Thieves World Part 6

Illyra did try to voice her fears to him at each waking interlude, but the mixture of visions and emotions found no expression in her voice. Within her mind, each re-dreaming of the nightmare brought her closer to a single image which both collected her problems and eliminated them. The first rays of a feeble dawn had broken through the fog when she had the final synthetic experience of the dream.

She saw herself at a place the dream-spirit said was the estate called Land's End. The estate had been long abandoned, with only an anvil chained to a pedestal in the centre of a starlit courtyard to show that it had been inhabited. Illyra broke the chain easily and lifted the anvil as if it had been paper. Clouds rushed in as she walked away and a moaning wind began to blow dust-devils around her. She hurried towards the doorway where Dubro waited for his gift.

The steel cracked before she had travelled half the distance, and the anvil crumbled completely as she transferred it to him. Rain began to fall, washing away Dubro's face to reveal Lythande's cruel, mocking smile. The magician struck her with the card marked with the Face of Chaos. And she died, only to find herself captive within her body which was being carried by unseen hands to a vast pit. The dissonant music of priestly chants and cymbals surrounded her.

Within the dream, Illyra opened her dead eyes to see a large block of stone descending into the pit over her.

'I'm already dead!' She screamed, struggling to free her arms and legs from invisible bindings. 'I can't be sacrificed - I'm already dead!' - Her arms came free. She nailed wildly. The walls of the pit were gla.s.sy and without hand-holds. The lowered stone touched her head. She shrieked as the life left her body for a second time. Her body released her spirit, and she rose up through the stone, waking as she did.

'It was a dream,' Illyra said before Dubro could ask.

The solution was safe in her mind now. The dream would not return. But it was like a reading with the cards. In order to understand what the dream-spirit had given her, she would have to meditate upon it.

'You said something of death and sacrifice,' Dubro said, un-mollified by her suddenly calmed face.

'It was a dream.'

'What sort of dream? Are you afraid that I will leave you or the bazaar now that I have no work to do?'

'No,' she said quickly, masking the fresh anxiety his words produced. 'Besides, I have found an anvil for us.'

'In your dream with the death and sacrifice?'

'Death and sacrifice are keys the dream-spirit gave me. Now I must take the time to understand them.'

Dubro stepped back from her. He was not S'danzo, and though bazaar-folk, he was not comfortable around their traditions or their gifts. When Illyra spoke of 'seeing' Or 'knowing', he would draw away from her. He sat, quiet and sullen, in a chair pulled into the corner most distant from her S'danzo paraphernalia.

She stared at the black-velvet covering other table until well past the dawn and the start of a gentle rain. Dubro placed a sh.e.l.l with a sweetmeat in it before her. She nodded, smiled, and ate it, but did not say anything. The smith had already turned away two patrons when Illyra finished her meditation.

'Are you finished, now, Lyra?' he asked, his distrust of S'danzo ways not overshadowing his concern for her.

'I think so.'

'No more death and sacrifice?'

She nodded and began to relate the tale of the previous day's events. Dubro listened quietly until she reached the part about Lythande.

'In my home? Within these walls?' he demanded.

'I saw him, but I don't know how he got in here. The rope was untouched.'

'No!' Dubro exclaimed, beginning to pace like a caged animal. 'No, I want none of this. I will not have magicians and sorcerers in my home!'

'You weren't here, and I did not invite him in.' Illyra's dark eyes flashed at him as she spoke. 'And he'll come back again if I don't do these things, so hear me out.'

'No, just tell me what we must do to keep him away.'

Illyra dug her fingernails into the palm of one hand hidden in the folds of her skirts.

'We will have to - to stop the consecration of the cornerstone of the new temple for the Rankan G.o.ds.'

'"G.o.ds", Lyra, you would not meddle with the G.o.ds? Is this the meaning you found in "death and sacrifice"?'

'It is also the reason Lythande was here last night.'

'But, Lyra ...'

She shook her head, and he was quiet.

'He won't ask me what I plan to do', she thought as he tied the rope across the door and followed her towards the city. 'As long as everything is in my head, I'm certain everything is possible and that I will succeed. But if I spoke of it to anyone - even him - I would hear how little hope I have of stopping Molin Torch-holder or of changing Marilla's fate.'

In the dream, her already dead body had been offered to Sabellia and Savankala.

Her morning's introspection had convinced her that she was to introduce a corpse into Molin Torchholder's ceremonies. They pa.s.sed the scene of the murder, but Jubal's men had reclaimed their comrade. The only other source of dead men she knew of was the governor's palace where executions were becoming a daily occurrence under the tightening grip of the h.e.l.l Hounds.

They pa.s.sed by the huge charnel-house just beyond the bazaar gates. The rain held the death smells close by the half-timbered building. Could Sabellia and Savankala be appeased with the mangled bones and fat of a butchered cow?

Hesitantly she mounted the raised wooden walk over the red-brown effluvia of the building.

'What do the Rankan G.o.ds want from this place?' Dubro asked before setting foot on the walkway.

'A subst.i.tute for the one already chosen.'

A man emerged from a side door pushing a sloshing barrel which he dumped into the slow-moving stream. Shapeless red lumps flowed under the walkway between the two bazaar-folk. Illyra swayed on her feet.

'Even the G.o.ds of Ranke would not be fooled by these.' Dubro lowered his- head towards the now-ebbing stream. 'At least offer them the death of an honest man ofllsig.'

He held out a hand to steady her as she stepped back on the street, then led the way past the Serpentine to the governor's palace. Three men hung limply from the gallows in the rain, their crimes and names inscribed on placards tied around their necks. Neither Illyra nor Dubro had mastered the arcane mysteries of script.

'Which one is most like the one you need?' Dubro asked.

'She should be my size, but blonde.' Illyra explained while looking at the two strapping men and one grandfatherly figure hanging in front of them.

Dubro shrugged and approached the stern-faced h.e.l.l Hound standing guard at the foot of the gallows.

'Father,' he grunted, pointing at the elderly corpse.

'It's the law - to be hung by the neck until sundown. You'll have to come back then.'

'Long walk home. He's dead now - why wait?'

'There is law in Sanctuary now, peon, Rankan law. It will be respected without exception.'

Dubro stared at the ground, fumbling with his hands in evident distress.

'In the rain I cannot see the sun - how shall I know when to return?'

Guard and smith stared at the steely-grey sky, both knowing it would not clear before nightfall. Then, with a loud sigh, the h.e.l.l Hound walked to the ropes, selected and untied one, which dropped Dubro's 'father' into the mud.

'Take him and begone!'

Dubro shouldered the dead man, walking to Illyra who waited at the edge of the execution grounds.

'He's - he's -' she gasped in growing hysteria.

'Dead since sunrise.'

'He's covered with filth. He reeks. His face ...'

'You wanted another for the sacrifice.'

'But not like that!'

'It is the way of men who have been hung.'

They walked back towards the charnel-house where Sanctuary's undertakers and embalmers held sway. There, for five copper coins, they found a man to prepare the body. For another coin he would have rented them a cart and his son as a digger to take the unfortunate ex-thief to the common field outside the Gate of Triumph for proper burial. Illyra and Dubro made a great show of grief, however, and insisted that they would bury their father with their own hands. Wrapped in a nearly clean shroud, the old man was bound to a plank. Illyra held the foot end, Dubro the other. They made their way back to the bazaar.

'Do we take the body to the temple for the exchange?' he asked as they pushed aside their chairs to make room for the plank.

Illyra stared at him, not realizing at first that his faith in her had made the question sincere.

'During the night the Rankan priests will leave the governor's palace for the estate called Land's End. They will bear Marilla with them. We will have to stop them and replace Marilla with our corpse, without their knowledge.'

The smith's eyes widened with disillusion. 'Lyra, it is not the same as stealing fruit from Blind Jakob! The girl will be alive. He is dead. Surely the priests will see.'

She shook her head clinging desperately to the image she had found in meditation. 'It rains. There will be no moonlight, and their torches will give more smoke than light. I gave the girl cylantha. They will have to carry her as if she were dead.'

'Will she take the drug?'

'Yes!'

But Illyra wasn't sure - couldn't be sure - until they actually saw the procession. So many questions: if Marilla had taken the drug, if the procession were small, unguarded and slowed by their burden, if the ritual were like the one in her dream. The cold panic she had felt as the stone descended on her returned. The Face of Chaos loomed, laughing, in her mind's eye.

'Yes! She took the drug last night,' she said firmly, dispelling the Face by force of will.

'How do you know this?' Dubro asked incredulously. 'I know.'

There was no more discussion as Illyra threw herself into the preparation of a macabre feast that they ate on a table spread over their dead guest. The vague point of sundown pa.s.sed, leaving Sanctuary in a dark rainy night, as Illyra had foreseen. The continuing rain bolstered her confidence as they moved slowly through the bazaar and out of the Common Gate.

They faced a long, but not difficult, walk beyond the walls of the city. As Dubro pointed out, the demoiselles of the Street of Red Lanterns had to follow their path each night on their way to the Promise of Heaven. The ladies giggled behind their shawls at the sight of the two bearing what was so obviously a corpse. But they did nothing to hinder them, and it was far too early for the more raucous traffic returning from the Promise.

Huge piles of stone in a sea of muddy craters marked the site of the new temple.

A water-laden canopy covered sputtering braziers and torches; otherwise the area was quiet and deserted.

It is the night of the Ten-Slaying. Cappen Varra told me the priests would be busy. Rain will not stop the dedication. G.o.ds do not feel rain! Illyra thought, but again did not know and sat with her back to Dubro quivering more from doubt and fear than from the cold water dripping down her back.

While she sat, the rain slowed to a misty drizzle and gave promise of stopping altogether. She left the inadequate shelter of the rock pile to venture nearer the canopy and braziers. A platform had been built above the mud at the edge of a pit with ropes dangling on one side that might be used to lower a body into the pit. A great stone was poised on logs opposite, ready to crush anything below. At least they were not too late - no sacrifice had taken place. Before IHyra had returned to Dubro's side, six torches appeared in the mist-obscured distance.

'They are coming,' Dubro whispered as she neared him.

'I see them. We have only a few moments now.'

From around her waist she unwound two coils of rope taken from the bazaar forge.

She had devised her own plan for the actual exchange, as neither the dream spirit nor her meditations had offered solid insight or inspiration.

'They will most likely follow the same path we did, since they are carrying a body also,' she explained as she laid the ropes across the mud, burying them slightly. 'We will trip them here.'

'And I will switch our corpse for the girl?'

'Yes.'

They said nothing more as each crouched in a mud-hole waiting, hoping, that the procession would pa.s.s between them.

The luck promised in her dream held. Molin Torchholder led the small procession, bearing a large bra.s.s and wood torch from Sabellia's temple in Ranke itself.

Behind him were three chanting acolytes bearing both incense and torches. The last two torches were affixed to a bier carried on the shoulders of the last pair of priests. Torchholder and the other three trod over the ropes without noticing them. When the first pallbearer was between the ropes Illyra snapped them taut.

The burdened priests heard the smack as the ropes lifted from the mud, but were tripped before they could react. Marilla and the torches fell towards Dubro, the priests towards Illyra. In the dark commotion, Illyra got safely to a nearby pile of building stones, but without being able to see if Dubro had accomplished the exchange.

'What's wrong?' Torchholder demanded, hurrying back with his torch to light the scene.

'The d.a.m.ned workmen left the hauling ropes strewn about,' a mud-splattered priest exclaimed as he scrambled out of the knee-deep mud-hole.

'And the girl?' Molin continued.

'Thrown over there, from the look of it.'

Lifting his robes in one hand, Molin Torchholder led the acolytes and priests to the indicated mud-pit. Illyra heard sounds she prayed were Dubro making his own way to the safe shadows.

'A hand here.'

'd.a.m.ned Ilsig mud. She weighs ten times as much now.'

'Easy. A little more mud, a little sooner won't affect the temple, but it's an ill thought to rouse the Others.' Torchholder's calm voice quieted the others.

The torches were re-lit. From her hideout, Illyra could see a mud-covered shroud on the bier. Dubro had succeeded somehow: she did not allow herself to think anything else.

The procession continued on towards the canopy. The rain had stopped completely.

A sliver of moonlight showed through the dispersing clouds. Torchholder loudly hailed the break in the clouds as an omen of the forgiving, sanctifying, presence of Vashanka and began the ritual. In due time the acolytes emptied braziers of oil on to the shroud, setting it and the corpse on fire. They lowered the naming bier into the pit. The acolytes threw symbolic armloads of stone after it. Then they cut the ropes that held the cornerstone in its place at the edge. It slid from sight with a loud, sucking sound.

Almost at once, Torchholder and the other two priests left the platform to head back towards the palace, leaving only the acolytes to perform a night-long vigil over the new grave. When the priests were out of sight Illyra scrambled back to the mud-holes and whispered Dubro's name.

'Here,' he hissed back.

She needed only one glance at his moon-shadowed face to know something had gone wrong.