Gyll watched as Aldhelm strode past him to the cavern mouth. Gulltopp had risen—its crescent grinned below that of Sleipnir. Aldhelm was briefly a silhouette against the backdrop of night sky (twinned shadow dark on the jumbled rocks of Underasgard), and then he moved on into the night.
Carefully, Gyll picked up the stalkpest in a fold of his nightcloak. “For the wort,” he told Cranmer.
“Aldhelm seemed angry.” Underneath cloth, Cranmer hugged himself.
“He’s always angry,” Gyll said. He stared past the cavern mouth to the dawnrock standing lonesome in the clearing and the newly clothed fingers of the trees beyond. “It hasn’t killed him yet.”
• • •
The grounds outside Gunnar’s window lay hushed in twilight, which was quickly arranging itself in the darker shades of full night. Sleipnir was up, Gulltopp was rising. Gunnar stood before his window for a long minute, staring at the landscape that surrounded his guildhouse, then he touched the contact that opaqued the glass. A wash of purplish black swirled in the panes; then the tendrils met, snaking about each other, swelling until all was black. Gunnar turned back into his room.
He was not feeling well tonight. A vague boiling churned in his gut and a sour taste lurked in the back of his throat—though, he mused, one might expect such reaction after the evening’s dinner. De Vegnes had been the cook for the night; his tastes ran to the unusual, the exotic, the highly spiced. Such fare tended to unsettle the stomachs of guild-kin used to a blander and more provincial menu. But if he wanted Potok to be able to speak before the Assembly next week, he would have to ignore the moaning of his stomach and work. Gunnar shook his head: Potok was an excellent speaker and a charismatic personality, but he needed to be fed the words he regurgitated. He was never able to create them himself.
The Muse of Speech was resting this evening. Even Gunnar, usually quick and facile, couldn’t find the words he needed—every phrase that appeared in the terminal of his desk seemed clumsy, falling over itself with pretentiousness. Gunnar clutched his complaining stomach, grimacing. He finally sighed in resignation and reached for the wooden box that sat on one corner of the desk. He opened the malawood lid, taking out the black silk that held his Tarot. He toyed with the cards, turning them in his thin hands and leaning back in his floater. He riffled the deck, though his mind was still entangled in the forest of Potok’s speech. He thought—as he did every time he handled the cards—that he would have to have them reproduced soon. They were simply too old and fragile for his constant handling. The trader from whom he’d purchased the cards claimed that they came from Terra herself. Extravagant tales of their lineage aside, the cards were ancient in appearance if not in fact: they were printed on cardboard, the image inked on the surface, two-dimensional. The corners were soft, bent, dog-eared with use, and one of the cards—the knight of swords—had once been folded in half.
Abandoning all hope of finding an opening for Potok’s speech, Gunnar spread the cards face down on his desk and plucked a card from the array.
The Tower: an edifice crumbled to dust in the midst of a storm, while figures plunged to their deaths from the ramparts. An eye veiled in clouds watched impassively from above. Gunnar shook his head once more, his narrow face pinched in irritation. The card was ill-omened, not that Gunnar professed a belief in the card’s ability to predict events. His attitude was more that of an interested skeptic, though he did feel that a person of some power had once possessed the cards, and that this imagined person had been able to use them to peer murkily into the many possible branches of the future. For his own part, he doubted that Dame Fate would be willing to reveal Her whims so easily. There were times: more than once he had thought he could discern a pattern to the cards that had fallen into a reading, some cohesiveness that suggested a single course of events.
The Tower, then: danger, destruction of plans, ruin. Gunnar tossed aside the card and pulled another from the pile without looking at its face. He held the card in his hand for a long moment, his eyebrows lowered in concentration, studying the intricate scrollwork on the back. The Sun, he guessed.
The Devil. Fate, blind impulse, a secret plan about to be executed: from the card’s face, a horned goat stared at him balefully, a scepter before it, and figures below the animal joined in mystic symbols.
“Well, then I’m to be damned and double-damned,” he muttered. He threw the card down.
“Light,” he said, and the room brightened in response to his command, the hoverlamps in each corner irising open. “Enough.” Gunnar leaned forward, gently moved the cards to one side, and touched the metal circle of a contact on the desk’s surface.
He leaned back once more, hands behind his head, eyes closed.
“Some notes for you, Potok. Though I think I might end this by telling you not to listen—I think de Vegnes’s supper has ruined my sense of composition.
“Point One: that Oldin woman insists that our guild will figure prominently in her plans, though she’s yet to give me any indication of what that might mean. She smiles when she says it, and she has a predatory smile. And she’s also as closemouthed about her ‘plans’ as a puffindle. I think we might do well to find out more about her and the Families—she’s only been here a few months, but there’s been more disruption around Sterka in those months than in the last five standards. There might be a file on the Family Oldin in the Alliance Center. An offworlder isn’t going to react as will those of us born to Neweden, and we can’t expect her to have our best interests in mind. We need to know which way she’ll jump if we push. By all means, bear in mind that you can’t trust her—she’s an avaricious bitch and she’ll go whichever way promises her the most, and I know she’s had meetings with the Li-Gallant as well. We have to be in a good position to promise her more, or she may start dealing with the other side. Butter up that tongue of yours, kin-brother. I expect miracles of it.”
(His eyes shut, his back to the window, Gunnar did not see the darkness swirl or the stars become visible through the now clear pane. Nor did he see the apparition that appeared there: the head and shoulders of a person wearing a light-shunter. His/her features were torn and scrambled, waves of pulsing shadow moving erratically. Dark against blackness, the head turned and fixed upon Gunnar.)
“I’m going to work on your speech tomorrow.” Gunnar stretched his legs out beneath his desk—a joint cracked loudly. “We have to stress the fact that our guild has gained in strength in the last several months. I actually think that I have the Hoorka to thank for that, having failed to kill me twice. It certainly put us in a good light with the other guilds. We’ll cite all the economic woes that Vingi’s rule-guild is causing. And I’ll hit hard on the ippicator smuggling and the lassari troubles—that’s Neweden’s lifeblood. I expect you to have them shouting by the finish, so we can call for a vote of confidence in the Assembly. We’ll lose, but it’ll give an indication of the rate of erosion in support for the Li-Gallant, and it might just throw a scare into Vingi. If we can force him into an open election . . .” Gunnar’s voice trailed off. His eyes opened, questioningly. He sensed something wrong with his room, though he could see nothing out of place. He started to turn in his floater, to rise.
He had only a brief second to glimpse the night-veiled face at the window before the soundless blast of a render tore the substance of the glass into dust and then struck him. His face contorted in agony so intense it did not truly register as pain. The render shredded the fabric of his chest, the living cells ruptured and smashed. Gunnar fell backwards over his desk, his flailing arms scattering the cards of his Tarot. The body, unwilling to admit the reality of its death, jerked spasmodically, then finally lay still.
The face at the window (an elusive and vague outline, a monstrosity of fluid shape) stared into the room for a few long seconds before dropping from sight.
Alarms, far too late to help Gunnar, wailed through the house.
• • •
Morning.
The sunstar la
thed the Kotta Plain with heat and light. The silent call of dawn woke the small encampment of Dead. Drowsily, they rose at the light’s beckoning, gathering their chimes and censers and bells. Someone—an emaciated young man, the filth of the five-day journey across the plain on his body and a scraggled, matted beard of indeterminate age masking lips cracked bloody with heat—began a plainchant, a dirge of greetings to the Hag. The morning offering to their patron rose from the several throats to be snatched away by a westerly breeze.
They readied for the day’s march. Though no one spoke to another—conversation was also a thing of life—they knew that they would reach Remeale before the sunstar set again, and perhaps the Hag awaited some of them there. If not, they would seek Her beyond. It was a simple axiom: the encounter with the Hag was inevitable. Until that time, the Dead paid no attention to those that still sought their living dreams on Neweden.
Even the living would one day find the Hag waiting for them.
They were standing now, waiting for one of their number to take the initiative and begin the march. A fume of incense wafted ahead of them, and they were now assembled in ragged order. The chant wavered, then altered itself. It had been noticed that one of their number lay still and unmoving in the grass—a woman, dressed in a soiled, torn tunic. She had been with them for some time, and the Hag had come to her during the long night. They chanted their praise to the Hag. Still singing, the Dead began the slow, inexorable parade to nowhere, leaving the body on the grass of Kotta Plain.
When the noise of their passage had subsided into a faint treble chiming (the Dead now dark specks wavering in the heat of the horizon), the carrion eaters came. They padded toward the abandoned campsite and the burnt circle of grass, moving with habitual caution, stopping every few seconds to sniff the air which reeked of human spoor.
They found the gift that had been left them. If they praised any god for the bounty, they did not say.
They merely feasted.
Chapter 2
Excerpt from the acousidots of Sondall-Cadhurst Cranmer, taken from the notes of his stay with the Hoorka assassins of Neweden. The access to these notes are with the kind permission of the Niffleheim University Archives and the Family Cranmer.
EXCERPT FROM THE DOT OF 2.27.216:
“I’d thought that the Thane—no, dammit, Gyll isn’t Thane anymore; I’ll learn that one day soon—I’d thought that Ulthane Gyll had managed to stagger toward some even keel with the Hoorka, but that optimism might have been premature. It’s partially his own fault, I admit, and he’d probably admit it also: his ambitions for Hoorka, to see them implanted offworld and escape the bounds of Neweden, are likely to lead to problems. And despite his resignation and the conferral of power to Valdisa, I suspect that Gyll still tries to guide the Hoorka through her, thus removing the guilt of failure by one place.
“No, that’s unfair as hell to Valdisa . . . Gyll is probably learning that if he wanted to use her as a figurehead, she will not play that game with him. She’s a strong-willed person in her own right; I hope I’m wrong, but I expect the two to come to some confrontation over that.
“The Hoorka are still not politically stable. Certainly the Li-Gallant Vingi holds a grudge against them, as it’s an ill-kept secret that it was his contract for Gunnar’s death that was twice failed. Or, as Gyll would probably say: ‘Gunnar was blessed by Dame Fate.’ Since the Li-Gallant holds the reins of power on Neweden, the Hoorka are not going to be given any concessions in their quest to become independent of Neweden, though Gunnar’s rule-guild is gaining in support, by all indications I’ve seen. The problem that’s making all that significant is the caste-bound social system of this world. In time, there might have been a slow, natural progression away from the idea of guild-kinship, but the Alliance has put too great a strain on the structure—cracks are beginning to appear, for Neweden finds itself no longer alone. In particular, the lassari are responding to this and becoming militant, no longer content to accept their role as the dregs of Neweden society.
“Now if I can remember to correlate and substantiate all this in the eventual paper . . .”
(Here there is the sound of glass against glass and liquid being poured. The transcriber was turned off; when the recording resumes, the time-tone indicates that it is a few hours later. Cranmer’s speech is noticeably slower and muffled.)
“The, ahh, social structure here hasn’t been subjected to outside influences in centuries: the planet was only on the outer fringes of the Huardian Empire and never knew the yoke of that Tyrant’s oppressions; before that is the long darkness of the Interregnum, with only a modicum of contact from the Trading Families. And Neweden was settled only after the First Empire fell apart—that’s your area of expertise, Bursarius—yah, I know you’ll listen to this when I ship it back to Niffleheim, and I’m not going to meddle with that pot of history.
“A point. Is there any significance to the fact that Neweden was settled not by a normal outward push of humanity, but by a group of exiled bondsmen?
“Wandering again . . . I’m glad I’m the only one that has to listen to these dots, and I apologize to my future self for all the maunderings. And of course to you, Bursarius. You still there?
“Umm . . . I know I wanted to say something else. Oh—the Hoorka code still bothers me, despite all of Gyll’s rationalizing. It sets them apart from the common criminals and makes them viable in Neweden society, but it also makes them susceptible to damage from outside change. When Neweden society eventually shifts, as it’s going to, I’m afraid the Hoorka will find themselves just one of the corpses in the pile.
“By all the gods, that’s a gory image there. Too much binda juice again . . .”
(Here there is the sound of Cranmer drinking, followed by another refilling of his glass. At that point, the transcriber was shut off once more.)
• • •
M’Dame Tha. d’Embry, Alliance Regent for the world Neweden, was not pleased with the way the day had gone thus far. She’d awakened to a dismal rain that left the sky a uniform, wan gray. There was also a constriction in her chest that made breathing difficult until she grudgingly let the autodoc in her room minister to her for a few minutes. Her left arm still felt the prick of the unit’s sensors, and the constriction, while lessened, was still there, a faint shallowness of breath when she exerted herself. And the rain had not stopped when she’d reached her austere offices in Diplo Center. Outside her window, the ranks of clouds sat unbroken across the sky, and water pooled on the flat expanse of Sterka Port.
The news, when she’d asked Stanee for her report of the night, had not been encouraging: Gunnar had been killed, assassinated by an unknown assailant in his own guild-house. She’d drawn back from her viewer in genuine shock. Murder, the cowardly slaying of someone without declaration of bloodfeud, was a very rare occurrence on this world. It was far too easy to gain satisfaction through duel. And Gunnar’s rule-guild was second in power only to that of the Li-Gallant Vingi. It had been reputed that Gunnar would one day wear the robe of the Li-Gallant; it could not happen now. D’Embry decided she would not like to see this morning’s Assembly meeting.
A dim suspicion formed in her mind. “Stanee, is there any indication that the Li-Gallant might have been involved in the murder?”
The face in the viewscreen—amber hair short at the sides and cascading unshorn down the back, lips and earlobes and eyelids touched with shimmering lapis lazuli; all the latest fashion done correctly but without dimming the counter-impact of a plain face—frowned below d’Embry’s field of view. “No, m’Dame, though let me check with Intelligence.” A moment’s pause, then Stanee looked up once more. “By all reports, all of the Li-Gallant’s guard force is accounted for last evening; the Domoraj had some festivity. Unless Vingi used a hireling, maybe a lassari . . .”
D’Embry cut off her speculations with a wave of her veined hand. “No, I doubt it. Let it go, let it go.”
“Will there be anything else, m’Dame?”
D’Embry ran a hand through dry, whitened hair, glancing sourly out the window to the damp morning. “No. You may return to your other duties.”
“Thank you, m’Dame. Oh, Karl’s asked me to remind you that Kaethe Oldin of the Trading Families has entered the Center. You’d asked to see her today. Did you want her sent up immediately?”
“Shit,” d’Embry said, loudly, then smiled at the shock Stanee tried unsuccessfully to mask. “Surely, child, you didn’t think we relics lack the words to utter a curse?”
A tentative grin.
“Send her in, Stanee. I wish I could avoid it today, but why ruin a perfectly awful morning.” She sighed, then frowned as a twinge of pain accompanied her next inhalation. “That’s all.” She reached out with a quick gesture. The screen flickered and went dark, receding into the floor. D’Embry sat back, gingerly testing her breathing and awaiting Oldin’s entrance.
Kaethe Oldin was tall and rather too heavy for the standards of Alliance beauty—the legacy of low-gravity life. Yet she carried it well. Her demeanor spoke of confidence in her appearance. The face was angular, a denial of the body’s weight. Above high cheekbones, her eyes were large, dark, and impressive. The woman evidently knew the impression they made, for her eyebrows were gilt, drawing immediate attention to the walnut pupils below. The stamp of FitzEvard Oldin, head of the Oldin conglomerate, was in his granddaughter. Her attitude told d’Embry more than she wished to know—Oldin strode into the Regent’s office with no hint of timidity, nor did her gaze move from the Regent to the soundsculpture in a corner of the room or the animo-painting on one wall; her entire presence exuded purpose. When she stood before d’Embry’s desk, it was with one hand on her hip, the other thrust into the pocket of her pants.
“M’Dame Oldin, the Alliance is always pleased to welcome a member of the Trading Families.” The words came fluidly from her, but the Regent’s intonation was deliberately cold and removed. It’s so easy to fall into after all the standards of practice—that aloof Diplo manner. It’s been so long that it sometimes becomes the reality and not the mask. And it’s far too late for me to change. “I once knew your grandfather. You remind me of him.”
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