by Lynn Abbey
With mortar and pestle, Hâlott ground the husks of the kastor beans to a fine powder. Then he added a bit of liquid from a vial, and another bit from a second vial. He was not overly cautious while doing these things; after all, why should he be? Poisons, toxins, venoms: None had an effect on him, not even elixir of ricinus.
Stirring the admixture, Hâlott’s brows twitched in a frown. What might the rune-marked box contain? And he wondered whether Rogi had yet found the man called Chance.
Grumbling to himself, Rogi stumped away from the Broken Mast along the docks. Several fishermen had paused in their worry about the oncoming storm season long enough to jeer at him, but they had made no move to plague him further. After all, he was Hâlott’s man.
Before going to the Mast, he had tried the Bottomless Well, the ’Unicorn, and the Yellow Lantern, but in none of those places was a man in black, no man with a cane. But now he was headed for the Golden Gourd, a place said to be a brothel, though they always threw Rogi out before he had occasion to see for himself.
Rogi finally reached the tavern. Stepping through the door, he immediately spotted a black-haired man in black clothes sitting at a table. A rather heavy hardwood cane hung on the back of his chair. Across the table was a black-haired woman dressed in drab, rather shapeless garments. It was Elemi, the S’danzo woman who had read her cards for Rogi and had told him that as a newborn on two separate occasions he had been deliberately cast into the sea and had been twice plucked therefrom. She and the man in black seemed to be in deep converse. Other than those two, there were but a handful of patrons within.
“You little shite!” called Prall, starting ’round the bar as he added, “I told you to never show your face in this—”
“I am thent here by my mathter Hâlott,” yelled Rogi at the barkeep. “I am here to thsee a man named Chanth.”
Prall glanced at the man in black, who shrugged and nodded.
“All right, pud,” said Prall, waving Rogi forward. “But keep a froggin’ civil tongue in your head.” Then he looked at Rogi and laughed uproariously and managed to gasp out, “As if you could keep that long lapper of yours inside your mouth.”
Rogi scuttled over to the table where the man sat and looked up at him. In spite of the man’s black hair, he appeared to be in his sixties. “Are you the one called Chanth?”
The man nodded.
“I am thent by my mathter who wanth to give you a commithion.”
“A commission?”
“Yeth.”
“And it is for … ?”
“He didn’t thay.”
Chance shook his head. “I take no commissions these days, Rogi.”
Rogi’s eyes widened in surprise, for the man knew his name even though Rogi had not until now ever spoken with this person called Chance.
Still, the man seemed to be intrigued, and he glanced over toward a dark corner where sat a young man. Rogi looked, too, and saw a youth also dressed in black, though a red sash splashed a bit of color across his waist. His black hair was pulled back in ponytail, and he wore a sword at his side and an upside-down dagger strapped to a forearm. A dangerouth perthon, thought Rogi.
Chance interrupted the small hunchback’s observations: “Rogi, have you no inkling whatsoever as to what this commission might be?”
Rogi glanced at Elemi. The young woman stared back at him, her dark, dark eyes glittering in the lantern light, her gold hoop earrings gleaming as well.
“You can trust her,” said Chance.
“I think he wanth you to open a boxth.”
“Open a box?”
Rogi nodded. “A thecret boxth.”
Chance smiled, and then called to the youth in black. “Lone.”
Lone stood and crossed the common room, his walk like that of a swaggering cat, his jet ponytail swinging in counterpoint.
Near dawn, Hâlott filled the minuscule fang with a minute amount of the ricinus elixir, and then he sealed the flat end with a insignificant amount of wax. Just as he took up the ruby ring, he heard a shout: “Mathter, Mathter, I bring you thomeone to open the boxth.”
Lone looked about the chamber and shook his head. Not only had he seen that the square-based tower was a ruin—with vine-covered rubble about its foundation, the top two levels but shells, with partial walls here and there and stairs leading up to dead ends or gaps—but now that he was inside, the ground-level floor seemed nearly a ruin itself, even though it was intact: barely livable, it was all but dead of neglect. Rogi set the lantern on a dust-laden table then went about lighting candles, while still calling out “Mathter, Mathter, thomeone to open the thecret boxth.”
Lone’s gaze went to the rune-marked, gilded box sitting on the table. There seemed no latch, no lock, no lid. He smiled in anticipation.
And then Hâlott walked into the room, and Lone turned, and for the first time the youth saw Hâlott up close and personal. Oh, he had seen Hâlott in the ’Unicorn now and again, yet always at night, and always from across the room. But now he stood no more than a stride away from what seemed to be the desiccated remains of a living corpse, and Lone wondered, What the frog has my mentor foisted upon me now?
At dusk, once again came a light tapping on the door. When Rogi answered it, he saw the young woman who had called him an ugly little creature and had fled.
Even as she recoiled once more, Rogi smiled and looked up at her, the irises of his eyes such a pale, pale blue that the whole of them looked dead white … white with black dots where his pupils were. Rogi began fumbling at the rope at his waist. “You would like to thsee my dragon, yeth?”
She huffed and said, “I would see your master.”
Rogi’s shoulders slumped. He turned and called out, “Mathter, thome woman to thsee you.”
A hollow whisper came from the adjacent room, and Rogi responded.
In moments, Rogi exchanged the ruby ring for a small but fairly weighty pouch, and the young woman fled once more.
Rogi sighed, and closed the door, then untied the pouch strings and fished out from among the coins two rather large and squarish silver ones—shaboozh—and one small gold piece—a royal—and pocketed them for himself. After all, he had worked hard for his wages: Not only had he found the “boxth,” he had wandered around in the shadowy woods in the moonlight with a bag of “beanth,” and he had searched all over town to find Chance and Lone and had been jeered at by fishermen and had nearly been thrown out of the Golden Gourd and …
From nearby and for perhaps the hundredth time came Lone’s frustrated shout: “Frog! Froggin’ chest!”
Dressed in white and wearing her ruby jewels, Nadalya, smiling, sauntered among the crowd of personages gathered in the courtyard to celebrate the visit of per-Arizak, known as Ariz to some and, because of his fiery temper, as the Dragon to others. Big and brawny and brown-haired, as were most of the Irrune, he was a man who clearly had gotten his height not only from his father, but also from his mother, Verrezza, Arizak’s first wife. In the courtyard to greet his eldest son was Arizak, who sat in a chair with his damaged left leg propped on a pillowed footstool. Tall, gray-haired Verrezza was there, too, for certainly she would not miss an event where the “one true” heir to the throne was present at court. Naimun, first son of Nadalya and Arizak, stood off to one side surrounded by his coterie of plotters, many of the young men laughing over something that their own pretender to the throne had said, or at some gaffe by Ariz, an uncouth but dangerous boor in their eyes, living in the hills with the bulk of the savage Irrune people as he did. Red-haired Raith was elsewhere among the crowd, the second son of Nadalya and Arizak. At seventeen, Raith was lithe and of a middling height, taller than his petite mother, shorter than Naimun, and certainly shorter than Aziz. Raith was the brightest of the lot, or so his mother deemed, and would make a better ruler than either of the two other contenders.
Additionally, there were merchants and their wives from Land’s End, powerful in their own right, as well as ladies of the court and daught
ers of various guests, all hanging on the words of so-called men of power or of their sons, especially those of Aziz, Naimun, and Raith. The smarter ones, though, sought out Verrezza or Nadalya, for that’s where the true machinations of the court as well as the progression resided.
Nadalya wove her way among the crowd, pausing here to jest with a youth, stopping there to speak of the tide and times with a merchant, lingering at another gathering to compliment the gems or hair or dress of some lady. Across the courtyard, she espied Andriko and caught his eye, and he nodded toward a cloth-draped table on which sat casks of wine used by the servants to replenish pitchers they bore through the gathering to refill goblets and glasses held by the guests.
Slowly, working her way outward, Nadalya eventually came to the table and casually and without notice found the box beneath, a cord tied to the hasp of the latch.
She tapped on the wine casks, as if measuring their fill, and at the same time, she repeatedly kicked the box below, the sound of one covering for the other. Then she took up the hasp-string and pulled the lid open, then stepped away toward Naimun and his circle of friends.
In moments, screams signaled that the enraged hornets had found their way out from under the cloth-covered table and were attacking anyone or anything that moved.
As men batted at the angry insects, women screamed and ran for the doors of the palace. Verrezza and Ariz got Arizak to his feet, and, with him hobbling, they headed for the palace as well.
Nadalya turned the ring ’round her finger until the gemstone was toward her palm, and she twisted aside the ruby and stepped to Nidakis and cried, “Oh, Nikki, there’s one on you,” and she slapped him on the back of his neck, then grabbed Naimun’s arm and headed for the palace, and was most pleased to see that Raith was before them and moving with the crowd.
The next day, Nidakis developed a cough, which by the following day turned into an endless hacking along with nonstop diarrhea. On the third day, a fever came upon him, and he could not keep any food on his stomach—vomiting until he was empty, and then retching nought but greenish bile thereafter. Even water would not stay down, nor juices of any kind. By that evening he had fallen into a coma, swiftly followed by death. The healers were puzzled, including Velinmet, the best of the lot … until postmortem they examined his body, and embedded under the skin in the back of his neck they found …
After four days of repeated and frustrating attempts, Lone, who had stubbornly determined that nothing could or would defeat him, at last opened the gilded box. It took twenty-seven separate moves of sliding panels in just the right sequence to unlatch the thing, and inside he and Hâlott found a carefully wrapped bronze bust of a woman. Beautiful she was, with a long, elegant neck and high cheekbones and graceful lips and a narrow chin and a long, straight nose. She had a high forehead and shell-like ears, and she wore what seemed to be a crown of sorts, or perhaps a strange, tall hat. The hat itself was marked with an ankh, like the one Hâlott himself wore. But strangest of all was that her eyes were outlined in a similar manner to Hâlott’s own painted-on eyes of kohl.
Lone was disappointed, for this was no treasure he wanted—no gems, no gold, no silver, no coinage or jewelry of any sort—and he had expected riches worthy of the puzzle of the box. But Hâlott was devastated, and he howled at the sight of the bust and sank to his knees and buried his withered face into his bony hands and sobbed inconsolably, though no tears whatsoever ran down his desiccated cheeks.
Lone drew away from the living dead man, and muttered something about coming back for his fee, and then he was out the door, leaving the grief-stricken necromancer behind, who now and again whispered the name Meretaten between howls of anguish.
For the next several nights, the guards at the Gate of Triumph reported seeing that dreadful person Hâlott wandering through the graveyard just beyond their post. What he was doing there, none knew, though one reported that he seemed to be weeping.
Rumors and whispers flew throughout Sanctuary, in the taverns and inns—the ’Unicorn, Yellow Lantern, Broken Mast, Six Ravens, and the many other establishments—over back fences, in alleys, down at the docks, and perhaps in the palace itself. No matter where, whenever men and women got together, inevitably their voices dropped and they whispered conspiratorially:
“That Nidakis, he’s not the first one of the court to have died in this manner.”
“A mysterious ailment, I hear.”
“Yar. Like the ones before: terrible fever, can’t keep anything down, coughing endlessly. They say their whole insides died—guts, lungs, hearts, livers, kidneys, all of it—and that’s what killed ’em.”
“That don’t sound like no snakebite to me.”
“Snakebite?”
“Yar. From one o’ them beynit snakes. Kill you in moments, they will.”
“Pah! Wasn’t no snakebite killed Nidakis.”
“Wull then, just how do you explain the fact that the healers found a tiny snake tooth stuck under the skin in the back of Nidakis’s neck?”
“I hear it was found in his mouth.”
“Bit him in the night, I hear.”
“Ooo, gives me shivers, it does, terrible snakes slithering through the dark.”
“’Fit were a snake tooth, a beynit snake, then the Beysibs are back.”
“Small, they are, I hear, and brightly colored.”
“The Beysib?”
“Nah, the snakes. The Beysib, though, eyes of a fish they have, them women.”
“Mayhap they’re gathering again.”
“Might have somethin’ to do with that ship what was wrecked.”
Rumors flew, whispers flew, and soon it was told that a huge conclave of the Beysib were plotting somewhere deep in dank tunnels beneath the city, and they would one day come forth en masse. It would then be a case of the devil you know—the savage Irrune—versus the devil you once knew—the fish-eyed Beysib.
Nadalya was quite pleased with this turn of events, for even some at court were caught up in the Beysib rumors. It was a nice bit of misdirection, Hâlott having used an embedded serpent’s fang to slowly deliver the deadly toxin. She would have to pay him a bonus. And because Nidakis had first sickened a full day after the courtyard gathering, and then had died three days beyond that, there was nothing to connect the gathering with his untimely demise. Yet even had there been, nothing could ever be proved. Regardless, Nidakis was dead—“Isn’t it sad, that poor youth, and he had seemed so healthy, too?”—and so she had temporarily cut off the head of that particular set of scheming serpents surrounding Naimun. Perhaps now the rest of the snake would die, and Raith would be safe from their plotting.
Little did Nadalya know that she had merely eliminated an insignificant member of a much larger cabal conspiring together for power. For, depending upon who was pacing it out, a mile or two northeast of Sanctuary in a closed room on a rich estate at Land’s End Retreat, powerful men gathered to speak of this latest assassination at court, and what they might do about it. Aye, though the conniver Nidakis was dead and his sycophants leaderless, the true head of that particular serpent was still very much alive.
None of this bothered Rogi at all, for he lay with an extremely well-satisfied lady of the evening in a room above the Yellow Lantern. His rather impressive and considerable dragon was very happy that night.
Consequences
Jody Lynn Nye
Pel held the compress on Tredik’s right biceps until the bleeding stopped, then dabbed at the deep slash with an antiseptic wash. The fair-haired carter’s lad watched him work, the pain dulled by a very small amount of poppy in a large slug of willow-herb tea. Pel wanted him conscious so he could appreciate what he was going through.
“Don’t tell my mother,” Tredik pleaded, as Pel sewed up the slash.
“That you’ve been brawling?”
The young man—old enough to know better—reddened. To his credit, he didn’t make a sound as the sharp needle went in and out of his flesh. “Not exactly brawling.
We were having our own tournament, see? We’re training up for next time. That Tiger lady, she shouldn’t have bested everybody in Sanctuary so easy.”
“Why not? If she was well trained, hale, and aware, she had as much chance as any fighter here.”
“But it’s not right, a stranger taking the prize in our own city. One of us ought to have defended it properly. I think it was witchcraft. If that old Torchholder had been around, well, he’d have spotted her for what she was. I mean, what she must be. A witch, I mean. No outlander ought to be that good.”
Pel smiled. He doubted that during the years of the Bloody Hand, or even the early times of Irrune rule, that anyone would have been invoking civic pride, but it sounded as though Sanctuary’s youth felt something for their troubled and fate-trodden city.
“Well, it’s too hot to battle like that,” Pel said gently, winding bandages over the now-clean wound. “Infection grows in temperatures like this.”
“Oh, so we should wait until winter rolls around again?” Tredik asked, rolling one mud-brown eye to meet Pel’s bright blue gaze. Pel had to laugh.
“There’s no right season for stupidity and high antics,” the healer said. “You’ll do what you do. It’s not up to me to stop you. I won’t tell your mother …”
“Gods bless you!”
“ …If you do.”
“Ser Garwood!”
“You can’t hide what happened to your clothes, can you?” Pel reminded him. “Those rips and all that blood? Take your time over the matter. You can pick your moment to tell her the truth. But she must hear it. What if you’d been killed? If you’re going to fight like a man, you must learn to take precautions like a man, and your medicine afterward. Speaking of which …” He produced a small clay bottle with a chunk of wax-soaked rag for a stopper. “One sip of this three times a day, dawn, noon, and nightfall. You haven’t got an infection at present. This will keep one from appearing.”