Song of the Serpent

by Hugh Matthews

  Raimeau, having grown tall and well-knit, was one of those now pulling an oar for Absalom, hearing all around him the sobs and lamentations of those who had, in an afternoon, gone from being sailors and passengers to become cargo. But his pity was not for them, nor yet for himself, but for the sight of Captain Hdolf's abused body, twisting at the end of a rope from the top yardarm of the mizzenmast—the Okeno pirates' signature.

  "I was taken to the slave market at Absalom and sold to the iron mines of the Fog Peaks," he told the man and woman seated with him at the fire, "where I spent ten years digging iron ore. The overseers were all dwarves—and not the better sort—and they drove us like beasts. My hair turned gray before its time."

  "Yet you survived ten years," said Gyllana. "Not many do."

  Raimeau's face took on an inward cast and his eyes saw something the others did not. "I was sustained," he said, "by a dream that came to me often as I lay in the filth and rags we slept on."

  Krunzle's attention was caught. "A dream? Of wealth, perhaps? Is that what brought you to Ulm's Delve?"

  The other man made a negating gesture. "Not wealth, no. It is hard to describe. It was merely a sense—a kind of knowing—that I was destined to accomplish some worthy deed, that I would be kept alive to do so."

  "And have you accomplished your destined deed?" said the thief. "Was carrying rock for Boss Ulm the cause of your existence?"

  "Don't mock him," said the woman. "He has come out alive after ten years in the mines. Could you have done as much?"

  "I have endured such trials as would make strong men tremble," Krunzle said, gesturing with a fishbone, "ordeals to strike terror into the—" He broke off, ducking sideways, as she threw a piscine vertebra at his head. He reached for a leftover length of kindling and raised it to repay the compliment, while she defied and dared him with eyes that showed white all around their rims. But at that moment Chirk intervened with a warning constriction, and the thief let the missile drop to the ground, unsped.

  So there you are, he directed a thought toward his inner mind. I was wondering if you had fallen asleep.

  I do not sleep, came the answer, but I have been thinking.

  Whereas I, thought Krunzle, have been managing trolls and rescuing damsels—all on my own.

  I was available, if needed. Now hush while I hear what the man has to say.

  While Krunzle and the snake had been conversing inwardly, Gyllana had asked Raimeau to tell more of his quest. The gray-haired man was saying, "The dream called me to Ulm's Delve. I hired on as a teamster on a wagon train bringing supplies to the town, then stayed to try my hand in the gold streams. But a man trespassed on my claim and when I protested to Boss Ulm, I was charged with boisterous conduct and sentenced to the basket chain."

  "I would be careful of following that dream any farther," said the thief. "Perhaps it does not mean you well."

  "Let him—" Gyllana began, but Raimeau quieted her with a soft gesture.

  "I have pondered on it," he said, "and I admit that I cannot say, one way or another, whether the dream is a helper ..."—he moved both hands, palms up, as if weighing two identical objects—"or a taskmaster." Now he put both hands together and linked their fingers. "But I can say that without the dream, my bones would be crumbling to dust under the slag heaps of the Fog Peaks. So, whenever it calls me to action, I step up and step out. And I go forward, hopeful that the future deed around which my life is shaped will indeed be worthy."

  The man's words resonated with Krunzle, enough so that for a moment he forgot to maintain the air of supercilious detachment that was his usual guise. The woman, being the product of generations of breeding among Kerse's most astute hagglers, saw the flicker of unguarded sentiment and immediately knew it for what it was. It drew her attention the way the mere twitch of a mouse's whiskers across the entire width of a kitchen floor will catch the eye of a cat.

  "Don't tell me," she said, a sly smile tugging at the corners of her lips, "that our vagabond rogue is also dream-drawn to some grand arena, where you will doubtless astonish the world with—"

  Again, Raimeau raised his hand and she subsided. The gray-haired man turned his quiet eyes on her and said, "It is, as you yourself have said, not a thing to be made mock of." His gaze went to Krunzle and he said, "Was it a dream that brought you to Ulm's Delve?"

  The thief framed in his mind a retort that would end the line of inquiry, but before it could reach his lips, he heard the snake's voice from the back of his head: Tell him the truth. I wish to hear it, too.

  Krunzle blinked once. It offends my principles, he said inwardly, not to mention the practicalities of self-preservation. "When two know your business, that is already one too many" is a thieves' maxim in which I put my faith.

  Nevertheless, said Chirk, adding a faint reminder of the pain that slept in the base of the traveler's spine and could be awakened in a roaring instant.

  "Well," said the woman, "are you formulating some new saga with which to astonish us? I would have thought you had a raft of them to choose from."

  "No," said Krunzle, "the truth: I, too, have had a kind of dream. Nothing precise, no burning words in the night. But a sense, or just an inclination, that my destiny lay in a certain direction—east and south. Over the years, my travels have taken me many places, yet always in the end I find myself trending back that way."

  Raimeau was interested. "And have you come to understand what that destiny might be?"

  "Not yet." It felt odd to the thief to be speaking candidly, as if he had discovered an unusual ability he had not known he possessed. "But I feel it has something to do with wealth. And perhaps stature."

  He expected Gyllana to make sport of his declaration, but she did not. Instead, she sat, thoughtful, her eyes on the fire. It was Raimeau who spoke. "And you, madonna, have you also experienced some sense of destiny?"

  She turned her gaze on him. "A dream?" She shook her head. "No, I am a daughter of a Kalistocrat of Kerse. I deal in plans and projections. I dream no dreams." Her face grew hard and she threw the last of the fishbones into the fire. "But Berbackian did."

  ∗ ∗ ∗

  They took turns watching that night, and kept the fire well lit, with long brands laid into it that could be snatched up and thrust in the maw of anything that came out of the darkness. Nothing did, though Krunzle, taking the second watch, heard something snuffling and huffing under the shadows of the trees. He shouted and threw a stick in that direction and heard it leave.

  Gyllana took the last shift and woke him when the first gray of dawn limned the tops of the mountains, still far off to the south. They had nothing to break their fast but water from the lake, and soon they were once more following the trail across the grassy plateau. They rode in silence for an hour, then Raimeau, again bringing up the rear, said, "It came to me again last night."

  "You dreamed?" said Gyllana, riding ahead of him.

  "I did. And it was full and strong."

  Krunzle looked back at the two of them. The other man's face was serene; the woman's was pensive. She returned the thief's gaze and said, "What about you?"

  "I had enough to contend with, keeping off the feral beasts drawn to your snores," he told her. "But since we have taken up the subject again, I remind you that you have heard our tales but have not told us your own—only that you are not here in pursuit of a dream."

  "I am in pursuit of a cad," she said, "a liar and a deceiver."

  "Three?" said Krunzle. "This may take longer than I thought. Come now, what of this Berbackian? I may have to face him, sword in hand. Tell me."

  She formed her mouth into a moue of distaste, but said after a moment, "I suppose you will hear the whole sordid story from someone; better it was from me." She made a wordless sound as she collected her thoughts, then continued. "He is from Taldor, I think of good family—he may have been lying, but his manners and mode of speech bespoke some breeding—and he was well schooled in warlike arts. He applied to the Mercenary League and was
commissioned an ensign, and soon promoted to undercaptain."

  She had met him when his platoon was assigned to guard duty at the Temple of Kalistrade. Her father had been one of that month's seven deacons and she had gone with Eponion to carry his paraphernalia for the noon observance.

  "We were having a dispute, my father and I. He had—informally, mind you—committed me in matrimony to Euphobios, the alum tycoon—"

  "Alum?" said Raimeau.

  "It is a mineral that, ground into powder, fixes colors in the dyeing process. Without it, there would be no red cloth, no purple, blue, yellow, whatever. He who controls the supply of alum controls the entire cloth industry of the Inner Sea."

  "Ah," said the lanky man.

  "My father deals in high-value commodities: silks and satins, jewels and precious substances. Marrying me to Euphobios would have strengthened his position in the cloth trade. Euphobios, for his part, liked the idea of allying his interests with my father's shipping line."

  "But you wanted the strapping young Berbackian, instead of the old alum king," said Krunzle.

  "Fool!" said Gyllana. "Euphobios, though older, is a well-made man. And what has wanting to do with marriage? I thought my father should get us out of the betrothal because there were rumors that a huge deposit of alum, hitherto unsuspected, had been discovered in the Aspodell Mountains. When it comes on the market, Euphobios will be selling pencils in Kalistrade Square."

  Now it was Krunzle's turn to say, "Ah."

  "Berbackian was to be nothing but a fling, an escapade carefully managed. Instead—" She broke off and swallowed, her face flushing. "Instead, I found myself acting like a schoolgirl. I don't know what came over me."

  Chirk was nudging the thief from within. "Did he perhaps," the thief said, "use a spell or a potion?"

  It was as if the idea had never occurred to the woman, but now having been voiced, she saw the shape of it clearly. "Why did I not think of that?"

  Prompted by the snake, Krunzle said, "I have heard that there are some incantations that protect themselves from discovery in just that manner."

  Gyllana's face resumed its customary expression of concentrated calculation. "It's possible," she said after a long stillness. "Though he would not have needed to use such means to interest me. He is a well set-up fellow, and knows which end of the boat to ..." She paused, thinking. "But he was always wanting to look through my father's knick-knacks, especially the—"

  No one had interrupted her. She had caught herself thinking out loud in company and stopped herself. But Krunzle wanted to hear the rest of the thought—and so did Chirk. "Go on," the thief said.

  "It is none of your business."

  "I think it is. Thang-Sha was particularly interested in an object that he said was of base metal, a talisman of some kind. I am not to come back without it."

  "I thought you were here to rescue me!"

  "It is a double assignment."

  She gave him a hard look, but he could see her thinking it through and coming to a conclusion. "Thang-Sha was interested, you say? Curious. He appeared on the scene at about the same time that Berbackian took the talisman. There was some discussion between him and my father, about retaining him for unspecified purposes, but it seemed that the talk always came around to that odd little object. And before I knew it, my father was demanding that I recover it. His pride was at stake."

  She had no more to say, and with the day growing warmer and all of them unfed since the night before and unwatered since dawn, neither of the men felt like broaching another topic. They rode on in silence, the ground gradually rising in a series of broad terraces, like waves of earth frozen in an instant and grown over with long, wheat-colored grass.

  Then they climbed to the top of one of these great ripples and saw, sheltered from the wind below, a road of packed earth and gravel, running roughly north to south. Into its surface was worn a pair of ruts as wide apart as Krunzle was tall. Where the trail met the thoroughfare, the woman dismounted and studied the ground. "There," she said, pointing to a hoofprint in the softer earth at the edge of the road. The horse that had made it had been shod, and into the shoe had been pressed a row of diamonds alternating with circles. She lifted up the hoof of her own horse and said, "That's the work of the Ulm's Delve smith. Berbackian went that way."

  She remounted and set her horse south along the road, Krunzle and Raimeau following. The gray-haired man studied the road as they went, and after a moment said to the thief, "The wagons that made these ruts were iron-rimmed, and the beasts that pulled them were iron-shod. I've seen them before."

  "And by the look on your face," said Krunzle, "you'd rather not see them again."

  "Runts," said Raimeau, as if the word filled his mouth with sourness.

  "Dwarves," said the thief. "I've nothing against them, myself."

  "Known many?"

  "Not really."

  "You're about to," said Raimeau. He gestured with his chin up the road.

  Krunzle looked. Gyllana had already reined in. The road rose in a gentle slope not far ahead of them until it topped a small rise. Over that crest, trotting toward them at a ground-eating quickstep, with twenty spears straight up like a hedgehog on alert and twenty shields slung over their backs, a clanking glitter of weapons hung from leather harnesses over their chainmail, came a half-platoon of dwarves.

  A whistle blew several notes, and without breaking stride, the four ranks of five became two ranks of ten, stretching the width of the road. It blew again, and the pace changed from trot to march, the shields came around to cover their fronts, and now the spearpoints no longer pointed at the sky. From within a wall of iron-studded, leather-covered oak, they bristled at the three travelers.

  "Halt!" came a harsh voice from within the formation. The dwarves took two more synchronized steps then stopped. The spears remained poised. The travelers had already reined in their horses, though Krunzle's was skittish. For a long moment, nothing happened. Then the shield wall briefly parted to emit a dwarf who seemed nearly as wide as he was tall. He wore a waist-length beard of grizzled black through which glinted two gold medallions pinned to the chest of his knee-brushing mail shirt. On the front of his conical helmet was a device like a brazen axe, burnished to a high gloss.

  He surveyed the three on horseback and Krunzle had the strong sense that they were not making the best of impressions. Then the dwarf said, "You are on the territory of the Regulate! You've no right to be here! So account for yourselves, and be quick about it!"

  The thief opened his mouth, but a warning tremor from the snake about his neck checked him. In any case, whatever he would have said would not have been heard over Gyllana's sharp retort, whereby she identified herself by name and by her affiliation to Ippolite Eponion, Second Secretary to the First Commissariote. "And that," she said, "gives me the right to plant my foot on any piece of Druma that I choose. About these two,"—she gestured to include Krunzle and Raimeau—"I need say no more than that they are my escorts. Now, if you will clear the way ..."

  The dwarf commander was not cowed. "Have you any means of identifying yourselves?" he said, and the eyes between the rim of his helmet and the upper reaches of his waist-length black beard swept over the three of them. "This one with the bronze torc around his neck has the look of a rogue born and bred, and yon stick insect of a man has the smell of the mines about him, or I miss my guess. A canny dwarf has to ask himself what kind of Kalistocrat's daughter associates with such riffraff."

  "My companions are my own affair," said the Kersite woman. "Now, move aside, or you will find yourself answering to the Kalistocracy's representative at Highhelm."

  The dwarf's lips moved beneath their covering of hair. Krunzle thought the motion might have been a sneer. The commander snapped his stubby fingers and said, "That for the Kalistocracy and all the rest of your kind. You stand not in Druma but within the bounds of the Regulate of Grimsburrow, and—"

  "Never heard of it," said Gyllana.

  "And,"
the dwarf went on, "I am Drosket, son of Drosket, squad leader first-echelon in the Regulate's duly sworn militia, with full powers to question, detain, and dispose of all interlopers, intruders, vagrants, and desperadoes."

  "What is this Regulate?" the woman said. "Another one of these petty communes you dwarves are always slapping together? Where you sit around and drink to your ancient glories and drone those mournful dirges you call poetry?"

  "Petty commune, is it?" The dwarf stepped forward and seized the mare's reins at the bit. "We are full two thousand dwarves of probity and good character, and the militia includes a thousand of us, spear-dwarves and axe-dwarves, every one of us battle-worthy and sworn to uphold—"

  He broke off there as Gyllana's heels struck her horse's ribs and the animal jolted forward, half-dragging Drosket along the road. But since the animal had been facing the double rank of spears, it did not go far, and the squad leader was able to regain his footing and some shreds of his dignity.

  "The trouble with dwarves," the woman was saying, "is that they think every conversation is an occasion for oratory. Here's what we'll do: You will escort us to your Regulate and there I will speak with whomever is in authority. Then we shall go about our business." She gestured with the back of one hand, indicating that they should now proceed up the road in the direction from which the dwarves had come.

  Drosket applied two hands to the reins. "We will not!" he said. Krunzle saw that the narrow band of flesh between brows and beard was now a deep shade of red. Drosket looked up at the Kalistocrat's daughter with a glare that, by rights, ought to have knocked her from the saddle. "We have a mission to fulfill."

  "Then fulfill it. Don't let us hold you up."

  Krunzle had heard that dwarves tore at their braided beards when frustrated. Now he learned that it was a comical sight, but that it was not a good idea for an onlooker to let his amusement show.