(Shadowmarch #2) Shadowplay

by Tad Williams

  “Nikos…” Dorza waved weakly. “Let him go. You cannot want anything from him.”

  “Ah, but I can and do. I want him beside me while you answer my questions.”

  The captain’s eyes darted away from his captive child, scanning the rooms for other bandits. Daikonas Vo could all but hear the man’s thoughts: Surely so confident a criminal as this one must have confederates. There were no confederates, of course, which was how Vo liked it, but it also forced caution. Dorza was a head taller than him; if Vo hurt the boy the captain would be on him like a mad bear.

  Vo wanted to head off the next problem too—anything to keep the man calm as long as possible. Any moment now he would notice the body crumpled on the floor just behind the door. Better simply to tell him.

  “I have bad news for you, Captain Dorza. Your wife is dead. She caught me by surprise. I did not know she was in the house. She was a brave one, it must be said. She tried to kill me with that club—a belaying pin, I think you sailors call it? So I had to kill her. I am sorry. I did not wish to do it but it is done, and…ah, ah, careful…if you let anger get the best of you the boy will die, too.”

  “Tedora…!” Dorza looked around frantically, at last saw the blood-soaked shape behind the door. “You…you demon!” he shouted at Vo. “Nushash burn you, I’ll send you to hell!” His eyes, red with tears, widened again. “The other children…!”

  “Are under the bed. They are safe.” Daikonas Vo prodded gently with his long blade at the boy’s gorge, eliciting a squeal of fear. “Now speak to me or this one dies, too. You carried a young woman on your ship. Some say she was Guard Captain Jeddin’s mistress. Where is she now?”

  “I’ll break you…!”

  “Where is she?” He pulled the boy’s chin back until it seemed the skin of his throat, downy with his first beard, might part without even the touch of the blade.

  “I don’t know, curse you! She stayed here with us but I threw her out when I found out what she was!”

  “Liar.” He pinked the boy just enough to make a drop of blood grow, wobble, then slide down into the neck of his shirt.

  “It’s true! She came to me with a note from Jeddin, saying to bring her here to Hierosol where he would meet us. I did not know she was the autarch’s wife!”

  “And you didn’t know Jeddin was a traitor? You are surprisingly ignorant for a veteran captain.”

  “I didn’t know anything until we arrived here. She hid it from me. She came with orders to leave that evening—the very evening when…when Jeddin was arrested.”

  “I do not think I like your answer. I think I will take one of the boy’s eyes out and then we will try again.”

  “By the gods, I swear I have told you all I know! It was only a few days ago that I threw her out—she is doubtless still in the city! You can find her!”

  “Did she know anyone here?”

  “I don’t think so. That was why she stayed with me—she and the child had nowhere else.”

  “A child? She had a child?”

  “Not hers, he was too old. A little mute boy—her servant, I think.” The captain ran his thick fingers through his beard. Though it was evening, and cool, his face was running with sweat. “And that is all I know. Here, even if you kill my son I can tell you nothing more, I swear on the blood of Nushash! On the autarch’s head!”

  “Swearing by the ruler you betrayed? Not a good choice of oaths, I think.” Daikonas Vo experimentally lifted his blade until it hovered just a fingernail’s breadth from the boy’s eye, but the captain only wept. It seemed he truly had nothing more to say.

  “Very well…” Vo began, then, with a fluidity learned only through long practice, snapped the knife across the room into Axamis Dorza’s throat. A good trick, Vo thought, but bad when you miss. The man’s hands flew to his neck, eyes wide with surprise. Gurgling, he sank to his knees.

  “It had to be,” Vo said. “Be glad I give you a quick death, Captain. You would not have liked to find yourself in the hands of the autarch’s special craftsmen.”

  Shrieking like a much younger child, the boy suddenly began to thrash in Daikonas Vo’s arms, trying to break away. Vo cursed his own inattentiveness—he had let his grip loosen when he threw the knife—but quickly managed to get the boy’s arm twisted behind his back again. He turned him then, put a boot in his backside, and shoved the youth’s head so hard into the table that the whole mass of oak tipped and turned. The boy was stunned but not dead. He lay bloody-headed in the broken crockery, weeping.

  An instant later Vo was himself upended and knocked to the ground, a huge, red-smeared thing atop him like an angry mastiff. Dorza had not bled out as fast as Vo had thought he would, a misjudgment he was regretting already. Something smashed hard against his head, a blow he only partially managed to deflect with his forearm, and then the bloody face was right above his, eyes goggling with final rage and madness. Vo rolled so that he was on his side, then his hand went down his leg and another dagger came out of his boot. A moment later it was beneath the captain’s ribs, and the man’s bulk was jerking and stiffening even as Vo held him fast—as intimate as lovemaking, but somehow less distasteful. When the movement stopped, Vo rolled the corpse off and stood, wondering how he would get all the blood off his jerkin.

  The boy was still on the floor, but he had drawn himself up onto his hands and knees, head wagging like an old dog’s, blood drizzling down the side of his face.

  “Someday…” he said, “someday I’ll find you…and kill you.”

  “Ah…Nikos, was it?” Vo wiped his dagger on the captain’s shirt before returning it to his boot, then tugged the other one loose from the gristle of the dead man’s throat. “I doubt it. I don’t leave enemies behind me, so there won’t be a someday, you see.” He took a few steps forward. Before the boy could pull away Daikonas Vo had his hair gripped tight, then slashed him beneath the throat like a pig held for slaughter.

  Only now, as the boy wriggled in the spreading pool of red, did Vo hear the muffled sobbing of the children under the mattress, doing their best to be quiet but—understandably, given the circumstances—failing. He heaved up the heavy mass of the table and threw it on top of the pallet, then poured lantern oil on the floor and splashed it on the walls. He took a smoldering stick from the oven and tossed it over his shoulder as he went out the door. Flames had already begun to lick up the walls inside the house as he walked, swiftly but without obvious hurry, down the steep hill road.

  So there’s a child with her, he thought. One of the boy-eunuchs had disappeared from the Seclusion on the same night, but that escape had been linked only to the traitorous Favored Luian, not the girl he sought: Vo, like everyone else, assumed the boy had taken advantage of the confusion to run away, and now he was displeased with himself for making such an obvious but unwarranted assumption.

  Well, if the child’s with her, it will make them that much easier to find. He could see yellow light gleaming fitfully on the roofs of the houses he was passing, which meant that up the hill the captain’s house must be burning well. Too bad about the children. He had nothing against children particularly, but he wanted no one knowing what he had questioned the captain about.

  Yes, this might not be too difficult after all, he thought with satisfaction. Hiersol was full of girls and young women, but how many of them were traveling with a mute boy? Tracking down his quarry would be only a matter of time and effort, and Daikonas Vo had never been afraid of a little hard work.

  12

  Two Yisti Knives

  When Zhafaris the Prince of Evening came to his manhood he became lord of all the gods. He took many wives, but highest among them were his nieces Ugeni and Shusayem, and I tell truth when I say they were as alike as two tamarind seeds. Soon both were heavy with the children of Zhafaris, but Ugeni was frightened and hid her children away, so that no one knew they had been born. However, Shusayem, her sister, brought forth her own children, Argal, Efiyal, and Xergal, and called them the heirs of Zhaf
aris.

  —from The Revelations of Nushash, Book One

  BRIONY SUPPOSED IT WAS POSSIBLE for a person to feel more exhausted than she did at this moment, dirtier, more sodden with sweat, and less ladylike, but she could not quite imagine it.

  I wanted to be treated like a boy, didn’t I? At the moment she was sitting on the ground sucking air, watching Shaso drink from a jar of watered wine. The old man had recovered some of his old bowstring-taut muscle during the days upon days they had been practicing; the sinews of his forearms writhed like snakes as he lifted the heavy jar. I didn’t want to be forced to wear confining dresses, or to be treated like a fragile blossom. Well, I’ve got my wish.

  Thank you, Zoria, she prayed with only the smallest tinge of irony. Every day you teach me something new.

  “Are you ready?” Shaso demanded, wiping his bearded mouth with the back of his hand. After keeping himself shaved and carefully trimmed all Briony’s life he had now let his whiskers and hair grow wild, and looked more than ever like some ancient oracle, the kind that had sailed across the sea on rafts to found the gods’ temples when Hierosol was little more than a fishing village.

  She groaned and sat up. No doubt the old oracles had been just as hard-minded as Shaso. It explained a lot. “Ready, I suppose.”

  “You have learned much,” he said when she was standing again. “But wooden sticks are poor weapons in many ways, and there are tricks that can only be learned with a true blade.” He squatted down and unfolded the leather bundle from which he had withdrawn the wooden dowels each day. Inside it lay four more objects, each wrapped in its own piece of oiled leather. “The first day we came here,” Shaso said, “I asked the boon of Effir dan-Mozan that I could choose among some of his trade goods. These were the best pieces he had.” He flipped open the wrappings, revealing four daggers, one pair larger than the other. The larger had curved crosspieces, the smaller barely any crosspieces at all. “They are Sanian steel, of excellent quality.”

  Her hand stole toward the knives, but stopped. “Sanian?”

  “Sania is a country in the west of Xand. The Yisti metalworkers there are of Funderling stock, and make weapons that all Xandians covet. These four would cost you the price of a pair of warhorses.”

  “That much?”

  “Yisti weapons are said to be charmed.” He reached down and took one of the larger daggers in his big hand, balancing it on his palm. He pointed at the simple, elegant hilt. “Polished tortoiseshell,” he said. “Sacred to their god.”

  “Are they really magic?”

  He looked up at her with amusement in his eyes. “No weapon can make a fighter out of a clumsy dolt, but a fine piece of steel will do what its wielder needs it to do. If it saves your life or takes the life from another, that is as powerful a magic as you could hope for, do you not think?”

  Briony was a little breathless, and having taciturn Shaso turn poetic on her did not help. She reached out her finger and traced the length of one of the smaller, needle-sharp daggers. “Beautiful.”

  “And deadly.” He picked up two of the knives, one large and one small, then took out their sheaths as well, hard, tanned leather with cords that could be tied around a waist or a leg. He scabbarded the two blades, then used the cords to secure the sheaths to the daggers’ hilts. “Do that with yours, too,” he said. “That way, we will not cut off any of each other’s important parts as we work.”

  They worked for another hour at least as the sun slid down behind the walls and the courtyard filled with soothing shadows. Briony, who had thought she could not lift her arm one more time, instead found herself revived by the fascination of sparring with actual blades, of the weight and balance of them, the new shapes they made in her hand. She was delighted to find she could block Shaso’s own blade with the crosshaft of her larger knife and then disarm him with no more than a flick of the wrist. When she had managed the trick a few times, he showed her how to move in below that sudden flick with the small knife, stabbing underneath her opponent’s arm. It was strangely intimate, and as the point of the leather-clad blade bounced against his rib she pulled back, suddenly queasy. For the first time she truly felt what she was doing, learning how to stab someone to death, to cut skin and pierce eyes, to let out a man’s guts while she stared him in the face.

  The old man looked at her for a long moment. “Yes, you must get close to kill with a knife—close enough to kiss, almost. Umeyana, the blood-kiss, we call it. It takes courage. If you fail to land a deadly blow your enemy will be able to grab and hold. Most will be bigger than you.” He frowned, then sank to his knees and began putting his blades back in their oilcloth wrapping. “That is enough for today. You have done well, Highness.”

  She tried to hand him the knives she had been using but he shook his head. “They are yours, Princess. From now on, I do not want you apart from them. Examine your clothes and find places you can keep them and then draw them without snagging. Many a soldier has died with his knife or sword-hilt caught in his belt, useless.”

  “They…they’re mine?”

  He nodded, eyes cold and bright. “The responsibility for one’s own safety is no gift,” he said. “It is much more pleasant to be a child and let someone else bear the burden. But you do not have that luxury anymore, Briony Eddon. You lost that with your castle.”

  That stung. For a moment she thought he was being intentionally cruel to her, humbling her further so she would be easier for him to mold. Then she realized that he meant every word he said: Briony, offspring of a royal family, was used to people who gave gifts with the idea of being remembered and needed—to make themselves indispensable. Shaso was giving her the only kind of gift he trusted, one that would make her better able to survive without Shaso’s own help. He wanted to be unnecessary.

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “Go now and get something to eat.” Suddenly he would not meet her eye. “It has been a long day’s exercise.”

  Strange, stubborn, sour old man! The only way he knows how to show love is by teaching me how to kill people.

  The thought arrested her, and she stopped to watch the Tuani walk away. It is love, she thought. It must be. And after all we did to him.

  She sat in the growing twilight for some time, thinking.

  “How well do you know Lord Shaso?” she asked Idite. As much as she had been offended at first by not eating with the men of the house, she had come to enjoy these quiet evenings with the hadar’s female inhabitants. She still could not speak the women’s tongue and doubted she ever would, but some of the others beside Idite had proved able to speak Briony’s once they had got over their initial shyness.

  “Oh, not at all, Briony-zisaya.” Idite always made the name sound like a child’s counting game, one-two-three, one-two-three. “I have never met him before you came to our door twelve nights ago.”

  “But you speak of him as though you had known him all your life.”

  “It is true that I have, in some ways.” Idite allowed a delicate frown to crease her lips as she considered. One of the young women whispered a translation to the others. “He is as famous as any man who ever lived, except for of course the Great Tuan, his cousin. I mean the old Great Tuan, of course. Where his eldest son is, the new Tuan, no one knows. He escaped before the autarch’s armies reached Nyoru, and some say he is hiding in the desert, waiting to return and lift the autarch’s cruel hand from our homeland. But he has waited a long time already.” She forced a little laugh. “But listen to me, talking and talking and saying nothing, croaking like an ibis. Lord Shaso’s name is known to every Tuani, his deeds spoken of around the cooking-fire. People still argue over Shaso’s Choice, of course—so much so that the old Tuan made it a crime to discuss it, because people died from the arguments.”

  Briony shook her head. “Shaso’s…choice?”

  “Yes.” Idite turned to the other women and said something in Tuani—Briony could make out Shaso’s name. The women all nodded solemnly, some saying, “se
sa, sesa,” which Briony had come to learn meant “yes, yes.”

  It was strange to think of Shaso as someone who had his own history—his own legends, even, although she had known that in his day he had been a much-respected warrior. “What choice, Idite? I mean, surely you can talk of it now without breaking the law. He’s only a few rooms away.”

  Idite laughed. “I was thinking of Tuan. There is no law here in Marrinswalk.” In her accented speech it became “Mah-reens-oo-woke,” an exotic name that for a moment made it seem an exotic place to Briony, too. “But there is custom, and sometimes that is as strong as law. His choice was to honor the vow he made on the battlefield, to a foreign king, to leave his country and live in exile. Even when the Autarch of Xis attacked us, Shaso was not allowed to return and defend us. Some say that without his strong hand, without the fear he made when he led our armies, the Great Tuan had no chance against Xis.”

  It took Briony a moment to understand. “You’re talking about how he came to serve my father? How he came to Southmarch?”

  “Yes, of course—I almost forget.” Idite lifted her hands in a gesture of embarrassment. “You are the daughter of Olin,”—“Aw-leen” was how she rendered it. “I meant no offense.”

  “I’m not offended, I’m just…tell me. Tell me about it.”

  “But…you must know all, yourself.”

  “Not what it meant to your people.” It was Briony’s turn to feel shamed. “I’ve never thought much about Shaso’s life before now. Of course, that’s in part because he’s so closemouthed. Until a few months ago, I didn’t even know he had a daughter.”

  “Ah, yes, Hanede.” Idite shook her head. “Very sad.”

  “I was told she died because…because Dawet ruined her. Made love to her and then deserted her. Is that true?”

  Idite looked a little alarmed. Some of the other women, bored or confused by the long stretch of conversation in Briony’s tongue, seemed to beg for translation. Idite waved them to silence. “I do not know the facts—I am only a merchant’s wife and it is not for me to speak of noble ones like the Dan-Heza and the Dan-Faar. They are above me like stars—like you are yourself, Lady.”