Saber and Shadow

by S. M. Stirling

  Shkai’ra tapped a fingernail against her teeth. Megan hefted an alabaster vase that held a white powder and several silver straws. A moment, and she turned to find her motion echoed by the other woman. Their eyes met, and Shkai’ra’s mouth stretched in a slow grin. “We’ll need a sack,” Megan said.

  —“No, no, that’s too heavy. Just pry out the gems.”

  “What, and ruin this thing of deathless beauty?” was the snide reply.

  “You—yes, you, the greasy one with the double chins. Pick that up and ...”

  “A pity we don’t own a horse.”

  “Oh, we will.”

  The guard had been doubled at the gate of the Weary Wayfarer’s Hope of Comfort and Delight; no more was necessary. Here along the harborfront, sensible rioters, arsonists, looters, and celebrants knew better, even in a drug-fogged state. Even if one got past the guards, there were the guests to deal with.

  Megan halted and stared fixedly at the pikeshaft that swung down to bar her way: it was at about chest-height for most, which put it on level with her eyes. She could see clearly the nicks of brighter wood in the heft where a blade had stuck. She turned her eyes to the door guard, the gaze flowing slow and gelid up the length of the weapon to rest on those of the pike-man. A spark of red nickered in the black of her pupils. “I’m a guest here.”

  His face Hushed hot, then cold. The shaft swung up. Wordless, Megan stalked on through into the busy courtyard.

  Shkai’ra followed, leading the burdened horse with a slow, ratcheting clatter of hooves on brick. Smiling, she rested a hand on the guard’s shoulder.

  “Smart man,” she said, and laughed.

  Chapter XXVII

  “God Among Us, the prisoners have arrived.” Aygah the Forty-first, a young male Avatar of Her, rose from the chair. That was one of several low shell-shapes slung in frames of tubular steel. There were no Fehinnan sitting cushions here in the private audience chamber; the furniture was solid, waist-height, of plain blond ashwood polished to a silky finish; the only touch of luxury was a throw rug over a couch-northwestern snowtiger, pale and silky and beautiful. The room itself was cool smooth stone on three sides, the fourth open to a view of terraced gardens and the Iamz, flowing molten beneath the dawn sun. The morning breeze blew through the open wall and its low balustrade, smelling of flowers and the brackish water of the tidal estuary.

  Aygah sighed and slowly finished his cup of tea as Smyna and Cubilano were thrown down on the hardwood boards at his feet. They lay prone, unbound; the guards stepped back to the walls and stood at an easy parade rest. Neither prisoner would dream of moving; the God’s presence pinned them more thoroughly than any spearpoint.

  The petulant adolescent face of the Sun-on-Earth turned to the wall. A print hung there, strange to Fehinnan eyes: a grassy slope and a two-story house of wood; on the lawn a dark-haired woman, face turned away from the viewer.

  “Damn,” he muttered, in a language no human being had spoken in a hundred generations. “Almost got it right that time.” He transferred his attention to the figures at his feet, and suddenly ... changed. Stance, the tension of hands and body, expression, all underwent a subtle transformation. In a corner, the crouching scribe wrote steadily: no word of the God was insignificant. All must be recorded, for the temple to plumb their oracular meaning.

  He walked over to the two lying on the floor, his face somehow contriving to look much older, his voice changed, straining for a baritone that the body could not reproduce. “Riots,” he said. “During the holy festival. My holy festival.” He began pacing around the room, apparently arguing with himself over the two failed conspirators, the voice and stance changing as he spoke, often with dizzying speed.

  “As the Sun-on-Earth ... no, you fool, I’m the Sun-on-Earth, and I say ... no, both of you are wrong. We are the God—STOP IT! All of you! This is confusing the issue! Riots, disruption. Remember that. All of us, remember and stick to the point! Well, if we insist ... I suppose.

  “Oh, you have been a very naughty girl.”

  A senile voice won out and the God stood looking down at Smyna. “You ... lost the war? No, that was that awful woman a few centuries ago.... Ah, the riots—yes, riots!” Mumbling, the God paced across the two of them, paying them no more heed than rolled-up rugs on the floor. With a sudden fluid move, the God turned. “You wanted to start a holy war. Without my—our! ... Go away and leave me alone. This is important—express permission. As well as causing discord in the Iron House—wasn’t that her grandfather? No. No. This is today; now. Not four hundred years ago. Pay attention, can’t you?—” The God-King slapped himself on the head, his right hand darting across to stop the left from striking again. “—Stop that!—Also killing many of the hands that I need to carry out my plans for Fehinna.” The decisive voice faded again into the argument of many, and Aygah continued pacing.

  “Got to find a better way to edit,” he muttered “Maybe use amnesiacs? No, too risky, might get stuck in a brain-damaged hulk.” His voice was abstracted, turned inward. The body jerked, turned, strode briskly to the clerk in the corner and took paper and pen.

  “Why don’t you write something useful?” a new voice said—a woman’s voice, with an archaic lilt to the spacing of the syllables. She dashed off a line and handed it back; the slow, inhumanly graceful pacing resumed.

  The priest-scribe looked down. She was a scholar, of sorts, and recognized the cursive script in use before the Maleficent’s time, before Fehinnan received an overlay of Pensa loan-words. The Sunne-Suyr-Grawnd bai Truly madde. She paled, looked up to be certain those eyes were no longer on her, and scratched the offending line out. Had not the God once said: “I am large: I contain multitudes”?

  The God-King came to rest near Smyna, standing on one of her outstretched hands without noticing. There was a crackle, and beads of cold sweat broke out above Smyna’s upper lip. She made no sound.

  “Look at me, woman,” the Voice said. She knew that Voice; it was that aspect of the God called Must-Obey. She looked up into the eyes and felt herself falling, whirling away into a blast of contending voices; an image formed in her mind of huge dusty store-houses heaped with treasures and trash, glittering in decay. There was no resistance in her; three thousand years of submission lay behind her, generation on generation.

  “Oh, I see. Yes, overenthusiastic. What was it that you did? Oh, yes—killed the shaahayds. No, they say shaaid now, don’t they? And all those fires, and the soldiers fighting each other. Bad girl.”

  Aygah’s face turned to the door. “General,” he said crisply. A figure in green stepped in and saluted, bowing low and going to one knee with his face to the floor.

  “Are those ... hillbillies ... tribesfolk, whatever, still being troublesome up in the Blue Ridge country?”

  “Yes, God Among Us,” he replied evenly.

  “I really must do something about that,” Aygah muttered, abstracted once more. “Poison gas? No, I already did that, and it didn’t work. Plenty of time.” The tone became crisp once more. “This one,” he said, resuming his pacing and kicking Smyna absently in the ribs as he passed. “Send her out there, have her kill them. All of them, and don’t let her back until it’s done. Now go away, you foolish woman.” Smyna crawled backward from the room, leaving faint blood marks where her injured hand pressed the boards. A silent servant appeared, buffed the spots with a cloth, and slid away.

  “A shepherd,” Aygah said. “That’s what I intended the High Priest to be—Chancellor, my Right Hand—when I created the office.” He looked down at the man. “Thousands dead, then a Purification disrupted by one woman, priests; My Hands killing soldiers and being killed. Raising taxes on staples to finance this little dream of yours? This is shepherding my flock? Perhaps I should give you to our enemies. You’d help them right into surrender. Bad boy. Bad, bad, bad.”

  A harsh bark of laughter, and he circled Cubilano slowly. “Why did we start that? The shaven heads? Oh, you don’t remember, either. Well, it w
as a long time ago ... you were the God only two hundred years before I was. Back to business.” The boy sighed and tapped Cubilano’s head with one foot. “Look at us, fool. We decide when the world is ready for Our benevolent rule. The Fehinnans as my chosen will be enough, for now.” The voice darkened. “And you have the presumption to tell me what to do, with your little schemes? There is very little I can do to you that you haven’t done or seen done.... Ah.” The God lifted his head as if listening to an internal dialogue. “Yes. Good that you reminded us. It was religious fervor that drove you to this. Commendable, in small quantities. The cannibals of the islands and south coast need to hear the word of the Sun. I think you are just the person to do the job. I never want to see your face again. If I do, Right Hand”—sarcasm rang heavy in his tone—“I’ll have it removed.”

  He turned to the general who knelt by the door. “Advice. This one was supposed to give us good advice. We’ll need a new adviser, new Reflection of the Effulgent Light, new Right Hand, new Chancellor, new everything. Wasn’t—” He looked down at Cubilano. “I said I didn’t want to see you again, tiresome fellow!” The man who had been High Priest crawled from the room; Aygah reflected that the man had seldom felt more genuine fear. “Didn’t I tell you to fetch the old one—the one before that one ... what was his name, Arhis, no Harriz, something like that? I’ll see him in a few hours, or whatever.”

  Absently, the God turned back to the table and turned a paintbrush in his slim fingers, his eyes straying back to the painting on the wall. “Next time I’ll get it right,” he said. “I may not have Andy’s talent, but I’ve got lots of time.”

  In the corridor outside, Cubilano stumbled to his feet. Perfect humiliation had burned his face to a certain purity; the dark eyes looked inward, blind. Blinder than the ruined eyes of the figure who leaned on his staff among the line of those waiting for audience; Cubilano might have passed him by if the staff had not reached out to tap him on the chest.

  The blind man’s aquiline nose flared slightly. “Didn’t recognize your old fellow student, then, Cubi?” he said, very softly. Cubilano jerked; nobody had used that nickname since the training classes in the temple, forty years gone. Forty years of struggle and effort. “We were friends once. Remember how I used to protect you from the well-born, who didn’t like a scholarship boy studying in the elite school?

  “But I recognized you,” the blind man went on. “By smell. I have to recognize people that way, since you ordered my blinding. Even that I would let be, if you had been a good shepherd to the people; instead you burned them on the altar of your pride—sacrifices to yourself, not to the Divine Sun. Now go—” He paused, remembering what the other boys had taunted Cubilano with. “Go scrape the chickenshit off your clumsy feet, serfkin!”

  The taunt lanced home, through all the years of mastery: a child’s cruelty, to a small boy lost and friendless among the children of the great ones. Cubilano had spoken scarcely a word in all the time since the guard came. Now he cried out and raised a hand to strike. The spearhead dipped down and touched delicately at the base of his throat; he looked up along it into bored, cool young eyes under the helmet brim. His shoulders slumped and shuffled off down the corridor, and for the first time his walk was an old man’s.

  The soldiers of the Elite Guard were not too rough with Smyna: fanatics they might be, but soldiers were soldiers. The officer of the detail was almost friendly, in a distant way. The guard did not need to fear that her treason would prove contagious; he sent for the palace garrison surgeon to splint the hand, and waited patiently while it was done.

  “So, it’s the border for you,” he said.

  Once the hand’s healed, a fast horse and over the mountains, she thought. Not much of a chance; the Painted People of the mountains had little love for her breed, but a better path than a lifetime of raid and patrol work, and once over the mountains in Kaina: well, there was always a market for swords. General-Commander of the Righteous Sword, then a mercenary at two bits the month, she thought. Bitterness was acid at the back of her throat.

  “Do me a last favor?” she said, putting down the winecup and watching unmoved as her fingers were forced back into their rightful positions.

  “Depends,” he said warily.

  She flashed a bright smile that gave him a brief flicker of disquiet. Lucky this one’s going, he thought. Truly, the God is wise.

  “Just pass on to my kinfast: ‘It was the red-hair’s doing.’ We’ve a previous debt with her. This makes it worth following up.”

  He shrugged incomprehension. “It seems little enough,” he said, and hitched at his belt. “Time we were going; it’s a long ride to Shaarlosvayal.”

  Jahlini wrenched the long knife free from between her opponent’s ribs and came erect, shaking tension out of her shoulders. The dim flickering tight cast shadows across the interior of the disused warehouse; the ranks sitting quietly on their heels beyond the fighting circle were motionless, patches of deeper black.

  Usually there was a certain formality to meetings of the Adderfang Dark Council. Today that had been dispensed with. There were too many empty seats and too many wounded; the Southside Serpentchief sat propped between henchfolk, one eye gleaming fever-bright from the white bandages that covered her face. Patches showed redly wet, rimmed with dirty yellow discharge; her breath came in a rhythmic bubbling. The two supporting her shifted uneasily as that brought a faint hint of corruption, sweet and cloying. Who would have expected a human to have claws? They were uneasily conscious that their overlord was now in a minority; Jahlini had few supporters among the sector lords, now.

  The chief of the Adderfangs rose from the body, gasping. Too old, she thought, conscious of the burning cut along one arm. Too old, if only one passage leaves me winded.

  “That settles it,” she said hoarsely, scanning the black-masked shadows-within-shadows. This was even more poorly lit than tradition demanded, and it smelled of the docks, coffee and molasses and timber-balk. The usual meeting place had proved to be known to the Intelligence Section; ten globes of lungrot had gone down the ventilators, followed by commando squads in gasmasks. But they wouldn’t follow us into the tunnels, she thought with a flicker of triumph. We can rebuild.

  “We can rebuild. We go to the cellars, fight off the other brotherhoods, then we rebuild—”

  The Southserpent made a wet noise of assent. Jahlini looked in her direction and flinched mentally at the hate in the single eye, though it was not directed at her. There was little left of her face; Jahlini would have sworn it was impossible to live a day with those wounds, much less a week. The claws that had torn her face off newly come out of the sewers; the rot, Dark Shining One, the rot.... But the red-hair is mine, she thought. When we have the time. The gates are watched, they can’t get out.

  “Rebuild?” a man’s voice snarled. “When the others have taken our protection circuits?”

  “The smuggling?” another continued.

  “Two of our joyhouses have been torched—and we don’t have enough blades to protect them!”

  Another figure stepped up to the edge of the circle, knelt to touch her knife to the line, and sprang in, fresh, tossing the blade from hand to hand. Behind her, there was a rustling as others moved to stand in line.

  “Rebuild, with a new Adderchief,” the challenger said. “Must be, oh, a dozen here with knife right.”

  Jahlini sank into a crouch. But how many would try it, after I kill this one? she thought. Her lungs burned, and the blood from her arm turned the sleeve sodden on her arm.

  Chapter XXVIII

  The jeweled message egg spun across the floor, trailing a length of silver chain and a large black tomcat providing momentum. Megan felt it bounce sharply off one ankle, then whirl under the bed; from beneath the mattress came rattling bangs and the cat’s satisfied whuffling as he picked the toy up and moved it to a new spot by the door. Ten-Knife-Foot settled himself carefully, adjusting all four paws, then batted the sphere of diamond-studded s
ilver against the oak panel. There was a hollow boom, and the ornament rebounded; the cat gave a small jump of delight and retrieved it to begin the process again.

  The Zak turned a ruby idly in one hand, flipping it gently over each knuckle, holding it up to admire the tawny crimson reflections in its depths. Pity I couldn’t take the setting, she thought. I wonder where Milampo got the idol. It was an even greater pity it had been one-eyed. A jingle drew her attention to the center of the bed. Shkai’ra had just upended another counting-house bag over her head, and a spray of tradewire and foreign coins tumbled down, slivers of red-gold lost in her mane of hair.

  “I’ve always wanted to do that,” Shkai’ra said, a little sheepishly, glancing sidelong at Megan sitting cross-legged on the window ledge. Bouncing off the bed, she crossed to where a mass of rainbow-colored silks lay tossed about. The tunic she was wearing was bright green with orange fringes; she pulled it over her head, rummaged in the pile, and held up another critically. Stretching, she rose to her toes and let the heavy dense-woven silk fall into place, sighing at the feel of the smooth fabric on bare skin. This one was a blue just short of black, the sleeves flaring to end above her wrists, the knee-length hem sewn with small bullion medallions that kept the drape smooth along the long taut curves of her body.

  “How do you like this one?” she asked, buckling on a broad leather belt, tooled with vine leaves picked out in gold.

  Megan looked up and smiled. “I like that. Much better than the red one before that. It clashed with you. That one shows you off.”

  She cast a critical eye on the pattern of gems on the white stone ledge before her and carefully placed the ruby into the design. “You want to see something funny? Come on.”