by Dave Duncan
“Their weapons did not, you mean?” Wolf asked.
“They did not. Their skin color is wrong. Their features are wrong.”
“So they were not painted? Have you kept some of their dead for us to see?”
“I have kept all of them, because they do not decay in the sort of cold we have been having, and also the balefires for our own dead consumed all the firewood Quondam can spare. The ground is too hard to bury them. If this thaw persists, we may have to give them back to the sea. It brought them here, after all, and from very far away.”
“You cannot say from where?” Hogwood asked.
Roland smiled inscrutably. “I cannot, but wiser men than I will be able to identify the clothes and chattels. Their dead wore strange garments and decorations. None of their weapons were metal, but they would be baneful enough. For example…”
He rose and went back to the chest in the corner, returning with what was obviously a wooden sword, its edges inlaid with obsidian teeth. “Be careful! These are as sharp as razors!”
Wolf took the hilt. “Impractical for battle, surely?”
“You could not parry with it, but two of our dead were decapitated by such weapons, each with a single stroke. No, that is a dangerous thing.”
“But consider the numbers, my lord! Estimates vary but most witnesses thought there were between two and four hundred invaders. And they had the advantage of surprise. Against how many defenders?”
“About fifty men, plus a score of women and children.”
“Yet the invaders’ losses were more than ours, even if you include our wounded. Militarily the result was an upset and that can only mean that our weapons were superior!”
“Or their fighting technique was inferior,” Hogwood said, taking the sword.
“Possibly.” Grand Master handed Wolf a matching stone-toothed dagger from his chest of wonders. He was enjoying displaying the bizarre hoard. “Darts, glass-tipped, and this hooked stick is a thrower for them, called an atlatl, if memory serves. This one is decorated with gold leaf and shell, but most were plainer. They are about as deadly as bows in practiced hands, I’m told. About as many shields as corpses…look at this shield. Made of woven reeds, covered in fur and trimmed with feathers. And this one, of cane with a flower design made entirely of feathers. I wonder what Griffin King of Arms would say to this heraldry, mm?”
“They are superb work,” Wolf admitted, “very light. They might block obsidian teeth, but a rapier would go straight through them. What beast sports this spotted fur?”
“Ah! Perhaps an ounce?” Grand Master smiled as if enjoying a secret joke. “When I was about the age you are now, brother, King Ambrose sent me on a very long journey to a land called Altain, far to the east of Eurania. In the mountains of Altain lives a very large, much feared, spotted cat called the ounce. It is twice the length of the lynx we find in northern Eurania, and is either related to the pard or a highland variety of it. I saw the skin of one and it looked just like that shield.”
“You think the invaders came from Altain?” Hogwood demanded sharply.
“No, I don’t. I still have much to show you. Headdresses, now. Fit for the palace ball. Like this. You would look sweet in this, Wolf.”
He handed over a crown of feathers, brilliant blue and green, trimmed around the headband with gold. He followed it with dozens of extraordinary garments and artifacts, chuckling at his audience’s amazement—a full-length cloak of iridescent feathers, sewn on what seemed to be very delicate cotton, sandals of some mysterious flexible stuff, fabrics of various dimensions and dazzling colors, displaying bizarre images of beings with multiple heads, human or otherwise.
“This is not just stranger than I expected,” Wolf admitted. “It is stranger than I could have imagined.” Athelgar was going to have a thousand fits.
“Now for treasures.” Grinning, Grand Master brought a leather bag and returned to his seat to open it. “A disc of gold, inscribed in unknown glyphs. This bracelet seems to be pure gold, as are these two earrings. These other trinkets are copper. But what of this ornate pin? It held a man’s cloak. Or these?” He passed over three carvings about the size of thumb joints, one of crystal and two of lustrous green stone. “Bizarre, are they not, but have you ever seen such delicate workmanship? A bird of prey and two cats?”
Hogwood and Wolf duly admired the little carvings but were puzzled by their backs, where each bore a stud like a small mushroom.
“What are they for?” he asked, just as she said, “What are they?”
“Why, those are labrets, of course!” Grand Master laughed. “Lip ornaments. The green stone is jade, I believe. I must report, Inquisitor, that I noted many corpses with pierced earlobes or lower lips and some with pierced noses, so I assume that much evidence was stolen before I arrived. Excepting one more item, these are the only true valuables I found.”
“I will give you a receipt for them,” Wolf promised, for they both knew how suspicious the officials in Chancery could be. “And I’ll offer reasonable payment for any more turned in.”
“Lips?” Hogwood tossed one of the labrets and caught it. “Surely, such a weight would drag down the lower lip and expose the teeth? Wouldn’t that look ugly?”
“I’m told it does,” Grand Master said solemnly.
“Told by whom?” she snapped.
“Where in the world has this stuff come from?” Wolf asked.
Hogwood frowned at his clumsy interruption.
“That is for you to determine.” Lord Roland reached to the bottom of the bag. “This, finally. This is my favorite.” He produced a flat package.
Holding it so Hogwood could watch, Wolf opened the cloth wrapping to reveal a roughly pentagonal plate about the size of a man’s outspread hand. Its front surface was a mosaic of innumerable tiny fragments of greenish-blue stone, depicting the face of a cat with lips open to reveal the double row of fangs. The image would have seemed fiercer and more impressive had its eyes not been closed and its color not so improbably non-cat. The backing was a thin sheet of dark wood, which protruded slightly beside each ear and was pierced to take a thin leather thong.
“Curious thing,” he said. “It would not be popular as a pendant, though. Most ladies would object to the weight. It would anchor a small boat.”
“No woman would be allowed to wear that.” Hogwood disentangled the thongs and extended them. “The right is shorter than the other. Both seem to be bloodstained. Was this cut by Sir Fell?”
Inscrutable, Roland sipped his drink. “Why do you ask?”
“Sir Lynx described a battle with a giant masked warrior. Sir Fell struck him on the shoulder, the right shoulder. The pendant fell to the floor?”
Grand Master smiled and nodded. “Correct. I admire your reasoning. We found it not far from Sir Fell’s body, near the hearth. The giant’s corpse lay just outside the door, and there was a fragment of thong embedded in the wound. It has a sinister beauty, this feline, wouldn’t you say?”
“It is the emblem of a chief,” Hogwood said, “like the cat’s-eye swords you both wear.”
Wolf resented that comparison. “Why are its eyes closed?”
“I’m sure that is significant,” Roland said, “but again you must seek wisdom elsewhere. The stone is turquoise and the fangs seem to be seashell. Exquisite workmanship, you agree? It obviously belongs to the same artistic tradition as the cats on the clubs.”
“It has that same strangeness,” Hogwood agreed. “But surprisingly naturalistic, too.”
“Like the labrets.” That was Wolf’s contribution to the learned confabulation.
“You will observe,” said Grand Master, who had had several days to observe, “that the stones suggest the spotted rosettes of ounce fur.”
“My lord,” Hogwood said in her iciest inquisitor voice, “you are keeping information from us. Who told you those sticks were called atlatls? Who described labrets to you? Where have you seen these things before?”
Former Lord Ch
ancellors were not easily browbeaten. “I am withholding no facts, inquisitor.” His voice was tempered steel. “To burden you with guesswork would not advance your search.”
“By law, you are required—”
“By law my Privy Councillor’s oath takes precedence. I will answer to His Majesty.”
“You told me yourself, Hogwood,” Wolf said, “that your superiors withheld information from you to avoid biasing your thinking.”
“I did not! What I said was—”
“Come, now!” Grand Master said easily. “I suggest you both leave your cares for another day and attend to your personal needs.”
“First I will see these corpses you have collected,” Hogwood snapped.
“Then I hope you have a strong stomach. Pray come this way.”
Wolf followed the two of them down the creaking stairs, even more deeply troubled than he had been on the way up. He had never met the word labret before, but he had seen one the previous day. At Ironhall, among Grand Master’s personal treasures in his bedchamber, he had noticed a thumb-sized golden stud bearing a serpent’s head; he had admired its workmanship and assumed it was some sort of foreign decoration—the Order of the Golden Snake, perhaps. Now he knew what it was and why Lord Roland had known that excessively obscure word meaning “lip plug.” He must know where his own labret had come from, and therefore what people had attacked Quondam. So why not say? He was withholding vital information from the King’s inquiry. But to doubt Lord Roland’s loyalty was blatant insanity. Wolf had said so himself only a few minutes earlier.
4
The Great Tower is no longer in use,” Roland explained as they trudged through the bailey’s slush, “except to stable bats and rats. The floors are unsafe.”
He unlocked the door with a key as big as a boot. Having no windows, the lowermost room had taken on a foul smell of death, like a badly maintained outhouse. It echoed creepily. As Wolf’s eyes adjusted, the wan beams of the lanterns reached out into the darkness to reveal row after row of corpses on the floor.
“First look at these two.” Grand Master led the visitors to a pair of shrouded bundles on makeshift tables. “I had these wrapped in the hope of keeping rats away from them. I shall have to move…you may wish to have them moved to the icehouse, Sir Wolf.”
“Good idea,” Wolf said. “Others will want to see them after us.” He opened the flaps of heavy oiled canvas and uncovered one of the mysterious raiders.
He was young, stocky, and certainly darker than any Chivian, perhaps chestnut color as Lynx had suggested, although it was hard to judge corpse pallor in that light. His only garment was a loincloth consisting of back-and-front flaps hung on a cord, but what he had lacked in clothes he made up in decoration, being painted in gaudy stripes of red, black, and yellow.
“His feet are muddy,” Grand Master said, “so he came barefoot. The breechclout is universal, but most of the others wore more—tunics, capes, cloaks, feathered headdresses. Some had greaves on their legs and a few wore a sort of padding, like cotton armor. I wonder if this lad was of low rank or just demonstrating his courage?”
Hogwood peered at an obscene clot like a blackberry over his heart.
“Unlucky enough to encounter Sir Mandeville, I fancy,” Roland said, “since he was the only one sporting a rapier. But physically this man is typical. No sign of beard stubble and only traces of a mustache, although he seems quite adult. Note that his lower lip has been pierced. He wore the crystal labret I showed you. You would think he would have preferred to invest in better armor instead.”
“Noble birth and low rank?” Hogwood suggested. “Or lowborn and high rank?”
Wolf said, “The poor devil was even uglier than I am.”
Grand Master shook his head. “Beauty is largely habit, Wolf. By our standards, his nose may be too long and his lips too thick. His eyes are not quite the shape ours are, but his companions all look much like him, so I expect his sweetheart considered him handsome enough. He was a husky chap, you must admit.”
“Well, we can discard any notion that these men are Chivian, or even Euranian.”
“Indeed you can. Look at the other one. He was certainly a leader.”
Roland led the way to the other table, and Wolf guessed what they would find there from the length of the bundle—and he no longer expected stilts, although Lynx’s estimate of seven feet tall seemed reasonable. This corpse’s skin was the same color as the other man’s, and at first glance he seemed lean, almost slender, but that was an illusion caused by his height, for his limbs were meaty. He had not been slain with rapier finesse. The corpse was black with dried blood; fragments of white bone shone in the gaping shoulder wounds. Lynx’s cut along his ribs was trivial, but Fell’s slash at his loins must have cleaved his liver in two. Yet still he had fought, this giant warrior, overcoming even Blades.
Ripped remains of a feathered cloak were glued to his body by caked blood, as was his breechcloth, but Wolf began his inspection by bringing his lantern close to the boots with claws on them that Lynx had mentioned and so nearly died from. They seemed strangely misshapen—too long and lacking a proper heel—and each bore four black, curved talons, which were not at all fragile. Those and the spotted fur itself were coated in clotted blood and fragments of flesh. Realizing whose that was, Wolf turned away in revulsion.
Or else just in refusal to accept an impossible conclusion.
“The claws seem to be retractable,” Hogwood announced, studying the right hand. Hand, not glove.
Wolf forced himself back to the great feet, and this time saw them as they were—enormous furred paws. As a man, the monster had been a giant; judged as a cat walking on its toes, its proportions were more understandable. Legs, arms, and torso were human; hands and feet were not.
He and Hogwood converged on its head, which still bore a golden circlet supporting a plume of feathers. The helmet was no helmet, any more than the gloves were gloves or the boots, boots. Its eyes were closed, but the great jaws hung open, its huge fangs still bloody. No human mouth could have crushed Lynx’s shoulder.
“Fire and death! Is it man or brute?”
“Man,” Hogwood said. “It gave orders, remember?”
Lord Roland chuckled. “Would you argue with them?”
“Or both?” said Hogwood. “Man and pard combined? Or did he die while changing from one to the other?”
Wolf raised his lantern, its flame dancing as his hand trembled. His questions spilled out too loud, echoing in that sepulcher. “What do you know that you are not telling us, Grand Master? Did you not meet with such creatures back in the Monster War?”
“Not like this, I think. The chimeras we faced then were animals—unstable, short-lived, and no smarter than dogs. This big fellow was described as giving orders. He was in charge.”
“Is he a shape-shifter, then? Did he fly up to the lookout as a bird, and change into a pard for the assault? Was he changing back when he died?”
“I know no more about it that you do, Wolf.”
Hogwood’s voice was calmer than Wolf’s. “But you know where he came from, this half-man, half-cat. You know whose foul conjurations produced such a monster.”
“I do not know, Inquisitor.” After a moment Roland added, “The witnesses claim that he slaughtered three men singlehanded and two of those men were Blades. Does not a warrior so mighty deserve a better name than monster?”
“It will do until we find a better,” Wolf said.
During dinner, Wolf talked with Sir Alden—peppery, bristle-bearded, and much weathered—who regarded him and his fancy writ with the contempt due to an upstart court jester. Yet this was the man who had ignored a badly broken arm to drive a wagon all the way to Ironhall through the rigors of a Secondmoon night. Many men were living now only because of that feat, notably Lynx. The old campaigner was a very impressive man, and Grand Master’s smile in the background confirmed that Alden was the candidate he had in mind for acting warden.
Later
the inhabitants of Quondam were assembled to hear the King’s writ read out and give three cheers for Athelgar. This time Wolf dared not brag about bringing the culprits to justice. No one would believe him. He explained that everyone would be required to make a statement to Inquisitor Hogwood. He also warned that all booty belonged to the King.
“However,” he added, “I will accept any souvenirs you turn in, with no questions asked. Gold I will buy for its weight in crowns, and I will pay fairly for anything else.”
The hall being the only warm place outside of the kitchens, Wolf settled there to read through the statements Grand Master had provided. Others seeking warmth or company spread themselves around adjacent tables or just sat on the rushes to gossip and ignore the minstrel wailing up in the gallery.
Soon a nervous youth shuffled up to Wolf, watched by many eyes.
He laughed. “Drew short straw, did you? What have you got?”
Shyly the boy produced a massive thumb ring, intricately carved and too heavy to be anything but solid gold.
“Now here’s a jewel fit for a king,” Wolf said. “The castellan would have had money scales around somewhere?”
The lad returned in a few moments with scales and an eager, relieved grin. It took seven crowns from Wolf’s expense pouch to outweigh his ring, but the boy strutted off with a negotiable fortune in place of stolen property that he would never have disposed of otherwise for anywhere near its true value.
Half the hall promptly stampeded in Wolf’s direction. He bought a chain and a pair of silver anklets, but the fourth man produced a gold duck as big as a plum, in itself heavier than all his remaining coins. Obviously Wolf had bitten off far more than his purse could chew. He offered the man an IOU, written in a fair hand on parchment, payable on demand by any of the royal coiners and slathered with an imposing wax seal. The hard-bitten Westerther farmer just scowled and clung tight to his loot. The treasure-buying project had apparently sunk at the dock.