Unclean: The Haunted Lands

by Richard Lee Byers

  “I doubt it. You paused to consider before you spoke. If you don’t have anything to tell me, what was there to think about? You were weighing greed against caution, and caution came out the winner. Well, that’s all right. I can appeal to your sense of self-preservation if necessary.” With one smooth, sudden, practiced motion intended to demonstrate his facility with a blade, Bareris whipped his sword from its scabbard. The guard jumped back, and a couple of the slaves gasped.

  “Are you crazy?” stammered the guard, his hand easing toward the whip on his belt. “You can’t murder me just because I didn’t tell you what you want to hear!”

  “I admit,” Bareris replied, advancing with a duelist’s catlike steps, “my conscience will trouble me later, but you’re standing between me and everything I’ve wanted for the past six years. Or since I was eight, really. That’s enough to make me set aside my scruples. Oh, and snatch for the whip if you must, but in all my wanderings, I never once saw rawhide prevail against steel.”

  “If you hurt me, the watch will hang you.”

  “I’ll be out of the city before anyone knows you’re dead, except these slaves, and I doubt they love you well enough to raise the alarm.”

  “I’ll shout for help.”

  “It won’t arrive in time. I’m almost within sword’s reach already.”

  The watchman whirled and lunged for the door. Bareris sang a quick phrase, sketched an arcane figure in the air with his off hand, and expelled the air from his lungs. Engulfed in a plume of noxious vapor, the guard stumbled and doubled over retching. Holding his breath to avoid a similar reaction, Bareris grabbed the man and pulled him out of the invisible but malodorous fumes. He then dumped the guard on his back, poised his sword at his breast, and waited for his nausea to subside.

  When it did, he said, “This is your last chance. Tell me now, or I’ll kill you and look for someone else to question. You’re not the only lout on the premises.”

  “All right,” said the slaver, “but please, you can’t tell anyone who told you. They said we weren’t to talk about their business.”

  “I swear by the Binder and his Hand,” Bareris said. “Now who in the name of the Abyss are you talking about?”

  “Red Wizards.”

  At last Bareris understood the watchman’s reluctance to divulge the truth. Everyone with even a shred of prudence feared offending members of the scarlet orders. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  “They—the mages and their servants—came in the middle of the night, just like you. They bought all the stock we had, just the way you figured. They told Chergoba that if we kept our mouths shut, they’d be back to buy more, but if we prattled about them, they’d know, and return to punish us.”

  “What were the wizards’ names?”

  “They didn’t say.”

  “Where did they mean to take the slaves?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Why did they want them?”

  “I don’t know! They didn’t say and we had better sense than to ask. We took their gold and thought ourselves lucky they paid the asking price. But if they’d offered only a pittance, or nothing at all, what could we have done about it?”

  Bareris stepped away from the watchman and tossed him another gold piece. “I’ll let myself out. Don’t tell anyone I was here, or that you told me what you have, and you’ll be all right.” He started to slide his sword back into its worn leather scabbard then realized there was one more question he should ask. “To which order did the wizards belong?”

  “Necromancy, I think. They had black trim on their robes and jewelry in the shapes of skulls and things.”

  Red Wizards of Necromancy! Bareris pondered the matter as he prowled onward through the dark, for Milil knew, he couldn’t make any sense of it.

  It was the most ordinary thing in the world for wealthy folk to buy slaves, but why in the middle of the night? Why the secrecy?

  It suggested there was something illicit about the transaction or the purchasers’ intent, but how could there be? By law, slaves were property, with no rights whatsoever. Even commoners could buy, sell, exploit, and abuse them however they chose, and Red Wizards were Thay’s ruling elite, answerable to no one but their superiors.

  Bareris sighed. Maybe the watchman was right; maybe it was something ordinary folk were better off not understanding. After all, his objective hadn’t changed. He simply wanted to find Tammith.

  Evidently hoping to avoid notice, the necromancers had marched her and the other slaves away under cover of darkness, but someone had seen where they went. A whore. A drunk. A beggar. A cutpurse. One of the night people who dwell in every city.

  Exhausted as he was, eyes burning, an acid taste searing his mouth, Bareris cringed at the prospect of commencing yet another search, this one through squalid stews and taverns, yet he could no more have slept than he could have sung Selûne down from the sky. He arranged his features into a smile and headed for a painted, half-clad woman lounging in a doorway.

  The fighter was beaten but too stubborn to admit it, as he demonstrated by struggling back onto his feet.

  Calmevik grinned. If the smaller pugilist wanted more punishment, he was happy to oblige. He lowered his guard and stepped in, inviting his opponent to swing. Dazed, the other fighter responded with slow, clumsy haymakers, easily dodged. The spectators laughed when Calmevik ducked and twisted out of the way.

  It was amusing to make his adversary reel and stumble uselessly around, but Calmevik couldn’t continue the game for long. The urge to beat and break the other man was too powerful. He froze him with a punch to the solar plexus, shifted in, and drove an elbow strike into his jaw. Bone crunched. Calmevik then hooked his opponent’s leg with his own, grabbed the back of his head, and smashed him face first to the plank floor where he lay inert, blood seeping out from around his head like the petals of a flower.

  The onlookers cheered. Calmevik laughed and raised his fists, acknowledging their acclaim, feeling strong, dauntless, invincible—

  Then he spotted the child, if that was the right word for it, peeking in the tavern doorway, one puffy, pasty hand pushing the bead curtain aside, the hood of its shabby cloak shadowing its features. The creature had the frame of a little girl and he was the biggest man in the tavern, indeed, one of the biggest in all Tyraturos, and he had no reason to believe the newcomer meant him any harm. Still, when it crooked its finger, his elation gave way to a pang of trepidation.

  Had he known what it would involve, he never would have taken the job, no matter how good the pay, but he hadn’t, and now he was stuck taking orders from the ghastly representative his client had left behind. There was nothing to do but finish the chore, pocket the coin, and hope that in time he’d stop dreaming about the child’s face.

  Striving to make sure no one could tell he was rattled, he made his excuses to his sycophants, pulled on his tunic, belted on his broadsword and dirks, and departed the tavern. Presumably because it was the way in which an adult and little girl might be expected to walk the benighted streets, the child intertwined its soft, clammy fingers with his. He had to fight to keep himself from wrenching his hand away.

  “He’s here,” she said in a high, lisping voice.

  Calmevik wondered who “he” was and what he’d done to deserve the fate that was about to overtake him, but no one had volunteered the information, and he suspected he was safer not knowing. “Just one man?”

  “Yes.”

  “I won’t need help, then.” Which meant he wouldn’t have to share the gold.

  “Are you sure? My master doesn’t want any mistakes.”

  She might be a horror loathsome enough to turn his bowels to water, but even so, professional pride demanded that he respond to her doubts with the hauteur they deserved. “Of course I’m sure! Aren’t I the deadliest assassin in the city?”

  She giggled. “You say so, and I am what I am, so I suppose we can kill one bard by ourselves.”

  Tired as he was
, for a moment Bareris wasn’t certain he was actually hearing the crying or only imagining it. But it was real. Somewhere down the crooked alleyway, someone—a little girl, perhaps, by the sound of it—was sobbing.

  He thought of simply walking on. After all, it was none of his affair. He had his own problems, but he’d feel callous and mean if he ignored a child’s distress.

  Besides, if he helped someone else in need, maybe help would come to him in turn. He realized it was scarcely a Thayan way to think. His countrymen believed the gods sent luck to the strong and resolute, not the gentle and compassionate, but some of the friends he’d found on his travels believed such superstitions.

  He started down the alley. By the harp, it was dark, without a trace of candlelight leaking through doors or windows, and the high, peaked rooftops blocking all but a few of the stars. He sang a floating orb of silvery glow into being to light his way.

  Even then, it was difficult to make out the little girl. Slumped in her dark cloak at the end of the cul-de-sac, she was just one small shadow amid the gloom. Her shoulders shook as she wept.

  “Little girl,” Bareris said, “are you lost? Whatever’s wrong, I’ll help you.”

  The child didn’t respond, just kept on crying.

  She must be utterly distraught. He walked to her, dropped to one knee, and laid a hand on one of her heaving shoulders.

  Even through the wool of her cloak, her body felt cold, and more than that, wrong in some indefinable but noisome way. Moreover, a stink hung in the air around her.

  Surprise made him falter, and in that instant, she—or rather, it—whirled to face him. Its puffy face was ashen, its eyes, black and sunken. Pus and foam oozed around the stained, crooked teeth in their rotting gums.

  Its grip tight as a full-grown man’s, the creature grabbed hold of Bareris’s extended arm, snapped its teeth shut on his wrist, and then, when the leather sleeve of his brigandine failed to yield immediately, began to gnaw, snarling like a hound.

  Bareris flailed his arm and succeeded in shaking the child-thing loose. It hissed and rushed in again, and he whipped out a dagger and poised it to rip the creature’s belly.

  At that moment, he would have vowed that every iota of his attention was on the implike thing in front of him, but during his time as a mercenary, fighting dragon worshipers, hobgoblins, and reavers of every stripe, he’d learned to register any flicker of motion in his field of vision. For as often as not, it wasn’t the foe you were actually trying to fight who killed you. It was his comrade, slipping in a strike from the flank or rear.

  Thus, he noticed a shift in the shadows cast by his floating light. It seemed impossible—the alley had been empty except for the child-thing, hadn’t it?—but somehow, someone or something had crept up behind him while the creature kept his attention riveted on it.

  Still on one knee, Bareris jerked himself around to confront the new threat. The lower half of his face masked by a scarf, a huge man in dark clothing stood poised to cut down at him with a broadsword. The weapon had a slimy look, as if its owner had smeared it with something other than the usual rust-resisting oil. Poison, like as not.

  With only a knife in his hand, and his new assailant manifestly a man of exceptional strength, Bareris very much doubted his ability to parry the heavier blade. The stroke flashed at him, and he twisted aside, simultaneously thrusting with the dagger.

  He was aiming for the big man’s groin. He missed, but at least the knife drove into his adversary’s thigh, and the masked man froze with the shock of it. The bard pulled the weapon free for a second attack, then something slammed into his back. Arms and legs wrapped around him. Teeth tore at the high collar of his brigandine, and cold white fingers groped for his eyes.

  The child-thing had jumped onto his shoulders. He reared halfway up then immediately threw himself on his back. The jolt loosened the little horror’s grip. He wrenched partially free of it and pounded elbow strikes into its torso, snapping ribs. The punishment made it falter, and he heaved himself entirely clear.

  By then, though blood soaked the leg of his breeches, the big man was rushing in again. Bareris bellowed a battle cry infused with the magic of his voice. Vitality surged through his limbs, and his mind grew calm and clear. Even more importantly, the masked ruffian hesitated, giving him time to spring to his feet, switch his dagger to his left hand, and draw his sword.

  “I’m not the easy mark you expected, am I?” he panted. “Why don’t you go waylay someone else?”

  He thought they might heed him. He’d hurt them, after all, but instead, apparently confident that the advantages conferred by superior numbers and a poisoned blade would prevail, they spread out to flank him. The masked man whispered words of power and sketched a mystic figure with his off hand. For a moment, an acrid smell stung Bareris’s nose, and a prickling danced across his skin, warning signs of some magical effect coming into being.

  Wonderful. On top of everything else, the whoreson was a spellcaster. That explained how he’d concealed himself until he was ready to strike.

  For all Bareris knew, the masked man’s next effort might kill or incapacitate him. He had to disrupt the casting if possible, and so, even though it meant turning his back on the child-thing, he screamed and sprang at the larger of his adversaries.

  He thought he had a good chance of scoring. He was using an indirect attack that, in his experience, few adversaries could parry, and with a wounded leg, the masked man ought not to be able to defend by retreating out of the distance.

  Yet that was exactly what he did. Bareris’s attack fell short by a finger length. The masked man beat his blade aside and lunged in his turn.

  The riposte streaked at Bareris’s torso, driving in with dazzling speed. Evidently the big man had cast an enchantment to quicken his next attack, and with Bareris still in the lunge, it only had a short distance to travel. The bard was sure, with that bleak certainty every fencer knows, that the stroke was going to hit him.

  Yet even if his intellect had resigned itself, his reflexes, honed in countless battles and skirmishes, had not. He recovered out of the lunge. It didn’t carry him beyond the range of the big man’s weapon, but it obliged it to travel a little farther, buying him the time and space at least to attempt a parry. He swept his blade across his body and somehow intercepted his adversary’s sword. Steel rang, and the impact almost broke his grip on his hilt, but he kept the poisoned edge from slashing his flesh.

  Eyes glaring above the scarf, the big man bulled forward, rendering both their swords useless at such close quarters, evidently intending to use his superior strength and size to shove Bareris down onto his back. Perhaps frustration or the pain of his leg wound had clouded his judgment, for the move was a blunder. He’d forgotten the dagger in the bard’s left hand.

  Bareris reminded him of its existence by plunging it into his kidney and intestines. Then the child-thing grabbed his legs from behind. Its teeth tore at his leg.

  Grateful that his breeches were made of the same sturdy reinforced leather as his brigandine, Bareris wrenched himself around, breaking the creature’s hold and turning the masked man with him like a dance partner. He flung the ruffian down on top of his hideous little accomplice then hacked relentlessly with his sword. Both his foes stopped moving before either could disentangle him-or itself from the other.

  His sword abruptly heavy in his hand, Bareris stood over the corpses gasping for breath. The fear he couldn’t permit himself while the fight was in progress welled up in him, and he shuddered, because the fracas had come far too close to killing him and left too many disquieting questions in its wake.

  Who was the masked ruffian, and what manner of creature was his companion? Even more importantly, why had they sought to kill Bareris?

  Perhaps it wasn’t all that difficult to figure out. As Bareris wandered the night asking his questions, he’d mentioned repeatedly that he could pay for the answers. Small wonder, then, if a thief targeted him for a robbery attempt. The
masked man had been such a scoundrel, and as for the child-thing … well, Thay was full of peculiar monstrosities. The Red Wizards created them in the course of their experiments. Perhaps one had escaped from its master’s laboratory then allied itself with an outlaw as a means of surviving on the street.

  Surely that was all there was to it. In Bareris’s experience, the simplest explanation for an occurrence was generally the correct one.

  In any case, the affair was over, and puzzling over it wasn’t bringing him any closer to locating Tammith. He cleaned his weapons on his adversaries’ garments, sheathed them, and headed out of the alley.

  As he did so, his neck began to smart. He lifted his hand to his collar and felt the gnawed, perforated leather and the raw bloody flesh beneath. The girl-thing had managed to bite him after all. Just a nip, really, but he remembered the creature’s filthy mouth, winced, and washed the wound with spirits at the first opportunity. Then it was back to the hunt.

  It was nearly cock’s crow when a pimp in a high plumed hat and gaudy parti-colored finery told him what he needed to know, though it was scarcely what he’d hoped to hear.

  He’d prayed that Tammith was still in Tyraturos. Instead, the necromancers had marched the slaves they’d purchased out of the city. They’d headed north on the High Road, the same major artery of trade he’d followed up from Bezantur.

  He reassured himself that the news wasn’t really too bad. At least he knew what direction to take, and a procession of slaves on foot couldn’t journey as fast as a horseman traveling hard.

  He doubted the horse he’d ridden up from the coast could endure another such journey so soon. He’d have to buy anoth—

  Weakness overwhelmed him and he reeled off balance, bumping his shoulder against a wall. His body suddenly felt icy cold, cold enough to make his teeth chatter, and he realized he was sick.

  chapter four