Burdens of the Dead

by Mercedes Lackey

  “Well, you could tell me what you were reading,” said Marco, slightly refreshed rather than affronted by his behavior.

  “Ah. You do not seek a love philter? That’s a change.”

  Marco blushed. The thought of help with fertility was never that far from his mind these days. But he hadn’t come for that reason…precisely. Though since it was never far from his thoughts, it certainly was possible that somewhere in the back of those thoughts…

  Marco might be taken with the lack of formality and respect, but his escort loitering just outside on the stairs felt differently about the matter. The escort coughed.

  “That’s no real cough,” said the man in the chair. “Go away and come back when you are really sick.”

  “I think it’s a warning sign, not a sickness in itself,” grated the gondolier who had brought Marco here. “The city of Venice expects more respect for its favorite son. I suggest you get up and bow and show some respect to M’Lord Valdosta, before I toss you into the canal. And think yourself lucky if I just do that, pizza da merda. If I walk off and tell people about it, they’ll treat you to drinking the canal dry.”

  The tall, slightly pot-bellied man stood up. He wore a well-worn sword, and didn’t look overly worried, but he bowed. “My mistake. I am new to Venice. What can I do for you M’Lord?” Like his rooms, his clothing showed shabby gentility. Perhaps he was more interested in paying for books than cloth.

  “I apologize for disturbing you,” said Marco, both embarrassed and amused. The sword— Marco was of Ferrara blood, after all, and steel-knowledge was in his blood—was plain but of good quality. It did not match with the persona of a normal charlatan at all. An out-of-work mercenary—an officer perhaps?

  “Not at all, M’lord. Alkindus can wait.” He carefully put a marker in the book.

  Marco grimaced. “It’s been waiting long enough for me. But…are you reading it in the original?”

  “Not the original, no. I’m not made of money. A copy merely. But in Arabic. Not as full of errors as the translations.”

  Marco was impressed. “You’re a scholar sir! I must introduce you to Dottore Felice at the Accademia.”

  But the man shook his head. “I wouldn’t. I’d tell him he was a fat useless self-opinionated fraud. I’ve little time for the likes of him. You can’t learn a language just from books, any more than you can learn medicine just from them.”

  That was a sentiment Marco found himself in perfect agreement with. “So…you are a physician then, and a scholar?”

  The man shrugged. “I’m someone who reads a bit, and seen a great deal. I make no claim on being physician or a chirurgeon. I’ve done both as well as I can, when there was a need.”

  “Oh. I thought you’d set yourself up as a doctor. It appears you’ve been treating people and charging them a fee.”

  “I learned along with the smattering of medicine I have picked up, that most people regard advice as worth what it cost them. Besides, it helps to pay for the beer. People see the books and jump to conclusions. They assume either I’m a magician or doctor, and doctoring is something I have more experience of, and is safer to be taken for. I give them good advice, charge them for it, they don’t like it and then they leave me alone.”

  “Doesn’t that make paying for the beer difficult?”Marco was thoroughly amused by now, and also very curious.

  “It does. But by then I have picked up a few other jobs, teaching usually. And love philters sell at quite amazing prices and with great frequency. Ones that help for the smell of the breath even work sometimes. Now, M’lord, what can I do for you? What brings you here to my humble abode?”

  “Curiosity,” said Marco, not entirely believing him. The man plainly knew more about medicine than many an academic, simply by his choice of reading matter. He was probably a sell-sword, and a good one, by his attitude…but there was still the matter of the books. Caesar had been able to read, but had not done so by choice, and had certainly never chosen to read medical texts.

  If this man was in fact doing so. He might be pretending in order to impress people. Marco remembered the opening paragraphs of the book well enough. “I have a translation of the book. How does it start in your version?” There, that was enough to tell him if the man had actually read the book, without sounding as if Marco was setting a test.

  The man took a pull of his beer and intoned solemnly in a foreign tongue, and then in Frankish repeated the gist of the opening Marco recalled. He did it all without referring to the book, so his reading skills may have been unproven, but his knowledge was not. “I have read it too often,” he said. “He’s wrong about a lot of things, but I think he’s right about precise quantities. After all, you use precise quantities of black powder for cannon. Too much will kill the cannoneer and too little won’t throw a cannon-ball.”

  That was true too, but it was not the simile most non-military people might have chosen. He’d been a soldier, of that Marco was certain. So what was he really doing in Venice? And how was it that he read Arabic, and medical books? He could claim otherwise, but he was a healer and cared about healing, Marco suspected. There was a little hint of irritation when he talked about people ignoring his advice. And yet…that black magic had come into Venice recently. Were black magic and healing even remotely compatible? Would a healer ever be desperate enough to use black magic? Best to keep an eye on this odd stranger, and if it was him, well, best to have the Lion close. “So as you say that you teach, perhaps you would consider teaching me enough of the language to be able to read those?” asked Marco.

  The fellow pulled a face. “I could teach you enough to start reading in Arabic. But it’ll cost you enough to keep me in beer for a while. And it’d be years before you can read the language well enough for Alkindus. I’m not staying years, milord.”

  He was at least honest, it seemed. And less evasive than Dottore Felice had been when Marco had suggested learning Arabic. “Is it worth making a start?” asked Marco

  The man grinned. “To me it is. To you M’lord, it depends on what you make of it.”

  The idea intrigued Marco, and it would enable him to watch this fellow. He wasn’t sure where the extra time would come from, but it would have to be found. Besides, this was Venice, where even the slightest knowledge of another language generally had its uses.

  Chapter 9

  Trebizond

  In Trebizond, the loading proceeded furiously. Sweating lines of porters carried tarpaulin wrapped bales from the warehouses, up the gangplanks into the round-ships. The pace of loading and trade was frenetic. So was the intrigue.

  The Podesta, Michael Magheretti, realized quite soon that the Baitini were out to wreak havoc. Unfortunately for them, the story about them trying to poison the cistern of the Hypatian siblings had spread all over the city. The dead bodies on the steep stair outside their cloister, having fallen from the roof, and the gaff and the purpose it had been needed for, got talked about, and tied together. The assassins were feared, and used that fear to intimidate. They were discovering that intimidation only works when the victims believe that silence and co-operation will help them to survive. When that is not true— when you started poisoning water-supplies that would just kill everyone—that does indeed produce fear, but no co-operation, not even tacit co-operation.

  It didn’t help them at all that they’d attacked Hypatians. The siblings were known as gentle and tolerant near-pacifists, yet it was the Baitini who had died, not them. As he knew, the siblings were loved by the poor and the women…and, it seemed, by anyone who had come to them for healing and help. Resentment was growing by the day, by the hour, and the dead assassins were widely regarded as having been struck down by a miracle.

  Surely, given that the Baitini had been the ones that had fallen, even their own fierce God could not be smiling on them? Had they gone too far?

  The Baitini responded with characteristic violence, which had worked in the past. But what they had not realized was that in the past peop
le had assumed that there was some logic behind their killing, and that something could be done to mollify the killers. Now people were swiftly revising their estimations and that, too, was making them angry. When you can appease something, you are inclined to do so. But when something is clearly operating from a position of intractable insanity—

  “They’ve become mad dogs,” Michael Magheretti said grimly. He sat, cross-legged, on cushions in the private audience chamber with the sultan of Trebizond and two of his advisers, sipping a spicy licorice tea. Or pretending to, rather. He really did not like the stuff and wondered if he could contrive to spill it.

  “Maybe we fail to discern their reason,” the plump sultan said. He had done considerable business with the Baitini before. Commerce had governed those transactions.

  “Garrgh!” The more elderly of the two courtiers courtier, who had slurped noisily at his small cup moments before, clutched at his throat. Then, fell forward struggling for breath, his lips turning blue and his hands clawing spasmodically.

  The sultan gaped. His bodyguards, lounging in the doorway and around the walls, rushed forward and surrounded him. The podesta’s guard did the same—tried to, rather. With only just two of them, it was more of a challenge.

  A servant went running for a physician, as two others tried to help the dying man. But it was too late. By the time the doctor arrived, the old adviser was dead. A search of his body and clothing turned up a scrap of parchment someone had stuffed in a pocket. The scrap carried the mark of the Baitini. It was the assassin cult’s custom to mark their work thus.

  Magheretti looked up from the paper into the stricken eyes of the sultan. “I think, most exalted one,” he said carefully, “That this is your answer. Things have gone quite beyond reason.”

  The assassins had intended to show the powers that ruled Trebizond that no-one was beyond their reach. They had planned to set power against power, killing the Venetian in the sultan’s palace. The wise assassin chooses his target and his place of attack very carefully. Only this time they’d killed the wrong man, in the wrong place.

  The sultan of Trebizond was known as mild man, better at intrigue and politics than acts of violence. His major weakness was a love of falconry. His eyes now were as wide and wild as one of his birds, hunting, and it looked as if violence was a sure option. “Send a message to the Baitini,” he said through clenched teeth. “That I want the ones who did this, and I want the one that gave the order and I want the people who paid for it. And I want them alive before tomorrow dawns. They’ll answer to me under my torturers. They have killed the master of my hawks, and I will see the killers and their payers suffer for it.”

  “They will try to blame it on us,” said Michael, his voice shaky. Thank Heaven he hadn’t liked the tea! The poison had been so toxic—too toxic, really; the Baitini had overstepped themselves there too—that it had almost instantly slain the first of their party to drink it. “But I think that poison was aimed at me. They have gone mad. We need to get rid of them. Smoke them out.”

  “I think,” said the sultan, grimly, “that this time they have gone their length.”

  * * *

  The Master of the Blade sat with the Master of Poisons and the Master of the Garotte, in audience with the Master of the Hidden Hand, the new commander of the Trebizond chapter. They were far from the winds of Alamut and the scented halls of Damascus here. This had always been a busy post, but not a particularly religious one. Yes, the work was holy…but they had all known that money changed hands.

  The new Master sent from the Supreme Master in Damascus did not seem to grasp the realities of the situation here. “We are treading on dangerous ground here, master. We…”

  “We have orders from a higher authority,” interrupted the Master of the Hidden Hand, his voice austere.

  “You don’t understand, Master. We could order some of the lesser Hands to confess, suitably drugged. The sultan…”

  “Is a man. His time has passed. It is our time now.” The Master of the Hidden Hand of God with absolute conviction. “We have orders, divine orders, to halt the sailing of the unbelievers fleet until the normal day. If we have to kill all of them, it will be done. And we will make examples of those who try to go against the order. Do you dare to question that, or our Master’s will?”

  They did not, of course. But there were barely a hundred and thirty of them in the city. And they had lived and acted with impunity for many years. The local officials and soldiery feared them. Someone would always attempt to curry favor by giving the Baitini word of any move against them.

  They were not prepared for the sultan’s Mongol mercenaries, his personal bodyguard who were not in the least afraid of the wrath of Alamut. Three full companies of the mercenaries smashed through the doors of the house used by the Master of Blade and several of the hands an hour later. The fighting that ensured was savage. Yashmad, one of the hands, escaped in the melee. Later, bloody, angry and afraid he reported to his Master, the Garrote. “Mamud and Ishmael are dead, I think. Malkis is still alive. They beat him insensible. They were dragging Amad. I don’t know if he was alive.”

  The Master of the Garrote called one of his senior hands. “Send word to the palace. They are to release our people on pain of our…displeasure.”

  The man came back a little later, looking shaken. “Sheik Marawass has been taken to the torture chambers. Emblin has fled. The sultan is offering five hundred in gold for him alive and a hundred for his head. We’d better leave here, Master. Marawass knows too much.”

  Something hit the outer door with a thunderous crash. The Master of Garrotte and the senior Hand wasted no time, but fled out the back and over the roof. Someone in the street shouted to the soldiers—something neither would have thought they’d dare to do a few weeks ago. “Tonight we go killing. Them and those Venetian unbelievers,” panted the Master, angrily.

  But first, they fled for their lives, knowing that the utter hold of fear they had enjoyed for so long was broken.

  * * *

  Michael Magheretti, podesta to the Venetian quarter of the city of Trebizond, tried to exercise both sympathy and patience. He had not previously been aware of just how many Venetian citizens had made their way to this far outpost of the commercial empire of Venice, only to find that the streets were not paved with gold. They’d found instead that it was easy to acquire a family and to live barely within their means.

  “Please, your honor. You must help us,” said the fifth supplicant for the day. “I have to get them out of here. They’re all I have and I can’t afford the prices the captains of the ships are asking, let alone the bribes.”

  “Bribes?” asked Michael. This was the first he’d heard of bribes.

  “Yes. To get on the list. There’s no space for everyone. So you have to pay to get on the list before they’ll take your money as a passenger. And the price keeps going up.”

  Once—not long ago—Michael would have leapt to his feet and said: ‘I’ll put a stop to that.’ But now he merely steepled his fingers and said: “I see. Who collects these payments?” he asked, his voice disinterested.

  “Balbi. The boatswain from the Pride of Chiogga,” said the man, before realizing that he might have said too much. “I mean, I have heard he might be…”

  Michael nodded wisely. “You can’t believe all you hear.”

  A little later he scheduled a series of meetings with various captains of the Eastern Fleet. And a boatswain. And the admiral of the Eastern Fleet.

  There was considerable explaining. Also a boatswain who would be lucky if he did not hang. But it did little to counter the fact that three Venetian-quarter people had died the night before, and one had been a babe in arms. The ships were going to be full, not of their usual cargo of rare spices and delicate silks, but of people and a lot of the money they’d need to sustain themselves back in safer places.

  Chapter 10

  Constantinople

  Hekate was, now and again, aware of the reach o
f Chernobog. After all, the people who lived along the northern fringe of what was now the Black Sea were the also descendants of the few survivors of the cataclysm when the gate had failed. Their blood had been diluted by many new immigrants and invaders, of course, in the long years since, which made the contact faint and far. Even the women no longer worshiped her, and that, too, diluted the sense of that dark power. Still. It was a shadow on her already shadowed world, and from time to time—like now—it troubled her.

  She lifted the old bone harpoon, and felt its weight—far more than it should have been—in her hands. Not as heavy as it had been in days gone past but…heavy. There was still virtue in it, still some power, even if she had not been able to stop the Earth-Shaker, his tritons and their terrible conches with it.

  Oh, she had punished them. They had suffered for her wrath and desperate anger, but she had not been able to stop them, and still the sea had poured in through the tear Poseidon had opened in her gate, flooding and destroying the fertile plains around the great lake that had once nurtured so many…so many.

  It was lost and gone, both her people and her love. And why should she do anything to aid these, these thinned-blooded creatures who had deserted her?

  Only the dogs remained, ever faithful. She lowered her harpoon, and Hekate turned back to the broken gate. Night had come. This was her time, and she walked the shadow-paths between spirit and mortal, seeing both, heeding neither. She walked through the streets of the city that those survivors had build on the edge of the chasm the Earth-Shaker had made, that the sea had torn deeper and wider, and, because of what she was, gates and walls and locked doors did not stop her. The city was still busy with the normal traffic of the night—whores, drunks, thieves and murderers. Hekate ignored them as if she did not see them, just as they did not see her or her dogs, because she willed it so.