Devil's Bargain

by Judith Tarr

  Saphadin had been practicing his archery: they had set up targets on the edge of the camp, and his bow was strung, although there was no arrow set to the string.

  His servant took the bow and unstrung it as Mustafa approached and dismounted and went down in obeisance. Saphadin drew him to his feet, eyeing the eastern mare with considerable interest. “Is that . . . ?”

  “A horse of heaven,” Mustafa said. “Yes, I do think so. She leaves the wind behind when she runs.”

  “God has favored you,” said Saphadin.

  He turned and began to walk. Mustafa followed, leading the two mares. Saphadin went not toward his tent but farther away from the camp. Guards trailed at a discreet distance.

  When they were still in sight of the camp but out of earshot of it, Saphadin stopped in a circle of broken stones. Some were of a size and shape to sit on; he took one and with a glance invited Mustafa to do the same. Mustafa tied up the mares’ reins and hobbled them and let them graze on the bits of new grass.

  “I hope you will pardon me,” said Saphadin, “for not immediately offering you guest courtesy. That will come, but for this I think perhaps you would prefer that no one hear us.”

  “You’re wise, my lord,” Mustafa said. “There’s no telling who might listen, or to whom the words might go. Have you heard any rumors from Tyre?”

  “None,” said Saphadin. His face settled into a terrible stillness. “What is it? What has he done to her?”

  Mustafa considered circling round to it, but that would only put off the pain. “She’s imprisoned on suspicion of murder.”

  Saphadin’s breath hissed between his teeth. “Who? Not Conrad, surely.”

  “Rather unfortunately,” said Mustafa, “no.” He told Saphadin what he knew: the woman slain, the slayer who had worn Sioned’s face, the warning Sioned had received even as her maid was dying.

  Saphadin heard him in silence, eyes fixed on the sky. Mustafa might have thought that his mind had drifted far away, but there was something profoundly intent in the way he contemplated the ramparts of clouds that built over the hills.

  When Mustafa finished, the silence stretched. The mares were grazing side by side from the same patch of grass—improbable enough that Mustafa was almost alarmed.

  He did not break the silence. Saphadin was thinking hard, from the way his brows had drawn together. After a long while he said, “To cast suspicion on her as an Assassin—that’s outrageous, but also it’s clever. People would actually believe it, because it’s so improbable.”

  “They do believe it,” Mustafa said. “There have been whispers, you see: that she’s no Christian, that although she shows her face at Mass beside the marquis or the lord Henry, she goes only out of courtesy, and not out of faith. Where would such a whisper have come from, if not from an enemy?”

  Saphadin nodded. “An enemy who has sown the seed of suspicion, so that people will believe that a woman from the far corner of the world could have sworn herself in fidelity to the Old Man of the Mountain.”

  “Whoever has done this knows too much,” Mustafa said. “He knows what gods she worships, and he knew when she was out of the castle. If he knows what she was doing in the city—”

  “I think not,” Saphadin said. “That she went to visit a man, yes, but not who the man was. And that makes me think that it was Conrad who did this. Only he would care so much that she trysted with a man other than himself. It would suit him well to use the name and terror of the Assassins, and to cast that suspicion upon her.”

  “But he has no magic,” said Mustafa, “and the witnesses swear that they saw the lady herself commit the murder.”

  “Did they? How bright was the light? She showed me how they had painted and prinked her for the court; her face was a mask, which any woman of like size and features could mimic.”

  “As closely as that?” Mustafa demanded.

  “People see what they wish to see,” said Saphadin, “and hear what they expect to hear. In the dim light of a castle, a clever woman with a gift for voices could be very convincing—and never need magic at all. I do almost pity her; she was evidence. Conrad would have been sure that she was destroyed.”

  “And so will our lady be,” Mustafa said. “I pray God she’s not dead already.”

  “She is not,” said Saphadin with such certainty that Mustafa could not say a word. He closed his eyes for a moment and sighed. “No; she is not. I would know. She’s still alive.”

  “But for how long?”

  “He won’t harm her,” said Saphadin. He rose. “Now come. Be a guest for a little while. Put your heart at rest. Our lady will be safe—you have my word on it.”

  Nothing in this world was safe, Mustafa wanted to say, but he could not bring himself to gainsay this lord of Islam. This powerful sorcerer; this man who loved the lady Sioned. “If anyone can set her free, my lord,” he said, “I know it will be you.”

  Saphadin’s lips curved in a thin blade of a smile. It was the smile of a tiger, baring his teeth for battle. “In the name of the Merciful and Compassionate, it shall be so.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Ahmad entrusted the Berber to his own personal servants, who were instructed to treat him as if he were a prince of the Faith. The boy was properly grateful, which showed the excellence of his upbringing, but he could not help but betray his deeper feelings. He wanted to be part of what Ahmad did. He wanted to share in the saving of her.

  “You’ve already done your share and more,” Ahmad told him. “Now let me do mine—and rest. We’ll call on you later, have no fear. Then you’ll need your strength.”

  That reconciled him, somewhat. Ahmad drew him into a quick embrace, as if they were brothers. “Be at ease,” he said. “I’ll bring her out of that place.”

  Mustafa nodded. His eyes were rebellious still, and his back was stiff, but his face was pale; he was swaying on his feet. Rashid and Maimoun took him in hand before he fell over, and carried him off into the inner regions of Ahmad’s tent, to be bathed and fed and put to bed.

  Ahmad drew a long, steadying breath. Alone, without the need to be strong, he could yield for a moment to the shock of the news that Mustafa had brought. He had had no sign—no inkling. Not even a shiver in the spine. Which might prove that there was no magic in this plot, but it troubled him nevertheless.

  She was not dead. If she had died, there would be a gaping wound where his heart had been, and a great span of emptiness at the core of his magic. She had become that much to him, nor had he known it until he heard that she might be put to death for a murder she was incapable, to the very soul, of committing.

  That she could kill—he did believe that. But she would kill in battle or in defense of someone or something that she loved. Not at random, with calculated cruelty, to spite an enemy.

  Mustafa was well taken care of. Ahmad called to him the captain of his personal troops and gave him instructions that he would follow to the letter. He did not like them; his face darkened as he listened. But he was obedient.

  Then Ahmad could put on a plain coat in which was sewn a coat of mail, and fill a satchel with certain articles from a locked and hidden chest, and mount the horse that waited for him. She was not a horse of heaven, but she was hardy and she was wise, and most of all she was steadfast. She would stand firm and keep her rider on her back, even if the world went mad.

  “My lord, will you go alone?”

  He looked down from the saddle into his servant’s face. “Allah is with me,” he said.

  “But, lord,” said Hasan, “Allah loves best those who help Him to perform His will.”

  Ahmad smiled in honest affection. “Dear friend,” he said, “the boy in my tent is much loved by one whom I love as my very self. Tend him for me; guard him and protect him. Keep him safe until I come back.”

  Hasan bowed to the ground. He was weeping, poor man, but Ahmad would not shame him by remarking on it. “Allah’s blessing on you,” he said, and touched his mare’s side with a hee
l.

  She went forward willingly, at ease, although the tilt of her ears told him that she knew there would be dangers ahead. He ran a hand down her neck—grimacing, then laughing briefly at the handful of red-brown hair that came away with it. Truly it was spring: the mare was letting go her winter coat.

  For this journey he could not simply close the space between a place that was his—his house, his tent, his garden—and another on which he had set the seal of his magic. Even if he had not been traveling into the hands of enemies, he could not spare as much power as it would take to create and maintain the working. Instead he must travel by mages’ roads, which Sioned called straight tracks. Her mother’s country, she had said, was full of them. So too was this one, with its heritage of ancient magic.

  He found the first road not far from his camp. It seemed a goat track, but it ran too straight for that, up over a long hill and out of the world that mortals knew. The seasons changed strangely there. Sometimes the land through which he rode was green with spring, and sometimes it was locked in winter. Sometimes there was no telling what season it was or what world he had entered; it was too strange to understand.

  In all the worlds through which the road passed, he rode north and somewhat east. With each passage out of his own world, he traversed a whole day’s journey in an hour’s time. He paused for the hours of prayer, praying with all his heart, as Mustafa had done, that it was not too late.

  As he drew nearer his destination, the passages became more difficult. The power that held this land was inimical, if not to all that he was, then to the particulars of his name and race and allegiance. But he must go on, if he was to do what he had set out to do.

  At the gate of the last passage, which had the semblance of a stone arch opening into a valley of shimmering stones, Safiyah sat waiting for him. She seemed a stone herself, hunched and shapeless, clad in dusty black, but the power in her was like a cry of exultation.

  He bowed to her as to the queen of mages that she was. The hand that he raised to his lips was frail; the flesh was burning away from the spirit within. “Lady,” he said. “You had no need.”

  “I had every need,” she said. “What were you thinking, to come here all alone?”

  He could not say to her what he had said to Hasan. It would be presumptuous. Her, he gave the truth. “I couldn’t ask anyone else to run this risk.”

  “Could not?” she inquired. “Or would not?”

  He flushed. She had always had the power to reduce him to a stumbling boy. But often, as now, she softened it with a smile. “It was noble of you, and wise in its way. Where you go, an army would never be enough, but a man alone might win the prize. Will you let me give you a gift?”

  “Your gifts are beyond price,” he said.

  She inclined her head to the truth of it, then drew his head down to hers, touching brow to brow. “Have strength,” she said. “Have courage. But in the moment of extremity, if all is lost—turn to mist and water. Become one with the air. Melt and vanish away.”

  The words were like a wash of cold fire. He shivered at the touch of them, and gasped as they came to rest in his heart. They were a spell of dissolution; yet also a blessing, and an escape if he would take it.

  She kissed his eyelids and brushed her fingers across his cheek, soft as the touch of a spider’s web. “God go with you,” she said.

  The way was open. She was gone from the gate. He knew a moment’s profound loneliness, cold as a wind in the wasteland; then the warmth of her blessing washed over him. He was smiling as he passed through the portal and rode down through the valley of stones.

  The gate out of the valley, like the gate into it, was occupied. But this was no friend to Ahmad or any of his kin. It was a shape in white, the color of mourning and of death. Its face was shrouded, its eyes hidden in whiteness. In its white-swathed hand was a dagger with a blade like a sliver of night.

  Ahmad faced it without either stealth or fear. He made no move to draw weapon, but his hands knew where to find each one of them. “Take me to your master,” he said.

  The guardian spirit regarded him with unseen eyes. He had laid no compulsion on it, apart from the expectation that he would be obeyed. Spirits respected strength; they scorned bluster and empty show.

  He waited in patience, sitting very still on the back of the most steadfast of his horses. The mare let one hip drop and let her head sink, seizing the opportunity for a nap.

  Was that amusement in the tilt of the shrouded head? The spirit whipped about abruptly, dissolving into a whirlwind, and spun through the gate.

  Where had been a vision of nothingness was a harsh and inhospitable landscape, a wilderness of stony crags. It was bleak and barren, but it was his own living earth, lit by a familiar sun and inhabited by a swirl of earthly spirits. They gathered always in places of power, even places of such terror as that which loomed on the crag above him.

  Masyaf. Ahmad knew it well enough. When he was much younger, he had ridden with his brother to attack it; they had failed, and its Master had only grown stronger in the years since.

  He could feel the great magic throbbing in his bones, drawn up from deep wells of the earth. Here was a center, a foregathering of powers. The crags were as thick with spirits as a hive with bees, swirling and swarming in the air and among the stones.

  It had not been so twenty years ago. There had been spirits, yes, and Sinan had been a sorcerer of some repute, but all too obviously he had spent the years between increasing his power beyond anything that Ahmad could muster against him.

  Ahmad’s heart quailed. He called up the memory of her face and the thought of the world without her, and his strength flooded back. It was the strength of desperation, but it was all the greater for that.

  His mare clambered patiently up the steep and narrow track. She did not care that arrows could fall from above, or a rain of boiling oil. That was a concern for men. She had hopes of a stable to rest in and cut fodder to eat, and a handful of grain if her hosts were generous.

  Her equine practicality was a bulwark against fear. Focused on his own stomach, thinking of bread and meat, fruit and spices, sweet cakes and cups of steaming kaffé, Ahmad passed through the clouds of spirits as if he had been invisible. He was too purely of earth for them, his magic too thoroughly concealed.

  They were simple spirits, most of them, but the higher he ascended, the more alarming they became. Their faces altered from fantastical to grotesque; they bristled with fangs and talons.

  But worse were the battles among them. Spirits in their right minds, or such minds as they had, coexisted in an airy amity. These were as contentious as a pack of starving dogs. The more power they fed on, the greedier they became; they could never be sated. These in their turn fed the power in the castle atop the crag.

  He fought his way through it as through a storm of wind—but this was no wind of earth. It buffeted his heart; it tore at his spirit. It tempted him almost beyond bearing, to fling himself into the cloud of living essences, to become a blind and mindless part of them. To surrender, to give way; to serve the Master on the rock and be served by him, feed and be fed, until there was nothing left of him, not even a whisper of fading breath.

  He was no longer guiding the mare. She carried him of her own will, up and ever upward, with steadfast persistence. He clung to the saddle out of sheer bodily refusal to fall.

  He must master himself; must win back the sight of eyes and mind. He must gather the tatters of his magic. He must be strong.

  He found that strength in the stubbornness that was one of his less endearing faults; in the memory of her. Even her face was gone from his sight, so full was it with the swirl of warring spirits, but he remembered her scent and the softness of her hair, and the taste of her lips on his.

  Her eyes. He could see her eyes. Violet, she called them, for the flower of her native country: a deep and dreaming color, like shadows in twilight. They were large and wide-set under a strong arch of brows; they met his star
e directly, with a clear intelligence.

  He felt her hands clasp his. She drew him up the track. With each step, the world became clearer. He saw the stones under the mare’s hooves, and the steepness of the slope, and looking up, he saw the castle now unexpectedly close.

  It seemed deserted. He saw and sensed no archers on the walls, arrow nocked to string, ready to shoot him down. The battlements were empty of guards. The gate was shut.

  That was the last of the defenses: darkness and silence and the vision of emptiness. He rode up to the gate and stood with his head back, measuring the loom of it. Calmly then, with the power that had remained coiled in him through all the buffets of this journey, he smote the gate.

  It rocked as if struck by a ram, and its iron hinges cracked. The mare shook her head at the sudden blast of sound. He sat quietly on her back and waited.

  The sun had been low when he struck the gate. It nearly touched the horizon when at last the glamour faded from the castle. The gate was still cracked; with the passing of the enchantment, it groaned and sagged on its weakened hinges.

  Slowly and somewhat gingerly, a smaller gate opened in the greater one. A man in white peered out. He was unquestionably mortal; he was old, if hale, and his face was deeply seamed with age.

  Ahmad dismounted and led his mare toward the gatekeeper. The old man looked hard at him, as if he must remember Ahmad’s face. He offered no gesture of respect. That was deliberate; he made sure Ahmad knew that. Ahmad smiled slightly and came on without pausing, so that the man had to draw back or be overrun.

  There were lights within, lamps and torches, and men in white going about their varied business. One of them took the mare, after Ahmad had retrieved the light pack which she carried behind her saddle. Another took Ahmad in charge, leading him up a stone stair to a small but perfectly appointed bath, and rooms beyond it of remarkable warmth and luxury. Dainties of food and drink were waiting there, and a demure creature in a drift of veils that hinted at marvels beneath.