The Death of Nnanji: The Seventh Sword Book Four

by Dave Duncan

  A sail flapped. The voice said, “Watch that tiller!”

  Terrible throb in his head. Gut churning. He shouldn’t be here. He was in trouble.

  “Can you talk, Addis?”

  He forced his eyes open a little. One of them hurt too much, but he managed to open the other enough to confirm that he was in a boat. Could see two men, likely another at the back, steering. Dirty brown loincloths, hair unkempt. Couldn’t make out facemarks.

  “Sit up, Addis.”

  Groan. Would hurt too much.

  “Think we hit him too hard, cap’n.”

  “Naw. Swordsmen have heads of stone.”

  “If he’s going to die we might as well let the little fishes have him now. You going to die on us, Addis?”

  I hope so. Just go away and let me do it in peace.

  “You want a drink, Addis?”

  After some thought, that did seem like a good idea. He’d got a mouth like a hot-weather shit house. He grunted and forced himself to sit up. His head almost burst, the boat spun in circles, his belly turned in the opposite direction. The nearer man dunked a dipper over the side and gave it to him. Holding it with both hands, he managed to take a few sips.

  The boat was a one-masted fishing boat, fore-and-aft rigged, making good time in mid-River, going downstream. There were other sails, but too far away to call to for help. Not that he could shout. There might be other boats nearer, behind him, but he mustn’t show interest by looking around. Wasn’t sure he even could look around.

  “Feeling better, Novice Addis?”

  “Why’d you keep calling me that? My name’s Jjon.”

  The man in the bow laughed. “Is it? Your parentmarks show mother and father both swordsmen. Were they both men?”

  The others laughed. Yes, there were two others.

  “Ask Mom that and she’ll cut your tripes out.” Goddess, even just talking hurt.

  “And then there’s this.” The man held up a small something, too tiny to make out against the glare.

  “Huh?”

  “It’s a message, a sorcerer message. Now why would a boy swordsman be carrying a sorcerer message in his pouch? It says, ‘Nnanji sitting up, eating.’ Why would a boy called Jjon be carrying that in his pouch?”

  Shit.

  Fishermen couldn’t read. The bastard must be a sorcerer. Double shit.

  “Didn’t know what it said. I found it. Was going to ask my mentor to read it for me. My name’s not whatever you said. It’s Jjon.”

  “Will you swear that on your sword?”

  He couldn’t, of course. If he forswore his sword, Dad would blot his facemark and throw him out of the Tryst and the craft, both. He’d stay a beggar all his life, a man without a craft.

  “Some crook’s stolen my sword.”

  “It’s here. I’ll let you hold it for long enough to swear that your name is Jjon. That’s fair, isn’t it, brothers?”

  Addis told him what to do with the sword. Then he threw up all over the boat.

  He kept hoping he would die, but he didn’t. Night came. The boat sailed on, over waters silvered by the light of the Dream God, filling the northern sky. He could probably squirm over the side before they could stop him, do it that way. Might be better than what sorcerers would do to him. Trouble was, River deaths weren’t always quick. The piranha sometimes only ate bits of people, spat out the rest.

  What a fool! What a sucker! Shonsu had warned him he might get kidnapped. He must have forgotten, must have done something stupid. He couldn’t remember, but he had new boots on now, boots he had never seen before. He must have fallen into some trap. And what had happened to Vixi? Vixi wouldn’t have let him get taken without defending him. Vixi was probably dead!

  Oh, Goddess, please be kind to him. Cherish him. Send him back to a good life next time, a longer one. Don’t let some stupid idiot like me mess him up next time.

  He was a hostage. Shonsu would get a ransom note. Maybe with a piece of Addis attached to show what would happen if he didn’t take the army away.

  Sometime in the night he realized that Shonsu wouldn’t take the army away. Go back home to Casr and tell Dad? No. Not to happen.

  Shonsu would go ahead and conquer Kra and Plo, and he’d find out who had killed Addis and avenge him. Small comfort.

  The men took turns steering and watching the prisoner.

  It was a very long night.

  Morning found Vixini unmurdered. He wasn’t too surprised. Any enterprising villains would have killed him while he slept, dropped him overboard, and lived happily ever after on the contents of his pouch and the proceeds from the sale of his sword. Ryad and Ryon were honest because they had been so cowed all their lives that they dared not risk the wrath of anyone above them, which was basically everybody.

  A quick scan of the visible traffic showed many boats, but none that he could positively identify as the kidnappers’. Nor did he recognize Triumph’s rig anywhere, so all he could do was keep heading for Soo. The reeve there would certainly cooperate in investigating the abduction of a swordsman. It shouldn’t even be necessary to mention whose son was asking and whose son had been taken. If Addis was on his way overland to Plo, then Vixini would follow, leaving word for Shonsu when he arrived. Dad might even be there already, for big ships traveled much faster than the little fishing smacks.

  Breakfast was dried fish and River water. Yesterday’s lunch had been fresh raw fish and River water. When the revered passenger had asked about food, Ryad had dropped the net overboard. Vixini had complained that this might slow the boat and let their prey escape, so it had been pulled up again at once, with four silvery fish thrashing around inside it. Ryad had filleted one and given the hungry passenger a slice to eat, but raw fish was inedible. The rest had been cleaned, split, salted, and laid on the gratings to bake in the sun. By evening it had been quite tasty, or else he had been too hungry to care.

  He decided breakfast could wait.

  Ryad was still asleep. Ryon was back at the tiller, assuming he had ever left it.

  “Are we nearly there yet?” Vixini asked.

  “No, er, Vixi.”

  This was to be ordeal by boredom for Er Vixi, which was his name now. At some time during a very broken night, he had realized how to reward his helpers.

  “When we get to Soo, Ryon, I will buy a good loincloth for you and one for your father. I will see you are sworn in as a fisherman and get facemarks. And I will send you back to Ivo with enough money to please the owners.” He had almost said “your” owners.

  He might as well have offered the man a small city, or a three-masted schooner full of gold. Ryon was so excited that he shouted at his father to wake up and hear the news. Ryad tried to kiss Vixini’s boots. Money terrified them, but the prospect that their life of drudgery and hunger might be guaranteed by gaining higher rank was the greatest joy they could imagine.

  Why did gratitude always come with a side order of guilt?

  By morning Addis could sit up. He was starting to feel a bit better. The spinning had stopped as long as he kept his head still. He could drink, but he refused food and didn’t watch while the men ate. There were three of them, all seemingly ordinary working men, smelly and dirty, but the youngest was clearly the leader. The others called him something like Cap’n, which might be his name or a short way of saying “Captain”. As Addis’s vision improved, he saw that they all wore fishermen’s craftmarks, but he was still convinced that the one giving the orders was a sorcerer.

  Around noon, with the sun blazing down so that even the sails shed no useful shade, he said, “You really think Lord Shonsu will call off the war just to save me?”

  Capn laughed. “Not a hope! You think we’re that stupid or you’re that important?”

  “Oh. Well what do you want with me, then?”

  “You’re a present.”

  “A present for who?”

  “For the king, old Arganari. You see, your father killed his son. He wants to watch… Well, he ca
n’t watch, because he’s almost blind, but he wants to listen to you dying.”

  Addis said, “But…” and then stopped. He knew all about the kid’s death. It was in the epic, Nnanji’s Farewell to the Prince, which Dad always said was the best epic he knew. The prince had been fatally wounded by pirates; he had asked Dad to kill him. Dad had borrowed the seventh sword from Shonsu to do it. It had been a Return, a swordsman ritual. A swordsman couldn’t refuse to Return another if he asked.

  Addis would have to explain that to the blind old king.

  When he got to Plo.

  Late in the day he managed to eat some stale bread and a piece of salted fish and keep them down.

  The men talked about arriving at Soo. This was Lorimers’ Day, when Shonsu was planning to start disembarking at Soo. Triumph might be right on their heels, or might even have passed them on the way. If Capn and his gang found the Tryst there before them, what would they do with their prisoner? Drop the evidence overboard?

  Summer days were long, the nights short. Around sunset, Addis smelt something very bad, the reek of burned houses mixed with something much worse. Soo had been sacked. As the boat drew closer he saw stone walls and chimneys, but no roofs. The docks were gone, leaving nothing but weathered piles standing in the River like petrified herons. The bank was two stories high here and had been faced with masonry, but some of that had been demolished too, so that there were heaps of rock under the surface. Where a narrow ramp had once led down to the water, even that had been half-filled in with burned timbers and bodies. Not just people, but not all dead horses either. It was meat rotting in the summer heat that smelled worst.

  The two men working the boat took it in slowly, so as not to crash into the piles and other stuff in the water. Then Capn caught one of the piles with a boat hook and drew the boat in by hand.

  “Three four five?” hailed a voice from above.

  “Thirteen twelve five,” Capn answered, and apparently that was the correct response, for men up above began to lower a very long ladder. They used ropes to steady it, and then made it fast to something at the top of the cliff. There was a menacing gap between the side of the boat and the bottom of the ladder.

  “Up you go, Addis,” Capn said. “If you fall in we won’t try to rescue you.”

  Normally it would have been an easy long stride from the bow of the boat to the bottom rung of the ladder, but neither his vision nor his balance was back to normal and he kept remembering how he’d have fallen between Hyacinth and Speedy if Vixi’s lightning reactions hadn’t saved him. Vixi wasn’t here now.

  It was all right for a swordsman to be scared, but he mustn’t show it, so Addis made the long stride and grabbed the ladder with both hands. He went up a few rungs and turned around. He could kick Capn in the face when he followed, and then there would be one less sorcerer dirtying up the World.

  Capn paused. “Just what do you think you’re doing, Addis?”

  “Wait and see.”

  Capn produced a sword, Addis’s own sword. “I can stick this in your belly from here, you know.”

  Addis backed up one more rung. “Try now.” The throbbing lump on his head was making him even angrier than he would have been without it.

  The sorcerer aimed the blade at Addis’s kilt. “Don’t suppose the king will care whether you’ve still got balls or not.”

  The man up above called down, “You mind if I hose down this ladder, master?”

  Capn laughed and backed away a pace. “No. You don’t mind if I watch?”

  Admitting defeat, Addis turned and climbed the ladder before he got peed on.

  So Capn was a Fifth, which explained why the other two men had deferred to him. But the two men waiting at the top of the ladder wore swords and swordsman facemarks, and suddenly hope flowered.

  “I’m a swordsman,” Addis said. “And I’ve been kidnapped by sorcerers!”

  Neither answered.

  “What yu’ doing, novice?” asked Capn, reaching the top of the ladder. “Trying to foment mutiny?”

  “Honorable swordsmen don’t take orders from civilians! Especially not to commit crimes against other swordsman.”

  “Shut your hole, boy,” one of the others said. “Honorable swordsman are true to their oaths.”

  “Move!” Capn gave Addis a shove, so he moved.

  But he had just learned what he was up against, or rather what the Tryst was up against. Most swordsmen were bound only to their mentors, who would be bound to their own mentors, but somewhere at the top of a chain there would be a first oath, a promise of obedience, to a civilian. The first oath reserved the oath takers’ honor, and the second oath bound protégés to be “mindful” of their mentors’ honor, so both allowed swordsmen to refuse evil orders. The exception was the third oath, known as the blood oath, sworn on the eve of battle, which pledged unquestioning obedience to the death, without exception. Only swordsmen bound by the blood oath would take orders from sorcerers, and then only if they had been specifically ordered to do so. Every swordsman in the Tryst was bound by that oath to the two liege lords. Now someone had set up a counter-tryst.

  Soo in the low red light of sunset was a gruesome sight, bringing his nausea back with a vengeance. Dead people, dead dogs, dead horses had been left lying in the street. The houses were empty shells. As his captor chivied him along at sword point, vultures and crows went flapping and stumbling aside, too full to fly.

  Addis should make a run for it, but even walking made his head hurt, and he knew he couldn’t outrun Capn in his present state. Where would he go if he could? The Tryst couldn’t disembark here without a dock, the banks were too high. Triumph might have come and gone already, slinking back to Ivo in defeat. Or news of this massacre might have reached Shonsu back in Ivo, if some passing ship had discovered it or anyone had escaped alive to carry the news. Then he just wouldn’t come. He would give up Addis as lost.

  Had Vixi’s body been found?

  Capn didn’t make him walk farther than one of the buildings overlooking the dock, which had been a warehouse. There were still horses in the big paddock behind it. And there were more swordsmen, one of them a Fourth.

  “You got him!” the adept said. “Congratulations, master.”

  “Not difficult. Get the horses ready. We leave at once.”

  Addis cringed at the thought of having to ride a horse the way he felt now.

  The adept was shouting to his men to saddle up. Swordsmen taking orders from a sorcerer? Dad would have things to say about that if he knew. Another man, a civilian, came trudging across the miry paddock. He had the stoop of a clerk, and his facemarks were sorcerer feathers. He gave no salute.

  “No sign of the Tryst?” Capn asked.

  “No, master.”

  “The news is out in Ivo, so they may come tomorrow, or not at all. You know what to do if any vessels approach.”

  He leered, showing very crooked teeth. “Kebab ’em on their swords.”

  “Try to, but don’t overstay your welcome. If you get in even one hit, I’ll be more than happy. As soon as they start coming ashore, you light the fuses in here and hit the saddle. I don’t want any of you taken prisoner, understand?”

  “Yes, master.”

  “Right,” Capn said. “Make sure every rider has two canteens. The Dream God will light our way.” He turned to Addis. “Well, prisoner? Will you give me your parole not to try to escape, or will I have to tie you in the saddle?”

  The only bright thing Addis could see about an all-night ride on a horse was that it might very well kill him. The worst thing was that he might pass out and fall on his head, which hurt quite enough already.

  “Nothing in the World could make me give you anything except a fatal blow with a sword, sorcerer. Tie me in the saddle if you wish. One day you’ll die for this.”

  Capn backhanded him so hard that he staggered and almost fell. The World spun crazily.

  “Smart ass swordsman! I hope the king has you skinned.”


  He took Addis by the scruff of the neck and pushed him over to where men were attempting to saddle horses made jittery by the mingled odors of fire and carrion.

  “You going to mount by yourself or do we tie you on like baggage?”

  Addis mounted.

  They took off his boots so they could tie his ankles to the stirrups. They tied his hands behind him, which was going to make the journey infinitely worse than it would be if they were tied in front. Soon after that the sorcerer, his prisoner, and the swordsmen rode out of the charnel that had been Soo and up into fresher air in the Mule Hills.

  Chapter 3

  At sunset Ryon promised Vixini that they would “soon” reach Soo, but the eye of the Dream God had almost reached the top of his arc, meaning midnight, before Vixini began to smell something very bad on the wind. Soon he distinguished the odors of carrion and burnt timber and guessed what he was going to find. He told the fishermen to be as quiet as they could, although he doubted there would be anyone left to meet them. Anyone who sacked a town as badly as Soo had been sacked did not plan on staying long.

  They lowered sail and went in on the current, steering with the oars, so the boat moved like a shadow. Ryad caught hold of one of the pilings that marked where the dock had been, and then waited for the passenger’s orders while the passenger tried to decide what those should be. Complicating everything was the flat, featureless light of the Dream God, which cast no shadows and ruined a man’s depth perception. There were building stone reefs in the water, but even if Vixini dared trying to jump and hop his way over to the actual shore, he would face the problem of climbing the cliff. A cut in the bank that must once have been a ramp for livestock was impossibly plugged with wreckage. Even in daylight this would be a monkey puzzle.

  Eventually he saw a place where the climb might be possible. The embankment had originally been faced with a masonry wall, much of which had now been spoiled and thrown down, but parts of it remained, and one edge looked as if it might serve as a ladder for a nimble lad with long arms. He pointed this out to Ryon, who nodded, so they began to maneuver the boat in that direction, using the piles for leverage. Twice they were blocked by debris in the water, but the boat had very little draft, and eventually they brought it up against the slimy stonework. Vixini made the two sailors hold it there by bracing their oars against piles.