He wore gray trousers, a blue shirt, and over his shoulders was slung a short bright green cape, heavily embellished with gold lace. This was smart evening wear in Hamal. Among the folk of Vallia he looked highly foreign and exotic.
Also, I noticed he wore a rapier and main gauche.
A great deal of the rigorous security maintained by my guards had been relaxed in recent seasons, and they now allowed people they didn’t know to wear weapons in my presence, although they were still mighty jumpy about it, by Krun.
The Vallians here wore evening attire. Now your normal Vallian will wear soothing pastel colors in the evening, gowns most comfortable to lounge about in. This was a pre-nuptial party and the folk wore startling colors. This was all part of the fun and freedom of the occasion, of course. My Delia astounded me, at least, by wearing a brilliant scarlet robe, smothered in gold. This was a far cry from her usual laypom or lavender gown. Milsi’s gown was a virulent orange. She and Delia had struck up a firm friendship, thank Zair, and Milsi was happy to be guided by the empress in matters of dress and protocol in this new land.
Yet, inevitably, there were very very few blue robes among that throng. Green, yes, Vallians have no objection to green. So, sizing up this Strom Nango, I guessed Marion had tactfully suggested he wear a differently colored shirt, and he’d simply smiled and said that he usually wore a blue one because it suited him.
After a few more words the strom was hauled off to meet other folk and Delia could corner me. We stood by a linen-draped table loaded with comestibles.
“Well? What happened?”
“Nothing. Seg and I just got things started and then left.”
“I have not mentioned it here. Milsi and I thought it best. No need to spoil the party.”
“Quite right.”
“And your impressions of this Hamalese strom?”
“A tough character. Hidden depths. He’s a pal of Nedfar’s now, it seems, although he fought against us in the war.”
Delia wrinkled up her nose. She knows full well how dangerous a thing for her to do in public that is. I managed to control myself.
“We beat the Hamalese in fair fight, the war is over, and now we’re friends. You put Prince Nedfar on the throne of Hamal and made him emperor. And his son Tyfar and our daughter Lela are—”
“Zair knows where.”
“So Marion presumably knows what she is doing.”
I gave Delia a look I hoped was shrewd. “She is not a Sister of the Rose.”
“Of the Sword.”
“Ah.”
“And we cannot stand talking together like this at Marion’s party for her husband-to-be. It is not seemly. There is old Nath Twinglor who promised me a three-hundred-season-old copy of “The Canticles of the Nine Golden Heavens” and if his price is right I shall forgo a great deal of other fripperies. Now do you go and try to be pleasant to Sushi Vannerlan who is all by herself over there.”
“Oh, no—” I began.
Very seriously, Delia said, “Sushi’s husband, Ortyg, was recently killed. He fell in a battle Drak only narrowly won. It would be seemly.”
Our eldest son Drak was still hammering away down there in the southwest of Vallia trying to regain the losses we had sustained when that rast of a fellow, Vodun Alloran, who had been the Kov of Kaldi, treacherously turned against us and proclaimed himself king of Southwest Vallia. As I walked slowly across to speak to Sushi Vannerlan, with the noise of the party in my ears and the scents of good food and wine coiling invitingly in the air, I reflected that I was not at all ashamed that I had not known Jiktar Ortyg Vannerlan had been slain in battle.
I’d been away in Pandahem until recently and was still in process of catching up with all that had gone on during my enforced absence.
Sushi was a slightly built woman, vivid and dark, and she’d painted on redness in lips and cheeks. Her eyes sparkled indicating the drops nestling there. Her dress was a shining carmine. Her hair fluffed a little, but it was threaded with gold and pearls. I feel I spoke the few necessary words with dignity and sincerity. Ortyg, her husband, had been a damned fine cavalry commander and I was sorry for all our sakes he was gone.
“Sushi!”
The voice, heavy and most masculine, sounded over my shoulder. Sushi jumped and genuine color flushed into her cheeks making the paint appear flaked and gaudy. She looked past me.
“Ortyg! Shush — this is the—”
“No matter who it is, they shall not steal you away from me!”
At the sound of the name Ortyg I felt for a moment, and I own it! that her husband had returned from the dead. Somehow this night with its mists and shifting moonlight had created an uneasy feeling in me. The swiftness and lethality of that shaggy beast seemed out of the world. And now Sushi was calling to her dead husband...
I turned sharply.
The man was like his voice, heavy and masculine. He wore the undress uniform of a cavalry regiment; he was a Hikdar, with two bobs, a bristly moustache, hard dark eyes, and a mouth full and ripe. His smile was a marvel.
“Ortyg! Please—”
“Now now, Sushi! I know I am late; but there had been a furor in the city and I was almost called out.” He was not looking at me. “But my Jiktar let me off, may Vox shine his boots and spurs for evermore!”
As he spoke he advanced, still looking at Sushi, and made to pass me. I stood back. I was highly amused. Also, this tearaway cavalryman was doing all the right things for Sushi she needed and that I, despite being the emperor, could not do.
He put his left arm about her waist and then swung about, holding her, to face me. He was flushed and triumphant.
“I claim Sushi, my lad, and don’t you forget it!”
Now I was wearing a rather stupid evening lounging robe of the self-same brilliant scarlet as that worn by Delia. This was her idea. So I looked a popinjay beside this cavalryman in his trim undress. The two bobs on his chest testified to two acts of gallantry in battle.
He saw me.
He didn’t know who I was, that was clear, yet my face, despite that I was making heroic attempts to smile, caused him to flinch back.
“By Vox! Sushi — who—”
“I’m trying to tell you, you great fambly! Stand to attention, my dear.” She looked at me, and she picked up her voice and it did not quiver, as she said:
“Majister, allow me to present to you Ortyg Voman, Hikdar in the Fifteenth Lancers. Ortyg, you stand in the presence of your emperor.”
“Ouch!” said Hikdar Ortyg Voman, of the Fifteenth Lancers.
And I laughed.
Then I stuck out my hand. “Shake hands, Hikdar Ortyg. I know of the Fifteenth. Mind you take care of Sushi.”
“Quidang, majister!”
Leaving these two to their cooing and billing I went off to see about a refill. The party really was a splendid affair. Marion, who was a stromni, had spared no expense. There must have been four or five hundred people circulating through the halls and galleries of her villa. Wine flowed in vast lakes and winefalls. Food weighed down the tables. Orchestras positioned at strategic points warbled tunes into the heated air without clashing one with the other.
Now Marion, the Stromni Marion Frastel of Huvadu, had quite clearly in my eyes not been able to pay for all this luxury herself. In these latter days Vondium and Vallia, it is true, had recovered considerably from the pitiless wars that had ravaged the country. We could throw a good shindig when we had to. But Marion’s stromnate of Huvadu lay right up in the north, north of Hawkwa country in the northeast. It was barely south of Evir, the most northerly province of Vallia. All the land up there above the Mountains of the North was lost to we Vallians and was now ruled by some upstart calling himself the King of North Vallia. He raided constantly down into Hawkwa country, and we maintained a strong army up there to resist his encroaches.
This meant Marion’s estates were lost to her, and therefore her wealth. It seemed to me that the Hamalese, Strom Nango, must have paid for this night’s entertainme
nt.
His stromnate, I gathered from Delia, lay in the Black Hills of Hamal, the most powerful empire in the continent of Havilfar south of the equator. He must either be wealthy himself or be spending lavishly now with an eye to the future. Marion’s husband the late strom had only just inherited himself through a collateral relative. If Nango eventually lived up in Huvadu once we had regained the stromnate he’d find it damned cold after the warmth of Hamal.
If Marion decided to go to live in Hamal then she’d cope with the heat. She was a fine woman, not too tall, and full of figure, a strong and forceful personality who did not take kindly to fools. She had a way with her that could at times be misconstrued and sometimes turned people unable to see her good points against her. I wished her and this Nango well, and strolled off to catch a breath of air.
People nodded and smiled as I passed; but I did not stop to talk. A group of girls, laughing and clearly playing pranks on one another, rushed past. I raised my glass to them and they all replied most handsomely. They were all Jikai Vuvushis, I knew, Sisters of the Sword, most probably, in Marion’s regiment. They fled off, shrieking with laughter, as far as one could imagine from the tough fighting women they were on the field of battle.
Out under a portico where the fuzzy pink light of the Maiden with the Many Smiles fell athwart the paving stones I spotted the serene face of Thantar the Harper. He was blind. He was not blind in the way that many a harpist was blinded on our Earth but as the result of an accident in youth. He wore a long yellow robe, and his acolyte walked a few paces astern carrying the harp. He would delight us later on in the evening with his songs and stories. He grasped a staff in his right hand and his left rested on the fair hair of a boy child who led him and was his eyes.
“Lahal, Thantar.”
“Lahal, majister.”
He knew my voice, then.
“I am most pleased to know you are here. You have a new song for us among all the old favorites?”
“As many as you please, majister.” His voice rang like a gong, full and round. A splendid fellow, Thantar the Harper, renowned in Vondium.
A hubbub started beyond the edge of the terrace where the Moonblooms opened to the pink radiance and gave of their heady perfume. I looked across.
A group of roisterers with their backs turned to me staggered away to the sides. Their yells turned to screams. A man stepped through the gap between them, walking in from the terraced garden beyond. He carried a young lad in his arms.
The hard, tough, experienced face of Jiktar Nath Corvuus was crumpled in with grief and rage. No tears trickled down his leathery cheeks; but the brightness of his eyes, the flare of his nostrils, his ferociously protective attitude, told that he suffered.
In his arms he carried one of his young lads, the brilliant crimson and yellow uniform hideously bedraggled in blood and mud. The boy’s helmet was lost and his brown hair shone in the lanternlight, swaying as Nath brought him in.
“Look!” choked out Nath Corvuus.
The boy’s throat was a single red mass, a glistening bubble of horror.
Chapter two
The Ganchark of Therminsax
We searched. Oh, yes, we searched.
Marion’s villa yielded weapons enough to give us some confidence we might meet and face up to a gigantic beast. We shone lanternlight into the shrubberies and arcades, we thrashed the bushes. We shouted and banged kettles and pans.
We found not a sign of that feral horror.
The Watch of this precinct carried on the search farther into the streets and alleys. Seg and I felt firmly convinced the beast must be lurking low, sated by now on a victim he seized and killed without being disturbed.
“I don’t want the whole city sent into a panic,” I said to the prefect, who attended me at Marion’s villa.
“Quite so, majister. We will prosecute the search with the utmost diligence; but I think we shall find nothing until the beast strikes again.”
The prefect was a Pachak, Joldo Nat-Su, who had only two arms. He had been long employed by Naghan Vanki, the emperor’s chief spymaster, and had lost his lower left in some fracas or other. Giving the post of city prefect in charge of the Watch to a man of Naghan Vanki’s had seemed at the time sensible. He ran a tidy force and carried the honorary rank of Chuktar.
“I think you are right, Joldo, bad cess to it. Sink me!” I burst out. “We cannot have wild animals roaming the streets of Vondium! It is not to be borne!”
“If we are ready when it is seen,” said Delia in her soothing and practical voice, “then we can catch it and cage it up again.”
“Ah,” said Prefect Joldo. “You say again, majestrix. So far my men have found no one who owns to having lost a caged animal.”
“Too scared what’ll happen to ’em,” said Seg.
He held Milsi close and I fancied that no man or woman would willingly let their spouse out of their sight until this wild beast was safely caged — or killed.
Marion’s party had incontinently wound up. Most of the guests had departed. There were just a few of us left, gathered in a small withdrawing room to talk over the events of the night.
Strom Nango kept to himself and made no effort to push forward or impose his views, and this pleased us. Everyone, including himself, realized he was on approval.
The Lord Farris leaned forward in his chair and said: “I’ll put every soldier we have at your disposal, Joldo. I agree with the emperor. We cannot allow this kind of happening in the city.”
Farris, the Kov of Vomansoir, was the emperor’s justicar-crebent, or crebent-justicar; I could never worry over which way around the title went. He ran Vallia when Drak and I were away. He was a man with an intense loyalty to Delia, a man I trusted, the kind of man Vallia sorely needed.
The conversation became general then as we talked the thing inside out.
And, then, Thantar the Harper struck a chord and we all fell silent.
He sat sideways on his chair so that a samphron oil lamp’s glow brought out the hollows of his blind eyes. His harp was quite small, resting between his knees, cunningly fashioned and probably two or three hundred years old. He used it to emphasize what he said, underlining the starker passages with grim chords, using ripples of sound to highlight a passage of action or love.
“You will delight us, Thantar?” said Delia. “We are in your debt that you accepted Stromni Marion’s invitation. She is, I think, to be congratulated as well.”
Marion looked pleased at this little piece of Delia’s tomfoolery; but Delia was deadly serious about Thantar. Great artists are not bidden to perform in the politer courts of Kregen, whatever they get up to in the barbarian lands.
Thantar just said: “It is your presence, majestrix, that does us all the honor.”
Well, so it was fulsome; he was dead right, too, by Vox!
In the rich and golden voice that appeared so incongruous issuing from so gaunt and desiccated a frame, Thantar began the story of The Ganchark of Therminsax.
Therminsax was the capital city of the Imperial province of Thermin, to the west of Hawkwa Country. From there a fine canal system extended southward. I recalled the iceboats that flew down from the Mountains of the North. Rough country around there, in places, and rich lands, too. With all the other romantic connections associated with Therminsax, I confess my own most important thought about the city was that it witnessed the creation of the Phalanx, the core of the army which had done so much to reunite and pacify Vallia.
Of course, by Zair, there was still a great deal to do. But then, that is the way of life...
No one spoke as the blind harpist delivered his lines.
The story was of the olden time; but not too long ago, when savage beasts still roamed wild and free in many of the provinces of Vallia. The chark was one such wild animal, untamed, ferocious, cunning, pitiless in a special way that set it apart from your usual run of creatures of the wild. The charks normally hunted in packs and men said they possessed a primitive lang
uage of their own. Sometimes a single chark, either female or male, would go rogue, go lonely, wander off as a solitary. These became a menace to the surrounding territory. They were not to be classed, I understood as Thantar spoke on, with the man-eating tigers of India on our own Earth which are too old and slow to catch much other game than humans.
These solitary charks were among the most powerful of the packs.
As he described the beast in glowing words, the Kregish rolling and fierce, subtle and cunningly hinting, I saw in my mind’s eye a picture of the beast I had seen on the towpath. That had been a chark. I felt sure of it.
Charks, said Thantar, were considered to be extinct. None had been reliably reported in Vallia for many years, although some men boasted they had seen the gray shaggy forms slinking through the back hills of Hawkwa country.
Then a rash of bloodthirsty killings set all Therminsax on edge. No one was safe. A mother taking her child to school wearing her best dress was set on and slain. Blood splashed the pretty dress, and the hunters followed the trail until they came upon the grisly remains. Men out in the woods burning charcoal were ripped to shreds. The city itself was not safe, for the great beast seemed able to steal in as and when he pleased, to take a life in blood-welling horror.
Traps were set. All were unsuccessful.
Listening intently, I admired the masterful way in which Thantar included blood and death and horror in describing each incident, and yet did not overburden his narrative with so much blood and death and horror as to offend the susceptibilities of the ordinary person. Only the ghoulish and perverted would complain at the lack. Only the sadist would demand more agony.
A change overtook the story. Now Thantar spoke with hindsight, telling us things that were afterwards discovered and deduced, facts unknown at the time of the events.
Even with all the hindsight, the wise men had been unable to tell how the young man, Rodo Thangkar, had first become a werewolf.
He had been a happy, carefree young fellow, training to be a stylor, reasonably well-connected. He had hoped to marry his childhood sweetheart, Losha of the Curled Braids. She was one of the earliest victims of the terror, her face slashed to ribbons, her throat torn out by the fangs of the werewolf.
Werewolves of Kregen Page 2