“Chance would be a fine thing,” Heno declared, managing the words rather better. “Did you fight, little bird man?”
Amkulyah stared at him flatly. “You know I was in the mines.”
“Would you have fought?” Heno swaggered over, looking down on the little Aethani.
“You think only Yoggs can fight, don’t you?”
“And C’lest,” Nedlam put in, dropping back to the bed with an agonised sound of splintering wood. “Oh, Heno?”
“What?”
“Lay off.”
The Heart Taker frowned at her. “Orama hus,” he said. Just talking.
“Lay off.” Nedlam stayed sitting, but something in her poise spoke elaborately of how small a room it was, if she chose to go for him. “Kul’s one of us, like C’lest. You like her, you live with him.”
“What is it with you and the human anyway?” Amkulyah asked, seeming to shrug off both Heno’s looming and Nedlam’s defence.
“Between her and me,” Heno told him, his frosty dignity somewhat sabotaged by Nedlam’s clarification: “Lovers.”
The Aethani’s round eyes grew considerably rounder. “The Slayer Celestaine and…”
Heno’s expression had lost its mockery. “And…?”
Kul cocked his head to one side. “I assume you don’t tell every human you meet. There would be horror, I think.” He blinked deliberately. “Disgust.”
Heno’s fists clenched and a few flickers of cold fire danced about his knuckles. “Remind me why we’re helping your broken little people again.”
“I don’t know,” Amkulyah admitted easily. “I watch you, Heno. Nothing in you says that you do anything for anyone except yourself. Or maybe her.” His inflection pointed at the absent Celestaine, rather than Nedlam, who stood up suddenly.
“All right, you both lay off.”
“You don’t need to stand up for me,” Heno told her smoothly. “I’m perfectly—”
“Shut up or I’ll belt you,” Nedlam told him, and to Kul, “and you lay off too. I can’t be doing with any of this. Heno is my friend. You are my friend. C’lest is my friend. Friends don’t argue.”
The enormity of this speech silenced the pair of them for several heartbeats, before Amkulyah finally asked, “Why is he your friend? And why am I your friend? You barely know me. Your people—”
“Did many things,” Heno broke in. “Many things at the behest of the Kinslayer. Terrible things. And so we atone.” He sounded anything but penitent. “And when the Kinslayer fell, Celestaine, of all the Slayers, looked on us and did more than just not murder us where we stood for the crime of being Yoggs, for the blood the Kinslayer had painted our hands with. And so she is a friend, yes. And more than a friend, now, but we were giddy with victory, and one thing led to another.” He said the words like the least giddy person in history.
“And another and another,” Nedlam put in cheerily. “Now, we’re friends, right.” And, in answer to Kul’s almost pleading expression. “I like you. You can shoot someone in the eye in the middle of a fight in the dark.”
“But… that’s not enough,” Amkulyah said weakly.
“Enough for me,” Nedlam said firmly, and then frowned. “And now I smell ora root.”
Heno perked up. “What?”
Ned went over to the window and pushed open the shutters a bit, taking a deep sniff. “Cart down there, all sorts of ora root.”
“Nonsense, the humans don’t take ora,” Heno said slowly. “It makes them crazy, makes them see things.”
Nedlam shrugged. “Nose doesn’t lie.” She made a sad face around her tusks. “Piss, I really want some now. Been ages.”
“What’s ora?” Kul asked cautiously.
“About the only good stuff we ever got down below,” Nedlam explained wistfully. A string of saliva worked its way down her chin. She inhaled again and shook her head. “No good, I’m going down to get some off them.”
“Ned, no!” Heno got in the way of the door. “They see you bearing down on them, they’ll think the war’s on.”
“Don’t care,” Nedlam decided. “I want ora, and they’ve got ora. Doesn’t have to be complicated.”
“Let me go,” Amkulyah suggested. “I’ll get some for you. I even have money.”
The two Yorughan exchanged glances, and Ned nodded eagerly. “I said you were a friend.”
Kul grimaced, but slipped past Heno and out of the door.
DOCTOR CATT WAS leaning out of his own windowframe in his shirtsleeves, not scenting the ora but just enjoying the breeze. Behind him, Fisher was darning Catt’s socks on the bed with the expression of someone intending to use them as a murder weapon.
“You’re only going to throw them out,” he muttered.
“But until we return to Cinquetann I will be inconvenienced by a paucity of footwear,” Catt replied over his shoulder. “And so it’s terribly kind of you to perform the necessary.”
“Better than listening to you complaining about it.” Fisher muttered. “Just go into Ilkand after her, already. Let her find the cursed thing and then take it.”
“But why, when I have a hero to take it for me, and not just point the way like a bloodhound?” Fisher asked him. “After all, we know she’ll come back here to her companions, one of whom I note is making his exit.”
“Oh?”
“The Aethani. Possibly, from all the beating about, sharing a room with the Yorughan was taking its toll.”
Fisher threw a balled-up sock at him, bouncing it neatly from the back of Catt’s greying head. “Done. What’s the boy-prince about, then?”
“Talking to some caravaneers.” Catt dipped into his pocket and produced a small brass horn inscribed with faintly glowing sigils, which he applied to his ear. “Let’s see now. Oh, he’s enquiring about… oh dear.”
“Oh dear what?”
“He’s asking for ora.”
“The thing the Yoggs chew? Banned here, isn’t it?”
“A prescribed substance just about everywhere, as some of our legal clients had cause to discover,” Catt agreed philosophically. “On account of its rather unpredictable effects on the human physiology.” He leant further out, seeing the rather shifty-looking caravan merchants strenuously denying that they had any ora, while Amkulyah tried to give them money. “Oh, this may be problematic.”
“Shroud up,” Fisher said suddenly, and acted on his own advice before Catt could question him, rendering the pair of them into nothing more than a faint shadow at the window. Moments later the inn courtyard below was filling with hard-looking men and women in white tabards bearing a halved shield. Most had hammers and some had crossbows, and they were seizing the merchants and slamming them to the ground, shouting at everyone to surrender. Amkulyah had skittered up the side of the covered wagon the moment they came in and was now crouched on the roof while they demanded he come down and give himself up. Catt saw his four crippled wing-limbs flex and clutch at the sky for an escape forever denied him.
“Oh, dear me,” he said. “Well, if we’re lucky…”
The explosion of Nedlam into the courtyard suggested that today was not going to be lucky for anyone. She didn’t have her ironbound club with her, but she barely seemed to need it, standing head, shoulders and half a chest over most of the Templars and bellowing for them to get back.
There must have been a good twenty of them, with drawn weapons, but they did indeed get back, though only for a shocked second. A moment later it might as well have been the war, and they were descending on Nedlam with the plain intent of hammering her into the ground. She opened her jaws and whooped out the Yorughan battlecry, meeting their charge with her own and shouldering right into the middle of them, giving them no chance to get a good swing in without braining one of their own. Unarmed, she was just picking them up and throwing them into their fellows, kicking, punching and slapping.
Catt watched glumly. “This is just going to be a distraction for Celestaine, isn’t it?” he observed.
&
nbsp; The Templars were up for a scrap, certainly. More and more were jumping Nedlam, dragging at her arms and neck, striking at her hamstrings and groin. One of them got a solid hammerblow to her face, but most were just trying to overwhelm her, massed strength against strength. Catt moaned as Amkulyah began throwing stones, cracking them across Templar temples or breaking noses.
“Aren’t we short a Yogg?” Fisher muttered, just as Heno appeared in the inn doorway, wreathed in white fire.
“Oh, dear me,” Catt whispered.
The Templars had Nedlam down by then, at least ten of them straining to hold her while an eleventh had eschewed her hammer for a knife, poised over the Yorughan warrior’s throat. Now everyone stopped, staring at Heno the Heart Taker with his staff upraised, about to bring excruciating agony to everyone present. A crossbow bolt skipped towards him and exploded when it met the flames dancing from his skin.
“Enough!” he bellowed, and Catt saw him take a deep breath, gathering himself. “We are not the enemy. We are companions of the Slayer Celestaine. Wait!” This last as the knife drew back to stab again. Heno tried for a reassuring expression, with debatable success. “This is clearly a misunderstanding. Shall we go with you to your city to find our companions and explain everything?” His eyes were on the knifepoint, and it was plain that, if the weapon moved another inch, that fire was going to be off the leash. “Otherwise things will go badly for everybody.”
If the lead Templar had been some fanatical veteran then ‘badly for everyone’ might well have been an understatement. But Catt identified their chief as a thin man, looking more like a book-keeper than a blood-letter, and standing prudently back from the scrum with a crossbow in the crook of his arm.
“You’re surrendering yourselves?” he called, because everyone knew the Yorughan never surrendered.
“Quite willingly.” Heno laid his staff down. “Aren’t we, Ned?”
“No!”
“Aren’t we?”
Nedlam growled and spat and fought a bit more to save face, but there were enough Templars to pin down even her. “You should have let them kill me, and then killed them.”
“I…” Heno rubbed at his carved tusk. “I am trying to do things differently. I am trying to do things Celest’s way. Just this once.”
“Ho u gash-la,” Nedlam spat, which Catt translated mentally as ‘You’ll regret it.’
“Probably,” Heno agreed.
The Templars bundled all three of them off soon after, along with all the caravaneers who hadn’t fled. Catt gave a heartfelt sigh. “I have my doubts about whether the Ilkand Temple will listen much to two Yorughan and an Aethani. In fact I think the former pair are going to get themselves executed publicly as a warning to… well, just as a general warning. I am rather disturbed by the way the Temple has gone.”
“Can’t be helped,” Fisher decided. “I’ll pack, shall I?”
“If you would, Fishy,” Catt agreed.
“For home.”
“For Ilkand,” Catt clarified. “If we want this scheme to work out, I think we’ll need to go change the Temple’s mind for it.”
“Catty, that’s not going to work,” Fisher pointed out.
“You forget,” Doctor Catt told him brightly. “I have a secret weapon of particular use against religious fanatics. Go get out the relics, would you?”
THERE HAD BEEN human slave-miners at the Dorhambri as well as the Aethani. Amkulyah had many memories of fighting them: bigger than his people, stronger, more suited to the hard work, they had jostled for the meagre food every evening, forcing the weaker and the smaller to band together or to starve. Towards the war’s end, humans had come to liberate the Dorhambri as their armies drove towards the Kinslayer’s fortress at Nydarrow, and it had been a shock to look up at that robust, heavy-boned people and not see them as bullies and persecutors—Yorughan in miniature. Amkulyah was young—he barely remembered the old days when human merchants would petition respectfully for entrance to Aethan, bowing and scraping to the Vaned Throne for the right to peddle their wares in exchange for Aethani riches.
But he had tried to recast them as allies, and not just brutish rivals for too-little food. Right now it was hard not to snap right back to where he had been in the Dorhambri.
They had put him in a cell with a window so small he could barely have fit his arm through it, and barred even so. He had no idea where Nedlam and Heno were, and he greatly feared they would be faring worse than him. And yes, he had been full of hatred for Heno not so long before—the Heart Taker would never know just how he had burned with it—but the Aethani were mannered by nature, and surviving in the mines had ground into him the ability to turn his back, turn his head and endure any slight or provocation.
And now he feared for Heno, even so; he feared for Nedlam. Because there were humans all around them, humans who hated and feared the Yorughan just like he always had. They had run the mines, and they had cut away the wings of his people, and so he had loathed and despised them, but most of all he had feared them. And of course that fear had never become anything else, because the Yorughan and their fellow minions had always been the masters at Dorhambri. What would the Aethani have become, if they had a couple of Yoggs at their mercy? Merciful? He didn’t think so. Nor would these humans be. Every second word from their mouths was ‘justice’ but what he heard was ‘vengeance.’ Amkulyah was good at reading human faces and his keen Aethani eyes noting all the little twitches and tics that spoke of the mind behind the muscles. These Templars were going to have a trial, they said, but they knew how it would go. And probably they would let Kul himself go, eventually, but by then it would be too late.
He went to the door and picked at the hatch. His nails were too blunt, but he strained the weakened sinews of his back until one of the sharp-edged flight-limbs flicked forwards and caught, agonisingly, in the seam, flexing and hissing in pain until he had slid the wood aside. Then he jumped and got his hands about the hatch edge, hanging there effortlessly, so much lighter than a human, yet almost as strong despite his size. He had heard no key, when they put him in here. Instead, there had been the solid thunk of a bar. These were short-term cells, he guessed; the Templars didn’t keep live prisoners for very long.
Next time, perhaps, they would invest in a lock. Supporting himself with one hand he writhed the other through the hatch and felt for the bar, snagging it on the third go and levering it up. It was heavy, though, and he tried to balance it but felt it tip and slam to the stone flags of the floor with a sound like the end of the world.
Swiftly he had the door open and was scurrying off down the corridor, desperately hoping the Yorughan were nearby. The sound of the bar had been too much, though. He heard alarmed cries and running feet. Old instincts cried Escape! and he began running, looking for a window he might fit through, following the light like a moth. The sounds of pursuit grew more urgent, but that didn’t matter now. He slipped through half-closed doorways, bolted past surprised humans. In his mind he was in the mines again, darting through the close tunnels, escaping another beating.
And there was a window; he vaulted up to the sill, ready to dive through.
The city of Ilkand Seaport was spread like a dirty, rucked-up sheet, but it was below, far below. He was up in Temple Ilkand, above the Gate, looking down on sharp-peaked roofs and the hard-flagged streets below. There was so much angry shouting behind him, though, and he thrust out his flight-limbs, instinct goading him to the act denied his people and alien to him. He leapt.
A hand caught his belt even as he did, hauling his thin body back within the prison of stone walls and ceilings. He tried to fight, but two humans had him, and he would break his own bones before he broke their grip.
“Just in time. Mad little tyke, isn’t he? You sure you want him?” one of his captors asked.
Amkulyah stopped struggling and looked past them to a familiar face. “Doctor Catt?” For a moment he couldn’t work out whether the Cheriveni was friend or foe. “What…?”
“Just a little voyage to hunt down something for our collection,” Catt said in his avuncular way. “Fishy and I happened to see you and your fellows being paraded through the streets, and we rather thought we should do something. In this case, bail you out.”
“The others!” Kul burst out. “The Yorughan, you’ve got them out too?”
“Ah, alas, sufficient largesse does not exist to pry them from the hands of the Ilkand Templars,” Catt informed him solemnly. “I think we had better locate Celestaine and inform her of developments, don’t you?”
Chapter Fifteen
CLOSE UP, THE Silver Tower didn’t look that silver. The eye refused to focus on it, seeing instead a blur of rainbow colours like spilled grease. Up above were structures that could have been balconies and windows, though Celestaine suspected they were just for show. There were no doors, but she knew Roherich of old. The whole tower would be a door, under the right conditions.
“You think he knows we’re here, then?” Ralas asked her, going to lean exhaustedly against the side of the tower and thinking better of it.
“I was counting on it,” Celestaine said. “I thought he’d open up, if it was me. I mean, we got on, mostly. As much as he got on with anyone.”
“Not saying much. So what’s the fall-back plan?”
“Well, there’s a question.” Celestaine tugged at her chin thoughtfully. “There would be a phrase he would use, I’d think. If the tower responds to his voice, then we’re screwed, but maybe it works for anyone. Open for Roherich! In the name of the Silver Mage!”
Nothing happened.
“Tulips,” Ralas said, and then, at her look, “He liked tulips. He wore one in his hat.”
“That once.”
“More than once.” Ralas squared his angular shoulders. “We’re neither of us the wizard to guess wizarding things, and it’d be other wizards he’d most want to keep out. It has to be something down to earth. What else did he like. What would say ‘home’ to Roherich of the Cold Heart?”
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