by Jude Fisher
Virelai’s knees began to buckle.
The Lord of Forent caught him by the elbows. ‘How now, my sorcerous friend: is your stomach too weak for such details? Do you perhaps see yourself entering a similar fire? Would you shriek, think you, or go with quiet dignity? It must be said, that’s hard to achieve when the flames begin to make your eyeballs sizzle.’
At this, Virelai crumpled. He sat there on the floor of the tower-room, shaking with terror. It was as he thought: where the Master was harsh and the Lord of Cantara both brutal and cruel, this man was more dangerous by far: he would see them all in the fires and laugh as they burned.
‘I am sorry, my lord,’ he managed to say. The words bubbled up and out of him in a torrent now as the floodgates of caution gave way. ‘It’s my master, my lord: Tycho Issian, Lord of Cantara, for whom I work this glamour. He has become ill with his need for – for a certain lady, and I am trying to help him ease his distress. It’s very difficult work, my lord, and my efforts have not always been met with appreciation. Many times he has beaten me when the spell fades before its time. It is very hard to make a glamour which will hold for any while, my lord, much less so one that depends for its effect on counterfeiting another so perfectly.’
But Rui Finco was barely listening to him now. Rather, he was staring first at Balia, then at Raqla. He pulled the latter from where she had subsided onto the floor and stood her alongside the first girl. He spent some time looking from one to the other; then he came back to Virelai.
‘You will not continue this practice, do you hear me?’
Virelai nodded mutely. Tycho would doubtless beat him black and purple; but he would prefer such treatment than to incur the Lord of Forent’s displeasure any further.
‘He is not to spend himself on these creatures. I cannot afford to have his obsession lessened in any degree.’
This last the lord uttered in a voice so low and so bland that it was clearly not meant to be any part of their conversation, but Virelai nodded anyway.
‘Can you bring them back to themselves?’
Understanding that he was not to burn, at least for the time being, Virelai scrabbled upright. ‘There is no need, my lord. Very shortly Raqla will be herself again, her hair black and her body wider. And if Balia sleeps for an hour or so the glamour will fade of its own accord: it requires some effort of concentration on the part of the subjects themselves to maintain the illusion you see, my lord—’
‘Yes, yes.’ The Lord of Forent waved his hands. Then his eyes narrowed as if something else had occurred to him. ‘The silver that the Lord of Cantara has so fortuitously come by in recent months; was it sorcerously made?’
Virelai’s terrified expression told him the answer to that question.
‘Even the silver he has given me to aid our venture?’
Virelai shook his head vigorously. ‘No, my lord. Lord Tycho thought it best to ensure that we traded the silver I made for true silver for your own coffers, my lord. Although I am finding that my skill in changing other metals to silver is improving all the time: I have some in my possession that has retained its new form for almost two moons now.’
The Lord of Forent became contemplative. ‘I see. How interesting. However, while I may not share my father’s penchant for the aroma of the roasted flesh of the Footloose, do not think I shall hesitate to skewer you personally if I find you carrying on your perverse practices—’
‘My lord, I—’
‘Do not interrupt me. I will personally skewer you if I find you making magic for anyone other than me. Do you understand me, nomad? You will remain here as my guest, as will your erstwhile master, the Lord of Cantara, and your damned pet cat, and from now on you will all three of you do my bidding, or face the fires for sorcery.’ He turned to the women. ‘It’s been some time since I took a golden-haired girl to bed. Shall we see if your changed appearance has taught you any new tricks?’
The two women followed their lord to the door with remarkable alacrity, Virelai thought; as if they were not simply being obedient to his command, but were eager to remind themselves of his abilities.
A moment later he was left alone in the chamber. Alone, that was, apart from the cat, whose eyes he could feel boring into him with the utmost contempt and loathing.
Every time he thought his life could get no worse, it seemed Fate had another unlucky card to deal him. He sighed, remembering the Master’s words to him: You should thank me for bringing you here to Sanctuary and saving you from all that greed and horror.
Yet again he felt the old doubts assail him.
Eight
Messages
‘Sur’s nuts, how I hate the blasted sea!’
She leaned over the gunwale again, catching her bleached and knotted braids in one hand and retching so horribly that anyone not privy to the situation might be forgiven for believing that a sheep was being slowly and grotesquely strangled.
The tall, gaunt man next to her watched this performance dispassionately, and when she straightened up, her face now almost as haggard as his own, he raised an eyebrow. ‘Picked the wrong profession for such a delicacy of stomach in that case, Mam.’
The weatherbeaten brown of the woman’s skin had taken on the faintest tinge of spring-green. Privately, Knobber thought it suited her: made her look a little more vulnerable, a touch more womanly. He hadn’t seen her look vulnerable since a distant evening in Jetra and that strange matter of the hillman whose disappearance had caused the mercenary leader such excess of emotion that he’d actually caught her shedding a tear. Only the one, mind, and that dashed away angrily with the back of a hand: but that one tear in itself had seemed a very abomination against nature. Generally, Mam looked barely female: it was hard to think of her as a woman at all, even if you scrubbed and combed out her hair and dressed her in one of the sheer gauze shifts the new queen was reported to wear, that were currently causing such a stir in court circles in Halbo. He shuddered. Actually, that image was not a pleasant one on which to dwell, and if Mam caught him entertaining it – and she did have an uncanny way with such matters – she’d not be amused. And Mam not amused was something to be avoided, and that was the truth.
‘Have you reckoned on what to tell him yet?’ he asked, changing the subject, though judging by the mercenary leader’s expression, probably not for the better.
Mam snarled. ‘You think I should concoct some fiction that sounds less bizarre than the truth?’
Knobber shrugged. Certainly their employer, Rui Finco, the Lord of Forent, was not going to be a happy man; for while they had managed to successfully stow the shipload of good Eyran weaponry they’d been paid to fetch south, they had signally failed to bring aboard their main cargo, the man without whom all the rest would prove pointless, for unless the range of a bowshot arrow had improved dramatically since he’d last heard about it, there was still no weapon that could fly across the wide Northern Ocean from Istria to Eyra without a boat to carry it within striking distance.
When he and Joz had arrived at the shipyard, not only was Morten Danson missing, but most of his workers and the best timber had gone, too. No one they spoke to seemed to know where he was: some lame excuse about the mumming in Halbo had been offered; but that hardly explained the missing men and wood, and it seemed more likely to Knobber that one of the King’s rivals had decided to make a little investment of his own. When they had got back to Halbo and reported their failure, Mam had seemed already distracted, full of unfocused fury, and rather than stick around to find out exactly what had caused her famously volatile temper, they had blurted out their own disappointing findings and headed swiftly for the safety of an anonymous tavern.
It was not, Knobber thought, a situation he’d want to explain to the Lord of Forent. No ships meant no war. Correction: no Eyran ships; no war, for those coast-hugging little Istrian vessels were worse than useless in a heavy sea. So, no Eyran shipmaker, no Eyran ships. No war: no more lucrative work for them. Perhaps, he thought speculatively,
we’d be better off fermenting a civil war in the Southern Empire. Or . . .
‘We could get the captain to turn around, take this lot north through the Sharking Straits and flog it to the Earl of Ness—’
‘This captain couldn’t find the Sharking Straits if it bit him in the arse. Besides, Ness has no money,’ Mam returned flatly, indicating that she had already considered and dismissed this possibility.
‘Erol Bardson?’
‘That man works by stealth, not open conflict. When he makes his move, it won’t be by force of arms, but by clever words and a knife in the back. War with Istria might suit his purpose well; but buying a shipment of arrows from us would be too obvious by far. No, Bardson has other plans, I’ll wager, though I’m not sure I’d take his coin even if he called me in.’
Knobber scratched his chin thoughtfully. ‘That sounds choosy, Mam. You developed a soft spot for young Ravn?’
Mam snorted. ‘Our stallion? Poor lad hardly knows which end’s up at the moment. They’ll be needing a new king in Halbo soon, and not through any treachery Bardson might devise: that woman must have worn Ravn’s cock to the size of a worm by now, so she can’t be getting much satisfaction from him.’
Knobber regarded his leader askance. He’d heard some women did receive pleasure from the act of love, but he’d yet to encounter one who’d admit to it. Though that might have something to do with— He pushed the thought aside.
‘You think Bardson will try to take the throne?’
‘There’s enough would take his side. Ravn did himself no favours when he took to wife an unknown nomad woman over the flower of the Eyran nobility. And he pays no heed to his counsellors, even when he sits with them, which I hear is rare in itself. Spends most of his waking and sleeping hours in the arms of his new queen and lets the rest go hang. They say Stormway and Shepsey are doing what they can, but they’re old men now, and their hearts aren’t in it any more. They’ve got ambitious lords and greedy farmers yapping round their feet like feists.’
‘Southeye was the one could have held it together.’
‘Aye. Well, we did what we had to do, and got well paid for it – one way or another.’
After the debacle at the Gathering and King Ravn’s subsequent escape, it had proved quite difficult to persuade the Lord of Forent to hand over to them the rest of the money, even though, as Mam had pointed out in no uncertain terms, they had kept their side of the bargain by delivering the King, and it was his and Varyx’s stupid fault that Ravn had got away from them. Rui had been less than impressed at the ease with which Mam had switched sides when the odds had shifted but when it looked as if a rumpus might ensue he’d paid up, albeit with ill grace. It had come as something of a surprise to be offered a new commission from the Lord of Forent: but work was work, and not so plentiful that they could afford to turn a job away.
The two sell-swords stared morosely over the side at the endless procession of grey rollers and contemplated their ill-fortune. But while Mam inwardly cursed her tardiness and lack of foresight in the matter of abducting the shipmaker, Knobber found himself wishing he was back on the little island a day’s sail east of the Galian Isles on which he had once fortuitously been washed up – the result of no shipwreck this, but an unfortunate altercation with some Circesian pirates – where the sun had shone day in and day out, and the light striking down through the gentle inshore waves was the identical cloudy, opalescent green of a stone pendant he had once scavenged from a mortally wounded southern warrior in a small skirmish in the foothills of the Golden Mountains when they’d found themselves caught on the losing side and had quickly switched allegiance. He’d put the thing around his neck and given its owner a quicker death than he deserved and thus regarded the stone as a good-luck charm, a symbol of his personal survival, though sometimes when he took it off and studied it he could swear that it appeared to change colour. He had lain on that painful, glorious, shining beach of crushed white seashells, with the sun beating down on his back, drying his shirt into stiff, salty folds, and stared into that softly polished stone as it shifted from grey to aqua-green in front of his eyes just like the flow of a sea, or the tide of his life— He was blasted out of this gentle memory as a particularly large wave struck the ship such a hard broadside blow that the timbers creaked and a bone-shaking rattle shuddered through the vessel’s frame and transferred itself deep down into his poor mortal bones.
‘Sur! Give an Istrian captain an honest, Eyran-made craft and he’ll still do his damnedest to sink it. Don’t they have the least understanding of seamanship? It’s a miracle we’ve not capsized a dozen times already. If we were closer to land, I’d drown the blasted man myself and take the helm!’
Another wave hit them hard. Mam groaned. Then she grabbed the gunwale and heaved desperately over it once again.
‘Whoo, that was a big one! Rough, isn’t it?’
A small, round man had appeared at Knobber’s elbow, grinning from ear to ear. His cropped piebald hair stood up in stiff little peaks – partly from an accumulation of airborne brine, partly because it had not seen clean water for – well, Knobber couldn’t remember the last time he’d seen Dogbreath bathe any part of his anatomy, let alone anything so frivolous as his hair. Dogo claimed that washing took off a much-needed layer of skin: and since there was so little of him in the first place he could hardly risk losing any more.
‘What’s the matter, Mam? Something you ate? Was it the hogfish last night – that smelled a bit off to me – or that rather ripe crab soup this morning?’
The sound of retching reached a crescendo, became more productive, then ceased abruptly. Mam shot upright, grabbed the little man by the throat in a single fluid movement and hoisted him until his feet dangled.
‘Why don’t you go and play in the rigging, Dogbreath?’ A shake accompanied each word. ‘Keep out of my way and don’t mention food in my presence, or you’ll find yourself making close acquaintance with the keel!’
When she put him down again, Dogo dodged swiftly behind Knobber. ‘Joz sent me to get you,’ he rasped, rubbing his sore neck. ‘Bird’s arrived from Forent.’
‘Damn me.’ Knobber made a superstitious sign. ‘How in seven hells do those pigeons find a single boat in the middle of a bloody ocean?’
‘I get paid to fight and steal; not fill my head with arcane knowledge. That’s Doc’s province. Why don’t you go ask him? Myself, I think we’d better go and find out the worst. I knew we should have throttled that sneaky bastard pigeon Lazlo claimed was his pet bird before he got the chance to send word of our little disaster to Rui Finco. Pet bird, I ask you. Whoever had a pet bird on board a ship? Get roasted the second day, it would, on any boat of mine—’
‘Sur did,’ Dogo interrupted.
‘What?’
‘Sur had his raven, came everywhere with him.’
Mam fixed the little man with a grim stare. ‘Shut up,’ she said.
‘And?’
‘Get ready to threaten that little weasel of a captain if it sounds bad. He’s got the balls of a mouse, that one: he’ll tell tales on us as soon as blink.’
‘I could spit him for you, Mam,’ Dogbreath added cheerfully, from the safe shelter afforded by Knobber’s broad back. ‘I could run him right through the gizzard and be away so fast he’d think a fly had bit him!’
‘Likely that’ll be the way your women feel when you’ve bedded them, little man.’ The troop leader adopted a bewildered, mimsy air and a gratingly high-pitched voice: ‘Ooh my, was that a tiny wee gnat gnawing on my privy parts, or have I just been visited by the mighty Dogo?’ Mam leered at the little man. ‘Don’t spit Lazlo, you numskull: he’s steering the ship: I just want him threatened, and that only if we have to. Let’s cross the bridge before we cut the ropes, eh?’
The pigeon had now made itself comfortable on the rakki above the wide sweep of the sail and was refusing to come down.
Two of the mercenaries – Joz and Doc – and a motley group of sailors from ha
lf a dozen Istrian provinces had gathered in a little knot at the foot of the mast and were gazing upwards. In their midst, a short, worried-looking man in expensively tooled leather was directing a thin, dark child from the Empire’s southern mountains, a boy they referred to as ‘the Monkey’, for his climbing skills, and for the legendary creature of the Far West, to shin up the mast to fetch the pigeon down and the boy was protesting, sensibly enough, to Mam’s mind, that as soon as he got within a body-length of the bird, the thing would take fright and fly off elsewhere, maybe to another ship entirely. And then where would they be? For this, Monkey received a sharp clip around the ear and a stream of abuse from the captain.
Joz Bearhand sighed and shook his head. These people had a tendency towards histrionics and impracticality that he found extremely irritating. He took a couple of steps backwards, reached around behind him, took aim. A moment later, the bird fell to the deck, twitching. In the middle of the stunned silence that followed, Joz retrieved the pebble (one of his favourites – a seawashed round of white quartz he’d taken from a beach in the Fair Isles), put it back in his pouch along with the catapult, pick up the limp form of the pigeon, untied the message scrip from its leg and handed it to Mam.
She unwound it carefully and started to read its odd combination of dots and dashes.
‘That message is for me!’
The Istrian captain came at her furiously with his hand extended, palm up, fingers flicking imperiously.
Mam gave him her ghastliest smile, making sure every single one of her pointed teeth were visible to him. Imagine what it would be like if I were to bite you, that look said. Imagine what it would feel like if I bit you, down there . . . Then she handed the scrip to him with a nonchalance that spoke volumes. Joz caught Doc’s eye and was rewarded with a wink. Dogo looked disappointed: he’d been looking forward to showing his little blade to the man.