corner of a sleek black sheet that might have been a cloak. They fell quickly, but not with the speed that would have killed them. The Harpers were drawn from their mounts by the sight of the falling men.

  "A cloak of levitation," Lucius said as he watched the raiders drift slightly faster to the ground. Ord broke out his bow, nocked an arrow, and loosed a shaft at one of the four men, who squealed as the arrow narrowly missed his face. His surprise caused him to let go of the cloak's edge, and he fell another hundred feet to his death.

  Ord nocked a second arrow and fired again. The raiders' descent had been slowed by the loss of the fourth man's weight. This time the teenager was able to strike one of the men dead center in the chest. One of the two remaining fighters reached and grabbed the dead man's hand, catching him before he plummeted and caused their descent to slow even further. Ord was preparing a third arrow when he saw that the raiders, who were now only twenty feet from the ground, had decided to take their chances with a free-fall. They released the cloak and fell to the ground in heaps, rolling and groaning at the impact. Myrmeen was certain she had heard the snap of bones. Neither survivor attempted to get up.