by Dave Duncan
“And his name?” inquired the Conch-flute.
“It is Wild-dog-by-the-spring, mover of mountains.”
Wolfie! Lynx bellowed out a laugh that must be a grievous breach of protocol. “A very ugly man, who looks as if his face had been stamped to mush in childhood and then chopped up by many obsidian blades?”
“It is he.”
“This is my brother, lord, my own parents’ son! And if he says he has brought the things we need to fight this war, then it is so.”
“You vouch for him?” asked Two-swans-dancing, beaming.
“With my life!” Lynx cried.
VIII
The Mort is Sounded by One Long Call and Several Short
1
All his life, Wolf had detested failure. Dolores made fun of his compulsive boot polishing, but that was a small part of a much greater struggle, his determination to succeed at anything he tried. Some Blades did only what their bindings demanded, nothing more. Not he. He had served a master he despised to the limits of his ability, even killing men when that had been the right thing to do in the circumstances. Nothing he had done in all his years in the Guard troubled his conscience.
But the Sigisa mission had turned out to be far beyond his abilities. The fact that no one could have achieved what he had set out to do was no comfort, because he should not have taken on an impossible task. The knowledge that the inquisitors had tricked him into it only made him feel worse. He had not even managed to end it cleanly and run away. Sigisa had piled disaster on disaster.
Within hours after Shining-cloud nullified their spiritual protection, both Wolf and Dolores succumbed to dysentery. She recovered in a few days. He took much longer and was barely back on his feet, still as shaky as an autumn leaf, when he contracted tertian fever, another Sigisian specialty. He had never known a serious illness before, and was appalled at what it did to him. He burned. He thrashed and raved in delirium, ranting mostly about his brother. Every second day the fever would return, each bout leaving him weaker than before, but nothing in the medicine chest helped. He needed an octogram and eight competent conjurers, and those did not exist in all Tlixilia. He almost died.
The start of Secondmoon found him reclining on a portable bed on the patio, sipping fruit juice and watching unfamiliar stars play peekaboo between the romping palm fronds. Phosphoric breakers spilled up the beach. His fever had stayed away for several days, so he might be going to live after all.
Dolores settled at his side. He moved the beaker to his other hand and wound an arm around her.
“Peterkin’s found a ship,” she said.
That was good news, although Wolf doubted he could walk as far as the harbor. “Not a slaver?”
“No. Isilondian trader, outbound for Mondon the day after tomorrow.”
The new Caudillo had been enforcing the laws against foreigners more strictly, and almost no non-Distlish vessels had dropped anchor in Sigisa in the last month. A Distlish captain would be within his rights in accepting the Chivians’ money and then impressing the men into his crew. What might happen to the two women then did not bear thinking about.
Wolf studied his wife’s face by starlight. “You will be coming with us, won’t you?”
She nodded wistfully. “Of course. I was wrong and you were right.” She lay down to snuggle against him. “Darling, I was so frightened we were going to lose you!”
He offered lips to be kissed. “Then it must be time I declared myself recovered. Tomorrow I shall strap on my sword and resume my old domineering ways. I think I can walk with it on if I lean sideways. Don’t ask me to use it.”
“Good. I feel in need of being domineered.”
“Has Peterkin fixed a fare yet?”
“They’re still bargaining.”
Something about her tone alerted him. “How much have we got left?”
“Less than ten thousand pesos.”
“What!?” That might not be enough to see all of them home to Chivial. “What has Rojas been up to, curse his smelly socks?”
“Well, first he tripled the rent on the villa. Now he wants to triple it again. When the sailors go out they get arrested on trumped-up charges and we have to ransom them from jail. You ought to see that jail! We must get out of here, love. Soon! Take over, please! We need you.”
“I love you when you’re humble like this!”
“Enjoy it while it lasts.”
Their humor was a shroud to bury black thoughts. Even if the Isilondian captain was willing to take passengers, would Rojas let the Chivians escape with the clothes on their backs? Not until he had taken every last maravedí out of the pockets. They would arrive in Mondon penniless. Wolf wasn’t ready to take up the battle again. He needed time to recover his strength.
“No word from Blood-mirror-walks and the boys?”
Dolores shook her head. “I don’t think we’re ever going to hear from them.”
“Or from Flicker?” Wolf would certainly have heard if there had been word from Flicker. He had been gone a month. He might be dead or almost at El Dorado by now.
“No. And no sign of Lynx. We have been watching every ship, love.”
Yes, it was time to go. “But we’ll need to find some way of sneaking on board without Rojas knowing,” he said glumly. “Let me sleep on it.” Expecting his milk cows to make a break for it, Rojas would keep close watch on the foreign ship. He might even preempt their flight and send in his bully boys this very night.
She cuddled closer and said softly, “Wolf?”
“Mm?”
“ ‘Put it in writing?’ ” She was smiling, but he heard shadows behind the words. “I did lie to you that day, love, but not very much. And we weren’t even betrothed then!”
“It doesn’t matter now.” What was done was done.
“It matters to me. So listen. It was the jaguar plaque I was after. You’d told me at Ivywalls that it was an active conjuration, remember? When Lynx refused to part with it, I guessed it was important. In the morning you and I delivered Lynx to the Pine Tree and went on to the palace. The plaque was the first thing I mentioned. Flicker and a couple of others were sent to the inn to keep an eye on Lynx. He’d skipped by the time they got there. Flicker dropped by when you and I were eating to tell me that they’d lost him.”
Wolf said, “He said, ‘Mother’s looking for you.’ ”
She chuckled. “Well done! I’ll make a snoop out of you yet. The code words are only hints, though. They can’t be more than that or they couldn’t be hidden in ordinary conversation. ‘Mother’ means bad news and ‘Father’ is good. If the team had been tailing Lynx he would have said something like ‘Father’s still on the road.’ I told him we didn’t know where Lynx was either.”
“And ‘Put it in writing?’ ”
“Meant I was working on it and didn’t need any more help. I hoped we’d find Lynx with the tracker. If we couldn’t, then there was nothing more to be done.” She kissed him again. “And I honestly don’t know if the King knew that Grand Inquisitor were trying to recruit you. I’m just very happy that they did and you married me.”
“No regrets here,” he said. He wished he believed more of what she had said.
Dolores punched him awake. “Wolf! Wolf! Burglars!”
He sat up, bewildered. One of the tangle mats was shrieking. Then another sounded off, even shriller, and now he heard thumps and human screams as well. He fell out of bed and dropped to his knees, not entirely by choice. It was his custom to lay Diligence under the bed at night, unsheathed, but during his sickness she had been pushed so far in, beyond easy reach, that he had to scrabble on his belly to find her.
Appalled at how heavy she was now, he reeled across the room to the door. Dolores was wrapping herself in a gown, but he did not worry about such niceties. He tumbled out in the corridor, bounced off the opposite wall, and headed for the din. The house was dark.
A tangle mat reacted to being stepped on by uttering an unbearable screech and closing arou
nd the trespasser’s feet so he could not walk. If he fell over, as he usually did, the mat slithered up his body and enveloped his head. The man in the entrance hall had reached that stage. He was a naked, dark-skinned naturale, heavily built. Surrounded by the ruins of a bench, his loincloth, and a once-sturdy table, he was thrashing wildly in his efforts to tear off the suffocating bandage. Knowing the rug would choke him unconscious and then relax enough to keep him alive, Wolf ignored him. He headed for sounds of battle coming from the dining room.
Before he reached the door, a man staggered out backwards, contesting possession of a sword with another invader. The first was recognizable as Hick by his clothes and lurid sailor language. His opponent was another naturale, albeit a somewhat skinny one, who should not be giving Hick so much trouble. When Wolf scooped up a table leg and cracked it over his skull, he dropped, taking Hick with him. The other intruder had now lost his contest with the tangle mat, making two of them out of action and available for later questioning. So far so good.
Peterkin lay groaning and half stunned on the dining room floor. Another intruder was doing a mad one-legged sword dance against the starlit windows, trying to kill a tangle mat before it broke his ankle, but without cutting off his own foot in the process. The mutilated mat howled as if it were alive and in agony. The window it had been guarding stood open.
Whatever Ironhall tradition might say, there were times when the table leg was mightier than the sword. Wolf slammed his cudgel against the back of the dancer’s knee, sending him toppling to the floor, screaming as the tattered mat scrambled for his face like a giant spider.
Something hurtled in through the window without touching the sill. It hit the floor with its front paws, spun over in an airborne somersault to strike the far wall with its back paws, twisting in midair so it was the right way up, and without ever pausing, launched itself at Wolf’s throat. He glimpsed fangs and claws, but he already knew that if this was not an actual jaguar, it must be a jaguar knight.
Off-balance for an attack from that direction, he had no time to turn and bring Diligence into play, but his left hand still held the table leg and he instinctively parried at the open jaws. Turning its head aside to save its teeth, the monster slammed into him. They hit the floor in a tangled heap. Had he been his usual nimble self, Wolf might have made a better showing, but in his fever-weakened state the double impact almost stunned him. His throat was exposed; he expected to feel it ripped open.
The cat thing rolled clear and went to the aid of the man being smothered by the vengeful tangle mat. Back in Grandon the inquisitors had insisted a mat could not be forcibly removed without pulling the victim’s head off, but they had never met a jaguar knight armed with eight finger knives. The remains of the mat fell silent. The gasping victim stopped thrashing.
All this had taken only a few seconds, and Wolf had barely managed to stagger to his knees. He was ages too slow to fight such a monster. Eyes glowing in the starlight, the Jaguar sprang, batting his weapons aside. They hit the floor together again, and this time he cracked his head so hard that flames danced before his eyes. Paws pinned his wrists, great fangs opened over his face. He heard a snarling cat sound. After a moment he realized it was human speech distorted into a yowl.
Not only that, the Jaguar spoke Chivian. What it said was “And whose turn is it to rub whose nose in the dirt now, brother?”
2
Before Wolf could collect his wits, light flooded the room. Help had arrived at last—Dolores, Megan, Hick, and Will, all armed with swords and carrying lanterns. Dolores was out in front and reasonably so, because she was the best fencer. She came within half a second of running her sword into a jaguar knight.
That was at least four-tenths of second too late, though. Lynx launched himself upward again, almost crushing Wolf’s wrists in the process. He slapped Dolores’s sword aside with his claws, spun her around, and pinned her against him. Then he waved four black talons in front of her face and the rescuer party froze.
“Stop!” Wolf croaked. “It’s all right. He’s on our side.”
My brother the monster! Spirits save us!
“Oh, I wouldn’t hurt my dear sister-in-law,” Lynx yowled, releasing her. “You are legally married, I trust? Give me a kiss, dearie?” He bared his fangs and waggled a grotesquely long tongue at her.
Dolores screamed and reeled backwards.
Yes, it was Lynx. Wolf knew the scars, although they had faded from red on pink to white on brown. He stood tall on his stilt feet; his head, hands, and feet had been transformed, and he wore a Tlixilian-style loincloth, but his chest was hairier than any naturale’s. He carried something strapped on his back. Seeing Wolf struggle to rise, he offered a paw. Wolf gripped his wrist where spotted fur gave way to human skin and was effortlessly flipped upright.
“What’s the matter with you? You fight like a grandmother.”
“Fever. More important, what happened to you?”
Lynx chuckled—a sound not far off a purr. “Obvious, isn’t it? Where’s my guide? Where’s Blood-mirror-walks?”
Wolf recalled the husky invader out in the hall. He should have recognized those shoulders. “He’ll be all right, as long as he doesn’t struggle.” He wrapped an arm around Dolores, who had been working her way closer to him without going too near Lynx. “Megan, release him, will you? And see to the other one?” Megan swept from the room.
“The other one’s Night-fisher.” Lynx seemed to be enjoying himself, but he was mistaken if he thought that exposing those frightful teeth counted as a grin. He turned to the intruder he had rescued from the mat. “And this is taker of one captive Corn-fang. Dread warrior, greet my father’s son, Lord Wild-dog-by-the-
spring.” Lynx spoke Tlixilian haltingly, and with what must be a Chivian accent. He had learned the language the hard way.
“I kiss the feet of my lord’s brother,” Corn-fang said, making no move to do so and looking as if he would prefer to cut them off. “His glory dims the sun.” The tangle mat had totally ruined his elaborate feather headdress and there was blood around his jade labret.
“I weep with shame that a valorous taker of captives should have been so maltreated in my house,” Wolf said. “May we evermore fight in each other’s shadow.” He presented his wife and the sailors, whom he promoted to warrior rank.
“I want to know how Lynx got here!” Dolores whispered. She was trembling, almost in shock.
“Yes. Explain, Lynx.”
“We can sing old songs later!” the cat-man said in Tlixilian.
Wolf was about to go and find some clothes, when in strode Blood-mirror-walks, clearly furious and wearing no more than he was. If a relative of the Emperor did not care, why should anyone? Behind him came the adolescent Night-fisher, limping and rubbing his neck. Then Peterkin and Don, and the room was crowded.
“Where is Heron-jade?” Blood-mirror-walks
demanded. “Why did he not warn you of our approach?”
“The noble warrior went inland with Flicker about a moon ago.”
The Tlixilians exchanged glances that Wolf found worrisome.
“Good chance to them,” Lynx said. “We must hurry, Brother, but you should offer your guests hospitality.”
The servants might be hiding under their beds or they might have fled to raise the population. Wolf asked Megan to inspect the outbuildings, and she went off accompanied by Blood-mirror-walks.
“You are welcome to all we have. What do you eat now? Raw meat?”
“Meat when I can get it.” Again Lynx had answered in Tlixilian. His obvious reluctance to speak Chivian suggested that either he had learned a new respect for good manners or that his companions did not trust him.
“Should I butcher a gardener?”
He purred that peculiar laugh again. “No, I haven’t gotten to that yet. It’s good to see you again, Wolf!”
“And you, Lynx. But you are changed.”
“No regrets!”
Could this night get a
ny worse? “Then I’m glad for you. How is dear Celeste?”
“Very well. Much happier. I came to fetch you, Wolf. Your presence is commanded in El Dorado.”
Yes, it could! Much worse.
“And me!” Dolores shouted. “And me!”
Wolf was appalled. He had been sure the mission was dead and could be written out of his life. Now it was alive again, he knew that he did not want it alive, did not want it to succeed. He wanted his brother to be a man, not a monster. He wanted to take his wife home, not squire her halfway across a continent of cannibals. He certainly did not want to acquire any vile conjurations for Athelgar and Grand Inquisitor.
He flopped down on a chair, feeling a hundred years old. “Listen, Lynx. I was relying on the Eagles to transport the arms we want to trade. I’m told that they can’t do that—that they only found Quondam last year by homing in on that pendant. If that’s so, then we’ll need years to ship weapons here.”
His brother scratched an ear with a claw like a fleshing knife. “Don’t see a problem. Both Amaranth-talon and Bone-peak-runner have been to Quondam. Either of them can find it again for you.”
Dolores squeaked with glee. The original plan was viable again! Life and incredible wealth were back on the table.
Wolf switched back to Chivian. “I have no weapons to trade. I was lying.”
“Then you may have serious problems when you get to El Dorado. But you are coming to El Dorado if I have to carry you.”
“So am I,” Dolores said sharply.
Lynx curled his lip in the snarl that he considered a smile. “Then you carry him. Where’s the kitchen?”
Wolf heaved himself to his feet and ripped a tapestry off the wall to make himself at least semi-respectable. He led the way to the kitchen shed, where the sailors were already preparing food for the visitors.
Megan emerged from the dark with a different escort. There were more intruders out there in the grounds, she said, but the servants were still abed and must have slept through the commotion. Fights were every-night occurrences in Sigisa.