The Jaguar Knights

by Dave Duncan

  “In your house we shall be bound by your ways.” Hummingbird raised his elbows and two men sprang forward to lift him to his feet. Everyone rose. “We have been honored by your hospitality, Don Ruiz.”

  The Alcalde doubled over in a bow. “Nay, my house is exalted by Your Highness’s shadow on the floor. I deeply regret that your journey was in vain. I am unworthy of the noble gifts Your Highness brought me and humbly beg that I may be allowed to decline them without giving offense.”

  “No, no. Keep them for friendship.” Prince Hummingbird pulled his cloak about him. “If the glorious Shining-cloud will favor us once again, we are ready.”

  In response the eagle knight overhead uttered an ear-piercing screech and…he did not exactly spread his wings, but he seemed to stretch out sideways and upward and continue to expand so that his darkness blotted out the sky and the stars. Wolf felt a blaze of pain as if red-hot irons had been thrust in his eyes. He staggered and cried out.

  Then the stars returned, fading in from pitch darkness. All the Yazotlans had gone.

  “Darling, you were wonderful!” Dolores embraced him. “I was so worried, and you saved the day. That monster churning our wits! I loved the way you—”

  “Later!” Wolf detached her gently and turned to face their irate host. Pedrarias and henchmen had emerged from the shadows. Negotiations were not over yet. “We are grateful for your efforts on our behalf, Your Worship. It is regrettable that the other side did not play fair.”

  “It is more regrettable that you turned out to have nothing to sell, Sir Wolf.” Bluster would have been easier to deal with than Rojas’s icy charm, his calculated killer’s smile.

  “I do have the merchandise. We had a misunderstanding. I told you I wanted to trade with El Dorado, which has conjurers who could transport it. You never told me you were going to bring in the Yazotlans. Evidently they are not so skilled in the spiritual arts.”

  “Nobody is,” Rojas said. “What you ask is impossible. You betrayed my trust and shamed me in front of the most powerful men I know.”

  “With respect, Excellency, they admitted that the fault was theirs. Else why would they have left you the gifts they brought?”

  The Alcalde’s eyes shone like steel in the starlight. “What they left or did not leave is not your concern. My fee is. You will produce it now.”

  “It is a fair request,” Wolf admitted, having no choice. Knowing that the Yazotlan Great Council was eager to obtain weaponry that the Distliards either would not or could not provide, Don Ruiz had performed his role of middleman admirably and expected to be paid by both parties. “Seventy thousand pesos. Tomorrow morning?”

  “Tonight. One hundred and ten thousand. I will offer your lady wife some refreshment while we wait. Hurry back.”

  Wolf made a halfhearted effort to argue that the additional forty had been conditional on reaching an agreement; not surprisingly, he got nowhere. He had right on his side, but he had admitted having the additional money and Rojas wanted it. He offered a bodyguard for the journey. Wolf assured him that Diligence was sufficient protection.

  As if the night had not yet provided enough failure, he now had to suffer the shame of leaving his wife behind as hostage. He was shown the gate and hurried homeward. The street was thronged with revelers, but he traveled warily, for the presence of witnesses was no guarantee of safety in Sigisa. A man could be cut down in the midst of a crowd without anyone seeing a thing. Women and drunks moved to accost him and he snarled at them menacingly.

  “You pee in the water jar, Wild-dog-by-the-spring.” A hand like a paving stone dropped on his shoulder.

  He glanced up at the scowling face of Heron-jade. “What means that?”

  “It means you don’t know your friends from your enemies.” He was panting, out of breath.

  “But you told me it was cowardly and dishonorable for eagle warriors to use sky-metal swords. You told me the Yazotlans were dishonorable and cowardly. Why do you object if I try to cheat them?”

  The big man screwed up his face as he tried to work out the correct response. “Shining-cloud is not the least of Eagles,” he said grudgingly. “I recognized his shadow in Calero’s.”

  Calero’s was a long way south, reputedly the wildest, nastiest dive on the island. “What were you doing there?”

  Heron-jade chuckled low in his throat. “Urging tranquility on the excited.”

  “Calero pays you for that?”

  “He lets me eat all I want for nothing.” Heron-jade had never asked Wolf for money. His feeding bills were so high that Wolf had never felt obliged to offer him any, and doubted he even knew what it was. It was amazing that the big man could be eating elsewhere as well, but his peculiar ideas on warrior’s honor might see bouncer as a permissible occupation.

  They walked in silence for a few minutes.

  “Great and most trusted watcher,” Wolf said at last, “speak of something near to my heart. If Shining-cloud or some other mighty eagle knight wanted to send me back to my homeland and then bring me back with a heap of valuable things, could he do it?”

  The eagle warrior had been asked such questions before, but had always sulked and refused to answer. This time he chuckled as if he found such ignorance amusing.

  “Of course not! If you told one of those rats in that corner to run to El Dorado, would it know where to go?”

  Wolf could see no rats where he pointed. “But Amaranth—”

  “Soaring Amaranth-talon and star-walking Bone-peak-runner went to rescue Plumed-pillar.”

  So Celeste’s jaguar pin had acted like a beacon, and without that guidance, the Dark Chamber’s plans lay in ruins. There was no practical way to import Chivian weapons into El Dorado.

  At the villa, Wolf ran his golden key over the gate. Nothing happened. He cursed and rang the bell. Many strange, outlandish blessings, Shining-cloud had said.

  Flicker opened the gate and stood foursquare in the entrance. “Where is she? What have you done with Dolly?”

  “I sold her to the cannibals. You are between me and the ransom money.”

  He stepped back to let Wolf past. “I told you to take the money with you!”

  “Bless the spirits I didn’t!”

  “What do you mean?” Flicker yelled, following. For once he had dropped his personation.

  In the light of the first torch, Wolf paused to examine the three pesos he had been carrying in his pocket. Then he continued, now trailed by Flicker, Peterkin, and Heron-jade. When he reached his bedroom, they were joined by Megan and Duff, both anxious.

  Wolf handed Flicker the key. “Open the box for me.” He pulled off his sweaty shirt and reached for another from the closet.

  “If you’d taken the money with you as I said, you wouldn’t have had to abandon her to those criminals!” Flicker insisted, kneeling beside the great sea chest in which they stored the bulk of the money. In a moment he cried out in fury as the key slid from his nerveless fingers.

  “Oh, sorry, Flicker,” Wolf said. “I thought it was just me. I suppose you can all see my sash now, can you?” Fearing trouble, he had gone to the mayor’s house wearing what the inquisitors, with unusual humor, referred to as his “war band,” a normally invisible belt that not only provided some defense against poisons, including alcohol, but also contained many useful gadgets. In Chivial only a White Sister could detect a war band, but obviously Shining-cloud had. Now its contents must be worthless—enchanted bandage, infallible tinder, light-maker, stamina bracelet, and the rest. The twine stronger than a steel chain would be only string. For most of these Wolf had no replacements. He held out the fake pesos for the others to see, reverted to nasty, greasy lead. “It is good I didn’t take all the money, or we would be in much deeper trouble. They had an eagle knight there. He disabled all our conjuries.”

  “No!” Megan said, wide-eyed. “No, that isn’t possible, Sir Wolf! No Chivian conjurer could do that, certainly not without putting the conjurements inside an octogram. And not sev
eral different conjurements at once!”

  “He did. He also used the Serpent’s Eye on us, so we became twittering chickens when we needed all our wits about us. Did you expect them to play fair? Nobody does, here. Someone find the antidote for Flicker. I want his sword arm working when we go to deliver the money.”

  He took Flicker and three of the sailors with him when he carried the ransom to the Rojas mansion, but they met with no trouble. Dolores was alive and well, chattering with Dona Fortunata. It was a very civilized extortion. The odious Pedrarias accepted the bags and weighed the coins under the Alcalde’s watchful eye.

  “So where do you head now, Don Lope?” Rojas inquired as he ushered his guests to the gate, where their guards were being guarded by his guards. “Home to Chivial, or on to El Dorado?”

  “I have not thought beyond falling into bed tonight, Your Excellency. Conjuration gives me a headache and your feathered friend packed a mean punch, spiritually speaking.”

  Rojas squeezed Wolf’s arm in a sort of friendly menace. “The Distlish allow their allies to keep very few captives, so they are short of virtue. You made them waste a lot of it tonight. Do remember Sea Queen, in port just now. You could do worse.”

  “I have not been doing well recently,” Wolf admitted.

  “But if you prefer to tarry in fair Sigisa to spend the rest of your money, I am sure there will be those who can help you do so.” The Alcalde smiled sadly—such a shame to cut a friend’s throat. “Good chance to you, and to you, Dona Dolores.”

  They headed for home with his threats still ringing in their ears. Dolores bubbled with joy, as if she’d just been to a glorious ball instead of being ransomed from a monster’s den. She had witnessed impossible things.

  When Wolf broke the news about the conjurements, she laughed.

  “That’s impossible, of course.”

  “So Megan told me. It’s still a blow.”

  “But that wasn’t the only impossible thing Shining-cloud did!” she said. “Oh, Wolf, it’s so wonderful! Let’s have a conference the moment we get back.”

  They went straight to their bedroom; Flicker and Megan joined them. Wolf sat on the bed and nursed a seething anger; Flicker stood by the door and glowered, arms folded. Megan made herself comfortable with her knitting.

  Dolores paced about, like Athelgar. “What the eagle knight did was absolutely incredible! Moving two dozen men from here to Yazotlan with a snap of his fingers!” She laughed excitedly. “If he has fingers. Then he deactivated all our conjurements—poof! Like that. No chanting. No octogram. All by himself! And there’s more. He is not only the most incredible conjurer I ever heard of, but he’s a sniffer as well!”

  Megan frowned. “You sure of that, dear?”

  “Yes, yes! He had to sniff out all our little gadgets in order to break them. We know,” she said with a glance at Wolf that meant he might not, “that a conjurer can never be a White Sister or vice versa. You either push the elementals around or you stand still and watch them. Blacksmiths don’t play lutes, is how Intrepid puts it. But Shining-cloud can do both!”

  “I don’t believe it,” Flicker said. “He must just have a general conjuration to release elementals.”

  “That has got to be impossible!”

  “I believe it,” Wolf said grumpily, aware that he never missed a chance to disagree with Flicker. “The sniffing, I mean. Heron-jade told me he detected the eagle knight all the way from Calero’s. ‘Recognized his shadow’ was how he put it.”

  “Now you’re saying Heron-jade is a White Sister?” Flicker was rarely so witty. They all smiled.

  “He’d look great in the hat,” Wolf said. “But remember he saw the enchantment on our tangle mats? The jaguars didn’t, but he did. They had an unnatural ability to see in the dark and probably other skills. An eagle knight, like his Sky-cactus, can delegate the ability to sniff out conjury to his followers. He must conjure them to do it! Try telling that to the White Sisters!”

  Glum silence. Everything they had been taught about spiritualism had fallen apart in the Hence Lands.

  “What does matter,” Dolores declared, “is that the Eagles’ conjuration skills are absolutely incredible and it’s worth anything to get hold of them! What do we try next, love?”

  “We go home. De Rojas told me to get out of town or he’d skin us completely. He even pointed out that there’s a Chivian ship in port. He was giving us a five-yard start.”

  Megan’s needles clicked softly. She was nodding to her knitting. Dolores stared in dismay at the crumbling of her dreams.

  Flicker sneered. “You flee from threats, Wolf?”

  “I learn from my mistakes, and tonight I learned that what we want to do is impossible. The mission has hit the rocks; all hands to the lifeboats. Firstly, we were relying on the eagle knights to fetch the trade goods. Rojas and Heron-jade both say that’s impossible.” He waited a moment in case his wife wanted to say Rojas had been lying, but she did not. “The Eagles need something to aim for, and without it they can’t find Chivial. To ship arms by sea would take us years. Secondly, the Eagles and Jaguars will never reveal their secrets.”

  “They will if they are desperate enough!” Flicker said.

  Wolf sighed. “No. I should have listened to my own advice. I told you, all of you, back on Glorious. I told you, ‘The Jaguars and Eagles guard their secrets so closely that we could learn nothing if we were free to walk the streets of El Dorado.’ ”

  “They were willing to trade tonight if we’d had trade goods ready!” Dolores protested.

  “Hummingbird was, love. Shining-cloud wasn’t. He and his flock had orders from their king to cooperate, but he found a way to wiggle out. That will always happen. You can bribe the rulers, or threaten the cities with massacre, but you cannot pressure the knights. Are you suggesting we tie the likes of Shining-cloud to a stump and start pulling out his feathers? You’re thinking of them as conjurers, like old Grand Wizard and his fumbling fog of fogies. I’m telling you they’re fighters, military orders like the Blades or the Yeomen. You could offer a Blade anything in the world for his sword and he would turn you down even if he were starving. Or try bribing a Yeoman to go out in public with mud on his cuirass. We will never get their secrets out of the knights!”

  He was looking at three disbelieving faces. Even Megan probably just thought it was too dangerous to try, not that it was impossible.

  “I should have seen this sooner,” he said. “We all should. We are trying to exchange goods for knowledge and that is never easy. It’s almost impossible in this case, because the naturales have no proper system of writing. They have no spell books we can buy.” More blank looks. Wolf pressed on. “Listen! Suppose we offer a whole wagonload of swords just for one conjuration—say the one the Eagles use to teleport people. That can’t be written down anywhere, because Tlixilians don’t have real writing. But we have the swords, they have the know-how, and we agree to trade. We send them, say, Flicker, and the knights teach him the technique. They may grumble, but they obey orders from their king or emperor and they reveal their mystery. We hand over the swords, and they send Flicker back. Now they have the swords and we have Flicker and both parties have the information. You see the difference?”

  “Then they kill me.” Flicker’s mind was as fast as his feet. The women were still puzzled but he was smiling, thin-lipped.

  Wolf nodded. “With their powers, they could probably do that no matter what precautions we took or where you fled. You might cheat them by writing it all down quick, but I wouldn’t count on even that. You’d be a dead man running. Then they still have the swords and we have nothing.”

  Even Dolores was frowning now, still reluctant to believe.

  “Suppose we had not been unmasked tonight,” he said. “Suppose I had managed to gull the Conch-flute into believing I did have a shipload of hardware on its way. We make a deal, so what happens? He certainly does not call Shining-cloud down off his perch to give Dolores a few tips in Tlixil
ian spirituality. No, he whisks her off to Yazotlan with him to learn the skills she wants at leisure. When I am ready to deliver the goods, I get my wife back in exchange. But for how long? I’m telling you that tonight was the luckiest failure of my life. I say we give up and go home.”

  Dolores jumped to her feet. “Darling, we can’t! We mustn’t! Chivial needs this. What if Isilond or Distlain gets these powers before we do? They could drop an army in the middle of Grandon. So what if it’s dangerous? We knew this mission would be dangerous. You’re trying to baby me again, Wolf! You are treating us like children.”

  “I am not trying—”

  “Yes, you are! I did not come all this way just to turn around and run home with my tail between my legs.”

  Megan folded her knitting back in its bag. “Let’s talk about it in the morning, Sir Wolf. It’s a big decision and we should sleep on it.”

  5

  The most important rule in a marriage was Never take an argument to bed. But there were times…

  “You didn’t listen to Rojas,” Wolf said as he snuffed the candle. “He knows we’re trying to deal with El Dorado. He can guess we have more gold. One night he’s going to send an army here again. He more or less promised! And this time we don’t have jaguar warriors to bash heads.” He rolled over.

  “Don’t touch me!”

  He rolled back again. “That won’t help.”

  “Nor will what you want.”

  “It would, you know.”

  “No, it wouldn’t.”

  “As you wish. Megan was right. We should sleep on it, not talk about it anymore tonight. Go to sleep.”

  “You don’t love me.” She saw triumph and fame being snatched away from her. He saw no chance of either. She saw her great adventure cut short for no reason. He saw both them and the people who relied on them dying nastily and soon.

  “You think I came to this fever swamp to please Athelgar?” he asked.

  Silence.

  He was bitter. “Yes, you let it slip tonight, didn’t you? I wasn’t the only one babbling secrets under the Serpent’s Eye.”