The Vondish Ambassador loe-10

by Lawrence Watt-Evans

  “Then it’s been a good hour, at the very least,” the soldier said. “Chances are that whoever it was fled the place long ago.”

  “Oh,” Emmis replied. He had to admit that the man was probably right. “But they might come back,” he said, “or they might be watching the house.”

  “That’s true, and one of your neighbors might have seen something, so I’ll come take a look, but I’m not expecting much to come of it. If it’s true your foreign friends have hired assassins, I’d suggest you keep a very good watch. Hire yourself some bodyguards, perhaps. Maybe sleep somewhere else for a few nights.”

  The three walked on in silence for a moment as Lar and Emmis considered this. As they neared the Arena Lar said to Emmis, “Maybe we should find you a sword.”

  “What? I’m a dockworker, not a soldier!”

  “You’ve got the build of a fighter,” the guardsman remarked.

  “A brawler, maybe, not a swordsman! I’ve never held a sword in my life!”

  “No one’s expecting you to take up fencing,” Lar said. “I just thought it might discourage intruders.”

  “You do look like a fighter,” the guard agreed. “Usually, that’s all it takes. No one wants to take on a man with a sword — you can’t tell by looking whether he knows how to use it or not.”

  “You aren’t carrying a sword,” Emmis pointed out.

  “That’s because I don’t want to kill anyone,” the soldier replied calmly. “If the red kilt and breastplate aren’t enough to warn someone off, a sword probably wouldn’t do it, either.” He patted his truncheon. “A whack on the head with this will take a man down, but he’ll probably still be able to get up the next morning, and I won’t have to apologize to his grieving family. Not to mention I’m less likely to get blood everywhere. And it’s easier to use in a crowd.”

  “You could carry both,” Emmis pointed out.

  “Then I’d have to think about which to use, and there are occasions when taking time to think about anything is a bad idea.”

  “Not to mention the cost,” Lar said.

  “Not to mention that,” the guardsman agreed, with a nod and a smile. “Or worrying about bumping into things with it, or whether someone might get it away from me while I’m using the truncheon. If I were posted along the wall, at any of the city gates, I’d have a sword, but on Games Street it just isn’t a good idea.”

  For a few paces the conversation dropped, but then Emmis said, “The man in the blue tunic has a sword. Or a stick with a blade, anyway.”

  “Blue tunic? You got a good look at this fellow, then?”

  “Reasonably good,” Emmis said. “It was a bit shadowy and it all happened quickly.”

  “So what did you see?”

  “Curly hair, pointed beard, blue tunic, black breeches, black boots, tall, thin, a bit hollow-cheeked. That’s about all.”

  “What about the other one?” Lar asked.

  Emmis shook his head. “Nothing,” he said. “Brown tunic, I think, but it might have been gray. Hair and beard could have used trimming. That’s all.”

  “Any idea how one of them got inside the house?”

  Lar cleared his throat. “I may not have locked the back door,” he admitted.

  The soldier grimaced.

  “He’s a foreigner,” Emmis pointed out.

  “You aren’t,” the guardsman said. “You should have warned him!”

  Emmis accepted the criticism silently.

  “Were your attackers foreign?”

  Emmis spread his hands. “I have no idea,” he said. “They didn’t say anything, so I didn’t hear any accents, and they didn’t dress any differently than we do. They could have been brought in, or they could have been hired here, I don’t know.”

  The soldier cast a quick glance at Lar’s velvet coat and elaborate hat, but did not comment Instead he asked, “You said you talked to the foreigner who hired them?”

  “Well, I talked to a foreigner. She said it was one of the others, a Lumethan named Neyam, who did the actual hiring.”

  “Could you find either of them again? The woman you spoke to, or the one who did the hiring? Would you know them if you saw them?”

  “Oh, I’d definitely recognize her. Neyam, maybe not — I only saw him once, and he had a hood up. But Annis the Merchant, the Ashthasan, absolutely, I’d know her if I saw her. We spoke at the Crooked Candle, in Shiphaven, north of the market; I don’t know whether that’s where she’s staying.” He frowned. “If she isn’t there, I wouldn’t know where to find them.”

  “How determined to you think these people are?”

  Emmis turned up a palm. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “How much money do they have?”

  “I don’t know that, either. Some. They paid me generously, but they dickered about it.”

  “So if this first attempt fails, do you think they’d try to hire a magician to finish the job?”

  “Oh,” Emmis said, feeling his guts twist.

  “They might,” Lar said. He and Emmis exchanged glances.

  “Then you’ll need to talk to a magician yourselves about some protective spells,” the guardsman said.

  “That would be reasonable,” Lar agreed.

  All three fell silent for the next few blocks, in fact none of them spoke again until they turned onto Through Street.

  When they rounded the curve, though, Emmis said, “Oh.”

  Lar said something long and nasty-sounding in Semmat.

  The guardsman grinned broadly. “Well, it’s been awhile since I’ve seen a real torch-bearing mob!” he said.

  It wasn’t really much of a mob, Emmis thought. There were only a little more than a dozen people standing in the street in front of the yellow house, and only four or five of them had torches.

  “In the name of Azrad VII, overlord of the city and triumvir of the Hegemony of the Three Ethshars, what’s going on here?” the guardsman bellowed, striding forward. Lar and Emmis hastened to follow him.

  A dozen voices replied at once as the entire mob surged toward him. The guardsman held up a hand for silence, then chose a man in the crowd. “You,” he said. “What’s going on?”

  “We don’t know!” the man answered. “Earlier today someone came running out the back of that house, and then a man with a sword came running out after him, and another man was at the front, and they all left the doors standing open and ran off. Someone got the landlord, because we couldn’t find the tenants...”

  At this point he was interrupted by several voices as various people pointed at Emmis and Lar and shouted, “Those two!” or “There they are!” or similar phrases.

  “I’m the landlord,” someone else said, stepping forward, and Emmis was relieved to see that it was their landlord, and not some further complication. “We thought one of my tenants might have been murdered, or kidnapped.”

  “We searched the house,” the first speaker said, “but we didn’t find anyone in there, or any blood or anything, so we talked it over and sent someone to fetch a guardsman from the Palace, and then we were waiting for you, and here you are.”

  “Except I didn’t come from the Palace,” the soldier said. “These two found me on Games Street.” He turned and looked at the house.

  The front door was still standing open. Emmis wondered how many of Lar’s possessions had disappeared so far. His own, of course, were probably all gone, left on the floor of the Crooked Candle.

  “That’s the place?” the guardsman asked.

  “Yes,” Emmis said.

  “Show me what happened.”

  Emmis nodded. He borrowed a torch from one of the neighbors, since of course no one had lit any candles, and led the soldier inside.

  “I was right here when they came at me,” he said, pointing. “I slammed the door behind me, and ducked, and the man’s stick hit the wall...”

  He held up the torch, illuminating a small gash in the plaster of the wall, right at head-height.

  “Then
I ran into him, and got up and ran out the back, and around through the alley, and then I went to find Lar.”

  The guard looked at the damaged plaster, then at the floor. He bent down and picked up a black wooden cylinder with a silver cap on one end; it was split lengthwise on one side, a narrow crack that was still fresh, judging by the color of the wood. “What’s this?”

  “That’s off his walking stick,” Emmis said. “It hid the blade on the end. It must have come off when it hit the wall.”

  “He didn’t retrieve it? Sloppy.”

  Emmis turned up an empty palm.

  Just then there were shouts from the street; Emmis and the guardsman turned and peered out the door.

  Two more guards had just arrived, accompanying one of the neighbors, a woman Emmis vaguely recognized from the courtyard. Lar and the landlord were going to greet them.

  “Well,” the soldier from Games Street said. “We’re all here now, I’d say. Shall we have everyone in for a cup of tea?”

  Chapter Thirteen

  It was almost midnight by the time the last question had been answered and the last visitor herded out the door. The three soldiers had all read Lar’s credentials with interest, and shown him great respect thereafter. Lar had declined their offer to post a guard overnight, on the grounds that no one would be stupid enough to try again after all this fuss, but he had closed the shutters very firmly, and checked the locks on the doors very carefully. He had also unpacked his sword from the bottom of a trunk, and inspected it carefully before sheathing it and hanging the scabbard on his belt.

  Emmis had been interested to see that this was not a fancy nobleman’s sword intended for display; it was a serious, workmanlike weapon, with a blade of smooth gray steel and a simple black leather grip.

  Finally everything was secured, leaving only Lar and Emmis in the house, looking at one another.

  “I’m going to bed,” Lar said.

  “What about the protocol?”

  “It will have to wait until tomorrow. I’m exhausted.”

  “And what happened in the Wizards’ Quarter today? Did Kolar give you your answer?”

  “That can wait until tomorrow, too. Good night, Emmis.”

  “Good night, sir.”

  He watched as the ambassador shuffled wearily to his room, entered, and closed the door behind himself. Then he stood in the hallway by the head of the stairs, listening to the faint sounds of the city outside — even at this hour, it was not entirely silent.

  This was his city, even if it wasn’t Shiphaven. This was still Ethshar of the Spices. People here did not casually hire assassins to kill their enemies, and then admit it to strangers. What kind of place was Lumeth, or Ashthasa, that those foreigners would even consider assassinating someone who had done them no harm? What kind of people were they, that Annis would admit her part in this crime to him, and apparently expect him to do nothing about it?

  Emmis wasn’t a fool, and he didn’t consider himself particularly naive. He knew that people sometimes murdered each other in Ethshar. He had seen a few of them hanged for it. He knew that thieves sometimes stabbed people to death in dark alleys, that burglars sometimes killed victims who woke up at the wrong time, that the poor homeless beggars in the Hundred Foot Field sometimes killed one another over nothing, that drunken brawls sometimes ended in a death or two, that feuding magicians sometimes went too far, that even lovers’ quarrels could turn lethal.

  But to hire a team of killers because someone talked about apprenticing his grandson to a warlock — that was insane.

  At least he knew he hadn’t imagined it — the neighbors had seen his attackers, and there was the mark on the wall, and the broken cap from the sword-stick. The guards had believed him. They took word back to their superiors at the Palace and in Camptown. They would look for Annis and the Lumethans, and when they found them they would see to it that the foreigners didn’t try anything like this again.

  And it might help get Lar his appointment with the overlord. This incident would demonstrate that the ambassador was someone important enough to worry about.

  He still hadn’t written that protocol, of course.

  He would write it tomorrow. Emmis frowned slightly; what would he do, while Lar was writing that thing? Did he need to stay around, to correct Lar’s Ethsharitic? The ambassador usually seemed capable enough with the language.

  Emmis paused. Did he need to stay around at all? He hadn’t signed on to fight off assassins. He could just quit, and go back to Shiphaven, and work on the docks. He could find another room somewhere.

  But all his belongings were lost; landlords would look on that with great suspicion. He could get his sisters and neighbors to vouch for him, but still, it wouldn’t look good.

  Besides, what would happen to Lar if he did that? And the Vondishman paid better than any shipowner or merchant who had ever hired Emmis.

  And Emmis wanted to know what in the World was going on, with these magicians and assassins and mysteries!

  He would stay, he decided. At least for now.

  And with that settled, he finally went to bed, leaving his clothes carefully draped across the furniture to air out, since he had no others to wear.

  The world looked very different in the morning sun, after a night’s rest, and Emmis was almost cheerful as he dressed. His tunic hardly smelled at all, despite the sweat-stains, but he still told himself he would have to wash it soon, and he would want to buy another at the first opportunity. Tailor Street was just three blocks to the east; he had never bought anything there, but earning ten bits a day in silver, he could afford it now.

  He ambled down to the kitchens, seeing no sign that the ambassador was out of bed yet, and set about assembling a suitable breakfast. He had the fire hot and had just put the teakettle on when Lar appeared in the doorway.

  “What do we have?” he asked.

  “Boiled ham,” Emmis replied. “Or sardines, if you prefer.”

  “Ham will do fine.”

  A few minutes later they were sitting in the dining room with mugs of tea and plates of ham; there were still no chairs in the kitchen.

  “Good tea,” Lar remarked. “Much better than the herbal stuff Sella makes.”

  “What happened in the Wizards’ Quarter yesterday?” Emmis asked. “Did you get your question answered?”

  Lar shook his head. “No. Kolar’s spell just made a... a nothing, a mess.”

  “Swirls, he called it. But what about Imrinira?”

  Lar set down his mug and turned up a palm. “She couldn’t help much,” he said. “She tried a few things. Mostly the Spell of the Eighth Sphere.”

  “What’s that do?”

  “It makes runes appear in a black crystal sphere,” Lar said. “But it can only answer yes-or-no questions, and not all of those. It did tell us that strong magic was interfering with Fendel’s Divination, that it wasn’t anything Kolar did wrong, but any time we tried to ask it a question about... about the hum itself, rather than about Kolar’s spell, the reply was so hazy we couldn’t read it. The magic was interfering again.”

  “Ah.”

  “So we went to see Imrinira’s friend Zindrй, to see whether witchcraft might work where wizardry didn’t. They have an agreement — when Imrinira needs witchcraft she goes to Zindrй, and when Zindrй needs wizardry she goes to Imrinira. But Zindrй couldn’t do anything with this, so she took us to Sella, who was expecting us. She said that witchcraft wasn’t going to help very much, but that other magicians could answer all my questions, and some of them were wizards — I just had to ask the right people the right questions. But then she called her apprentice in and whispered to her, and said that you would be along in a moment, and then you were, and you know the rest.”

  “Oh.” Emmis considered this for a moment. “So what did Imrinira say, when Sella said that magicians could answer your questions?”

  “She said that she couldn’t, but that if the interference came from a protective spell of some ki
nd, then the wizard who cast it could probably tell me why it’s there.”

  “Does it come from a protective spell?”

  “I don’t know.” Lar picked his mug up again. “I didn’t get a chance to ask her about that.”

  “So are you going to go back and ask more questions?”

  “Not right away,” Lar said. He sipped tea. “I need to think about what questions to ask. And I need to write that protocol.”

  Emmis nodded.

  “Besides, my first trip to the Wizards’ Quarter got assassins sent to kill me,” Lar added. “Who knows what will happen if I keep going back?”

  “What more can happen?” Emmis asked. “They’re already trying to kill you.”

  “They might do a better job of it.”

  “How?”

  “Hire magicians. Or Demerchan.”

  “Perhaps you should get some protective spells of your own,” Emmis suggested. “Talk to a theurgist about that door shrine — it might be useful.”

  “It might. But first I need to write my letter to Lord Ildirin.”

  Emmis sighed. “Please yourself. I suppose I could see about buying some decent furniture while you do that, and I do need more clothes.”

  “You left yours at that inn in Shiphaven?”

  “Yes. So I’m sure they’re long gone.”

  “Not necessarily. Might the innkeeper have kept them for you?”

  Emmis frowned. “I doubt it,” he said.

  “I think you should go back and ask. I’d be interested in knowing just how quickly Annis disappeared after you ran out of there, too.”

  “I still can’t believe she told me they were going to assassinate you!”

  “Oh, they think everyone in Ethshar is a cold-hearted mercenary. I’m almost surprised she didn’t try to hire you to kill me.”

  Emmis’s mouth opened, then closed again.

  “Really, people in the Small Kingdoms have no idea how a place like Ethshar can exist,” Lar said. “It’s too big for them to comprehend — the stories say there are a million people in Ethshar of the Spices alone! I don’t think there’s a one of the Small Kingdoms with more than thirty thousand people in it; the Empire of Vond might have a quarter of a million, at most. And there’s all the magic here, and three overlords instead of a king or council...”