by David Duncan
Wallie's pulse was pounding, and his mouth was dry. The lobster pots passed below him, and he got his first clear glimpse of the captive. Katanji looked shaken and pale and very small. He was keeping his eyes down to avoid looking at Sapphire, but his face was bruised and bleeding. The sorcerers had obviously done some preliminary questioning.
Bastards!
"Up!" Wallie roared. "Sorcerers! I am sent of the Goddess!"
He stepped forward to the top of the plank so that they could have a clear view of his blue kilt. He raised his sword.
The sorcerers' eyes swung toward the shout. They saw a Seventh and a group of men with swords and they reacted instinctively, pulling their weapons from their sleeves. Seeing battle impending, bystanders and pedestrians screamed and started to run.
Wallie yelled, "Charge!" and hurled himself flat on his face.
Roar!―a very loud and jagged explosion. He felt the ingots beside him shudder. Splinters of wood flew across the deck. He grabbed the foil with the basket and thrust it up over the rail to draw any more thunderbolts, but nothing happened to it. He scrambled to his feet and he did not die.
Chaos he had predicted, but not this. The amount of smoke from the primitive black powder was astonishing; the air was thick with it and full of terrified screams from people and horses. Especially horses, plunging horses, churning the crowd. The lobster pots were a lightweight load and that wagon had bolted straight left, into the beer wagon, and barrels were cascading down. The basket wagon came charging to the right, into the sorcerers, scattered them, plowed over the sailcloth, and toppled onto its side. Baskets bounded into the roadway among the barrels and milling civilians.
He was halfway down the gangplank when he saw Nnanji impale his first sorcerer. But where was Katanji? Then he caught a glimpse of red through the smoke, as the big Fifth disappeared around the beer wagon and headed toward the town. Wallie left the battle to his army and gave chase.
Now the barrels and baskets were a hindrance instead of a helpful distraction. He dodged and sidestepped and cursed until he was past the worst of it and had a clearer view. The Fifth, with his prisoner over one shoulder, was in the middle of a panic-stricken crowd streaming toward the town through a maze of goods and wagons and skittish horses. Wallie threw people out of the way as he ran, but the big man was a powerful runner, also, even with his burden, and it took long minutes to catch him... almost to the end of the dock. Then Wallie came up behind him and thrust his sword between the man's legs.
The sorcerer fell headlong on top of Katanji, rolled over, and started to pull something from a pocket. Wallie was briefly conscious of a hate-filled face glaring up at him. He kicked. The first sorcerer Wallie had met was out of the battle then. Maimed perhaps, but probably not dead, so the swordsman had kept the promise he had made in Aus.
Katanji sat up shakily, looking dazed, saw Wallie, exclaimed, "Oh, Lord Shonsu!" and burst into tears.
Wallie glanced at the crowd ahead and saw cowls fighting their way toward him. He was almost into the reinforcements coming from the tower. He sheathed his sword, threw Katanji over his shoulder, and began to run.
The dock had emptied of people, and now he needed them for cover. He pounded down the roadway as hard as he could go, with his scalp prickling, waiting for more thunderbolts. He started to veer from side to side, even when there was clear space ahead, and he heard Katanji groan at the shaking he was getting. He saw Sapphire's blue hull still a long way ahead along that cluttered avenue between the wagons and the heaps, an avenue walled by the sides of ships, arched over by the webbing of masts and rope and yards. It seemed to stretch forever.
There was shouting close behind him, very close. Then something kicked him in the back with the strength of elephants and proclamations of thunder. He was hurled forward and for the second time the unfortunate Katanji acted as landing pad for a large man.
* * *
All the breath went out of Wallie, and the impact rattled his bones from his feet to his teeth. Half stunned, he could only lie and gasp like a landed fish.
Then his arms were grabbed and pulled behind him and something cold went round his wrists with a click.
"A Seventh!" said a jubilant voice. A foot crashed into Wallie's ribs. "Up, swordsman!"
He gasped and was kicked again. He was dragged to his feet, reeling and dazed. Every rasping breath was an agony. There were sorcerers of various colors alt around, even a green.
"A swordsman of the Seventh!" the Sixth exclaimed, and then laughed. He smiled up at Wallie. "You are a welcome guest, my lord! We shall have much entertainment from you."
Damned handcuffs! Manacles! He swayed and looked to see Katanji being hauled to his feet, also, although he seemed barely conscious and his sling was soaked with blood. "Let the boy go!" Wallie said.
"Hors d'oeuvre," the Sixth said, a smallish, wrinkled face peering out of a green cowl. "You can watch him go first. Shonsu, of course? You are hard to kill, swordsman! But this time we shall make sure. There will be no haste."
Then he frowned and turned to stare toward the River, and Wallie became vaguely conscious of a rumbling noise.
He struggled to focus sense out of a many-colored, whirling mist. A wagon was moving. Two men were standing up in front, one flogging the horses, and the other waving a sword. It carried a whole company of sword-waving figures. More men were jumping on it as it reached them. Swordsmen! They were pouring off the ships as it passed and being hauled aboard.
From a million miles away, from a million years ago, someone was shouting inside his head, very faintly. It sounded like Wallie Smith. The chief sorcerer started yelling orders in a shrill voice. Then Wallie made out that thin, far-off internal screaming: "Delay them! Distract them!"
His tongue was a dead fish in his mouth. "Honorable... Rathazaxo!"
The sorcerer paused and stared in surprise. "Well done! How... No matter. You will tell, later. Everything, you will tell."
He turned back to consider the onrushing wagon.
Wallie flogged his mind and voice. "The tryst is come, sorcerer."
This time he got a glare. "You could not know!"
"The gods told me. Did you think your pigeons could do better than the gods?" Everything was going round faster and faster. "Ink and feathers, little bits of leather?"
He had scored. Not only the green―half a dozen sorcerers were staring at him openmouthed. Their age-old secret?
"How do you know of that, Shonsu?"
"Sulfur... charcoal... horse urine..."
Anger and fear showed within the cowls.
The rumbling grew louder. Then the Sixth awoke again to danger. He shouted orders. Wallie was shoved back to the side of the road. He stumbled and fell heavily on a pile of bales, and a flame of agony in his back dragged a scream from him. The rigging swayed before a darkening sky. He thought he would vomit...
Yet he hung on. He twisted his head to see. The hollow rumbling was growing louder, the wagon picking up speed, the shouting becoming clearer. Now the two men were distinguishable, even to Wallie's muddled vision―the heavyset bulkiness of Oligarro driving the horses, yelling and whipping, Nnanji's matchstick lankiness, whirling his sword as he yelled for swordsmen, his ponytail a banner of blood in the wind. The water rats were responding, leaping off the boats and coming to help against sorcerers. And armed sailors, also.. .even a few free swords in ponytails and kilts... Oligarro had not been the only liar in port.
Louder and louder came the juggernaut, gathering speed even as it gathered passengers. Then Wallie saw what the sorcerers were trying to do. He twisted and scrambled frantically until he got to his feet, his head a whirlpool of pain. Katanji was staggering about behind them, in the path of the coming destruction, too dazed to understand. Wallie backed up to him, grabbed his good arm with manacled hands and towed him to the side of the road, knocked him down yet again, and turned his muddled attention to the eight sorcerers lined up across the road. They were all standing with legs apart. The
y were all holding pistols.
"Ready!" the Sixth shouted, and the sorcerers raised their arms outstretched before them. The wagon was plunging forward, and in the midst of the dust and the noise and confusion Wallie registered the terrified eyes of the horses.
"Aim!" the Sixth shouted.
Then he opened his mouth again, and Wallie hurled himself bodily into the nearest man. He teetered and fell against his neighbor. Had Wallie had his wits and normal strength he might have felled the whole line, like dominoes, one into another. As it was, he ricocheted limply off and fell once more, thumping his head on the timbers as a hail of knives flashed over him and the pistols roared, squirting great clouds of smoke. Half the sorcerers fell, and the wagon plowed into and over the rest.
There were swordsmen everywhere, screams and swords and yells and knives and cheers and smoke and blood.
The smoke cleared, the noise stopped.
He was lifted more gently―but not much more gently―to his feet. Eight dead sorcerers... a crowd of swordsmen―free swords in kilts, water rats in breechclouts, sailors... Tomiyano and Holiyi and Maloli, even a few women. They were cheering and laughing. Then Nnanji threw an arm around him, grinning and exultant.
"We did it, brother! Wiped out the lot of them!"
"Well done," Wallie whispered. "Oh, bravely done!" But he did not think he was audible.
Nnanji was. "On To The Tower!"
Cheers! "On to the tower!"
"No!" Wallie yelled. He lunged at Nnanji as he started to move away and then gasped again with the pain. The tower was booby-trapped. There would be cannons and grapeshot and shrapnel bombs... "You can't take the tower! Back to your ships!" Gods! It hurts to speak!
Anger and disappointment rumbled around him. Wallie leaned weakly against Nnanji. "Back to your ships!" he repeated faintly.
"Brother!" Nnanji pleaded. "We have a victory. We must follow it up. The sutras..."
That bang on the head―he couldn't think, and his tongue was all over his mouth. "I ama theventh," Wallie mumbled.
"Brother!"
"A Seventh!" Wallie repeated faintly. His knees were paper. The howling of the wind...
He was a Seventh. Muttering, they turned and headed back.
"Katanji?" Wallie said. The dock road was swaying nauseatingly, the storm drowning out everything.
"He's on his way back." Nnanji was beginning to look worried.
"Casualties?"
"Only Oligarro, brother. Not serious."
Earthquakes, now; the dock was going up and down in great fuzzy waves.
"He's got a little round hole through his shoulder," Nnanji said from a far distance. "I think he'll be all right, if there's no curse on it."
There was something very important that Wallie had to say, if he could only remember... He slid to his knees, and the World faded behind the gray roaring.
He thought of it again as they carried him on board Sapphire, when he saw the other pile of dead sorcerers. His orders to wound, not kill, had not worked very well. He tried to speak, to tell Nnanji to collect weapons. If he made the words they were not heard.
They laid him on a hatch cover and sailed away.
††† † †††
He had been studying a fire bucket for some time―perhaps only a few minutes, perhaps longer. He had not been conscious of being unconscious... He remembered them cutting off his manacles, unbuckling his harness, and laying him gently on the cover. He was lying there now, on his side with his head in Jja's lap. Delayed shock? Not the sort of thing that a hero was supposed to get. He tried to turn over, winced, and made do with twisting his head to look up at her. This was an interesting viewpoint, and he studied contentedly for a while, then looked beyond, to where her face hung against the sky, the most beautiful and certainly the most welcome face in the World, a miracle of golden brown against blue.
"That's the sort of smile that drives men mad," he said. The smile grew broader, but she did not speak. "What's so funny, then?"
The smile became broader still. "Not funny, my love―happy."
Again be tried to move and grunted with pain. "I don't think you should smile like that when I'm dying. See that hole in my back? Those broken white things are ribs. The puffy pink things are bits of lungs."
"There's no hole in your back." Soft as snowflakes, her fingers stroked from his shoulder blade down to the base of his ribs. "You have bruises, that's all. A bump on the head. No bones broken, Brota says."
Wallie said, "Brota can only look at the outside. Inside feels like a junkyard." He decided that the smile was fifty percent relief and fifty percent the sort of smile she gave Vixini sometimes and fifty percent some sort of admiration. All the rest of it must be love. Hell, it was a good smile to be given. Yet... "What is so funny, wench?"
Jja snickered. "You have a mothermark. I know it wasn't there this morning."
Another battle won―after the last battle, his right eyelid had suddenly gained a swordsman fathermark, but his left had stayed blank, uniquely blank in the World.
'Tell me," he said, wondering what the little god had made of a crime reporter.
Jja's smile broadened. "It's a feather, my love!"
A scribe, of course. Or was the god playing his jokes again? The sorcerers were a lot more than scribes; they were also chemists, and the new Lord Shonsu was a blend of the old Shonsu the swordsman and Wallie Smith the chemist. Very funny, Shorty! I thought you promised no miracles? What are the swordsmen of the tryst going to think when they see that?
Sorcery as technology? That was going to need some rethinking.
He had been thinking of spy stories, and whodunnits. But it had not been a whodunnit, rather a howdunnit. His eyes had told him, Katanji had told him, and he had paid no heed.
Gunpowder certainly―the smell alone confirmed that. What else did they have? Probably not much; Honakura had been right, they were mostly charlatans. Whatever had caused that ancient quarrel between the priests and the scribes, the swordsmen had sided with the priests. The scribes had been driven out and herded up into the mountains. In self-defense they had claimed magical powers and probably devised all sorts of clever little tricks, like the sleight of hand that could steal a sailor's knife. That explained the sleeves and the hidden hands.
And sleight of hand explained the magical bird. Tomiyano had not opened the pot, because he had been holding it. The sorcerer had lifted the lid, and the bird had come out of his sleeve. Put a bird in a dark pocket, and it would freeze. That had not been all meaningless mumbo-jumbo, though. A pigeon could carry a message, but it could also be a signal. No message meant send help. The purpose of the exercise had been to release the pigeon, and the other sorcerers had shown up very soon afterward.
Burning rags? Lights in the forest? Phosphorus! Quite possible―middle sixteen hundreds on Earth, but not all technologies would make discoveries in the same order, so phosphorus was possible. Urine, both human and animal, would be the source of phosphorus, as well as of nitrates for the gunpowder. That was why the tanners and dyers were evicted; those crafts used urine, also, and the sorcerers wanted to corner the supply. Why had he not seen that? The scar on Tomiyano's face was an acid burn, of course. What else? He would have to rethink everything he had learned and reinterpret it. Surely all of it would have a rational explanation now―sorcery or science, but never both.
It had all been there for him to see that day in Aus: distillation coils, sulfur, pigeons. Even earlier―what would be mined in volcanic terrain except sulfur? Dumb swordsman!
He had come so close when he had Kandoru's murder reenacted. Had he followed his own logic through to its proper conclusions, he would have seen that the tune had been a stage prop, the fife a weapon. Then he would not have locked his mind into a belief in sorcery; things would have turned out differently then.
He twisted around and saw Nnanji and Thana standing by the rail watching him. so he made an effort, and Jja helped him to sit up. He had indeed been unconscious, and fo
r some time, it seemed. Sapphire was already in among the islands north of the city, winding her way along a channel in a line of ships, all fleeing from Ov and the sorcerers' wrath. The sun shone on blue water and the hot fall tints of dogwood and willows on those islands. White herons stalked the beaches. The massive white cloud over RegiVul was almost invisible in its remoteness, its shadows the same soft blue as the dome of heaven itself. Brota was humped by the tiller, probably finding her helmsman solitude relaxing after the excitement. She saw him move and raised a fat arm in salute.
Nnanji and Thana came hurrying over, hand in hand.
"Where's Katanji?" Wallie asked.
"He's below, resting." Nnanji shook his head sadly. "It will take a real miracle to make a swordsman out of him now, brother! His arm is smashed. Brota says we can't even put a cast on until the swelling goes down."
"The Goddess rewards those who help us," Wallie said awkwardly. "If Cowie went to live in a palace, then I think Novice Katanji will be looked after."
Nnanji nodded, and Wallie asked what had gone wrong, what had happened. Very simple, was the answer―mosquitoes. Katanji had been slapping, like the rest of them, and had smudged his slavestripe. The fake sailor had noticed as Katanji edged close to see what was in the baskets. But Oligarro was fine, Nnanji said, a clean wound, no bones or arteries.
His grin would not stay away long: "And no one else but you got as much as a broken fingernail! We should have had minstrels with us, brother!" He hugged Thana tightly. "The first victory of your tryst, Lord Shonsu!"
"It's not my tryst! Ouch!" He had moved again. "What's that?"
Gingerly Nnanji held up a thin silver tube. "I found it on the dock. Is it safe, my lord brother? I can throw it overboard. .."
"Oh, it's safe if there's nothing in it! You didn't pick up anything else, did you?"
"No, brother."