by Dave Duncan
"What is to be done?" Sorghaghtani demanded angrily. "Can we not help him break the binding?"
"We must try," the tutelary answered. "For him to fail at the last minute would be tragedy for all Italy. But the dangers are extreme."
"Is he not a strong man, able to withstand what must break most others?"
"Undoubtedly, but even for him the shock may be mortal."
"Will you two stop that!" Toby roared, glaring from one to the other. "If you are going to put me to death, Holiness, then go ahead and do it. Otherwise, throw me in a cell where I can get some sleep. Or, best of all, let me go down there and die beside the men who trusted me, the men I have betrayed. But stop discussing me as if I'm a colicky horse!"
They ignored him.
"Great Spirit, will you not explain his error to him?"
"He cannot believe us, and there is no time. The forces are poised, and the word must be given before the sun rises. Sorghaghtani, daughter, bid Chabi take him to the spirit world and show him the truth."
The little shaman uttered a cry as shrill as a bat's. "Nay, Holiness, do you know what you ask? Is he not untrained? What has he done that you would destroy him so horribly?"
"Tobias, if you could save the city by laying down your life, what would be your choice?"
His knuckles were white on the railing. "Do you have to ask?"
"You have to answer."
"Take my life, then. Will it be quick?"
"No, and it may be a shameful death, but we have no more time. Send him, Sorghaghtani, send him."
The shaman's fingers awoke a gentle rumble from the drum on her lap.
"No!" Toby protested. "The hob! Do not rouse the hob!"
"It is time to rouse the hob," said the tutelary.
The beat became a muffled thunder, and then a roar of blood in his ears. A weight of worlds crushed him down. He folded to his knees and bowed even smaller, feeling as if he were shrinking under a merciless load—tiny and smaller still, no larger than Chabi. He spread his arms, for he could move nothing else, and his arms raised him. He soared, and Chabi went with him, together borne on the imperative of the drumming. The dome rocked and spun and vanished away in the wind. Like an autumn leaf he rode the tempest, spinning through shapes and shades of madness, lights, and colors no mortal eye could see. Chabi was with him.
At last he sank. The rushing slowed and tumult faded, leaving him in the stillness of a moonlit glade. The drumming was a distant background, a pulse in the world, a voice chanting far off. Deer slept in the long grass and thorny shrubs, does mostly prone, fawns curled small. The stag was on his feet, antlers held proud aloft as he stared at the newcomer, although if he could see Toby, it was more than Toby could. He had no sense of being there, neither in his own body nor any other. But the stag knew him and saw him, and there was sorrow in the great liquid eyes.
"You call from afar, shaman," the stag said, "very far from the worlds of the ancestors." He twitched his black nose inquiringly, seeking the missing scent. "We are not a fighting people. The wolf drives us in winter, and we must run."
Toby could not speak, but drumming spoke for him, and the stag seemed not to mind. It turned its magnificent head to look eastward. "Many have cried in distress to the fathers, but always they wanted us to fight for them, and we are not a fighting people. Thus say the ancestors to us: 'You shall not enter their battles. They must turn the pack themselves.'"
The beat lamented, then changed, growing more agitated, urgent. Forest shifted and blurred and reformed as walls of stone. Moonlight puddled silver on floorboards under narrow windows, its reflected rays sketching in the inner darkness a massive bed of finely carved woods and thick brocade. Through a gap in the draperies showed the slender whiteness of a girl asleep.
The herd had gone, leaving only the stag, and he looked to the west, sinews straining in his mighty neck as he supported the weight of his rack. "Your song is different. You ask us not to fight, but to run, and this we can do. Behold, I answer your call! I will go before the pack and run for you, shaman."
The drum's pulse rose in triumph, and the stag himself changed—fur melting, flesh flowing—until what stood before the moonlit windows was a young man, stocky and muscular, and yet his thick shoulders still bore the stag's head and antlers. A cloth tied loosely around his now-human loins was probably not normal wear but something taken up in a hurry. He looked to the north. "Show me the way. I am yours to command."
Still Toby could not reply, and again the voice of the drum answered for him, its beat slowing to a somber throb, a dirge, a funeral march, full of menace. The stag-man understood, for his shoulders sagged. He turned to the south, and his voice rose in complaint, a voice growing more and more familiar, just as the walls and the windows were aching at the edges of memory.
"You ask too much, shaman! To flee before the hunters is no shame when one is not sprung from a fighting people. But not to run, or to run in circles, or to cower in a hollow and watch the pack close, ah, but you ask too much!" His antlers were visibly melting and drooping. "Think you because I will not fight that I have no honor? That I forget the ancestors?" The wilted antlers hung over his chest like ropes; and all his pride was shame. He laid his human hands on the window ledge and belled a great note of despair to the starlit night and the sea. "This is what you do to me, shaman! I will have recompense. You will suffer for this."
Castel Capuano! It was Castel Capuano!
"I will suffer," Toby said aloud, and the scene shattered in a cacophony of drums.
* * *
He sprawled on the gallery with his arms outspread and the stonework cold under his face. "No!" he said. "No, no, no! I do not remember."
"More, Sorghaghtani!" said the toneless voice of the tutelary. "He will recover and thank you for it, or he will not return to reproach you. Even madness will be better than failure."
Again the drumming swept him up and whirled him into the spirit world.
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
A forest at sunset. He stood naked before a huge and ancient oak, staring up at a hole in the trunk and a squirrel that sat on the edge of the hole, gibbering at him as the rumble of the drum faded into the distance like a passing storm.
"Go away, go away!" the squirrel chattered. It was a very red little squirrel, and it wrapped its bushy tail around itself and peered down at him with eyes like angry bright beads. "Go, go, go! Go now! Go away! They are mine."
"I only want to borrow them," Toby said.
"No! No! No! No! They are mine. They are ours, not yours, shaman. Go! Go away! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
"I will bring them back." He reached up to the hole and tried to push the squirrel aside. It bit his finger. He cried out at the pain and snatched his hand away to suck the wound. He could taste the blood.
The squirrel danced in fury now on the edge of the hole, jabbering, "Mine! Mine! Mine!," and "Ours! Ours! Ours!," and sometimes, "Go away! Go away!" It lashed its shiny tail around like a feather duster.
"I need them just for a little while. I will bring them back." He reached up to grab the brute. It ran up the trunk out of reach, clinging to the bark with its claws.
"There is nothing there, shaman. The hole is empty."
"Then you won't mind if I look?" He stretched as high as he could and felt inside the hole with his right hand. The squirrel jumped on his wrist and bit it. As he grabbed for it with his left hand, it dived into the hole, and suddenly he had both hands in the hole and they were caught there. He was trapped. Inevitably, the ground sank away under his toes then, leaving him hanging by his wrists. The tree bark was harsh and spiky against his skin. He knew what was going to happen now. This was Sergeant Mulliez's whipping post again.
The squirrel bit on his fingers a few times, then poked its head out between his hands to smile at him. "You must promise to bring them back!"
"I promise," he said.
The lash crashed across his shoulders and he gasped, but it was not quite a scream. He had made no sound before on the whi
pping post, and he would not now.
"Promise more faithfully!" sneered the squirrel. It was redder than ever, red as the blood he could feel streaming down his back.
"I promise!"
Crash! This time he had been ready for it.
"You are still lying. Swear, shaman!"
"I swear!"
Crash!
Someone was screaming.
"Stop that, Sorghie!" he said. "You won't get around me that way."
The roughness on his hands and face was stonework again. He was leaning against the wall with his arms over his head, still in his armor and soaked in sweat, not blood. His helmet had fallen off. He dropped his arms and turned around, but he continued to lean against the wall, for his legs were trembling. The shaman sat at his feet, doubled over her drum.
"Will nothing convince you?" she wailed.
"Not this. None of it makes any sense to me."
"Again!" commanded the tutelary. "This must be the last time. No matter what it does to him, leave him there until he stops struggling."
Toby started to say, "I've never admitted defeat in my life," but they didn't give him time to get the words out.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
He sat in darkness, a warm and cozy darkness smelling of loam and animal fur. He was listening to a tantalizingly familiar voice. It spoke in Italian, but slowly and clearly, a soft voice with steely undertones:
"...problem is trust. After so many centuries of disunity, cooperation is foreign to us. Even when we face a common foe, we cannot combine because no state can ever trust another. Alliances change too fast." The shape emerging from the darkness was not human. Human eyes were closer together and did not glow with that yellow light.
"Trent was a miracle, but it was a very brief miracle. One day's cooperation—yes, even Italians can agree for a single day when the enemy is in sight. But more than that..." The speaker sighed and smiled, animal teeth showing close below the eyes. "As soon as the sun sets we start conspiring again. To let another's army march across your contado is hard. To put your forces under another's command is almost unthinkable. To send them off to guard another city and leave your own vulnerable—that is an impossible concession."
The light creeping into the scene had the bluish tinge of daylight. The speaker was a fox, a very large red fox.
"Then we must plan accordingly," said another voice, one that Toby did not recognize. Nor could he see the speaker. "One day's cooperation, no marching through others' territory, no putting your forces under a stranger's command, no leaving your home city unguarded."
"If you can devise a strategy that satisfies all those conditions, then you are indeed a military genius." The fox was melting, shifting. The cave, too, was changing.
"It may be possible to come close, Your Magnificence."
Il Volpe pricked up his ears. "Indeed? How close?"
"Close enough, because no one makes alliances with the Fiend. You can trust your oldest enemy before you trust him."
"Some have tried." It... he... was becoming human, at least below the neck. The surroundings were beginning to look more like a room than a fox's earth, too, smelling less of loam and musk, more of polish, printer's ink, leather bindings, and wine.
"And lived to repent it, but not much longer. First, territory. Obviously someone will have to make a concession so that the separate states may bring their forces together. But this will not be a problem once the Fiend has already invaded, will it, messer? Any state will welcome its neighbors in if they come to drive Nevil away."
Who was this Unknown? He was using almost exactly the same words Toby himself had used many times. He was certainly no Italian.
The fox sipped from a stemmed goblet. "They may not agree so before it happens, but do continue."
"Command, then. You said yourself, that command can be relinquished for one day. It happened at Trent, it can happen again."
"One day?" The fox smiled. "That might be negotiable."
"Leaving the city unguarded—would you settle for sending your army out as long as it remained between you and the foe?"
The fox laughed. "You bargain with a gentle touch, messer! Tell me your plan." When did foxes ever concede anything? He was human from the neck down now, a fox-headed man covered with a red pelt, sitting back at his ease in a silk-upholstered chair. The earth was fast becoming a room, Pietro Marradi's little private office, which was a nook barely big enough for two, three at the most. It was lit by daylight but still dull, as if seen through smoked glass.
This was a distorted memory. The only time Toby had seen this room had been the morning when Marradi had summoned him in from Fiesole and announced that it was time to negotiate the condotta—meaning that all the sparring between Don Ramon and the dieci that had gone before was of no importance and the matter would now be settled by the principals, messer Marradi and messer Longdirk, man to man. Which is what they had proceeded to do. At the Carnival Ball that evening, the Magnificent had forced the dieci to accept the terms, then the next morning he had gone back on his word.
But it was a false memory. Sorghaghtani was weaving lies. Marradi had never had a fox's head, and Toby had never made the absurd promises the Unknown was making. This imposter with the barbaric accent must be the mysterious Shadow, the source of all the trouble, the one who had turned Marradi against Toby, tampered with Maestro Fischart's demons so that he died, betrayed Lisa—and even stolen that missing bag of gold.
"The Fiend must strike at Italy," the Unknown said, "can we doubt it? He rules his dominions by terror and cruelty, continually stamping out dissent. He cannot tolerate another defeat, for if he ever starts to seem vulnerable, all Europe will explode under his feet. He will come in the spring, and he will bring the hugest army he can raise. If he makes those mistakes, I can break him."
The fox narrowed its eyes suspiciously. "How? Why is size a mistake?" His fur was starting to look like clothes.
"Because a great army eats greatly and is clumsy to maneuver. If he waits for the harvest, my plan may not work, but if he comes in the spring, then he must either bring his provisions with him, which will slow his advance, or else guard his supply lines. Nevil likes to move very fast. He also tends to overextend himself. He has not been caught out yet, but one day he will be. Our strategy must be to encourage his overconfidence, draw him onward, lengthen those lines, lure him into a trap."
"And what will be the bait in this trap?"
"Florence, messer."
Toby wanted to scream and could not. He wanted to shout Stop! Stop! He tried to yell a warning: Stop, because whoever he is, you are being tricked. But he uttered no sound at all. Marradi remained unaware of the hidden watcher in his future. Even so, he was not pleased at the prospect being offered.
"You presume far, comandante! You expect me to stake out my city as a sacrificial lamb?"
"I see no other way of dealing with the threat, Your Magnificence. The Fiend will send his thousands and hundreds of thousands pouring over the Alps. He will devastate the north—Turin, Milan, Venice, Parma, Verona, and all the rest. You will be overwhelmed by starving refugees; he will follow slavering at their backs. Even if Rome and Naples try to come to your assistance, by then the roads will be full of refugees, the northern powers will have been destroyed, the price of food will be—"
"Stop, stop! You give me waking nightmares. Why Florence?"
"Geography, messer. We must tempt Nevil south before he sacks Milan or Venice, or very many of the smaller cities. He may bleed off some troops to guard his supply lines, which will help us, but the main point is that when he throws his siege works around Florence, he will be between the four great powers. Milan, Venice, Rome, and Naples can move in. The jaws of the trap close here."
The fox smiled skeptically and lifted the goblet to his muzzle. "I believe the beginning. I approve of the ending. It is the middle I distrust. What lure can you dangle to attract a demon?"
"Several things," said the Unknown. "I have already p
resumed to make a few preliminary arrangements."
"Oh, you have, have you?" Skepticism became open suspicion. "What arrangements?"
"In confidence, Magnificence?"
"You have my word."
"Well..." The Unknown hesitated. "After Trent, the Khan wrote to congratulate me. I wrote back and asked him to appoint you suzerain."
Marradi almost leaped from his chair in horror. "You what?" Lips curled back from the carnivore teeth.
Lies! Lies!
"You know how Nevil feels about suzerains?"
"I certainly do! He pickles their heads in jars of brine."
"He must catch them first. So if there is a new suzerain in Florence, he will be very tempted. And there is myself. I do not wish to sound immodest, but I have been a nuisance to him for longer than anyone, and at Trent I did nothing to win his affections."
Who was this demon-spawned fraud, this imposter with his glib falsehoods? Obviously Marradi thought he was speaking with Toby himself.
Now he stared at the Unknown with deadly intent. "I cannot imagine what he would do to you if he took you alive, messer. You would truly stay in the city while the Fiend closed in to besiege it?"
"I will. Throw me in jail if you don't trust me. I also have something he wants very much, the only thing he fears, a certain gem. He knows I have it. I also had the audacity to suggest to the Khan that he send a personal envoy. If he complies, then Florence will contain your noble self as suzerain, me, the amethyst, plus the Khan's envoy. If your Magnificence can think of any additional bait, then we should add it to the hook."
Lisa! Poor Lisa walked into this conspiracy that very night. It was Lisa and Blanche who brought the Fiend to Florence.
The fox steepled his fingers, seeming unconvinced. "You really think this will tempt him south, leaving enemy strongholds in his rear? I am no soldier, messer, but even I would not make that mistake."
"The deception will have to be carefully staged," the imposter conceded. "We must lull him into overconfidence. For example, he is well aware that Maestro Fischart, formerly Baron Oreste, is the most skilled hexer in all Europe. To him, in truth, belongs the credit for the victory at Trent."