The Death of Nnanji: The Seventh Sword Book Four

by Dave Duncan

  But the swordsmen of Plo must know that the Tryst would return to avenge its dead, and that would be all the excuse their reeve needed to swear them by the third oath: Blood needs be shed, declare your allegiance. When the two forces met, both sides would be bound to fight to the death.

  “I have some good news for you,” Wallie explained later. “I’ll be passing it around the fleet, but you deserve to hear it first, Addis. Your dad is reported to be on the mend.” He passed over the message slip. It said, once the abbreviations were straightened out: Nnanji sitting up, eating.

  Addis thanked him. “You going to show this to anyone else, my lord?”

  “No.”

  Addis put it away in his pouch. The Tryst in general had never known that Liege Nnanji’s injury was so serious that he couldn’t sit up or eat, so they must be told only that he was recovering. Not many men or boys would have seen that so quickly.

  “Who knows?” Wallie said. “It would be just like him to raise another army and get to Kra before us. Has Master Filurz told you our plans?”

  Of course he hadn’t.

  “Tomorrow, Lord Joraskinta and a few men will be going ashore at a village on the south bank to take an overland trail from there to the next loop. Honorable Quarlaino will go with him, because he knows the Plo area and the best road to it. The rest of us are going on to a city called Soo, which will be a faster journey, if the Goddess wills. Soo is on a different reach from Plo, but it has an overland connection and it should be only a short march for us.

  Addis looked puzzled but was too discreet to question.

  “You’re wondering why I’m splitting my forces. The Soo crossing is not arduous, from what I’ve been able to discover, but it brings us down to the River at Cross Plo, on the wrong bank. The enemy will try to hinder our crossing, and that’s where Joraskinta comes in. The way he is going involves many land crossings before reaching the right stretch of River, so it would be hard to take an army by that route. One ship is easier to hire than hundreds of horses. The way we’re going requires only two land trips and we finish up with a long voyage to Soo, sailing between river banks studded with many fine Tryst cities where we can enlist swordsmen.”

  Addis was smiling.

  “Novice?”

  “Lord Joraskinta will hire boats for us?”

  “Ships. Yes. Well done. We shan’t need many just to ferry us over the River, but we do need some. Something else’s worrying you. Out with it!”

  “Should you be telling everyone your plans, my lord? I don’t mean my mentor or I will chatter, but there are sailors who may be in the pay of the sorcerers, and if someone talks too loosely, they’ll hear.”

  “I am quite certain that the sorcerers know everything about us, right down to what we just ate. You two must stay mindful of that. I don’t want either of you taken hostage.” That was the most important thing he had to tell them, and he waited a moment for the message to sink in.

  “What would happen then, Dad?” Vixini asked. Addis could have asked, but hadn’t.

  “I don’t know. Please don’t put me in the position of having to decide. This war may be too important to throw away to save some stupid colt who gets himself in trouble.

  “What is happening, I believe, is this: Vul made the treaty with the Tryst and the other covens waited to see what would happen. Behold, it worked! The swordsmen stopped killing sorcerers on sight, and the sorcerers are doing very well, manufacturing strange novelties, like soap, locks, and telescopes.” The industrial revolution had begun. “Other covens began to join in. There was resistance, of course. There always is. Now the resistance has set up battle lines at Kra. It’s probably too late. The Tryst has grown too powerful to stop.

  “That doesn’t mean that we’ll necessarily win this round. And it isn’t as simple as Kra bad, all other covens good. The sorcerers themselves are divided. Not all the Vul coven support us, and likely not all in the Kra group are against us. Treachery may work both ways, but trust no strangers, not even swordsmen.”

  Chapter 2

  The royal palace of Plo was a rambling relict crouched on the craggy hill above the city like a vulture’s nest. A few parts were modern and gaudy, others had been the quarters of long-dead kings, now used as slave barracks. Some parts were supposed to be impregnable fortifications, but looked much like others that had been designed as royal bordellos. Arganari XIV the Merciful, holy priest of the seventh rank, king of Plo and Fex, had never approved of his sprawling residence and often wished that he had ordered most of it pulled down years ago. The only reason he hadn’t was that it would have cost too much money, meaning he would have had to raise taxes, and in those days he had believed that it was his duty to keep taxes as low as possible.

  He would also have lost the respect of his subjects. As priest as well as king, he knew the importance of appearances, of the right things being done in the right order and the exactly right way. Kings who tore down the work of their ancestors undermined the foundations of their own rule.

  Some parts of the pile he did like. On calm days in the past he had enjoyed wandering along the north gallery, which commanded a magnificent view of the city below, the mighty River on whose banks it stood, and the misty, distant Mule Hills, which were no doubt green with spring now. Alas, it was years since he had been able to see any of those things. Moreover, the north gallery was intolerably windy, and he had trouble enough walking at the best of times, without being buffeted by random buffets of gale, every one of which raised a firestorm of pain in his crippled hips and knees. He leaned heavily on his cane and wished that he’d brought two of them.

  Old age had stolen most of his sight and today the wind washed away the rest in torrents of tears. To his left the great parade of his ancestors was barely a blur, although children in the streets of the city far below would be able to see them, standing proud against the sky: thirteen gigantic statues of his predecessors looming high on their plinths. The great company began with the over-muscled, near-nude swordsman, Arganari I, and continued with twelve priests to Arganari XIII, his grandfather. The first empty plinth beyond that was reserved for himself, Arganari XIV. Although his line had not been noted for reckless experimentation in nomenclature, each one of them had claimed some special title: the Benevolent, the Shrewd, and so on. Local bird life, with more artistic judgment than respect, decorated them all equally. Some day he, too, would be standing there as a gulls’ latrine.

  In the past he had often wondered if the Goddess would cause him to be reborn as a palace slave who would gaze on his previous incarnation and pine for lost glory. But She rarely allowed that sort of memory. For all he knew, in a previous life he had been one of these other kings, whose likeness now stared arrogantly out across at the Mule Hills for all eternity. He did look quite like XI, the Sagacious.

  It was not the first empty plinth, his plinth, that saddened him, for death was an inevitable and not always unwelcome visitor, certain to coming calling on him in the near future. But he was the last of his line, and the next base after his would not support an Arganari. There would be no Arganari XV. This was the greatest sorrow of his life.

  All the kings of Plo and Fex except the swordsman butcher who founded the dynasty had been priests, because the priesthood was a much safer craft. Although kingship had required Arganari to be a skeptical, cynical ruler, as a priest he had always been devout. Ever Her sincere servant, he had performed his sacerdotal duties with faith and diligence. On major festival days he still had himself carried down to the great temple of the Goddess near the River, where all gods were worshiped. All except one, for the Fire God had been cast out millennia ago, and since then had been honored only by the sorcerers.

  Yet even a minor and suspect god could summon a king, and that was why the most holy Arganari XIV was enduring his painful progress along the north gallery. Tucked away at the far end of it, spurned and neglected, stood a chapel of the Fire God. Which royal ancestor had built it or why was unknown, but the templ
e always allocated a priestess to tend it. Once a month she would clean it out and replace the logs stacked on the hearth with fresh. No mortal ever lit that fire, but this morning watchers had reported smoke coming from the chimney. That was how the Fire God announced his presence. When the king answered the summons, the god spoke to him out of the fire.

  It was a great regret to Arganari that the Goddess he served had never spoken to him as the Fire God did. She had never granted him a miracle. The closest She had ever come was when She stole his son away to die in a distant land, yet the outcast Fire God honored him with personal messages. Explain that, holy man.

  Nigh on half a century ago, when XIII the Benevolent had been visiting his other city, Fex, the chapel chimney had begun to smoke. Terrified half out of his wits, Crown Prince Arganari had answered the summons in the king’s stead. The god had informed him that his grandfather had just suffered a stroke and would be dead by sunset, making the younger Arganari King Arganari XIV. It was two days before the news arrived by mortal means.

  Twenty or so years later, his son, another Crown Prince Arganari, had sailed off with his bodyguard on a state visit to Fex to let the other half of the kingdom view their future ruler, newly sworn to the swordsman’s craft. The Fire God had summoned the king to warn him that his son had been moved by the hand of the Goddess to a distant land. He was currently on his way from Tau to Casr but would be murdered en route by a swordsman, Nnanji of the Fifth. Secular confirmation of the prince’s death had arrived about eight weeks later.

  There had been two more revelations within the last three years. The news was never good. What dread tidings would he receive this time?

  Heart thumping, eyes streaming tears, the king recognized the blur ahead as the chapel. When he reached the door, he found his honor guard of three swordsmen waiting there for him, although he had sent them on to open it. The three blockheads, two yellows and a brown, had been chosen for brawn, not brains, because the entrance was barred by a massive balk of timber that only three strong men together could lift. The young fools, however, had been too frightened to obey their orders before their high priest arrived, as if he could defend them against some monster lurking within. No mortals could imprison a god, so the purpose of barring the door was to keep lay folk out—one did not want irresponsible intruders offering prayers to a suspect god.

  “Well?” he wheezed. “Do I have to help you?”

  The brown kilt gasped. “No, Sire! On the count of three…”

  Nowadays metal workers sold fancy gadgets called locks, which could only be opened by the correct key, but the god might be angered if his privacy were maintained by such newfangled trickery. The three giants managed to lift the monster and even lay it down without crushing their feet. No ogres came bursting forth.

  “Dismissed!” the king snapped. “Go and wait at the far end.” Their blurred shapes disappeared into the pearly mist of his blindness.

  When his lungs had stopped laboring so hard, he hauled the heavy door open, releasing a rush of heat and smoke that made his eyes sting and water even more. He pulled the door shut behind him. He hated and feared this place, haunted by a dread that the guards might return and bar the door again, shutting him in there to die.

  The Fire God’s shrine was narrow, dim, and austerely empty. From a tiled floor, smooth ashlar walls soared up to a vaulted roof, and the only light came from a small, barred window. The hearth was opposite the door and above it hung a mask of copper and gold. Larger than human, the face itself was quite without expression, for both mouth and eyes were empty holes; but the priestesses kept it polished and as the draft from the fire and wind made it swing on its chains, so the play of light on the metal made it seem alive.

  Arganari choked back a smoke-induced cough and leaned his cane against the wall. Then he raised his hands and croaked out the prayer to the Fire God that was contained in the last of the many priestly sutras, as if it had been left in only on sufferance, to be known only to priests of the seventh rank.

  Lord of hearth and storm, nourisher of crops,

  Enrage out hearts against our foes,

  Inflame out bodies with lust to breed children,

  And give dominion to us who live in high places.

  In Arganari’s opinion, that prayer alone was quite enough reason to have driven the Fire God from the Mother’s temples.

  “You took your time answering our summons.” The voice echoed bizarrely in the enclosed space. It issued from the midst of the fire, not from the mask.

  “I came as fast as I could. My joints are filled with your holy fire.”

  “Beware of insolence, priest. We have news for you.”

  Which is what he had feared. “Good or bad?”

  “Mostly good. We warned you last year against the swordsman tyrant Nnanji who plotted to seize your kingdom and add it to his dominion. Had you followed our instructions more closely, you could have taken him alive and had the pleasure of punishing him for the pitiless murder of your noble son, so long ago. Instead he escaped back to his lair, planning to raise a larger army and return. Last Masons’ Day, as you count it, it seemed good to us to have the monster struck down by a woman he had violated.”

  “Praise the—praise to you, Dread Lord.”

  “Quite,” said the god, his voice burning with contempt to show that he knew which deity Arganari had almost invoked. “It was our divine decision to cripple him, that he survive in pain and regret. May he suffer long!”

  “Amen.” Arganari had never put much faith in Reeve Pollex’s plans to snare the tyrant alive. No man who had conquered so much territory so fast could be such a fool as to let himself be captured. Kra’s attacks on the Tryst, at Arbo, Cross Zek, and elsewhere had admittedly stopped its advance before it reached Plo’s borders, but Nnanji’s withdrawal had been the obviously sensible response. Arganari had never doubted that he would return with much greater resources, unless his failure prompted his underlings to start fighting among themselves.

  “His deputy, the swordsman Shonsu, is on his way here with an army, also intent on deposing you and your line and adding your kingdom to their swordsman empire.”

  “And this time they will bring a greater force.”

  “Undoubtedly, but Shonsu is by far the lesser man.” The mask moved in the draft, and the play of light across its metallic face shaped a brief smile, thin lipped and venomous. “Have you forgotten that he was an accomplice in the murder of your son? It was his sword that Nnanji borrowed to slay that helpless, wounded child. Tell your reeve to capture that one, so that you may yet enjoy inflicting an even slower and more subtle end on him than the one we have decreed for his master.”

  A priest who had named himself the Merciful should not be tempted by such thoughts, but Arganari was far from being the only person to have suffered from that brutal child slaying. The news had killed his wife, and the consequences for his people must still work themselves out when his dynasty failed and scavengers made carrion of his ancient kingdom. It was those loses that cried out for vengeance, far more than his own.

  “Listen carefully, little mortal. The fools think to attack you by way of Soo and the trail over the Mule Hills. Order your reeve to muster all the swordsmen he can from up and down the River, and also to empower the largest posse of civilians he can control. Shonsu sailed two weeks ago and expects to arrive by Barbers’ Day, although that seems unlikely. We shall send our sorcerers from Kra, armed with fearful weapons and our rage. They will require food, shelter, and ferry transport. Swordsmen cannot comprehend such weapons, so give your reeve explicit orders that he is to obey the instructions of Grand Wizard Krandrak. Do you understand?”

  “I hear and obey, Dread Lord.”

  “And your reeve must make sure that he has taken control of all the traffic on the River, so that even if Shonsu’s army reaches it, they cannot cross. Let them starve to death on the left bank.”

  “The Tryst has enslaved more than half the World already. Can Plo and Fex
stop them?”

  “Plo, Fex, and Kra, and all freedom-loving cities along the Plo Reach. The Tryst’s dominion is founded on smoke. One serious massacre and it will collapse. Followers will slay leaders and in a year the Tryst of Casr will be a legend.”

  Arganari desperately needed to sit down. Kneeling was out of the question, for he would never be able to stand up again, but his legs trembled and his joints ached. He sagged back against the masonry, feeling its spiteful cold through his silken robe.

  “Where am I to find the money? Already my people groan under the taxes you had me impose last year. One season, you promised, and the Tryst would be gone forever. Now you say it is returning in wrath, stronger than ever.”

  “Ask the fools if they would prefer the tyranny of the swordsmen to the centuries-long benevolent rule of your family. Will you surrender your kingdom to the men who slew your son? If even that crime does not arouse your righteous anger, then hear this. The ailing Nnanji has sent his own son along on this ill-fated expedition. Does that interest you?”

  “His son? The monster’s own son?”

  “His firstborn, a trainee killer the same age your prince was when Nnanji slew him.”

  Slew him on the River! For a swordsman to kill a child was most foul murder, but to do so on a boat upon Her holy waters was sacrilege as well. Every day since then Arganari had prayed for justice. Was She about to grant it at last? Could killing children ever be justified? Appalled at the emotions this news raised in him, he dared again to question the god.

  “Why are you telling my this, Dread Lord?”

  Because if your response to our instructions pleases us, we may just give him to you. You can start to plan something suitable for the brat, to complete his education—fatally! Go and give Pollex his orders. We have spoken.”

  “Wait!” Arganari shouted, but he was too late. There was no answer. The god had gone from his shrine.