"My lord Scion."
"What?"
"He was dead before he hit the sea. I shot him with a dart-tube."
I gulped. "You did what?"
"I shot him with a dart-tube, my lord Scion."
"Why did you do that?"
"Because he was about to put a knife into your back."
"Oh," I said.
There he sat, the descendant of great poets, looking up at me politely, as if he'd just announced that my bath was ready. I dropped back beside him and stared at the wall of the cubicle. It was painted bright yellow, and there was a pattern of red interlocking spirals running around the base. Miisheli colours. Ghastly combination. Ghastly people.
"I called out to warn you, my lord, then shot him. I had no choice—he was too close to you. But it's a pity the body went overboard; I wanted to see who it was."
"Oh yes," I agreed, "a great pity. I wouldn't mind knowing who wants me dead so badly. This is at least the fourth attempt."
"Four? I knew of only two," Chasco said thoughtfully. "The matter of the Frath Minor in the Gilgard has not yet been explained. The Miishelu said they'd investigate."
"Did they?"
"I don't know, lord Scion. The Satheli captain and I were not welcome at their deliberations." He frowned. "Tell me, my lord, who would gain by your death? And why?"
I thought it over. Having lost both Calla and the archives, I had nothing much to live for; but the puzzle had some intrinsic worth. "I would guess that since the Frath Major seems to want me alive for the moment, his enemies naturally want me dead. Which would put most of the Miisheli court under suspicion. In fact, there could be any number of unrelated factions trying to kill me, all for different reasons—that would be interesting. How did you happen to be on deck at just the right time?"
He accepted the abrupt change of subject. "It was my business to be there, lord Scion. I've had you in sight ever since we embarked."
"I didn't spot you."
"I learned how to stay out of sight," he announced calmly, "when I served in the Web."
"Oh." I drew a deep breath. Of course he had been in the Web. I should have guessed. All the signs were there, the fingerspeech, the reserve, the inaudible feet, the invisible watchfulness. Mentally, I smeared a layer of professional grime on his very clean face, substituted filthy rags for his spotless uniform, then I knew he was telling the truth. I had seen a hundred like him in the old days, quiet rebels, shadows, risking their skins daily under the sharp eyes of the Sherkin garrison. I hesitated, then asked, "Why didn't you tell me this before?"
"Is it important?"
"It's important to me. I owe a great deal to the Web. But after the liberation, I could find very few of you to thank."
He shrugged. "Many of us were wiped out in the last days of the Sherkin Empire. The rest of us disbanded shortly after. The Web wasn't needed any more, and we had new lives to build."
I drew another deep breath. "Did you know a woman called Calla?"
"I knew her. Everybody knew Calla."
"Yes," I said sadly. "Yes, I suppose everybody would." The grief swept over me again, undiminished by the passage of years. I stared hard at the hateful yellow wall, followed the hideous red spirals with my eyes. Chasco sat quietly beside me. After a while, he touched my arm.
"My lord Scion? I think that was the mess-bell. The Frath Major will be expecting you."
"I suppose he will." I stirred myself, wondering if the Clanseri would notice the moisture at the corners of my eyes, but not wanting to make it obvious by brushing it away. If he noticed, he gave no sign. I made what was probably a pathetic attempt to be businesslike.
"One more thing, Chasco. Did anyone see you use the dart-tube?"
"I don't think so, my lord Scion."
"Because there are bound to be questions—"
"I doubt it, my lord, with respect. The man's accomplices, if he had any, won't want to draw attention to themselves. Everyone else will assume he was washed overboard in the squall."
I sighed. "I hope you're right. And if so, that will be the end of it." We sat awkwardly for a few moments, not speaking. Then I said, "I suppose I should get these wet britches off before dinner."
"Yes, my lord Scion."
"I might catch my death otherwise. That would save somebody the trouble of killing me."
"Yes, my lord Scion."
"I don't want to make things easy for them."
"No, my lord Scion."
"Goodbye, then."
"Goodbye, my lord."
"Though I suppose you'll still be following me."
"I'll be following you, my lord."
I nodded, and got up to leave; but paused at the door and looked back at him, noticing something for the first time.
"Chasco?"
"Yes, my lord Scion?"
"Where's your green armband?"
He looked at me steadily. "I discarded it when we left Gil, my lord. I'm in your service now."
"I see. Chasco?"
"Yes, my lord Scion?"
"I wish you'd start calling me Tig."
* * *
12
ONLY FOUR AND a half of us appeared in the eating salon that night: myself, the Frath Major, two of the lesser Fraths, and the Satheli envoy to Miishel, who dashed out with his hand over his mouth when the fermented chicken innards were brought in. I ate enormously, although the ship was rolling and bucking and the platters slopped about disgustingly on the eating benches. Some Of the Miisheli delicacies should have turned my belly even on dry land.
The Frath Major watched me narrowly. "I see you enjoy Miisheli cooking," he said, as if the idea didn't quite please him.
"Actually," I said with my mouth full, "I don't like it much. These snails are repulsive. What are they cooked in?"
"Garlic-root."
I popped another one in my mouth to confirm that they were as awful as I first thought, and swallowed it without chewing. The Frath was still watching me with embarrassing concentration and it dawned on me that I may have been ever so slightly tactless, so I ate another snail while casting around for something other than food to talk about.
"Tell me, cousin," I said at last, "where is the Bequiin? I'm anxious to talk with him."
"Why?" the Frath asked sharply.
I looked up at him, surprised at his tone. "For one thing, I'd like to borrow something to read. Presumably he brought some books along."
"No." Again, the sharp tone. Then he recovered himself, and said more affably, "Poor old Ardin is indisposed. He suffered badly from seasickness on the voyage to Gil, and I expect he will keep to his cabin until we reach Cansh Miishel. You will have all the books you want then."
"I will? That's cheerful news." I wiped the snail juice from my chin and beamed at him. But somehow I felt, looking at his hard, clever face, that I was being offered either a poisoned sweetmeat or one attached to a hook and line. Like Rinn, the original weathervane, the Frath seemed to be playing a rather devious game called Keep the Scion Happy, which suited me for the moment; but I'd have given my back teeth to know what the prize was going to be.
Rinn herself, poor little doxy, was in a bad state when I returned to our suite for the night. The serving maid who was holding the silver puke-bowl for her was not much healthier, so I sent her off to bed and took over the bowl-holding duties myself, also freshening the damp cloth that covered Rinn's forehead and eyes. She stirred miserably.
"Niil, darling, is that you?" she whimpered in Miisheli. Niil was a Frath Minor, not very young but undeniably good-looking in a tired and dissolute way. I gathered he was on Rinn's current roster.
I patted her hand. "It's Tigrallef, Rinn. Your husband."
She pushed the cloth off her forehead and stared up at me with dull eyes. I think she was too sick to remember who I was, and wouldn't have cared anyhow. She rolled on to her side and proceeded to fill the silver bowl, and then was fast asleep before I even finished mopping up her face. For the rest of the night I sat by
the pallet, dozing, holding the bowl as required, occasionally sponging the sweat off Rinn's forehead, feeling the Tasiil strain and creak around us as she rode the energetic sea. Sometime around dawn, the storm subsided and Rinn stopped throwing up at regular intervals, and I was able to fall into an uneasy sleep.
In the morning, when I went to Shree's cubicle, he was up and dressed in fresh clothes and feeling well enough to be harrying a steward to do something about the stench of sick in his room. I dragged him up on deck with me, telling him in a low voice about the cold swim I almost took, and the knife I almost had between my shoulderblades, and the timely intervention of Chasco the Clanseri, ex-member of the Web and new faithful retainer. He listened without comment or expression until I said, not mincing words, that I no longer numbered Chasco among the enemy and expected Shree to follow my example. Shree put his head on one side and frowned at me—mutinously, I thought.
"Chasco's the bastard who dragged you out of the archives."
"He didn't drag me. I walked."
"The one who was in command when the assassins broke into your bedchamber and might have killed you."
"Yes, but—"
"The one who hogged the second-most comfortable chair in the room all the time the Primate had you locked up in the Temple Palace."
"Yes, Shree, all right, but—"
"The one with the Primate's green band around his arm."
"Not any more. Trust my instincts on this, Shree, I don't think he's the Primate's man now, if he ever really was."
"All right."
"He—what did you say?"
"I said, all right, I'll trust your instincts."
"Oh." I had expected more resistance, somehow. This was like a tug-of-war where one man suddenly lets go of the rope. I was flustered. "Why?"
"I've seen his kind before, in the Sherkin army. Too intelligent to be good spear-fodder, too much initiative to be trusted in the ordinary way. Very dangerous in the ranks."
"So what did you do with them?"
"We promoted them. It wasn't just viciousness that made us a good army, you know. No, I should think your instincts are right. Your friend Chasco doesn't look stupid enough to give his loyalty to a grubbing old puppetmaster like the Primate. Or to a puppet like your esteemed brother Arkolef."
I hesitated. It seemed even less believable that he'd give it to a fumbling, nearsighted, unprincely and apolitical grubber in old books like me, but I didn't like to disturb the accord by asking Shree what he thought; he'd probably have told me.
I had to leave him then while I took breakfast with the upper aristocracy, a meal which was only slightly better attended than dinner on the night before. The Frath Major hardly spoke to me; the Satheli envoy managed to last out the entire meal this time, though he paled dramatically when exposed to the frogspawn in aspic. As soon as I decently could, I took my leave and went to find Shree again. He was not on deck; he was not in his cabin, which now stank worse of incense than it had of vomit. I tried the small salon reserved for junior courtiers, one deck down from my quarters, and found it was deserted. The only other place I could think of was Chasco's cubicle, so I started up the broad midship companionway that would take me into one end of the maze of cabins. I remember thinking it was not wise to be wandering alone like that in the dark ways of the ship, though my uneasiness could hardly be classed as a premonition. I had no warning of what was about to happen.
Stop!
A woman's voice, with the persuasive force of a hammer-blow to the head. I stopped dead.
"Who's there?"
No answer. No stirrings on the deck below; no stirrings on the deck above, where three dark corridors branched from the top of the companionway. I shook my head, certain I was imagining things, and went up another step or two.
BEWARE!
It was so persuasive this time that it knocked me right to my knees, my hands over my ears, halfway up the flight. At almost the same moment, something whirred over me at about the level where my throat had just been.
Puzzled, I looked up the stairs. A large Miisheli with a very large triple-curved sword poised over his head was just beginning to topple towards me. He also seemed puzzled, probably because of the throwing disc half-buried in his belly.
I stepped out of his way and looked down the stairs. Another large Miisheli was crouched at the bottom, aiming a second throwing disc in my direction. Before he could let fly however, the first Miisheli finished tumbling past me and crashed into him sword-first, skewering him as neatly as a sausage on a toasting fork.
I did not wait to check their health. In two leaps I was at the top of the stairs; I threw myself into the right-hand corridor at full gallop, skidded to a halt at the sight of a cloaked figure running ahead of me, saw it glance back at me before vanishing at the next turning. A moment later, a door slammed. I wavered for a few seconds; then, since no one seemed to be pursuing me, I ran cat-footed to the turning and poked my head around the corner.
Eight closed doors stood between me and the end of the passage, four to a side. Eight eminent name-plates: two Han-Fraths, four Fraths Minor, the Bequiin Ardin and the Satheli envoy. The shadowy oval of a face I had glimpsed could be any one of them. Behind the doors there was only silence.
As I thought, my two protectors were in Chasco's cabin having a cosy chat. They seemed to be getting on very well together. They sat me down and told me what they had decided: that they thought I might still be in danger, and from now on, one or both of them would be guarding me at all times. After all, they said weightily, there could be other assassins on board besides the one Chasco killed.
It gave me the best laugh I'd had in ages.
Eventually I became coherent enough to tell them about my adventure in the companionway, and took them with me to see if the assassins were still there, alive or dead. We were not very surprised to find the foot of the stairway deserted and quite damp, as if the floorboards had been hastily swabbed. Nor did we hear subsequently that any members of the crew were missing. None of this was reassuring, smelling as it did of conspiracy and concealment. The related question of the figure in the corridor was thoroughly turned over; for future reference, we discreetly noted down the names of the two Han-Fraths and four Fraths Minor. The Bequiin and the Satheli envoy we considered unlikely candidates.
What I did not tell Shree and Chasco about was the voice. As far as they were concerned, I had been saved by tripping over my own feet, according to the luck the gods frequently bestow upon the innocent and clumsy. I did not tell them about the voice because I only half-believed in it myself, and even so it frightened me. Although it had probably saved my life, the memory of it was repellent.
Of course this was not the first time I'd been on board a ship, but it was the first time I'd been able to sit up and take notice. The Tasiil was a lovely vessel, clean-lined and massive, built to transport members of the Miisheli royal clans around the oceans. As far as I knew, she was the largest manmade object on the face of the Great Known Sea. She was a four-masted windcatcher, not a galley, and her lower foredeck was broad enough for forty men to stand shoulder to shoulder across its width, and long enough to use for foot-races. The upper fore-deck was smaller, graced with a number of little ornamental deckhouses and a whole garden in pots and a tiny temple with a built-in altar so that the priests could burn their offerings without setting fire to the ship.
Below, the space saved by not having oarbanks was taken up by a honeycomb of cabins and galleys and opulent staterooms, while two positively sinful royal suites were sited under the afterdeck. Rinn and I were in one of these, the Frath Major in the other. Both suites opened on to a large pleasure salon that outdid anything else on the ship in terms of sheer eye-punching ostentation, all marble tables and heavy brocade hangings and silk-slipped settees in alarming colour combinations, more vulgar even than anything Arko dreamed up when he refitted the Temple Palace two years back, and vastly more expensive.
I spent as little time as possible below dec
k. This was partly because Rinn decided she would pass the rest of the voyage on her pallet with a wet towel on her head, and my presence was an unwelcome distraction. I suspected she was occasionally doing more on that pallet than resting, judging by the number of Fraths Minor and lesser courtiers that I never saw above deck, but I honestly didn't care.
Anyway, I liked being outside. I liked watching the companion ships of the convoy lolloping through the waves on all sides of us, and set myself to learning what the flag language meant. I liked the fresh tang of the air, laced with salty spray, especially after the sinus-stopping cocktail of incense and heavy floral perfumes in the state quarters below. I liked the parade of empty islets and atolls and navigation points and low barren hills rearing out of the sea. I liked the schools of silver finnyfish that streaked along beside us just under the surface, and the whales that investigated us and prudently swam away. I liked not being seasick. I liked being in the sunshine and the open air. We'd never had much of those commodities in the archives.
It was fortunate Shree and Chasco liked all those things too, because they stuck to me like lint for the next three days. I was not left unguarded for a moment—by day they flanked me, by night they took turns sleeping in the salon outside my quarters. Chasco developed a disconcerting habit of practising his knife-throws as we sat at leisure on the upper foredeck. Shree spent a lot of time conspicuously honing his sword. This seemed to deter any would-be assassins for the time being, though we often had the feeling we were being watched or followed.
And so those three days of the voyage passed, so pleasantly that I forgot from time to time that I didn't want to be there; that someone had been trying to kill me; that a bride I didn't love was already cuckolding me regularly in a stateroom I regarded as a bad joke; and that in something over a week, we'd be making landfall in Cansh Miishel.
We sighted the first ships far to the north on our fifth morning out of Gil. There were maybe four of them, maybe five, certainly no match for the seven fighting wind-galleys and three rammers in our own escort. My eyes were too short-sighted to see them at all, but Chasco and Shree, strolling beside me along the rail of the lower foredeck, could make them out well enough to disagree on the exact number.
Gil Trilogy 2: Scion's Lady Page 9