Hour of the Octopus

by Joel Rosenberg

  It seemed somewhat more than barely possible that the victor would be Arefai, given that custom called for all the other hunters to let him take both the first and last quarry, and for nobody to make a better kill than his first. It would be a major solecism for anybody else to outdo Arefai, the sort that would lead to a challenge. A nasty way to commit suicide, actually; it would be an insult not only to Arefai but to his family, and that meant that the challenger would have to face every warrior of Den Oroshtai in turn.

  There is the legend of Lord Ulane, who—in a somewhat different context—challenged the son of the lord of Rewsby Grove, and found himself taking on all the men of Rewsby Grove one by one, but, frankly, I don’t believe it; I’ve been through Rewsby Grove, and it’s a tumbledown ruin, not worth anybody’s fighting for.

  “Lady,” Lord Arefai said, his voice taking on a formal lilt that I hadn’t heard from him before, “I go, as our ancestors have always gone, in search of game for the table, hoping that my search will prove fruitful, that my eye will be sharp, and my arm strong and accurate.”

  I didn’t think that would be a problem, all things considered. I didn’t know of my own observation, mind you, that there were deer in the forest beyond, but I would have been astonished if there weren’t, and wouldn’t at all been surprised to learn of a dozen of them, hobbled and blindfolded, waiting in the woods. Our beloved ruling class does not like to come back empty-handed from the hunt, and the chief huntsman was absent, no doubt assuring that there would be game in our path.

  The wind brought me a scent of patchouli and lime as she reached into the bosom of her robes and pulled out a piece of red silk. I’m sure it’s called a scarf, although it was far too light and sheer to keep out any wind. A stiff breeze would have torn it.

  “A token,” Lady ViKay said, “for the most successful of the hunters.”

  Two servants appeared at her elbow, one with a silver salver, another with a teak tripod. Without looking down, she set the scarf down on the salver just as the first servant managed to set the salver on the tripod. I was expecting the breeze to blow the silken scrap away, but one of the servants had already thought of that, and immediately set a highly polished onyx weight on top of the silk.

  Under the shiny bone-white stone, the crimson silk fluttered in the breeze like a pinned butterfly.

  Arefai looked over the group carefully, his eyes resting on mine for too long.

  I don’t mind a bit of acting, but this was ridiculous. I wasn’t going to shoot his deer, embarrass him, and commit suicide, all in one stroke. The only reason I had been credited with the kill back in Den Oroshtai had been because Arefai was using my arrows—which he knew. The contest with Lord Minch had been fixed by Narantir’s predisposition spell, cantrip, incantation, or whatever it was—which he should have known.

  I had no illusions about my abilities as a bowman, and no intention of finding some now. I would shoot low and wide and late, thank you very much, and let the spells fall where they may.

  His eyes swept past me, and I could breathe again.

  The horses were waiting for us at the bottom of the hill.

  Hunting in Glen Derenai turned out to be different from hunting in Den Oroshtai.

  Where the hunting trails in Den Oroshtai were paved, those in Glen Derenai were dirt paths, sometimes barely broad enough for a single horse and rider, sometimes wide enough for half a dozen to ride abreast. Where the hunting trails in Den Oroshtai cut mainly through dark woods, occasionally skirting a meadow or glen, those in Glen Derenai stretched out alongside fields, over unfarmed hills, and down next to streambeds shining in the sun. Strips of forest separated plowed fields from meadows, but the paths tended to cut across the strips, instead of running along inside them.

  It was all a much more open, much brighter, much more golden than green thing to hunt in Glen Derenai.

  It was, however, equally painful: bouncing on the back of a horse hurts. There’s a sleight to the way you move your hips and back, and I didn’t have it. Everybody else did; except when they stood in their stirrups, it looked like the bottoms of all the lords were glued to their saddles. Even Toshtai, looking far too large for his suffering saddle horse, didn’t bounce up and down as he rode.

  Riding through grasses that brushed my knee, we topped a hill. I finally caught a glimpse of the sea—Eter Kabreel, the Closed Sea, the body of water that separates D’Shai from the mainland north of Bhorlan.

  We quickly rode downslope, and the sea disappeared, but I still had to repress a shudder. There’s something about the Eter Kabreel that always bothers me. I don’t know what it is, honestly, and I probably never will.

  It’s not unfamiliarity; I spent my first seventeen years as an itinerant, and I’ve seen large bodies of water before; it’s not like I’m a peasant, away from my paddy and hut for the first time.

  I’ve seen the waters of D’Shai, from the friendly gray and blue waters of the Eter Shalough that separate the Ven from the rest of D’Shai, where sailboats both large and small follow the zigzag trade route north and south, to the Eter Enothien, the Open Sea that laps on the morningwise coast of the Ven, Helgramyth, and Otland, and the waters that go on forever from there.

  And I have seen the icy lakes up in Helgramyth, so clean and blue that it looks like they never have been sullied by man.

  I have walked from north to south and sunwise to morningwise in D’Shai, from Wyness Tongue in the north to Flinder Bay in the south, from the most morningwise coast of the Ven to Lower Midwich, and south from there to Wisterly, where the Tetnit stands guarding the Sleeve, that narrow body of water that separates D’Shai from Bhorlan and the Bhorlani.

  I have seen the waters, and have drunk and swum in most, but something about the slate gray water of the Closed Sea always chills me, no matter how bright and hot the day.

  Arefai, riding beside me, caught my shudder. “What is it, Kami Dan’Shir?”

  I shook my head. I couldn’t admit that it was just a glimpse of the distant sea that bothered me. Truth has nothing to do with what I will or won’t confess to, after all.

  “Nothing much, Lord,” I said. “I just had a flare of kazuh.” I pursed my lips and tried to look intelligent. “A feeling that there is… some subtle danger, some subtle threat.”

  Given that I was riding with a party of a dozen D’Shaian nobles, some of whom had long been making war on each other, the chances of that being the case were roughly the same as of there being a flea somewhere in a pack of wild dogs, of there being some bark on one of the trees yonder, or of an aged concubine coming unvirginal to one’s bed.

  Nevertheless, Arefai looked impressed. “I will stay alert.”

  “Very good, Lord.”

  Far ahead of us, Lord Orazhi, almost at the crest of the hill, raised a hand and dropped lightly from his horse.

  “Quarry ahead,” Arefai whispered, as all the horses slowed.

  We dismounted and moved forward, the high grass coming more than waist-high, sometimes tickling my nose. It was good to be back on solid ground again, although I was having some trouble keeping my balance; it seemed that I had gotten used to the rocking of the swaying animal.

  Without a word, Lord Esterling and another young noble whose name I didn’t know gathered the horses, leading them downslope. Esterling glared at me for a moment—the idea of serving a bourgeois didn’t please him, apparently—but gave me enough time to untie my gear from the saddle before he added my horse to his string; the idea of leaving the horse in my awkward hands probably bothered him more.

  I took my time stringing my bow, although I probably could have done it quickly. I was getting good at this.

  Arefai and I made our way up to the top of the hill in a half-crouch. I didn’t and don’t know much about hunting, but I did notice that the wind was blowing toward us, which would tend to carry both smells and sounds away from whatever was in front of us.

  We topped the hill and looked down.

  Down below us, a stream ha
d carved a shallow valley as it wound its way from the distant snow-rimmed Sorkle Mountains, to fall off the black cliffs and splash into the Eter Kabreel.

  Three deer stood by the side of the stream, drinking: two females and a large male, a rack of antlers crowning his erect head. I didn’t have a lot of experience to compare them to other such, but either the male was unusually huge or the females were tiny.

  “The buck is a worthy shot,” Minch said, quietly, quickly reaching for an arrow. There was something strange about the way he was fumbling at his quiver, instead of smoothly drawing and nocking the arrow the way Arefai did. Even so, he pulled an arrow and nocked it at the same time that Arefai did.

  Arefai drew his string back.

  Minch drew his own string, and fired.

  Arefai’s eyes grew wide.

  My kazuh flared.

  In retrospect, both the problem and the solution were obvious.

  It would be a coarse and obvious solecism for Minch to outshoot Arefai; it would be equally coarse and obvious for Arefai to falsely accuse Minch of having done so.

  Unless Minch outshot Arefai without outshooting him. Unless he did it right in front of our eyes but could, nevertheless, credibly deny the plain evidence.

  That was what he had done.

  An acrobat has to be able to move quickly: before Arefai’s arrow had quite come up, I reached out a hand and plucked his string from his fingers, firing his arrow down into the tall grasses just as Minch’s shot spunged into the chest of the buck below.

  “Brilliant shot, Lord Arefai,” I shouted. “Stunning.”

  His eyebrows shot up and his nostrils flared wide, and for a moment I didn’t know how it would go.

  Minch solved the problem for me.

  “What did you say, you filthy little bourgeois?” he said, squaring off against me, one hand on his bow, the other on the hilt of his sword. “You interrupt the hunt with your—”

  “Minch.” Arefai dropped his bow to one side and took two quick steps toward Minch. “I have had enough insolent—”

  No, no, no, I wanted to scream. Let it go.

  The purpose of the whole thing was to provoke Arefai into making an inexcusable attack on Minch, be it a physical attack or just an accusation. But I was only a dan’shir, not a warrior, and I had no chance of stopping a pair of swordsmen.

  Moving quickly but silently, Dun Lidjun stepped between the two of them, his face flat and impassive, like the surface of a moonlit pond. One open palm faced Arefai as Dun Lidjun turned to face Minch.

  Dun Lidjun’s gesture had silenced Arefai, stopping him in his tracks. The old man made no motion toward his sword, but Minch’s hand jerked away from the hilt of his own blade as though it were on fire. That wasn’t part of anybody’s scheme, for Minch to draw on Dun Lidjun and be hacked to death in self-defense.

  Nobody said anything for the longest time. We stood, motionless as a mural.

  “A brilliant shot, indeed,” I finally threw into the silence.

  “Yes,” somebody else said, “a fine shot, Lord Arefai.”

  Dun Lidjun’s voice was low. “I’ve seen none finer, Lord Arefai,” he said, his eyes never leaving Minch’s.

  “No offense intended, Lord Arefai,” Minch mumbled. “A good shot, indeed.” His expression was dutifully passive, but he hadn’t given up, not yet.

  Demick didn’t say anything, but Orazhi gave a low laugh.

  “My old eyes deceive me, Kami Dan’Shir,” Lord Orazhi said. “Foolish eyes that they are, for a moment—and I say this in self-mockery, you understand, commenting on the weakness of my eyes and foolishness of my mind, and nothing more, you see—it almost looked as though it was Lord Minch who had shot, and not Lord Arefai.”

  Perhaps my eyes flashed my thanks, although I tried to keep my face calm.

  “With respect, Lord,” I said, “you are correct: your eyes were mistaken.” It’s safe to contradict a member of our beloved ruling class when that’s what he has as much as told you he wants you to do. “You’ll see that it is one of Lord Arefai’s arrows that has pierced the heart of the buck, and not one of Lord Minch’s.”

  I was trying to decide how Minch had set it up, how far he had gone, when I realized it didn’t matter, not at this level of hypocrisy.

  “I am sure that is so.” Orazhi beckoned to a huntsman. “The arrow, and quickly.”

  “Lord Minch, might I see your quiver?” I said, holding out a hand.

  He looked from me to Dun Lidjun and then back to me.

  “Here. Take it,” he said, unbuckling it from his waist. It dropped to the ground; he spun on the ball of his foot and stalked back toward the horses.

  I fell to one knee and picked up the quiver. “You see, Lord Orazhi,” I said, as I dumped the arrows out on the ground, “all of these have the markings of Lord Minch, and none of Lord Arefai. There was no unfortunate blunder in which Lord Minch got Lord Arefai’s quiver.”

  Which was unfortunate. If he had been carrying more of Arefai’s arrows, that would have brought the whole matter out in the open, or as out in the open as things were going to get. Which would have settled Minch. To pick a fight with a visiting lord is a solecism, but being caught that way would have put the solecism squarely on Minch’s head, which would quickly have been rolling about the ground.

  Now, I don’t know much about swordfighting, but it was clear to me that Arefai was certain that he was the better swordsman, and I would have been willing to bet that he was right, particularly since I’d be betting Arefai’s life, and not my own.

  The huntsman, half out of breath, trotted up with the arrow held high in his hands. At Lord Orazhi’s nod, he handed it to me. The slim arrow was redly darkened from head to fletching. I rubbed my thumb along the shaft, near the nock point, revealing three gold bands.

  “Lord Arefai’s arrow,” I said. “Nicely shot, Lord Arefai. Would you not say so, Lord Demick?”

  Demick smiled too easily. “I would be happy to say so,” he said.

  There is a nasty game that they play over in Agami, in some of the smaller domains near the foot of Mount Ashen.

  A peasant, usually—although sometimes it’s a bourgeois or a middle class, if there’s somebody in particular that the local lord wants to punish—is turned loose along hunting paths, given a start before the members of our beloved ruling class start after him or her. There is, in theory, a goal that the victim can reach in safety—a bridge, a stream, a field, a town, but it’s likely that somebody so impertinent as to defeat a lord’s sport isn’t going to enjoy the experience.

  Yes, him or her; there’s two versions of the game. One is merely a rougher version of what members of our beloved ruling class do with peasant girls anyway; the other is a hunt for a human quarry. Manhunters take a single tooth from their dead victims; I’ve seen lords with a whole necklace about their noble throats.

  From the way that Lords Minch and Demick kept looking at me as we rode down the road toward the fields of wildflowers beyond, I knew how the quarry felt.

  A low stone fence cut the meadow ahead, stretching across the rolling ground from horizon to horizon. It looked low, that is, but as we approached, it seemed to keep growing, until it was clear it was at least waist-high.

  “Excuse me, Lord?” I asked Arefai.

  “Yes, Kami Dan’Shir?”

  “Where is the gate?”

  “Gate?”

  Yes, yes, you brain-feeble idiot, the gate. The gate that we open, so that we can walk the horses through to the other side of the fence.

  “No gate?”

  He gave his reins kind of a twitch. “Oh, we don’t need a gate. We’ll just jump.” His smile was, I think, supposed to look casually reassuring instead of moronically optimistic. “Just kick your horse toward the fence; he will take it by himself.”

  Lord Orazhi kicked his horse into a canter and took the fence easily, as though this sort of insanity was something that he did every day, pulling up his horse a short way beyond and waiting for
the next rider, Lord Toshtai. Even carrying his considerable bulk, Lord Toshtai’s large white horse had no trouble with the jump, although I think it may have resented his heft—do horses actually grunt, or was I just hearing things? Edelfaule was next, then it was Arefai’s turn. As though he was trying to persuade me how easy it all was, he took the leap in grand style, to clear the fence by, so it seemed, easily half again its height.

  Very well, I decided. This couldn’t be as hard as it seemed, and while there had to be a gate somewhere, I couldn’t not try, not with Lord Demick behind me, ready to use my reticence to somehow cause Lord Toshtai to lose status.

  So I kicked my heels against the hard side of my horse, and he (she? it? I hadn’t looked, I realized) went from a bouncy walk to an even more bouncy canter as he or she or it followed the others to the fence.

  Just at the last moment, when I was absolutely certain that the horse was going to crash into the low stone wall, the wall fell away below us as the horse leaped it, far higher than I thought it should have, as though something had startled it at the last instant.

  There was a moment there that felt every bit as good as flight. The ground wasn’t as far below, of course, but I was in control. I, little Kami Khuzud, had managed to jump a horse across a fence.

  Arefai was right, I decided.

  This wasn’t bad.

  Then the horse landed hard, tearing me from the saddle. The ground came up and hit me, harder, on the side.

  It was just as well I hadn’t had breakfast, all things considered.

  Chapter 9

  The deep personal concern of our beloved ruling class, the gentle touch of wizards, and other lies.

  “I think it safe to move him, eh, Tebol?” Narantir’s thick, whisker-rimmed lips split in a smile; one of the many things I hate about Narantir is how much he enjoys his work, particularly when that work involves me being hurt.

  I didn’t remember the others leaving, and that bothered me. Not that I would have expected members of our beloved ruling class to loiter to see to the welfare of a lowly bourgeois.