Authors: Dave Duncan
The words drifted, away through the steamy glade; sweat streamed down Julian’s face. Then a flicker of movement caught his eye. And another. In the patchy shade at the out skirts of the wood, sunlight glinted on metal. All around the grove, soldiers were moving in, pushing their way through the shrubbery. They held naked swords in their hands.
Oh damnation!
His audience was waiting, puzzled by his sudden silence. He had lost his place. Where in Hades had he got to? He smiled comfortingly at his frightened flock and jumped a few mental pages to be certain he did not repeat himself. Meanwhile his mind was racing.
So was his pulse. He had not felt terror like this since the day a Boche shell had buried him alive.
He was not Jumbo Watson, who could preach a magistrate and two soldiers to their knees, and there must be thirty armed men out there, maybe more. He was not Pedro Garcia, who had magicked himself out of danger in similar circumstances. Julian Smedley could not save himself with mana, even if he wanted to. Every scrap of mana that came his way went into healing his hand—that was not a conscious decision, it just happened. When he had come to Nextdoor a year and a half ago, his arm had ended at the wrist. Now he had a palm. On his last circuit, it had begun to sprout five stubs. He assumed that one more tour would give him recognizable beginnings of fingers and thumb.
Wrong! This tour was going to kill him. He was likely to die on the wrong end of a bloody sword unless he could do something dramatic.
Right. The first thing was to keep control of the meeting. So far the congregation had been too intent on his words to notice the intruders. If they leaped up in panic and tried to flee, they would undoubtedly be hacked down in a bloodbath.
He stopped preaching. He raised his arms in the sign of the circle.
“Brothers! Sisters! We are greatly honored. We have visitors. See the noble company of His Majesty’s brave soldiers come to join our worship. Nay!” he shouted over the sudden screams. “Do not be afraid!”
In one simultaneous surge, the worshippers were on their feet. Damn!
“
Stay where you are!
Welcome these worthy men; admit them to our fellowship in the name of the True God! Enter, friends!”
The captain, distinguished by a scarlet plume on his helmet, was emerging from the undergrowth almost at Julian’s side. A grizzled boar of a man, in leather and steel, he was showing his teeth in a gloat of triumph at having cornered his prey so easily. “Desist in the king’s name!” he bellowed, raising his sword.
Julian bellowed right back at him. “God save the king!” He turned to his cowering, paralyzed flock again. “God save the king!” he repeated.
Wily old Kinulusim echoed him at once: “God save the king!”
“Long live His Majesty!”
This time the response was stronger. “Long live His Majesty!” The congregation had huddled in around Purlopat’r and his uncle, with the young giant towering head and shoulders over everyone else. All those frightened eyes stared at Julian in mute appeal.
“Let us pray, brothers and sisters. Let us pray that good King Gudjapate be granted long life and wisdom to reign over his people. Let us pray that he be granted health and prosperity and true counsel, that his beloved queen…that the noble young prince…” And so on and so on.
The captain was nonplussed, unwilling to interrupt these patriotic sentiments. His band had come to a halt, all in full view now, a ring of dangerous young men waiting for the word to begin the roughhousing.
Julian roared on. He prayed that the king might continue to be a beloved father to Randorland. He prayed that the king be saved from the wickedness of evil demons. The faithful would know that he referred to Eltiana, the Lady, patron goddess of the vale, but he was careful not to mention her by name nor any of the other local deities either, not even the Undivided. He gave the captain no excuse to interrupt. Gathering words from the wind, he gradually edged his prayer into a sermon again, and this time he used number three.
Julian disliked sermon three more than any other of the current year’s issue. He had spent little time studying it, because he had not truly believed that he would ever use it. Just to read the words made him feel more than usually hypocritical, although he had known that three would be a good crowd rouser, pure hellfire: The Five promise you an afterlife of bliss among the stars—they lie! The Pentatheon and all their avatars are not gods at all, they are foul demons, who will be destroyed by the One True God at the Day of Judgment, and all who worship them and serve them here will be similarly wiped out. Solid stuff. Solid balderdash! Who could know what happened after death? Certainly not Prof Rawlinson or the other scribblers of the Service who had written the True Gospel. At least they had not designed a god so malicious that he would torment sinners forever. An eternity of black and solitary boredom was the Valian concept of hell, and the Service had been content to stay with that.
Julian tossed in a little brimstone for good measure.
What he could not remember, he improvised, ranting and roaring. With one small, unoccupied corner of his mind, he registered that it was working. He was holding his own. Sheep and wolves alike, his listeners were rooted to the spot, intent on the torrent of words. Three cheers for charisma!
But it was not enough. He could not go on forever. As soon as he stopped, the captain and his men would snap out of their trance and remember their duty.
He was starting to repeat himself.
His stump had stopped hurting. He was soaked in nervous sweat, but he was also soaked in mana, loads of it—this was a node, after all, and a powerful one. He could feel mana like crackling static in the air, and he must be spewing it right back at the worshippers so fast that his mutilation had no chance to steal it on the way.
There was the answer! For the first time since he crossed over to Nextdoor, he was capable of working a little magic. If he were Pedro Garcia he might use the trapdoor, but he was a true-blue Englishman, who would never desert the ship.
“You ask for proof?” he demanded, although no one had spoken a word. “You want evidence of the powers of the Undivided? Then behold and I shall show you.” He thrust out his arm. “You—Purlopat’r Woodcutter! You have known me for a year now, have you not?”
The big youth nodded, eyes wide as soup bowls.
“Then tell your brothers and sisters why I wear a glove!”
“You have only one hand, Holy One,” Purlopat’r cried out squeakily.
“Wrong! I did have one hand. My right one was cut off at the wrist, wasn’t it? See now what is there!” He ripped off the glove. “My hand is restored to me. My fingers are coming back. Next time I visit you, brothers and sisters, I shall have a hand here as good as the other. This is how the One Who Cannot Be Named rewards those who serve him.”
The Service would disapprove thoroughly. The Service would accuse Julian Smedley of promoting superstition, raising false hopes, seeking self-aggrandizement. Under the circumstances, he could not care less what the Service might think. He just wanted to keep on breathing.
“A holy miracle!” yelled old Kinulusim, falling to his knees.
“A miracle!” chorused the faithful, copying him. Young Purlopat’r actually prostrated himself full-length, like a falling cedar. Only the soldiers remained standing.
The captain stood openmouthed and irresolute. Julian swung around to flaunt his maimed—his partially unmaimed—hand at him. He gathered up all that crackling sense of mana and mentally hurled it at the man in desperation.
Kneel, damn you! Kneel!
It was doubtless a very tiny ray of mana by the standards of the Five or their avatars, but it was enough to overpower one crusty, intractable old veteran.
Repent! Repent!
Slowly, reluctantly, the captain sank down on his knees, and all around the glade, his followers followed his example.
Jesus!
“Let us pray!” Julian barked. “Let us give thanks for the evidence of mercy and goodness—”
He gasped as flames of agony enveloped his hand. Then he caught his breath and plunged ahead. The mana was boiling in now, not just from the already overawed believers, but from another thirty converts also. He had worked a miracle. He was a holy man. The captain was weeping and half his men had thrown away their swords.
Amorgush had gone to sleep on Dosh Coachman’s arm, but he managed to slide it free without waking her. She rolled over on her side, breathing loudly. He slid out of the bed and wriggled his toes in the thick rug.
Sunlight streamed in through the windows, gleaming on silk sheets, marble walls, and furniture polished to a glassy luster. Just one of those gold-framed paintings would keep him in luxury for the rest of his days, or possibly get him hanged. Outside, acres of manicured garden swept down to the shores of Joalwater. A small fortune in jewelry lay scattered on the dressing table, making his fingers itch.
He must resist the temptation if he wanted to continue living on old Amorgush. He stooped for the clothes he had dropped on the floor an hour ago. They were fine clothes. Give the old bag her due—she was generous. That was about the only good thing to be said of Amorgush, though. She claimed to be forty, and the gods should strike her dead for perjury. She was reputed to be the richest woman in Joalvale. She was certainly one of the stupidest, although not quite stupid enough to believe the words of adoration he whispered to her every day about this time. She knew he was only a hired man.
He slipped into his pink linen breeches and kid shoes, fastened his wide leather belt lovingly. That did not come from Amorgush. It was probably of Randorian make, although he had stolen it in Mapvale a couple of years ago. A twist would bring the ornate buckle free, bearing a thin strip of steel, flexible yet razor sharp on both edges, a beautiful thing. He loved it. Poor little Dosh always felt naked without at least one weapon concealed somewhere on his person.
He donned his silk tunic—a delicate lilac shade, exquisitely embroidered with many-colored wildflowers—and admired himself in the mirror for a moment, then looked more carefully, checking for love bites. He found none. What he did notice, with annoyance, was the gleam of scalp through his curls. Blond men always went bald young, and he was no longer as youthful as he liked to think he was. There were faint lines starting on his forehead. He turned away angrily from his reflection.
The old hag was still asleep, snoring now. That relieved him of the obligation of a sticky, hypocritical farewell embrace. Amorgush was a good living, but he felt he earned every crust of it, and he headed for the door with the conviction that he had just done a noble day’s work. After such a session, his nominal duties in the stable always seemed positively recreational.
The corridor was deserted. He strode along it, admiring the pillared grandeur, intent on a quick bath to get the stench of her perfume off him. All things considered, though, his position in the Bandrops household was the most enjoyable sinecure he had found in his highly varied career. For one thing, Joal was the finest city in the Vales, with every facility a man could dream of. He was paid enough to indulge his versatile taste in vices. Best of all, he need not fear the wrath of a jealous husband, because Bandrops knew exactly what his coachman did during siesta hour.
It had been Bandrops who had first brought Dosh into the house. Bandrops Advocate was an up-and-coming politician—which in Joal meant a man with the instincts of a killer spider—who was widely expected to bribe his way into the Clique when the next vacancy occurred. He had married Amorgush for her money, as his personal tastes ran more to the likes of Dosh than to matrimony. For a while poor Dosh had been required to satisfy both of them regularly, which had been hard work, but now the master had found himself a tender juvenile page, and his calls upon his coachman’s evenings were much rarer.
As Dosh reached the head of the staircase, who should be trotting up it but that very same Pin’t Pageboy, looking hot and flushed and positively adorable. He stopped, and the two of them appraised each other warily. Dosh had a faint worry that Pin’t was after his job with the mistress. Pin’t was distrustful of Dosh’s own advances, although he had so far managed to resist them admirably.
“Feeling the heat?” Dosh inquired. “It’s a remarkably warm fall.”
“You don’t look very cool yourself,” the brat retorted. He had a dark curl trailed artfully over his forehead—Dosh wished he knew how the kid organized that so consistently. “I was looking for you.”
“Wonderful! I’m just heading for the bathhouse. Come along.”
Pin’t curled a lip in refusal. “The master wants you.”
Dosh regretfully dismissed the thought of cool water. At this time of day, Bandrops would be wanting a coachman, not a catamite—probably. He shrugged. “Then I’d better go to him. But keep my offer in mind.”
“I can’t think why I should.”
Dosh trotted down. “Experience, my boy!” He reached out in passing, aiming an affectionate pat, which Pin’t foresaw and dodged. “I could teach you some very useful tricks.”
“I doubt it,” Pin’t retorted.
He was certainly wrong.
Dosh knocked and was bade enter. The master’s office was a sumptuous, sun-bright room overlooking a manicured garden. The rugs alone represented more wealth than most men earned in their lifetimes. Amorgush left all the financial decisions to her clever husband.
Bandrops’s perpetual stoop seemed only to emphasize his bulk. He sported the thickest, blackest eyebrows Dosh had ever seen, under a shiny bald pate, although every other part of him sprouted dense black hair. He had a mellifluous, orator’s voice, a raging ambition, and sadistic tastes in recreation. He was wearing a loose silk tunic of sky blue and leaning his fists on his ornate desk.
He greeted his coachman with a disagreeable scowl. “I am sorry to drag you from your work.”
“I am entirely at your command, sir, of course,” Dosh remarked airily as he crossed the sumptuously colored Narshian rug. He was much more interested in the other man standing near the window.
The other man was younger, leaner, even harder, with a cold intensity in his face to warn the discerning observer of potential trouble. He, too, wore the standard Joalian tunic and breeches. In contrast to Bandrops’s, his forearms were almost hairless, well muscled, and also much paler than his hands. As were his shins. His cheeks above his close-trimmed beard were darker than his ears and forehead.
“This is the boy, Kraanard,” Bandrops declaimed. “Dosh, this is Kraanard Jurist. He has need of your services.”
“As my master bids me, sir.” Dosh bowed to the stranger, wondering what sort of services were implied. He wondered, too, why an obvious soldier, a man who normally wore greaves, vambraces, and helmet, would be masquerading as a jurist.
Kraanard regarded him with unconcealed contempt. “Have you a moa, boy?”
If Dosh wished to be impertinent, he could now ask where a lackey like him could ever acquire the wealth to own a moa, but that was not what was meant. Moas resisted new riders with murderous zeal; it took months to attune a moa to a man. Dosh was skilled at many things other than seduction. He could harness the household stock to the master’s coach and drive it. Officially, that was all that was expected of him.
When Bandrops had hired him, though, he had set out to imprint one of the household moas—mostly because he thought the brute would make suitable severance pay if he had to leave without notice. Bandrops knew he had been trying, because he had commented on the numerous bruises and tooth marks poor Dosh had acquired in the process. What he did not know, apparently, was that Dosh had persevered. There seemed no reason not to tell the truth in this instance, for the other servants knew.
“There is one I can usually manage, sir.”
The other men exchanged pleased glances.
“You will come with me,” Kraanard announced. “We shall be gone only a few days.”
Dosh had survived so long in his perilous career only because he possessed an acute sense of danger. Now tocsins clamored in his mind. There was something extremely fishy here. He contrived an expression of youthful anxiety, which had always been one of his most effective.
“I doubt I can handle Swift for that long, sir. I am only an amateur on a moa.”
Bandrops reddened, but it was the soldier who answered.
“The matter is extremely important. Even if you suffer some scrapes, you will be well rewarded.”
“I am sure to be thrown a few times, sir. Then Swift will escape.”
Kraanard’s eyes narrowed. “We shall have others with us. We shall round it up for you. They never go far.”
Now the details were starting to take shape—a troop of lancers!
“If you need a moa rider, sir, surely there must be hundreds of native-born young Joalians far more expert than I am.”
Again the two men exchanged glances. Then Kraanard strode across until he was right in front of Dosh and could stare down at him with cold gray eyes and unmistakable menace. He was considerably taller.
“But I understand that you are familiar with a man named D’ward.”
If he wanted to shock, he succeeded. Dosh felt as if he had been dropped into ice water and for once his self-control failed him.
“The Liberator?”
Kraanard was pleased by the reaction. “Some call him that. He is here in Joalvale, somewhere over by Jilvenby.”
D’ward! It had been more than three years. They had been traveling with a band of Tinkerfolk, Dosh’s own people. Dosh had tired of the grinding poverty and run out on them. But before that…
“No!”
A dangerous silence…Kraanard said, “What does that mean?”
Dosh himself did not know what that meant. He did not know what he was thinking. D’ward!
“It means he wants money,” Bandrops growled in the background. “He’s a greedy, grasping scoundrel with the heart of a whore, but he’d sell his own mother for a few silver stars.”
Mother certainly, but not D’ward!
Why not D’ward? Dosh did not know. He needed time to think.
Kraanard smiled. He closed a fist in Dosh’s hair and bent his head back. “How does thirty stars sound, boy? All you have to do is identify him for us. We’ll handle the rough stuff. You won’t be hurt.”
Dosh uttered the plaintive cry he used to indicate pain or fear, but at the moment he was feeling neither. He was filled with an inexplicable fury. Thirty stars? That was too much. What sort of gullible fool did they think he was? Far too much! Thirty stars was more money than he’d ever owned in his life.
“What’s the Liberator to you, boy?” Kraanard demanded. His breath stank of fish.
Good question! “Sir, you’re hurting me!” Dosh wailed, but his mind was churning. What, indeed, was the Liberator to him? Betraying friends had always been one of his specialties, so why should he feel so different about D’ward? Was it because D’ward, although he had known exactly what Dosh was, had always treated him as an equal, another human being? He was almost the only person who ever had. Dosh slid the knife out from his belt.
The trooper did not notice the movement. Snarling, he twisted Dosh’s hair harder. “Answer me!”
Dosh gave him his answer. Flexible blades were tricky for stabbing, but he drove it expertly between Kraanard’s ribs. He had a very intimate knowledge of anatomy—he knew the way to a man’s heart. The knife came free easily as the body dropped. Bandrops gaped, then dived around the desk, heading for the door and opening his mouth to shout, but he should have done the shouting first. Dosh leaped, took him from behind, and cut his throat.
He had wiped the blade clean on Bandrops’s tunic before the blood stopped pumping out of its owner. Meanwhile, he was thinking hard. Killing had never bothered him—nor excited him either. His heart was beating quite normally—but he had certainly behaved in a very uncharacteristic fashion. Why refuse an offer of thirty stars, however remote the chances of collecting?
More to the point at the moment, how had the authorities known that Bandrops Advocate’s coachman could identify the Liberator? He could think of no reasonable explanation in mortal terms, which meant the gods must be meddling again. Dosh revered no god. He despised most of them—especially Tion, the Youth.
Which god was mixed up in this? Many men and women affected special loyalty to a specific god, swearing allegiance to a mystery. Tion had the Tion Fellowship and probably several other cults also; Thargian warriors would belong to the Blood and Hammer, loyal to Karzon. Dosh knelt beside Kraanard and peered carefully under the neck of his tunic, looking for a chain. Not finding one, he undid the laces, but then he was forced to conclude that the late, unlamented Kraanard had not been wearing an amulet. He stripped the tunic off the corpse and began to inspect it—a nice, well-muscled body. He noted with approval how tiny the wound was and how little it had bled, like a deadly snakebite, he thought proudly.
He did not find what he was looking for until he removed Kraanard’s breeches. High on the inside of the man’s right thigh he discovered a small red birthmark in the shape of an Ø. Dosh would bet his ears that the man had not been born with that birthmark.
Well! He had expected a five-pointed star, symbol of the Maiden. Astina was presiding deity of Joalia, her resplendent temple standing not a mile away. In her avatar of Olfaan, she was patron goddess of soldiers. If a Joalian trooper was sworn to any deity, it should be Astina, but Ø was the symbol of Eltiana, the Lady. The label was so inconspicuous that the cult must be a very secret one. The Lady was goddess of such things as passion, motherhood, and agriculture. None of her aspects was especially threatening, so far as he could recall; a few of them demanded ritual prostitution from their worshippers, but Dosh had no quarrel with that.
He patted the dead man’s cheek. “You rascal! You’re a spy—or even an assassin, perhaps? I misjudged you!” But the evidence was clear—the Lady was after D’ward and could be assumed not to have his best interests at heart.
He rose and surveyed the carnage. Moments ago those two had been rich and powerful, and he a lowly flunky. Now they were dead while he was still alive. Such is life. Situations change, though—having slain a prominent citizen and a soldier, poor Dosh would soon be as dead as they were if he lingered long in Joalvale. All he would have left to look forward to would be a prolonged and very public death.
Besides, whatever D’ward was doing in Joalvale, the lunatic ought to be warned of Eltiana’s concern. It would be an hour or two before anyone thought to interrupt the master at his business. That was long enough for him to get well out of town. Amused by a sudden inspiration, he took the time to undress Bandrops’s corpse also—that should confuse the issue a little.