by David Drake
“At least one of the leaders of the new cult is a priest of the Shepherd,” Tadai said. “Very likely several are. I’m making inquiries, but discreetly of course. It’s no proper business of the kingdom to tell people how to worship.”
He coughed again. “Within reason.”
The young entertainer gripped his father’s outstretched hands. Acting in concert, they front-flipped him onto the older man’s shoulders, facing the opposite direction. The audience shouted and stamped its delight.
Sharina touched her dry lips with her tongue. “You haven’t said what they were worshipping,” she said.
“That’s the absurd thing,” said Tadai. His mouth scrunched as though the words he was preparing were sour. “It’s a scorpion. They claim their god is a scorpion!”
Sharina’s mind was cold, as cold as the Ice Capes. She’d known what he was going to say. She’d known as soon as he mentioned a new religion.
The rat bounded out to join the human tumblers. It jumped to the father’s right shoulder, then to the son’s left. With a final delicate hop it reached the boy’s head and perched there, standing on its hind legs.
“To be honest,” Tadai said, “I was hoping that all this was a joke. It seems utterly insane.”
“Men of Pandah, honor calls us!” the rat piped, throwing its little right foreleg out as though it were an orator declaiming. “No proud foe can e’er appall us!”
“By the Lady!” Tadai blurted. “Why, the rat’s singing. They didn’t tell me he could do that. Why, this is marvelous!”
“On we march, whate’er befall us,” the rat sang. “Never shall we fly!”
“Bravo! Bravo!” bellowed Lord Quernan, who commanded the city garrison. He lurched to his feet. Foot, rather, because he’d lost his right leg at midthigh during the capture of Donelle a year earlier. The whole audience began to stand in irregular waves.
Lord Tadai started to rise, but he subsided when he saw Sharina remained frozen in her seat. “I must admit that I find this new cult disturbing,” he said. “How could anyone worship something as disgusting as a scorpion?”
“How indeed?” Sharina whispered. The dream of the night before filled her mind with blackness and horror.
Chapter
7
LATER—
Sharina drifted toward the dream temple like a leaf nearing a mill flume. She didn’t move swiftly, but she was locked into a certain course no matter what she wanted.
She was locked into certain doom.
“Sharina!” called the figure waiting for her on the black granite plaza. “It is time for you to bow to Lord Scorpion. Come and worship the greatest of gods, the only God!”
She tried to shout, “I will not!” but only a whisper came out.
“Worship!” the figure demanded. “Bow to Lord Scorpion willingly; but willing or not, you will bow. Worship!”
The force that gripped Sharina spun her lower, closer to the waiting figure. The Scorpion didn’t lower from the clouds this time, but Its presence permeated the world; it was immanent in all things.
“You have no power over me!” she said. Her voice was a whine of desperation.
The figure laughed triumphantly. “Lord Scorpion has power over all things, Princess,” it said. “Worship Lord Scorpion and rule this world at my side!”
“Who are you!” she shouted. She tried to reach the Pewle knife, but her arms didn’t move. Perhaps she wasn’t even wearing weapon; this was a dream.
But she knew it wasn’t only a dream.
“You may call me Black,” the laughing figure said. When she’d completed another full circle, he would be able to raise a hand and touch her. “You will be my consort. Together we will rule this world in the name of Lord Scorpion, Who rules all!”
Sharina remembered tearing the dream apart to escape the night before, but her fingers wouldn’t close now. “Cashel,” she said, but the name was so faint a whisper that even she couldn’t be sure that she’d spoken.
“Cashel is dead!” said Black. “Cashel will never return, he can never return!”
“Lady, protect Thy servant!” Sharina prayed with frozen lips.
“The Lady is dead!” said Black. “Lord Scorpion rules all. Worship Lord Scorpion!”
He was reaching toward her. He would grasp her wrist and pull her to him. She felt the grip of long fingers, tugging her from this world into—
Sharina jerked bolt upright in her own bed. The moon shone through the slats of the jalousies. By its light she saw a rat wearing pantaloons and a white vest, sitting upright on her pillow.
“Ordinarily I would have waited for you to awaken normally,” the rat said in a conversational voice. “From the way you were thrashing about, though, I didn’t think you’d mind. My name is Burne, Princess.”
GAUR HAD COBBLESTONE streets, which Ilna disliked intensely. The alleys to either side were so narrow that the three-story stone buildings overhung most of the pavement. Even here on the High Street, Ilna felt like she was walking up a canyon toward the gray limestone bluff lowering above the town.
She smiled slightly. She had walked up canyons, and into caves, when necessary. She didn’t like stone, true, but there was very little she did like. She’d deal with Gaur the way she dealt with everything else.
“Lady Brincisa,” said an ironmonger standing in his doorway. He extended his little bow to Ilna as well.
The shop keep ers they’d met were deferential, though they also seemed rather cautious. People going the other way in the street mostly bowed to Brincisa, but a few turned their heads toward the wall till she was past.
“How do the people here support themselves?” asked Ingens, walking a pace behind the two women. “Gaur seems prosperous.”
Did it? The townsfolk were well enough dressed, so Ilna supposed that was true. She shouldn’t let her dislike of a place color the facts.
“Rice farming and trade on the river,” Brincisa said, apparently unconcerned by the question. “There was a special tax to pay for digging a canal after the river shifted its course during the Change.”
She smiled with a kind of humor. “The town elders didn’t assess us,” she went on, “but my husband and I chose to make a payment without being asked. The money was of no significance, and we prefer to be on good terms with our neighbors—so long as they remain respectful.”
“Is your husband expecting our arrival?” Ilna said. She was knotting patterns as she walked, but out of courtesy she didn’t look at them. She too preferred to be on good—well, neutral, in her case—terms with those she had to deal with.
“My husband Hutton died three days ago, mistress,” Brincisa said with a smile of cool amusement. “That’s part of why I need your help. But our discussion can wait till we’re at leisure in my workroom.”
She paused and gestured to the house on her right. A servant in the familiar dark livery held open one panel of an ornate double door. It occurred to Ilna that she’d never heard Brincisa’s servants speak, though they were perfectly ordinary to look at. Perhaps they were just well trained.
She entered and started up the stairs of dark wood. The staircase beside this one led down from the door’s other panel toward a basement. Behind her Ingens said, “Mistress Brincisa? This house—how were you able to build it?”
Ilna looked over her shoulder. Brincisa, also looking back, was following Ilna up the stairs, but Ingens was still in the street staring at the building’s front.
“All the other houses are stone,” he said, shifting his eyes to Brincisa on the staircase. “But yours is brick.”
“My husband and I preferred brick,” Brincisa said. “And not that it’s any of your business, we didn’t have it built here: we moved it from another place.”
She paused. If her voice had been cool before, it was as stark as a winter storm when she continued, “Now—you may either come in or stay where you are, Master Ingens. What you may not do is trouble me again with your questions. Do you understand?”
>
“Mistress,” Ingens murmured, lowering his head and keeping it down as he entered the house.
Brincisa turned to meet Ilna’s gaze. In the same cold tone she said, “Do you have anything to add, mistress?”
Ilna smiled faintly. “I prefer brick also,” she said. “Not that that’s anyone else’s business.”
Brincisa waited for a heartbeat, then chuckled. “Yes, mistress,” she said. “We can help one another. My workroom is on the top level, so go on there if you will.”
Ilna counted the floors absently with quick knots in her fabric, one and one and one and finally one more; the fingers of one hand, four. Not only was Brincisa’s house made of different material from the rest of Gaur, it was taller. The molded plaques set into the brickwork over windows were too ornate for Ilna’s taste, but she had to admit that they were tasteful.
Each floor had a central hall with doors set around it. There was only one door on the uppermost hallway, closed like the others. Ilna stopped beside it and waited for the others to join her. Brincisa touched the panel; an unseen latch clicked and the door swung open.
“Enter, mistress,” she said. “And you may enter as well, Master Ingens; but remember your place.”
The secretary nodded. His face was tight, but he successfully hid whichever emotions were affecting him.
Save for the hall and staircase, the upper floor was a single high room lighted through a ceiling covered with slats of mica; it cast a faintly bluish shimmer over everything. The walls were frescoed with a base color of fresh cream. Roundels of green and gold framed the doorway and alcoves—there were no windows—and sea creatures swam in the upper registers.
Ilna stopped just inside the door when she felt sand scrunch under the soles of her bare feet. She looked down. What she’d thought was a gray pavement was instead a thin layer of ground pumice, brushed over tightly fitting slabs of pale marble. She looked at Brincisa.
“For my art, mistress,” Brincisa said. “So that the incantations don’t leave residues to interfere with later work. Don’t worry—the grit won’t follow you out of the room.”
Ilna sniffed. “You’re wrong that they don’t leave traces,” she said. “But it’s no matter to me.”
Ingens followed the women inside; the door closed behind him, though it hadn’t been touched by anything Ilna saw. The secretary clasped his hands before him; he turned his head slowly to look around, but his body was as stiff and straight as if he’d been tied to a stake.
Brincisa’s earlier spells did leave signs despite the care with which the sand had been raked, but the fact Ilna could see a pattern remaining didn’t mean it was of significance even to the powers on which the universe turned. She’d really been slapping back at Brincisa for her assumption that Ilna was afraid to get her feet dirty. Brincisa obviously insulated herself from the realities of life even in this considerable town; she couldn’t possibly imagine the muck of a farming hamlet.
Which raised another question. . . .
“Mistress?” Ilna said. “You came here from another place, did you not?”
“I will not discuss the place we came from!” Brincisa said. She was noticeably angry, but Ilna thought she also heard fear. “That has nothing to do with anyone but me and Hutton, and now with me alone!”
“Yes,” said Ilna, silently pleased to have gotten through the other woman’s reserve. “But the reason you came here concerns me, since I’m here as well. And—”
She smiled faintly to keep the next words from being a direct accusation.
“—I came here in a way that concerns me a great deal.”
Brincisa made a sour face and nodded in apology. “Yes, of course,” she said. “As I’m sure you’ve guessed, Ortran is a nexus of great power now, but the island of fishermen that existed in your former universe was just the reverse. It repelled the use of the arts. At the Change that, that vacuum so to speak, drew Gaur and its immediate surroundings into this present.”
Ilna thought over what she’d just been told. She hadn’t noticed any difficulty in seeing off the troublesome fishermen, but she hadn’t knotted a very complicated pattern either. Regardless, Brincisa had answered her question in a direct, perfectly believable fashion.
“All right,” she said. “What is it that you want from me?”
For the first time since she’d entered the room, Ilna took the time to look at its furnishings. A stuffed sea wolf hung from the ceiling, a young female no longer than an outstretched arm. Some of the beasts stretched as much as three double paces from jaws filled with conical teeth to the tip of the flat, oarlike tail.
Not far from the lizard was a series of silver rings around a common center, each with a gold bead somewhere on the circle. Ilna must’ve frowned in question, for Brincisa said, “An orrery. You can adjust it to show the relative positions of all the bodies in the firmament.”
Ilna didn’t know what “the firmament” was, let alone what “the bodies” were. She supposed it didn’t matter.
Brick pillars projecting into the room to support the roof. On the lower floors the alcoves were probably pierced for windows, but in this workroom the walls were solid; the spaces were filled with bookshelves and racks for scrolls.
On one end of the long room was an earthenware sarcophagus molded in the shape of a plump woman who smiled in painted idiocy. On the other was a skeleton upright in a wooden cabinet—Ilna couldn’t tell how it was fastened; it seemed to be standing normally—and a soap-stone tub holding a corpse whose flesh lay brown and waxy over the bones.
The items were more impressive examples of the trappings of the charlatans who came through the borough periodically, their paraphernalia carried on the backs of wasted mules. Brincisa, whatever else she might be, was not a charlatan.
“My husband Hutton and I came to Gaur seventeen years ago,” Brincisa said. “The town was very suitable for our researches, as you might expect. There’s a peculiarity in the laws of the community, however, which has created a difficulty for me.”
As she spoke, she toyed with a silver athame. The reflections on the flats of its blade didn’t seem to show the room in which Ilna stood. “As I told you, my husband died three days ago.”
Ilna nodded curtly. She expected there would be a point, and she’d learned that they wouldn’t reach that point any more quickly if she said, “Why do you imagine I care about the death of someone I’d never met?” or even some more polite form of words to the same effect.
“In expectation of his death, Hutton placed his most valuable tool of art in a casket which he bound to his breast with a single hair,” Brincisa said. “He then walked out of the house and died in front of the municipal assembly building. Even I couldn’t prevent him from being buried with his casket.”
She flung the athame at the stone floor. It rang musically away, its point bent. Ingens whimpered faintly.
“That was his,” Brincisa said mildly.
She continued to smile, but the fury in her eyes was obvious to anyone. “My fellow townspeople fear me, as they should,” she said. “But they are more afraid of violating their burial ordinances . . . and in that too they are wise. Nothing I could do or say would change their minds.”
Ingens opened his mouth, then closed it again with a shocked expression. Ilna glanced at him, looked at Brincisa, and said, “Master Ingens, did you have a comment?”
Ingens licked his dry lips. His eyes shuttled quickly between the two women. He didn’t speak.
“Master Ingens,” Ilna snapped, “your place is whatever I say it is! If you have something to say, say it!”
She glared at Brincisa. Brincisa bowed politely.
“If Master Hutton knew he was going to die,” Ingens said in a perfectly normal voice, “why did he choose to do it in a public place, Mistress Brincisa?”
“To spite me, of course,” Brincisa said with an undertone of fury. “All those who die in Gaur are immediately interred in the clothes they die in, in the cave on Blue Hill. That�
�s the bluff that you may have noticed at the head of High Street.”
“Immediately?” Ilna said.
Brincisa shrugged. “Within four hours,” she said. “Though I doubt that I could have untied the casket’s bindings regardless of how much time I had.”
Her gaze focused on Ilna. “You can untie them, mistress,” she said. “And in exchange, I’ll see to it that you and your companion—”
She nodded to Ingens.
“—reach your intended destination more quickly than you would’ve done had your vessel not been damaged in an earthquake.”
“You want me to rob a grave for you,” Ilna said.
Brincisa shrugged. “Yes,” she said. “I’ll help—the entrance to the cave is always guarded, but I’ll put the whole town to sleep so that you aren’t inconvenienced. But you’ll go into the cave alone to remove the casket. After all—”
She smiled coldly.
“—you never met the man, so why should you care about him now that he’s dead? I assure you, mistress, you would not have liked him in life.”
Ingens gestured with one finger to call silent attention to himself. Ilna nodded to him.
“I’m sure Mistress Ilna can untie this hair,” the secretary said, “but I’m perfectly willing to go into this tomb and cut the casket free without worrying about the knot. Wouldn’t that be simpler?”
“Cutting this particular hair would not be simple, no, Master Ingens,” Brincisa said with amusement. “Not though you used a sword of diamond. Untying the knot will not be simple either, but I think Mistress Ilna will find it possible.”
Ilna shrugged. “It seems straightforward enough,” she said. She felt her lips curl up in a kind of smile. “If it’s a bit of a test, well, I don’t mind a test.”
“Then we’ll go to the tomb tonight,” Brincisa said with satisfaction. “For now, I had dinner prepared against your arrival. You’ll have plenty of time to eat and prepare.”