Jianna paused to stare. This was the wall that everyone spoke of; the wordless Sishmindri statement, the barrier defining the realm of Roohaathk, formerly the Briar Patch, and now referred to with increasing frequency as the Frog Pond. It didn’t look like much—just a crude, strong makeshift barrier—but the mere fact of its existence was astonishing.
The soldiers looked bored, scarcely poised for attack or defense. Several were seated on the ground, and a few were even throwing dice. Their apathy was understandable. The Sishmindris were invisible and noiseless. No stir of life or activity, no croaking of amphibian voice, no sound of any description escaped Roohaathk. The place might have been deserted, or perhaps its greenish population had prudently gone into hiding.
There was actually little to see. The new fence, the inactive guards, a few citizens at the well, others scattered about the square—
Inexplicable dread stirred at the pit of her stomach. Her eyes came to rest on a tall figure standing some yards distant. She viewed him only in profile, but recognized him at once. The broken, misshapen features, shaded by a wide hat—the powerful frame and stooped posture—the mutilated hand grasping a knotted stick—all unmistakable.
Her husband.
Coincidence? Or something more? Jianna drew great lungsful of air. Her feet wanted to run. She controlled them with an effort. Her heart pounded, and her hands clenched.
He could not have known that she would be here at this time. Until a few hours ago, she had not known it herself. He could not have stalked her to this place, and his presence was coincidental. Nothing more.
But he’s such a skilled hunter.
As if in confirmation of this description, Onartino Belandor raised his head and sniffed the air like a hound.
She shivered, fighting the urge to bolt; took a deep breath, marshaled her will, and forcibly set her thoughts straight. He was not a hound, or a demon, or an arcanist, and this crossing of paths was accidental. Moreover, he could not possibly recognize her. Unlike Onartino, she wore a full-face mask, as well as a hooded cloak that concealed her entire figure. She had maintained her hunched posture and her arthritic limp throughout her trek, and her disguise was impervious to anything less than arcane vision. He could inspect her at leisure, from head to toe, and he would not know her.
At that moment, he turned slowly and looked at her.
Her hands went clammy inside the big gloves. Some deep and certain instinct told her that he saw straight through her disguise.
Nonsense. Impossible.
Onartino’s one eye never wavered. His dead gaze clamped on her, and held. A motionless moment passed, and then he commenced a laborious advance.
Jianna, caught in the worst of nightmares, stood watching. A lucid corner of her mind noted his dragging steps, his obvious handicap. If she ran, he could not hope to overtake her. No, he would not even try. He would simply follow her trail at his own pace, follow it to the end. Onartino would not worry that his wife could run faster than he, any more than he would worry that he could not equal the speed of a fleeing doe.
She would not run; she would remain calm. She would stand still and do nothing to give herself away. Another moment and he would be past her, and gone.
He was very near now, so near that she could see the red scars crisscrossing his broken face; even the red veins reticulating his one eye. That eye was fixed on her.
He saw her. She knew it to her nerves’ ends, but her intellect rejected the knowledge.
The lips moved, and words emerged, slurred but intelligible.
“Mine. Wife. Mine.”
Remarkable to find him so altered, and yet so much the same.
A big hand devoid of fingernails reached toward her, and she shrank back. Then she was running, faster than she had ever known that she could move, almost fast enough to sprint up invisible stairs into the sky. She cast a glance back over her shoulder as she went, and saw him standing there motionless. He was watching her, but he made no attempt to follow. She exited the square, ducked into an alley, turned a corner, then another, and Onartino Belandor was left far behind, outdistanced and lost to view. She let herself slow to a walk. He hadn’t a prayer of overtaking her, but her heart still pounded, and she was breathing in gasps.
There was no reasonable cause for such terror. She had, through sheer ill luck, encountered her half-witted husband, but she had eluded him quickly. The incident would not repeat itself. She would change her mask, her cloak, her posture, her gait. She was unlikely to meet Onartino again, but if it happened, he would not know her. So Jianna assured herself, but could not control the trembling of her limbs.
The room on the second story of the Governor Sfirriu’s house still contained two cots, but only one was occupied. The governor’s wife lay yet upon her sickbed. But the other patient, the young daughter, had so greatly improved that it had been judged permissible—indeed advisable—to remove her to the comfortable familiarity of her own bedchamber. She still required care and attention, but her recovery was assured.
Less certain was the fate of the older woman. Early in her treatment, she—or, as Rione believed, the entity inhabiting her body—had struggled vigorously against restraint, writhing and twisting within the confines of her damp linen wrappings. She had rubbed her head hard against the pillow in a vain effort to dislodge the earplugs, and her nostrils had flared in search of discernible odors, of which there were few in the room. At length, a slow tide of incomprehensible syllables had streamed from her lips, and it had sounded so like some sort of communication that Rione had nearly succumbed to the temptation to reply. The words, if such they were, seemed to hover on the verge of intelligibility. If he but engaged her, or It, in conversation, then listened closely, concentrated intently, surely he would understand … He had resisted the impulse, however. Madam Sfirriu—or whatever lurked inside her—was to receive no aural stimulation. The earplugs had remained in place, and Rione had remained mute.
The struggles and vociferation had continued for some days, before a change occurred. All movement and sound had ceased. The sufferer had lapsed into a coma, and lay like one already dead.
Rione had seen it more than once. He had treated enough plague victims to recognize the point of crisis. It was at this time that the invasive entity—frustrated with prolonged inactivity, dissatisfied with immobility and isolation—might choose to withdraw, leaving the patient free to recover. Conversely, it was at this time that patients often died, their corpses requiring restraint sufficient to discourage Wandering. The outcome was wholly unpredictable.
Seating himself at the small writing desk in the corner of the room, he busied himself for a time with polishing the glass equipment arranged thereon. The equipment was already gleaming and spotless but, for now, there was nothing else to do. The window shutters were closed, the windows themselves covered with multiple layers of thickly padded quilts, placed to exclude all noise and odors from the outside world. In the dim silence of the sickroom, Rione found himself periodically nodding off to sleep. Whenever this happened, he would pull himself up sharply, rise, and pace about the chamber. He did not wish to sleep. For one thing, it was necessary to maintain vigilance. For another, his slumbers were apt to be haunted by dreams of his sister Celisse, and of his final, disturbing interview with her. He preferred to avoid such dreams.
The creak of the bed frame pulled his attention back to his patient. She was stirring again, for the first time in days, once more struggling weakly to free herself. Rione rose, stepped to the bedside, and studied her attentively.
Her lips moved. Hoarse, almost inaudible syllables emerged. Rione stooped to catch them, and heard more gibberish, or so he initially believed. He listened, and the syllables resolved themselves:
“Prenziarra. Prenzi. Prenziarra.”
Prenziarra was her daughter’s name. Her mind was her own again. The entity had departed, taking the pestilence with Itself.
Rione drew the waxen plugs from her ears, then answered, “Prenzia
rra is safe in her own chamber. She is improving by the hour, and will soon be well. You, too, have begun to mend, madam.”
She strove to speak again, and failed. At once he offered her water. She took a few sips, throat muscles straining, then managed to utter another syllable.
“Dreams.”
“They will recede now.”
“Blind.”
“No, madam. All’s well.” He stripped the linen bands from her face. “Now open your eyes.”
She obeyed. Her eyes, whites yellowed with illness, took him in, and widened. He remembered then to remove his beak-nosed mask, exposing his own face to view.
She looked at him and smiled, almost imperceptibly. Her eyes closed. She slept.
Falaste Rione studied his unconscious patient. Both experience and instinct told him that she was now past the major dangers, and stood an excellent chance of full recovery. His satisfaction was deep and genuine, but tempered by the knowledge that his own utility was approaching its end.
Jianna walked on, hardly caring where she went, so long as her path carried her away from Onartino Belandor. Presently, however, she recalled her original purpose: the meeting at the Heap, in Crookneck Lane. She had forgotten it for a while, and now she would be late. She needed to hurry, for she could not afford to miss Lousewort, and he would not wait long.
She had wandered off course, and her surroundings were unfamiliar. She paused to ask directions of some anonymous humorist whose full-face mask displayed a toothy painted grin and a flamboyantly curled, painted moustache. His directions were sound, and she followed them to Crookneck Lane, a zigzagging little way identifiable by the image of a hanged man daubed in screaming colors upon a building at the corner of the street. And now she needed to find the Heap. A tavern? Boardinghouse?
Neither. Crookneck Lane was narrow and shadowed, with projecting gables almost meeting overhead to block out the sun and trap the perpetual smoke. A narrow band of gloomy grey atmosphere ran down the middle of the street, while the recesses on each side drowned in shadow. The air was heavy and pungent with an odd mix of the appetizing and the revolting, but Jianna caught little of it, for the fragrance of the herbs lining the nasal cavity of her mask smothered external odors. The place was cramped, quiet, and more than ordinarily dark, even by the dim standards of the day—a quality certain to recommend itself to Lousewort.
She did not need to ask about the Heap. She made her way to the bottom of the street, and there it was—a hulking, malodorous mass of refuse, with organic waste of every description fleshing out a skeleton of charred wood and blackened masonry. Evidently a large structure had burned to the point of collapse at some time in the past, and the neighborhood residents had never troubled to dispose of the ruins. They had, in fact, enlarged upon them.
She spied a male figure loitering beside the great pile, too distant to identify with certainty. She advanced slowly, maintaining her false geriatric shuffle despite recent evidence of its inefficacy. Soon she descried a familiar nondescript entity. Lousewort was attired in his usual, quietly ordinary garb. He wore no facial protection beyond a kerchief wound about the lower portion of his face, and needed none; his eminently forgettable features required no concealment.
She halted before him. He looked her up and down, and the crinkling of his eyes above the kerchief suggested a smile.
“Good job,” Lousewort observed in his unclassifiable voice. “If I’d never seen that get-up before, I wouldn’t have known you.”
My husband encountered no such difficulty. Should she tell Lousewort of her encounter with Onartino? To what purpose? He could not help her—nobody could.
“I’m going to ask you to bare your face today, though,” he continued. “And you might push back the hood and show your hair, if you will.”
“Unmask? Out here in the open? Why?” demanded Jianna, surprised.
“I want them to see at a glance that you’re a woman.”
“They? Who? Why? Are you talking about meeting some of your people, for Falaste?”
“Not now. I’ve found two more for Falaste—a couple of boys who can pass—but more of that hereafter. Right now, there’s another matter.”
“What matter?”
“A conference, you might call it. A conversation. Could be important, if it goes well. I’d like you to come with me. Are you willing?”
“Yes, certainly, if I can be of any help. What do you want me to do?”
“Just be there, visibly female. The mask, the hood—?” He gestured.
“Oh, yes.” She removed the coverings with reluctance, feeling dangerously exposed without them. “Feminine enough?”
“You’ll do.”
He started walking, and she fell into step beside him.
“Where are we going?”
“Along a couple of alleys, around a couple of corners, and down into a cellar.”
“That’s enlightening. Why do these people we’re meeting need to see that I’m a woman? You’re not planning to barter me for gunpowder or anything, are you?”
“Don’t worry, I wouldn’t do such a thing unless really necessary.”
She smiled as if sharing a joke, but was not at all certain that he did not speak in earnest.
“No,” Lousewort continued. “I’m bringing you along because they’ll see the presence of a female at such a meeting as a sign of good faith. An infant would have been even better, but we had none handy.”
“Shall I play with a rattle, and coo?”
“No need to get your back up. You’re a sharp lass, one of our likeliest, and that’s why I wanted you here. You’ll keep your eyes and ears open.”
“Our likeliest,” he had said, as if he viewed her as a member in good standing of the resistance. Such irony. Just how likely would he deem her, should he ever learn her true identity? Of course, his mistake was understandable. For a long time she had involved herself, directly or indirectly, in resistance concerns. She had more than fraternized with members—she had lived with them. She had nursed, tended, and comforted their wounded; she had mourned their dead. She had worked, eaten or gone hungry, and endured with them; had talked to them and learned their ways, their plans, ambitions, secrets, and even some of their names. She had become most adept at passing herself off as one of them. She had become a mistress of pretense.
But then—the question surfaced for the first time—was it altogether pretense? Had she not come to share their convictions and hopes, more or less? Certainly she had come to view the Taerleezi occupation of Faerlonne as an outrage. She had learned to regard the Taerleezis with hostility, anger, even hatred, and she longed to see them gone. Virtually every Faerlonnish national shared her sentiments, however, and what of that? Faerlonne had been conquered and occupied; it was done. A realist could only accept inevitability and make the best of a bad situation. Her father had done so. A pragmatist to his fingertips, Aureste Belandor had cooperated with the victors, thereby preserving his own life, his title and wealth, the safety and comfort of all his family members and retainers. His compatriots loathed and despised him for it. But had he ever been guilty of anything beyond simple rationality?
Not if one accepted the basic premise of unbreakable Taerleezi domination. But the folk of the resistance had never accepted it—not for an hour, not for an instant. Their belief in the ultimate liberation of Faerlonne was absolute. Did that make them noble patriots, or suicidal fools? Or both?
One thing was certain. She, Jianna Belandor, daughter of the Great Kneeser, had been drawn by happenstance and need into the sphere of resistance activity. So far, she had hovered unharmed about the edges, but that could scarcely continue unchanged. These people would presently ask more of her. They would solicit her assistance in resistance projects of increasingly perilous nature, and then what would her answer be?
Perhaps she had already given it. Perhaps her consent to accompany Lousewort to this mysterious “conference” was involving her in something dangerous. Theoretically, she could still ba
ck out, but the current of events seemed to sweep her along. Where exactly was it sweeping her?
She glanced about and saw nothing that she recognized; just a cramped, muddy little thoroughfare, largely unpaved, with many a broad and deep puddle to sidestep. But Lousewort seemed to know exactly where he was going, and she had to scurry to keep up with him.
Along a couple of alleys, around a couple of corners, and down into a cellar, he had told her, and by now they must have done all of that, except for the cellar.
At the foot of a short flight of damp stone steps leading down from street level stood a heavy door, upon which Lousewort knocked in an eccentric sequence. A bolt scraped, and the door creaked open.
He went through, and Jianna followed him into a low, dimly lit space. It was a cellar, as he had promised, and a rude one at that, with a floor of packed dirt, mineral-encrusted walls, and rough ceiling beams still clothed in bark. The air was still, chilly, and charged with a distinctive, almost sweet odor. She hardly noted these details, for her astonished attention fixed upon the three motionless occupants. Sishmindris—two males and a female. Their gender was easily observed, for all three were unclothed.
Her eyes rounded. Lousewort had neglected to mention that he was leading her into a nest of amphibians. Perhaps he had feared that she would balk. Well, he needn’t have worried. Her chin came up. She most certainly was not afraid of Sishmindris, no matter what people might be saying these days about the creatures’ murderous tendencies.
Still, there was something decidedly unnerving about this particular trio. Perhaps it had to do with the mean surroundings—the dungeon-like cellar, barely illumined by the glow of a tiny grease lamp, the deep shadows. Or more likely, it was the unfamiliar nakedness of the amphibians. Domesticated Sishmindris were invariably covered, often in liveries of fanciful color and cut, and the garments tended to enhance the wearers’ amusing superficial resemblance to humankind. Unclothed, they looked … different. Alien, unpredictable. Dangerous.
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