by Dave Duncan
“I want an explanation for that scene yesterday! You told me that Marradi had put his villa at your disposal.”
Toby met his glare squarely. “He did, senor. I suspect his sister bears me a grudge, and the problem is of her devising.”
“The word in Florence is that the duchessa has sworn to have your hide for a rug and certain other parts of you as paperweights.”
“I have done nothing to provoke her enmity.”
“Obviously doing nothing was the trouble. Demons have no fury like a woman scorned, Constable.” The don’s smirk implied that he had not made the same mistake and his information had been collected firsthand, which was certainly possible.
Hamish was scrabbling in his papers. “A note arrived from Il Volpe this morning, Captain-General. He apologizes for the misunderstanding. The meeting may proceed at Cafaggiolo as planned.”
All very fine, but a private apology would not begin to undo the damage of that very public snub.
“Typical republican stupidity!” said the don. “Never apologize, under any circumstances.”
Hamish had not finished. “There is also a note from podestà Origo. He says that the prince has absolutely forbidden any meetings until he arrives in Florence. He does not say when that will be.”
“Sometimes republicans don’t seem so bad,” Toby remarked glumly. “Does the idiot think the war will wait on his pleasure?”
After a tense silence, the don said, “Who was corning?”
Toby had been trying to keep the don and the proposed meeting well apart, but he could not refuse his nominal superior information when he asked for it, especially after the brilliant save the man had improvised in the loggia yesterday. He passed the question to Hamish.
“There was a letter in last night from Rome. The College will send Captain-General Villari. That’s everyone we invited! Ercole Abonio from Milan—and he’s bringing di Gramasci of the Black Lances. The Stiletto from Venice. Mezzo will come if his health improves; otherwise he’ll send Gioberti or Desjardins.”
The don raised aristocratic eyebrows. “Mezzo?”
“Paride Mezzo, collaterale of the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies.” No one but Hamish ever bothered to use that formal name for Naples. He just liked the sound of it. “We were about to invite the small guns: Verona, Bologna, Genoa—”
“Bah! They don’t matter. They do what Milan and Venice and Florence tell them, and those three have no choice but to cooperate.”
“They have some very competent soldiers,” Toby protested.
“We do not need advice.” From the don, that we was a remarkable concession, unless he had just taken to classifying himself as royalty. “The keys are Naples and Rome—Naples because it has the men, and Rome because it has the hierocracy for hexers. It also has to let the Neapolitans march through. Get those two into the coalition, and we may have a chance. At least we’ll bloody the foe. The Swiss?”
“We can try. They’re as biddable as cats.”
“I assume that the real purpose of the orgy was to get you elected comandante?”
“Would be nice,” Toby admitted. “But I do want to discuss strategy. We need to plan how to resist the invasion. We can’t know where until we know which way Nevil’s coming.”
“Make up your mind, Constable. If you want to be elected jefe, then you bring in every little town that can field a pikeman. They’ll all vote for you because Florence is less of a threat than any of the other four, but they’ll never agree on anything else. If you need to decide whose crops are going to get burned, then you leave them out, all of them.” Whatever illusions Don Ramon pursued, he was never stupid. He had a much better grasp of politics than he normally cared to admit.
“Another thing we must talk about is gramarye,” Toby said. “We don’t have a single hexer, and I’ve heard that the College is being absurdly uncooperative. If all the senior condottieri unite to appeal to Rome, then perhaps the hierocracy will bend a little.”
“What need have you of hexers if you have one good shaman?”
Toby had registered Hamish’s slack-jawed astonishment a split second before that new voice at his back spun him around.
A bizarre figure came limping across the courtyard toward them. It was short and completely enveloped in a floating costume of many colors and many parts—panels and swatches in green and brown and gray, bedecked with ribbons and lace, beads and embroidery, bunches of feathers and wisps of grass, a design that was either completely random or fraught with great meaning. Some parts of it looked new, others were grubby and worn by many years of use. The dainty, pointed chin suggested a woman, but she might be a young girl, or even a boy. Her hair and the upper part of her face were hidden by a blindfold and an elaborate headdress. Around her neck hung a drum as large as a meal sieve, which she steadied against her hip with one small brown hand.
Obviously she had just come out of the villa, but how had she passed the guards in there? How had she even entered the camp unchallenged? The hob was not reacting as it did to gramarye. Was this one of the camp brats playing a joke?
To his credit, the don remained on his stool. A slight narrowing of his eyes was the only sign of tension as he crossed his legs and leaned back to rest his elbows on the table. “And who might you be?”
She smiled, revealing a perfect set of sparkling white teeth. “Are you not in need of a hexer?” Her voice had a singsong accent and a curious huskiness. “And are you not all faithful children of His Splendor the Khan, who has sent his son to direct you? Who doubts that the illustrious prince has sent his personal shaman to be your guide and protector against the demons of the foe?”
Toby did, but he bowed. Hamish just glowered.
The don frowned. “A battlefield is not a fit place for a woman!”
“Who is it a fit place for?”
For a moment he bristled at such heresy, then twirled up his mustache, which was usually a sign of amusement. He rose gracefully and bowed. “Don Ramon de Nuñez y Pardo at your service, madonna.”
“And I am Toby Longdirk.”
“Who does not know you? Am I not Sorghaghtani? And is not Chabi my eyes, who found you?” The shaman raised an arm, and the great white owl floated down to settle on it, then shuffled sideways until it stood on her shoulder. The shaman was not just a boy playing pranks.
The don had not been aware of the owl.
Hamish said, “How do we know that you are sent by the prince and not the Fiend?”
“Are you not still breathing?” Chuckling, Sorghaghtani perched on a stool and arranged her drum on her lap. She ran fingertips over the skin, raising barely audible tremors like distant gunfire. Her hands and the visible part of her face had a brownish olive cast that was not European. Inside those extraordinary hodgepodge draperies she might be young or old, but there could not be very much of her. She was brazenly sure of herself and her owl—nothing else was provable at the moment. “Is your imp distressed by my presence, Little One?”
Toby assumed she was speaking to him, as the owl was staring in his direction. “No. Do you keep a spirit immured in your pet?”
“Who is the pet and who the keeper? Is it wise of you to arrange your council and not include the illustrious Neguder?”
“I have never heard of anyone called Neguder.” Toby was starting to believe he was holding this conversation with the bird and not the woman. She was inhumanly motionless, except for the resonant tremor of her fingers on the drum and the movement of her lips as she spoke.
“Who else would be military advisor to the splendid prince?”
“Is he competent?” barked the don.
The owl turned its head in his direction. “Competent?” the shaman shrilled. “Who asks if a Tartar general is competent?”
“I do. Is he?”
“How could he be, when all preferment in the army is based on birth, when the Horde has not fought a war in two centuries, when all the skills of the steppes are forgotten and the swords rusted? Who would trust a man
who drinks himself to stupidity every night?”
The don looked ready to eat his mustache. “Then why should I invite him to anything?”
“Will you defy the express command of illustrious Prince Sartaq, noble son of Ozberg Khan, your exalted liege lord?”
“Show me this command!”
“Can you not wait and ask him yourself?”
“Why,” snapped the don, “do you always answer questions with questions?”
“Does it annoy you?”
“Yes it does.”
The woman smiled.
Hamish leaned across the table, peering at her blindfold to see if it was genuine. “Why should we trust you? How do we know you are not sent by the enemy? Or are just a fake? How old are you?” He was seriously annoyed
“Will you believe in me when I give you such boils on your backside that you cannot sit down?”
“Do that, and I’ll wring your bird’s neck and make it into soup. Why are you blindfolded?”
“If Chabi must be my eyes, will not the noon sun be too bright for her?”
“Well, yes, but …” Hamish straightened up. Frowning, he fell silent as he tried to puzzle out what that answer-question implied. At least the shaman had taken his mind off Lisa.
26
They might be violent by nature, but soldiers of fortune were rarely monsters. The men of the Don Ramon Company were as concerned for the welfare of their souls as most other men, as heedful of the guidance of good spirits, and as abhorrent of demons’ mindless evil. They were reasonably devout—but only reasonably. They would have as soon trusted their opponents not to use gramarye against them as they would have gone into battle wearing paper helmets. Only gramarye could fight gramarye, so the death of the company hexer had been the cause of much foreboding. If Longdirk tried to lead them to war before he found a credible replacement for the late Karl Fischart, he would march alone. Could they accept a woman? Even more unlikely, could they accept a shaman, whose style of conjuration would be so unfamiliar to them?
Could he? It was to be expected that the Tartar prince would show interest in the victor of Trent, but for Sartaq to assign his personal shaman to one of the smaller mercenary companies out of all the dozens in Italy was a gift horse with a very large mouth indeed. Was Sorghaghtani what she said she was? Whom did she serve? Hamish did not want to trust her, although he could not explain how he would test any adept for hidden loyalties. Toby was prepared to accept her because the hob seemed to. Either she was a hexer of such enormous power that she could blind the hob, or else she meant no harm. If he vouched for her, Hamish would go along, and the don probably would. How about the rest of the Company?
Sorghaghtani herself asked that question before he did. She also inquired why he did not invite all the officers to meet her at sunset in the courtyard and why he did not show her to her quarters in the meantime.
Since Fischart’s death, the adytum held no spiritual threat to disturb the hob. Toby could go there now and had even inspected it a few days previously with the idea of turning it into a gunpowder store, eventually deciding it was too close to the villa. He conducted the little shaman there. She seemed pleased with the building and asked why he did not leave her to get on with her work.
He walked by it a few times during the day and each time heard her drum throbbing away inside as if she were performing some sort of shamanistic spring cleaning, but the hob paid no attention. Twice he tapped on the door to ask if she needed food and neither time was there any answer, but when he went to fetch her at sunset, she came out to meet him with her drum slung around her neck, all ready to go. An instant later the owl swooped down to settle on her shoulder.
“Do you need food, madonna?”
“Who? Why give me titles? If my mother called me Sorghaghtani, is that not good enough for you? Who can quest in the spirit world with a full stomach?” She hobbled off along the path. She was blindfolded, although the light would not bother her owl now. He could not tell whether her awkward gait meant that she was old or just badly shod. For all he knew, there was an adolescent inside that grotesque costume.
He caught up with her, staying on the non-owl side. “Have you cleansed the adytum of evil influences, Sorghaghtani, the shadow Oreste mentioned?”
“Have you sharpened the pikes, Little One?”
“You would rather I did not ask you questions?”
“Is not one of us enough?”
He could not tell if she was being humorous, since her face was hidden—he was so much taller than she that he could not even see the owl’s goggle-eyed stare. He tried again. “I have assembled the officers. Will you tell me what you propose to do?”
“Why cannot you wait and see?”
“Do you ever say anything that is not a question?”
“Why do you ask?”
Toby sighed. “I’m beginning to wonder.”
She chuckled, and that was an improvement.
“I have seen your owl many times in the last few weeks, and heard a drum. Was that you?”
“Who else?”
“Why were you spying on me?”
“Was I spying or just trying to find you?”
“I assume when you answer like that … I mean, I take that answer to mean that you were trying to find me.”
“Do you?”
This was becoming more than a little irritating. “Warn me what you plan tonight, Sorghaghtani, because the hob—my imp as you call it—will not tolerate gramarye.”
“Have I vexed it yet, Little One? Would it behave so well if I were a danger to you? How much will it do your bidding?”
“I try not to let it do anything. If I do, it will soon learn to bypass my controls and then overpower me. The tutelary at Montserrat warned me of that many times. Let sleeping demons lie.”
The shaman chortled. “Tutelaries? You always believe tutelaries? Why do you carry it so strangely in your heart?”
“I do not carry it willingly at all. It cannot be exorcised, for we have grown too much together.”
“Think you I cannot see that? Will not both become one soon?”
“Not soon. In many years perhaps, and I can only hope that then I will be the one who survives.”
She did not offer her opinion of his chances.
Even before the horrors of Trent, Toby Longdirk had seen more manifestations of gramarye than most men, but not all of it had been violent and destructive. In the days before he learned to suppress its antics, the hob had often played tricks around him—often embarrassing, as when he found pretty things collecting in his pockets, sometimes deadly, but once in a while very convenient, almost as if it could think and were trying to please. So he knew gramarye, and yet Sorghaghtani’s séance that evening was unlike anything he had ever witnessed before. It was subtle and stunningly effective, and the hob never stirred.
The courtyard was deeply shadowed, lit by a willowy moon in the pink dusk and the gleam of a few candles inside the villa itself. After the long-awaited payday, not all the officers of the Company were available to attend a council or competent to understand what was happening if they did, but the don had collected at least a score of them, perhaps thirty. They stood in small groups around the edges, under the trellises, staying well back, as if frightened the new hexer would turn them into goats to demonstrate her skills.
Toby presented Sorghaghtani, personal shaman to His Highness Prince Sartaq. He mentioned how honored and fortunate the Don Ramon Company was to have acquired such a hexer. The resulting silence might have come straight out of one of the age-old Etruscan tombs that were being excavated around Tuscany. Unless these men could be convinced, they would not persuade the rank and file.
“Are you always so mud-headed?” Sorghaghtani demanded shrilly. “What must I show you? Will you give me your hand, Little One, and stand at my back lest I fall off?”
Clutching his fingers in a powerful grip, she scrambled up on a stool and then the stone table itself. Evidently she could move as nimbly
as a child when she wanted to, and his estimate of her age plummeted. She sat down cross-legged, gave the owl a wrist to step onto, and raised it overhead. Chabi spread her wings and floated away into the night. Sorghaghtani squirmed a few times as if to make herself comfortable on the hard tabletop, then settled the drum on her lap. “Do they understand that they must not speak, lest they anger the spirits?”
Of course they did not, so Toby passed the word. He stood ready behind the shaman and waited to see what she could do to convince this case-hardened crew of mercenaries.
For a long time she just drummed, but no one protested or made jokes or tried to leave. The rhythms were hypnotic and also restless, seeming to sing back and forth to their own echoes, although normally there were no echoes in the courtyard. To and fro, in and out, the sound went, surging and falling, then stopped abruptly, leaving a silence taut enough to raise the hair on a man’s neck. The shaman sat hunched over her drum, motionless. When she spoke, the voice that rang out was female, but not hers.
“Mario! I, Angelica, speak. I need you. The mare foals tonight.”
In the far comer, Mario Chairmontesi cried out.
Then another voice came from Sorghaghtani’s throat, and this time Toby knew it, although he had not heard it for almost three years. “Ramon! Francisca am I. The new casa is ready, but servants … oh, to find servants!”
Wherever the don was standing in the courtyard, he did not comment, or if he did, the sound was lost in another voice: “Martin, my child! Hilda. So tall you are, so strong! Hilda with Ehingen am.”
At that, Toby really did feel the hairs on his neck prickle, for Ehingen could only be a spirit or tutelary, so the woman who had spoken was dead. But he had no time to wonder what Martin Grossman was thinking before another spoke, and another, faster and jostling, as if the voices were struggling to take their turn in the shaman’s mouth—not wives or lovers, only mothers, and more than half of them naming the spirit that now cherished them. Most spoke in Italian, but others used German or French or Spanish. Some, like Hilda, spoke as if to children. One just wailed incoherendy, perhaps a wraith with no tutelary to care for it. One said plaintively, “You never knew me.” The audience was reacting. Men tried to answer, or ask questions, or call back those who had spoken and fallen silent. Others tried to hush them as they waited for their own message. Some merely howled. Many wept as the significance sank in, and the weeping was infectious.