The Face of Chaos Part 15

'No, I'm not from Bal.u.s.trus,' Samlor said. He straightened up. holding the wine bottle. He pulled the cork with his teeth and spat it on to the floor before he went on. 'I came to buy information from you,' Samlor said, and he slurped a mouthful from the bottle.

The mask did not move. An index finger lifted minusculely for the chopping motion that would have ended the interview. Samlor spat the fluid in his mouth across the desk, splattering the topmost ledger and the lap of the seated man.

The hawk-masked leader lunged upward, then froze as his motion made the lamp flame gutter. There was a dagger aimed at Samlor's ribs from one side and a long-bladed razor an inch from his throat on the other; but the Cirdonian knew, and the guards knew ... and the man across the desk most certainly knew that, dying or not, Samlor could not be prevented from hurling the bottle into the lamp past which he had spat so nearly.

'That's right,' said Samlor with the bottle poised. 'Naphtha. And all I want to do is talk to you nicely, sir, so send your men away.'

While the leader hesitated, Samlor hawked and spat. It would take days to clear the petroleum foulness from his mouth, and the fumes rising into his sinuses were already giving him a headache.

'All right,' said the leader at last. 'You can wait below, boys.' He settled himself carefully back on his stool, well aware of the stain on his tunic and the way the ink ran where the clear fluid splashed his ledgers.

'The knife,' said Samlor when the guard who had disarmed him started to follow his fellow through the trap. An exchange of eyes behind masks; a nod from the leader; and the weapon dropped on the floor before the guard slipped into the alley. When the door closed above the men, Samlor set the potential firebomb in a corner where it was not likely to be b.u.mped.

'Sorry,' said the caravan-master with a nod towards the leader and the blotted page. 'I needed to talk to you, and there wasn't much choice. My niece was stolen last month, not by you, but by Beysibs. Some screwball cult of them fishermen.'

'Who told you where I was?' asked the black man in a voice whose mildness would not have deceived a child.

'A fellow in Ranke, one eye, limps,' Samlor lied with a shrug. 'He'd worked for you but ran when the roof fell in.'

The leader's fists clenched. 'The pa.s.sword - he didn't tell you that!'

'I just mumbled my name. Your boys heard what they expected.' Samlor deliberately turned his back on the outlaw to end the line of discussion. 'You won't have contacts with their religious loonies, not directly. But you'll know their thieves, and a thief wili've heard something, know something. Sell me a Beysib thief, leader. Sell me a thief from the Setmur clan.'

The other man laughed. 'Sell? What are you offering to pay?'

Samlor turned, shrugging. 'The price of a four year old girl? That'd run to about four coronations in Ranke, but you know the local market better. Or the profit on the thief you give me. Figure what he'll bring you in a lifetime ...

Name a figure, leader. I don't expect you to realize what this giri means to n", but - name a figure.'

'I won't give you a thief,' said the masked man. He paused deliberately and raised a restraining finger, though the Cirdonian had not moved. 'And I won't charge you a copper. I'll give you a name: Hort.'

Samlor frowned. 'A Beysib?'

The mask trembled negation. 'Local boy. A fisherman's son. He and his father got picked up by Beysib patrols at sea before the invasion. He speaks their language pretty well - better than any of them I know speaks ours. And I think he'll help you if he can.' The mask hid the speaker's face, but the smile was in his voice as well as he added, 'You needn't tell him who sent you. He's not one of mine, you see.'

Samlor bowed. 'I couldn't tell him,' he said. 'I don't know who you are.' He reached for the latch of the trap door. 'I thank you. sir.'

'Wait a minute,' called the man behind the desk. Samlor straightened and met the hooded eyes. 'Why are you so sure I won't call down to have you spitted the moment you're through this door?'

The Cirdonian shrugged again. 'Business reasons,' he said. 'I'm a businessman too. I understand risks. You'll be out of this place-' he waved at the dingy room - 'before I'm clear of the alley. No need to kill me to save a bolt-hole that you've written off already. And there's not one chance in a thousand that I could get past what you have waiting below, but -' calloused palm up, another shrug- 'in the dark ... You have people looking for you, sir, that's obvious. But none of them so far would be willing to burn this city down block by block to flush you, if he had to.'

Samlor reached again for the latch, paused again. 'Sir,' he said earnestly, 'you may think I've lied to you tonight... and perhaps I have. But I'm not lying to you now. On the honour of my House.' He clenched his fist over the medallion of Heqt on his breast.

The mask nodded. As Samlor dropped through the trap into darkness, the harsh voice called from above, 'Let him go! Let him go, this time!'

There was nothing ugly about the harbour water with the noon sun on it. The froth was pearly, the fish-guts iridescent; and the water itself, whatever its admixture of sewage, was faceted into diamond and topaz across its surface.

Samlor sipped his ale in the dockside cantina as he had done at noon on the past three days. As before, he was waiting for Hort to return with information or the certain lack of it. The Cirdonian wondered what Star saw when she looked around her; and whether she found beauty in it.

There was commotion on one of the quays, easily visible through the cantina's open front. A trio of Beysib had been stepping a new mast into a trawler. As they worked, a squad of cavalry - Beysib also, but richly caparisoned in metals and brocades - had clattered along the quay. The squad halted alongside the boat. The men on the trawler had seemed as surprised as other onlookers when the troopers dismounted and leaped aboard, waggling their long swords in visual emphasis of the orders they shouted.

Nine of the hors.e.m.e.n were involved either in trussing the startled fishermen or acting as horseholders for the rest. The tenth man watched coldly as the others worked. He wore a helmet, gilded or gold, with a feather-tipped triple crest.

When he turned as if in disdain for the proceedings, Samlor saw and recognized his profile. The man was Lord Tudhaliya, the swordsman who had been demonstrating his skill on an Ilsig animal the other day.

The fishermen continued to babble until ropes with slip knots were dropped over their throats. Then they needed all their breath to scramble after the cavalrymen. The troopers remounted with a burst of chirruping cross-chat which sounded undisciplined to the caravan-master, but which detracted nothing from the efficiency of the process. Three of the men tied off the nooses to their saddle pommels. Tudhaliya gave a sharp order and the squad rode at a canter back the way it had come. Citizens with business on the quay dodged hooves as best they might. The fishermen blubbered in terror as they tried to run with the horses. They knew that a misstep meant death, unless the rider to whom they were tethered reined up in time. Nothing Samlor had seen of Lord Tudhaliya suggested his lordship would permit such mercy.

There were half a dozen regulars in the bar, fishermen and fish-merchants. When Samlor looked away from the spectacle, he found the local men staring at him. He gave a scowl of surprise when he noticed them; but even as the locals retreated into their mugs in confusion, Samlor understood why they had looked at him the way they had. The Cirdonian had nothing to do with the arrests on the docks just now; but he had nothing to do with this tavern, either. He had sat here during three noons and drunk ale ... and on the third day, the Beysibs made an arrest on the dock below. To the vulnerable, no coincidence is chance. These fishermen were unusually vulnerable to all the powers of the physical world as well as those of the political one. No wonder the Beysib counterparts of these men had turned to a G.o.d their overlords would not recognize; a personification, perhaps, of mystery and of the typhoons that could sweep the ocean clear of small boats and simple sailors.

Hort slipped into the cantina. He was dressed a little on the gaudy side. Still, he wore his clothes with the self-a.s.surance of a young man instead of a boy's nervous gibing at the world. He raised a finger. The bartender chalked the slate above him and began drawing a mug of ale for the newcomer.

'I'm not sure you want to be seen with me,' Hort muttered to Samlor as he took his ale. 'The fellows they just carried off -' he nodded, as he slurped the brew, towards the trawler bobbing high on its lines with the mast still swinging above it from the sheer legs. 'k.u.mmanni, Anbarbi, Arnuwanda. I talked to them just last night. About what you needed to know.'

'That's why they were arrested?' the caravan-master asked. He tried to keep his voice as calm as if he were asking which tailor had sewn the younger man's jerkin.

'I would to G.o.d I knew,' Hort said with feeling. 'It could be anything.

Tudhaliya is - Minister of Security, I suppose. But he likes to stay close to things. To keep his hand in.'

'And his swords,' Samlor agreed softly. His eyes traced the path the hors.e.m.e.n had taken as they rode off, towards the palace and the dungeons beneath it.

'Would enough money to let you travel be a help?'

Hort shrugged, shuddered. 'I don't know.' He drained his mug and slid it to the bartender for a refill.

'I'm not afraid to be seen with you,' Samlor said. 'But I'm not sure you want to tell me about the - cult - with so many other people around.' He smiled about the cantina. The men there had just furnished him with a tactful way to prod the frightened youth into his story.

Hort drank and shuddered again. He said, 'Oh, I was raised with everyone here.

Omat's my G.o.dfather. They won't tell tales to the Beysib.'

It wasn't the time for Samlor to comment. He a.s.sumed it was obvious anyway.

Anyone will talk if the questions are put with sufficient forcefulness. But Hort must have known that too. The local man was not a coward, and he was not the worse for never having asked questions the way Lord Tudhaliya would. The way Samlor hil Samt had done, when need arose, might Heqt wash him . with mercy when she gathered him in ...

'There's a boat went out last month at the new moon,' Hort said beneath a moustache of beer foam. 'A trawler, but not fishing. Do you know what Death's Harbour is?'

'No.' Samlor had poled a skiff as a boy, when he hunted ducks in the marshes south ofCirdon. He knew little of the sea, however, and nothing at all of the seas around Sanctury.

'Two currents meet,' Hort explained. 'Any flotsam in the sea gets swept into the eye of it. Wrecks, sometimes. And sometimes men on rafts, until the sun dries their skin to parchment shrouding their bones.' He laughed. 'Sorry,' he said. 'I forget what sort of story I meant to tell you.' The smile faded. 'n.o.body fishes in Death's Harbour. The bottom is deeper than anyone here ever set a line.

Scooped out by the currents, I suppose. The fish won't shoal there, so it's no use to us. But a Beysib trawler went there last month, and it's coming back now slower than there's any reason for. Except that it's going to arrive tonight, and the moon is new again tonight.'

'Star's aboard her, then?' Samlor asked and sipped more ale. The brew was bitter, but less bitter than the gall that flooded his mouth at the thought of Star in Beysib hands.

'I think so,' Hort agreed. 'Anbarbi didn't approve. Of any of it, I think, though none of them said what was really going on. We'd seen the boat at sea, my father, all of us from Sanctuary that go to sea ourselves. That's what we talked about, though they didn't much want to talk. But from what Anbarbi let drop, I think there was a child on the trawler. At least when it put out.'

'And it'll dock here this evening?' the Cirdonian said. He had set down his mug and was flexing his hands, open and shut, as if to work the stiffness out of them.

'Oh -' said Hort. He was embarra.s.sed not to be telling his story more in the fashion of an intelligence summary than of an entertainment with the discursions which added body to the tale and coin to the teller's purse. 'No, not here.

There's a cove west a league of Downwind. Smugglers used it until the Beysib came. There are ruins there, older than anybody's sure. A temple, some other buildings. n.o.body much uses them now, though the Smugglers'11 be back when things settle down, I suppose. But the boat from Death's Harbour will put in there at midnight. I think, sir. I tell stories for a living, and I've learned to sew them together from this word and that word I hear. But it doesn't usually matter if my pattern is the same one that the G.o.ds wove to begin with.'

'Well,' Samlor said after consideration, 'I don't think my first look at this place had better be after dark. There'll be a watchman or the like, I suppose ... but we'll deal with that when we find it. I -' he paused and looked straight at the younger man instead of continuing to eye the harbour. 'We agreed that your pay would be the full story when I had it to tell ... and you'll have that.

But it may be I won't be talking much after tonight, so take this,' his clenched hand brushed Hort's flexed to empty into the other's palm, 'and take my friendship. You've - acted as a man in this thing, and you have neither blood nor honour to drive you to it.'

'One thing more,' said the youth. 'The Beysib - the Setmur clan, I mean - are real sailors, and they know their fishing, too ... But there are things they don't know about the harbourages here, around Sanctuary. I don't think they know that there's a tunnel through the east headland of the cove they've chosen for whatever they're going to do.' Hort managed a tight smile. Sweat beaded on his forehead. The risk he was taking by getting involved with the stranger was very real, though most of the specific dangers were more nebulous to him than they were to Samlor. 'One end of the tunnel opens under the corniche of the headland.

You can row right into it at high tide. And when you lift the slab at the other end, you're in the temple itself.'

Hort's coda had drawn from his listener all the awed pleasure that a story well told could bring. The local man stood up, strengthened by the respect of a strong man. 'May your G.o.ds lead you well, sir,' Hort said, squeezing the Cirdonian's hand in leave-taking. 'I look forward to hearing your story.'

The youth strode out of the cantina with a flourish and a nod to the other patrons. Samlor shook his head. In a world that seemed filled with sharks and stonefish, Hort's bright courage was as admirable as it was rare.

To say that Samlor felt like an idiot was to understate matters. It was the only choice he could come up with at short notice, however, and which did not involve others. At this juncture, the Cirdonian was not willing to involve others.

He had rented a mule cart. It had provided a less noticeable method of scouting the cove than a horse would have done. The cart had also transported the punt he had bought to the nearest launching place to the headland that he could find.

The roadstead on which Sanctuary was built was edged mostly by swamps, but the less-sheltered sh.o.r.e to the west had been carved away by storms. The limestone corniche rose ten to fifty feet above the sea, either sheer or with an outward batter. A lookout on the upper rim could often not see a vessel insh.o.r.e but beneath him. That was to Samlor's advantage; but the punt, the only craft the Cirdonian felt competent to navigate, was utterly unsuited to the ocean.

Needs must when the devil drives. Samlor's great shoulders braced the pole against the cliff face, not the shelving bottom. Foam echoed back from the rocks and balanced the surge that had tried to sweep him inward with it. In that moment of stasis, Samlor shot the punt forward another twenty feet. Then the surf was on him again, his muscles flexing on the ten-foot pole as they transferred the sea's power to the rock, again and again.

Samlor had launched the punt at sunset. By now, he had no feeling for time nor for the distance he had yet to struggle across to his once-glimpsed goal. He had a pair of short oars lashed to the forward thwart, but they would have been totally useless for keeping him off this hungry sh.o.r.e. Samlor was a strong man, and determined; but the sea was stronger, and the fire in Samlor's shoulders was beginning to make him fear that the sea was more determined as well.

Instead of spewing back at him, the next wave continued to be drawn into the rock. It became a long tongue, glowing with microorganisms. Samlor had reached the tunnel mouth while he had barely enough consciousness to be aware of the fact.

Even that was not the end of the struggle. The softer parts ofth& rock had been worn away into edges that could have gobbled the skiff like a duckling caught by a turtle. Samlor let the next surge carry him in to the depth of his pole. The phosph.o.r.escence limned a line of bronze hand-holds set into the stone. The powerful Cirdonian dropped his pole into the boat to s.n.a.t.c.h a grip with both hands. He held it for three racking breaths before he could find the strength to drag the punt fully aground, further up the tunnel.

The tunnel was unlighted. Even the plankton cast up by the spray illuminated little more than the surfaces to which it clung. Samlor spent his first several minutes ash.o.r.e striking a spark from flint and steel into the tinder he carried in a wax-plugged tube. At first his fingers seemed as little under his control as the fibres of the wooden pole they had clutched so fiercely. Conscious direction returned to them the fine motor control they would need later in the night.

By the time a spark brightened with yellow flame instead of cooling into oblivion, Samlor's mind was at work again as well. His shoulders still ached while the blood leached fatigue poisons out of his muscles. He had been more tired than this before, however. The very respite from wave-battering increased the Cirdonian's strength.

With the tinder aflame, Samlor lighted the candle of his dark lantern. Then, carrying a ten-gallon cask under one arm and the lantern in the other hand, he began to walk up the gently rising tunnel. The lantern's shutter was open, and its horn lens threw an oval of light before him.

The tunnel was not s.p.a.cious, but a man of Samlor's modest height could walk safely in it by hunching only a little in his strides. He could not imagine who had cut the pa.s.sage through the rock, or why. Sc.r.a.ps - a buckle, a broken knife; a boot even - suggested that the smugglers used it. Samlor could imagine few circ.u.mstances, however, in which it would pay smugglers to off-load beneath the surf-hammered corniche rather than in the shelter of the cove. For them, the tunnel might be useful storage; but the smugglers had not built it, and in all likelihood they had as little knowledge of its intended purpose as Samlor did, or Hort.

Samlor set down the cask at what he estimated was the halfway point along the tunnel. The cask had been an awkward burden in the narrow confines, and its weight of a talent or more was as much as a porter would be expected to carry for even a moderate distance. Because it used muscles in a way that the punt had not, however, the hundred yards Samlor had carried the cask were almost relaxing.

The only thing certain about the escape he hoped to make in a few hours was that he would have very little time. Now the Cir-donian set the cask on end and drew his fighting knife. The blade was double-edged and a foot long. It was stout enough at the cross-hilt to take the shock of a sword and was sharpened to edges that would hold as they cut bronze, rather than something that its owner could shave with. Samlor had razors for shaving. The knife was a different sort of tool.

He set the point at the centre of one of the end-staves, using his left hand to keep the weapon upright. The b.u.t.t cap was bronze, flat on top, and a perfect surface for Samlor to hammer with the heel of his right hand. The blade hummed.

The beechwood cracked and sagged away from the point. Working the knife loose, Samlor then punched across the grain of the other four end staves as well. The line of perforations did not quite open the cask, but they would permit him to smash his heel through the weakened boards quickly when the need arose.

He was more aware than before of the lantern's hot sh.e.l.l as he paced the rest of the tunnel's length. He could hear someone above him when he reached the end of the tunnel. The susurrus could have been anything, wind-driven twigs as easily as the slippers of a guard on the floor above. There was a sharper sound to punctuate that whispering, however; a spear grounded as the man paused, or the tip of a bow. The stone conducted sounds very well, but it conducted them so well that Samlor could not get a precise fix on where the guard was in relation to the trap door. For that matter, the caravan-master had no idea of how well the upward-pivoting door was concealed. It might very well flop open in the centre of the room above.

The good news was that the sounds did not include speech. Either the guard was alone, or the party was more stolid than the random pacing seemed to suggest.

Samlor needed more information than he could get in the tunnel. There would be no better time to learn more. He shuttered his lantern and slid the worn bronze bolt from its socket in the door jamb. There were stone pegs set into the end wall as a sort of one-railed ladder. Samlor set his right foot on the midmost, where his leg was flexed just enough to give him its greatest thrust. His right hand held the dagger while his left readied itself on the trap door. Then the Cirdonian exploded upward like a spring toy.

As it chanced, the door was quite well hidden in an alcove, though the hangings that would once have completed the camouflage were long gone. There was no time to consider might-have-beens, no time for anything but the pantalooned Beysib who turned, membranes flicking in shock across his eyes. He was trying to raise his bow, but there was no time to fend Samlor away with the staff, much less to nock one of the bone-tipped arrows. Samlor punched the smaller man in the pit of the stomach, a rising blow, and the point of the long dagger grated on the Beysib's spine in exiting between his fourth and third ribs.

The Beysib collapsed backwards, his motion helping Samlor free the knife for another victim if one presented himself. None did. The nict.i.tating membrane quivered over the Beysib's eyes. In better light, it would have shown colours like those on the skin of a dying albacore. The blow had paralysed the man's lungs, so that the only sound the guard made as he died was the sc.r.a.ping of his nails on the stone floor.

Samlor slid the body back through the trap door, from whence its death had sprung. He hoped the victim was not a friend of Hort; he sympathized with simple folk looking for solace apart from the establishment of such as Lord Tudhaliya.

But they had made their bed when they stole a child from the House of Kodrix.

The temple had been a single, circular room. It was roofless now, and its girdle of fluted columns had fallen; but the curtain wall within those columns still stood to shoulder height or above. That wall had been constructed around only three-quarters of the circ.u.mference, however. A 90 arc looked out unimpeded on the waters of the cove, which lapped almost to the building's foundations.

And out at the mouth of the cove, its hull black upon the phosph.o.r.escence through which sweeps drove it languidly, was a trawler. The vessel's sail was furled because of the breeze that began to push against the rising ride when the land cooled faster than the sea.

There were sounds outside the temple. Mice, perhaps, or dogs; or even tramps looking for at least the semblance of shelter.

More likely not. Nothing Hort had said suggested that the ceremony planned for tonight would be limited to the boatload who had carried Star to Death's Harbour. Not all the Setmur would be involved, but at least a few others would slip in from the greater community. The tunnel was as good a hiding place as could be found; and if the guard had been placed in the temple, it was at least probable that Star would be brought to it by her captors.

Samlor slipped back the way he had come. He set the tip of the Beysib bow between the edge of the trap door and its jamb. That wedged the door open a crack, through which Samlor could hear better and see; and be seen, but the lights would be dim against discovery, and the alcove was some protection as well. Then Samlor waited, with a reptile's patience, and the chill certainty of a reptile as well.

The firstcomers were blurs bringing no illumination at all. Shawls, pantaloons like those the guard had worn, sweeping nervously through Samlor's field of vision. They chattered in undertones. Occasionally someone raised a voice to call what might have been a name: 'Shaushga!' The corpse stiffening at Samlor's feet made no reply.

Then a hull grated on the strand. There were more voices, and more of the voices were male. Water slopped between sh.o.r.e and hull as at least a dozen persons dropped over the trawler's gunwale. Then the temple floor rasped beneath the horn-hard soles of barefooted fishermen. A tiny oil lamp gleamed like the sun to light-starved eyes.

In the centre of the open room, a Beysib in red robes set down the burden he carried. It was Star, had to be Star. She was dressed also in red. Her hair had been plaited into short tendrils so that the blaze above her forehead seemed to have eight white arms.

'I don't want to,' the child cried distinctly. 'I want to go to bed.' She refused to support herself with her legs, curling to the pavement when the Beysib set her down.

The man in red and a woman as nondescript as the others in a brown and black shawl bent to the child. They spoke urgently and simultaneously in Beysib and a melange of local dialects. The latter were almost equally unintelligible to Samlor for the accent and poor acoustics. The man in red held Star by the shoulders, but he was coaxing rather than trying to force her to rise.

The trawler had been crabbed further into the cove so that Samlor could no longer see it from his vantage point. The Cir-donian held his body in a state of readiness, but at not quite the bowstring tautness of the instant before slaughter. There would be slaughter, nothing could be more certain than that; but for the moment, Samlor continued to wait. There were ten, perhaps twenty, Beysib within the temple wall at the moment. Some of them were between Star and the hidden door. That would not keep Samlor from striking if the need arose, but there was at least a chance that some of those now milling in the room would spread out if the ceremony began.

Star had gotten to her feet. She was pouting in the brief glimpse Samlor had of her face as she turned. He could not imagine how anyone had taken Star for the maid's daughter. Even the set other lips was a mirror of Samlane's.

The Beysib chattering ceased. Their feet brushed quickly to positions flanking the temple opening. It was much as Samlor had hoped. Star stretched her hands out, palms forward, towards the cove. The man in red was still with her, but the woman had joined the others just outside the building. Star began chanting in a bored voice. The syllables were not in any language with which Samlor was familiar. From the regularity of the sounds, it was possible that they were from no language at all, merely forming a pattern to concentrate nonverbal portions of the brain.

Samlor tensed. He had already chosen the spot through which his dagger would enter the kidneys of the man in red. Then, suddenly, Lord Tudhaliya's troopers swept into the gathering with cries of b.l.o.o.d.y triumph.

The security forces might have intended to take a few prisoners, but as Samlor bolted from his hiding place, he saw a woman cut in half. The trooper who killed her had a sword almost four feet long in the blade. His horizontal, two-handed cut took her in the small of the back and bisected her navel on the way out.

The troopers had approached dismounted, of course. Even so, they had shown abnormal skill for cavalrymen in creeping up among the ruins. There was no way of telling how many of them there were, but it was certainly more than the squad that had made the arrests that morning. Lights began to flare, dark lanterns like Samlor's own still hissing in the tunnel below.

The red-garbed Beysib bawled in horror and tried to enfold Star in his cloak, as if that would serve as any protection from what was about to happen. Samlor smashed the Beysib down with the dagger's hilt to his forehead, not from mercy, but because the point might have caught and held the weapon for moments the Cirdonian did not have to lose. Samlor grabbed the screaming child by the shoulder and spun for the tunnel mouth.

A Beysib cavalryman leaped from the crumbling wall. He was aiming a kick at Samlor's head.

The angle was different, but too many camels had launched feet at the caravan master for Samlor to be caught unprepared. The boot slashed by his ear as he pivoted. The Beysib's sword was c.o.c.ked for a blow that the fellow had to hold until he landed, or he risked lopping off his own feet. The long weapon did nothing to keep the Beysib's momentum from impaling him on the Cirdonian dagger.

Samlor slipped the hilt as it punched home. He tossed Star to the trap door and rammed her through as he jumped in himself.