The Sea Peoples

by S. M. Stirling

  Louis looked at his cousin with a startled air, then sighed in relief. “Of course I renounce the—what is it I must renounce?”

  “The crown,” Hildred said angrily.

  “Of course,” he answered. “I renounce it. Come, old chap, I’ll walk back to your rooms with you.”

  “Don’t try any of your doctor’s tricks on me,” Hildred cried, trembling with fury. “Don’t act as if you think I am insane.”

  “What nonsense,” Louis replied. “Come, it’s getting late, Hildred.”

  “No,” the other shouted, “you must listen. You cannot marry, I forbid it. Do you hear? I forbid it. You shall renounce the crown, and in reward I grant you exile, but if you refuse you shall die.”

  Louis made a forced smile, but Hildred drew a long knife from his sleeve and barred his way.

  “Archer has opened his own throat, but there are more knives about this night than that, or this! Ah, you are the King, but I shall be King. Who are you to keep me from Empire over all the habitable earth! I was born the cousin of a king, but I shall be King!”

  Louis stood white and rigid, his eyes full of a terrible surmise. Suddenly a man came running up Fourth Street, entered the gate of the Lethal Chamber, traversed the path to the bronze doors at full speed, and plunged into the death chamber with the cry of one demented.

  Hildred laughed until the tears ran down his face; he and John both recognized the man at once.

  Vance, John thought. God pity that poor exiled armorer and his daughter! Mary ever-Virgin, intercede for them!

  “Go,” Hildred cried and wept. “You have ceased to be a menace. You will never marry Constance now, and if you marry anyone else in your exile, I will visit you as I did my doctor last night. Mr. Wilde takes charge of you tomorrow.”

  Then Hildred turned and darted into South Fifth Avenue, and with a cry of terror Louis dropped his belt and sabre and followed, boots pounding on the pavement. John heard him close behind at the corner of Bleecker Street, and Hildred dashed into the doorway under Hawberk’s sign and into the corridor that gave on their rooms.

  The door was closed, but bore the scars of forced entry. Hildred tittered at the sight.

  “Halt, or I fire!” Louis cried, but when he saw Hildred dash up the stairs, leaving Hawberk’s shop below, he stopped. Hildred heard him hammering and shouting at their door as though it were possible to arouse the dead.

  • • •

  Now I’ve seen everything, Pip thought, as the cat flew towards Deor’s face.

  She’d seen cats thrown, of course. Usually they complained, wriggled, righted themselves in midair, landed and streaked off with an air of affronted dignity. This one . . .

  “Watch out!” she called, and tried to hit it with a slingshot ball.

  She missed; she’d been expecting to miss; and the thought that she was probably going to miss made her more likely to miss.

  “Sod this for a game of soldiers!” she screamed, and pulled out her mother’s kukris, the larger in her right hand. “Chop-chop!”

  Deor ducked, and the cat sailed by him with its claws outstretched. Deor moved then, quick and certain, but his slash with the glyph-graven knife was directed above the shabby black feline. It screamed, and so did Wilde. Toa’s shovel came down like a giant cleaver, and the little man swayed aside and leapt to the floor as it crushed the custom-made chair into splinters.

  “Call on your protectors!” Deor said sharply.

  Pip shrieked and raised her kukris. “Well, if you’re going to protect me, get on with it!”

  . . . and suddenly her paw lashed out at the cat.

  Paws? some part of her thought. Now I have paws. Four paws. And I’m walking on them. It’s like being on springs! I could jump a hundred feet! I can smell everything and it’s bright as day in here! I can move like lightning!

  Most of her was just thinking that the little beast smelled wrong, as if it had been dead too long to eat without actually being dead, something that you definitely would not eat unless you were very, very hungry. It was a Bad Thing, bad enough to make her ignore the fascinating meadowlark flittering around the room, and even the great shaggy she-bear. They were busy with the other Bad Thing, anyway, the one that smelled like an ape . . . as much as the cat smelled like a cat, at least.

  And though it was ridiculous she knew they were members of her pride. The bird was her brother and the bear was her sister—they were even bearing to the same male, and there was nothing more sisterly than that. Even the giant ratty thing was a relative; in fact, he smelled rather like a sire. Not her sire, but definitely A sire. They were all hunting together, though it was also like a standoff between two different prides over territory where you snarled and leapt and showed your claws and teeth.

  No, more serious, more like fighting a pack of hyenas to protect the cubs, she decided.

  The plate-sized claw-edged disk on the end of her forelimb flashed through the air and slapped down with a force that might have broken a buffalo’s neck, the claws gouging into the dried wood in a shower of splinters. Her awareness was tightly focused yet broad at the same time; she could see the bear’s paw-swipe at the ape-thing, almost as fast as hers and even more powerful, and the way something bright flashed with the meadowlark’s beak, and the bush rat’s chittering menace from the door, blocking the way out.

  The Bad-Thing-cat tried to scuttle between her forelegs, hissing. Pip- lioness sprang straight up, her arched back nearly reaching the ceiling, twisting lithely in midair to come down with all four paws aimed at the cat. Space itself seemed to twist in turn, and somehow the cat was not where she landed, her three-hundred-odd pounds of healthy young lioness making an audible but padded thump. Her hind paws instantly fastened into the floorboards by weight and claw-lock and torqueing against them she struck in a boxing motion, slap-slap-slap-slap fast enough to make the air hiss. The tip of one claw just touched one haunch of the frantically dodging cat, and a little tuft of black fur arced through the air with a curve of red dots.

  Blood smells bad too, Pip-lioness’ nose told her.

  The cat screeched. The lioness’ teeth were barred like twin curved saws of ivory and a racking snarl sounded through the room, under the basso growl of the she-bear. The meadowlark sang a song of magic and battle that Pip understood even though there were no words in her mind, and the words were in another tongue than the one her ape-self knew:

  “—lord of the host of heroes

  Who undaunted fight on Vigrid plain

  All-seeing saw his own death

  At the end of Time

  On Earth’s last day

  And whispered this

  To his bright blade—”

  Everything slowed. Pip-lioness’ breath smoked in the sudden cold. Things flashed before her eyes—raven-wings circling a single blue eye that saw everything that ever was or would be, ash-leaves fluttering from a cloak lined with blue, a gray beard and the thrust of a spear that cut like the rushing passage of time. She could smell a wolf, and smell goats—but overpowering, goats bigger than buffalo—and the haft of a hammer clanged against the iron gloves of a red-bearded giant as chariot-wheels rumbled like thunder. By the door a tattooed brown giant laughed with a sound of volcanoes and earthquakes and the tsunamis that crush all before them, in his hand a massive fishhook-shaped weapon that sank into the fabric of the universe and pulled with world-shaking might.

  The redbeard’s Hammer reached out and touched it, and the figures shared a fighting grin. A winged circle turned over all, and a single piercing trumpet-note sounded.

  The ape-thing turned and scuttled for the door. Even Pip’s lioness soul had been daunted by the half-seen, half-sensed figures about her, but from them flowed power that made the one true path to strike part of bone and sinew. Her claws flashed out—

  And she was kneeling on the floor, panting, wheezing, while Wilde l
ay bleeding at her feet. The blood-dripping kukri in her right paw—

  “Hand,” she muttered to herself. “God, but that was a vivid hallucination—”

  —was outstretched towards the dying man. She must have hacked across his throat . . .

  Thora grinned at her. “Look at the wound, Pip,” she said.

  Pip did. That jagged tear was not what the honed steel in her hand would produce.

  “He’s dying anyway,” Pip said, wiping the steel on the hem of her skirt.

  It wasn’t as if these were really her clothes, though she did step back from the spreading pool that was near-black in the dim light.

  “That’s what counts,” she said coolly.

  Thora nodded, and touched her chest where the amulet lay again.

  “Thanks, my old friend,” she said . . . and Pip knew she wasn’t addressing anyone here. “I’ll make a Blót when I can.”

  Toa grunted from the doorway, his face and massive forearms sheening with sweat as if he’d grappled with forces strong enough to have uprooted oaks.

  “Someone coming up the stairs, bloody fast!” he said.

  “Quick!” Deor snapped.

  He bent and grabbed Wilde by the collar and dragged him backward from the room and into the corridor beyond. The knife in his hand moved in a curious pattern around the dying man’s head, then dipped into the blood and drew runes in a semicircle about him.

  “Through here!” he said. “Thora, Pip, together—feel the bond that unites you to Prince John.”

  Pip did, feeling a little self-conscious about it. And there was a feeling of connection; but it didn’t lead anywhere in particular as far as she was concerned.

  “Here!” Deor said, his head turning with an intentness like a hunting wolf.

  They followed him down the dark corridor, leaving the light of the tallow candle behind. The next room was lined by books and papers, dim shapes in shadow. One wall had a bare space, and on it was hung a plaque that bore a three-armed yellow sigil on black, twisting in ways that made her eyes want to slide away and focus on it at the same time. Deor advanced on it with the knife held before him, and used the knife to flip the plaque off the wall. It shattered, and Pip felt an obscure sense of relief, as if some physical pressure she hadn’t been conscious of until that instant was removed.

  And now she could see the wall better. “Look,” she said. “See the gap between those two bookcases?”

  Deor tried to feel into it, but his hand wouldn’t fit. She stepped over and ran hers in; it was tight, but she could just feel a line down the plaster beyond.

  “Wilde had small hands—smaller than mine, but there’s definitely something there. I’d say that bookcase is concealing a door. It must pivot on the other side. Toa, watch our backs.”

  The big man had good eyes, but huge hands and fingers like muscular sausages.

  Thora, Deor and Pip began tracing the outlines of the mahogany shelves. Pip’s fingers found a rough spot.

  “Help me take these bound files off here!” she said. “I’d wager there’s a catch here somewhere.”

  Behind them, the door to the outer room slammed open.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  BETWEEN WAKING WORLD AND SHADOW

  John felt an inner dizziness, and the world contorted around him, making him feel as if he were about to pitch forward on his face . . . when he didn’t have one, and was bound upright back where he did have one. He was here and there, spinning, the fabric of things buckling like the buffeting of huge blows or a raging storm through existence rather than sea and air—only the typhoon that the Grasscutter had raised in Westria came close to the cataclysmic violence he sensed.

  Hildred’s mind blazed like a burning jewel, but something was tugging at the connection between them. Wilde’s door was open, and Hildred burst through crying:

  “It is done, it is done! Let the nations rise and look upon their King!”

  Wilde wasn’t there, and the first jar of worry dampened the flow of maddened joy. Hildred went to the cabinet and took the diadem from its case, the diamonds and fretted gold glistening blue and yellow in the dim light of the tallow candle, and then drew on the white silk robe, embroidered with the Yellow Sign.

  “King!” he muttered. “At last I am King, King by my right in Hastur, King because I know the mystery of the Hyades, and my mind has sounded the depths of the Lake of Hali. I am King!”

  His mind moved gloatingly to the first gray pencilings of dawn, and how a tempest brewed which would shake two hemispheres. Visions of shouting crowds and ranked guards and men and women kneeling before a throne possessed Hildred as he threw up his arms in exultation.

  Then a man groaned. John and the Boisean with him both recognized the sound of someone badly wounded, too badly hurt to scream, but Castaigne was simply puzzled by it, and by the smell of blood—he did recognize that, and vague fleeting memories of hunting trips and hanging a deer up to drain while the dogs nuzzled at it and ate the offal went through him.

  He seized the tallow dip and sprang to the door to the hallway, sheltering the guttering flame. The cat passed him like a demon, and the tallow dip went out, but the long knife flew swifter than she, and he heard her screech; John and the Boisean recognized the heavy tugging feel of a steel edge ramming into meat and bone. For a moment the sound of her tumbling and thumping about filled the darkness, and then Hildred lighted a lamp and raised it over his head.

  Wilde lay on the floor with his throat torn open. The unwilling co-hosts of Hildred’s mind recognized the ragged tear of an animal’s claws, and the word tiger went through them in unison. At first Hildred thought his mentor was dead but as he looked, a green sparkle came into his sunken eyes, his mutilated hand trembled, and then a spasm stretched his mouth from ear to ear.

  For a moment terror and despair gave place to hope, but as Hildred bent over him his eyeballs rolled up in his head, and he died with the usual twitching squalor and stink.

  “My Crown, my Empire! Oh, Master, no!”

  John had noticed steps behind him, but Hildred hadn’t in his agony of soul, an agony that shook John even though he realized how richly it was deserved. Hands seized him from behind, and bound him despite a struggle that left his veins standing out like cords. His voice shrieked wordless hate, and he sank his teeth into a wrist below a blue uniform jacket’s cuff, worrying it until the man screamed, too, and staggered away with blood spurting from a torn artery. It ran down Hildred’s teeth and chin too and across the silk of his robe. It tasted hot and salt and metallic as he fell to the floor and struggled in futile jerks against the handcuffs and the boots.

  He saw Hawberk then, and behind him Louis’ ghastly-pale face, and farther away, in the corner, a woman, Constance, weeping softly.

  “Ah! I see it now!” he shrieked. “You have seized the throne and the Empire. Woe! Woe to you who are crowned with the crown of the King in Yellow!”

  His mind spun down to blackness, and John heard a familiar voice shouting:

  “John! Johnnie! Wake up!”

  Cords of silver and gold pulled at him, pain and relief and hope more bitter than either. He opened his eyes.

  • • •

  “I’ve got it!” Pip said. Then: “John! Johnnie! Wake up!”

  There was a prison stench as the stretch of wall swung back. A lamp burned dimly, high on the windowless wall, and a chain from an overhead bracket ran to a thick bar. That ran behind Prince John’s back, between the crooks of his elbows, with his hands bound in front of him and the balls of his feet just touching the dirty boards below. Another man sat manacled to the wall not far away.

  “Wait—” Deor began, then swore and followed her.

  The others crowded in, and the hidden door swung shut. John looked at her, his honey-brown eyes dull.

  “You almost look . . . real . . .” he said.


  “I am real, you bloody fool!” she snapped. “Toa, hold him!”

  Muffled through the door and the books and papers on the other side came shouting and a high frenzied shrieking. Toa put an arm around John’s waist and lifted, enough to take the strain of the rope, and Pip flicked out her kukri in two precise chops. The weapon had started as a peasant’s tool in Nepal, used for everything from cutting kindling to settling disputes with the neighbors; her mother had gotten these from a Gurkha veteran she’d adventured with after the Blackout, a sort of uncle-mentor. The heavy back-curved blade was fine steel and it snicked through the heavy sisal with a thack-thack-thack as she moved it with snapping precision, then struck the point into the floor and took John in her arms, lowering him gently.

  “Water, somebody,” she said.

  A hand—she didn’t notice whose—put a bottle in her hand; it was lemonade from the street cart, but that would do. John’s lips were cracked and his face gaunt and heavy with brown beard just getting to the end of the bristly stage, but his eyes cleared as they met hers.

  “Ah!” he said, taking his lips from the bottle. “Holy Mary, Mother of God, that was good. Pip . . . Thora . . . Deor . . . Toa . . . thank you! But what are you doing here? Where is here?”

  It’s the dream of a mad God, Pip thought, then took pity on his bewilderment—that was apparently literally true, but not what he needed to hear.

  She closed her eyes for a moment, feeling herself shuddering in relief. We found him! she thought, and it was as if a weight had been taken off her very bones.

  Admittedly they hadn’t rescued him yet, or themselves; they were stuck in a very bad place. But half-done was well-begun.

  Deor spoke with a briskness that was more soothing than a gentler tone would have been:

  “My Prince, you were abducted in the moment of victory. You remember that?”

  “Yes . . .” he said, frowning. “The Pallid Mask . . . and there was some local ghoulie working with him—Rangda, I think I heard her called. She . . . well, she looked to me like a woman with white hair only her face was . . . sort of like a beast, with fangs. . . .”