Irona 700 (19 page)

“Vly!” She reached out a hand for him and found no one.

She hit the door running, grabbed the bolts, slammed them home. That stopped the rattling. Goddess, Goddess, why would he have gone outside in the middle of the night?

Or had he? If what had raped her earlier had been a Shapeless, then it must now have gone home to Svinhofdarhrauk and Vly might have been dead for hours.

But she could not know that.

If it had been a doppelgänger, it had been a very convincing one—not behaving in the least like the real Vly, but looking like him, smelling like him, sweating like him. Vly blaming himself for her decision to come here, crazy with guilt, drunk out of his mind for the first time in his life … But Vly had always been so protective! The least hint of an insult, a hand reaching out to her from a crowd, anything, and he had reacted to draw his sword and defend her.

Irona took a log from the scuttle, poked up the fire, threw some fragments of bark and kindling on the embers. As flames flickered, as darkness retreated, she made out his sandals and smock lying where he had dropped them. His sword was not in evidence anywhere, but his precious dagger was there by his sandals. Armed with that, she went all around the room, accompanied by her monster shadow, but together they found nothing, not a mouse.

Shivering, she wrapped herself in a blanket and sat close to the fire, with the dagger beside her. She could not go back to sleep while Vly was out there. She was certainly not going out to look for him.

Wail … Howl … Moan …
Iro-o-o-na …
It was only the wind. Not Vly's voice. She would know his subterranean growl anywhere. She realized that she did not expect to ever hear it again. If the Shapeless had not gotten him, or he had not fallen over the edge, he would soon freeze to death out there. But she must stay awake, must keep vigil until morning. Vly had never walked in his sleep before, so far as she knew. He had never mentioned doing so. He couldn't have gone down into the rock. He had either fallen over the parapet, or his corpse was lying out there in the yard.

Something scratched on the door. A dog might do that. A man half dead with cold might crawl close and just have enough strength left to … No. She remembered the thickness of the timbers. No human hand could scratch hard enough to be heard through that.

From time to time she put another driftwood log on the fire.

How had her life gone so terribly wrong? Obviously Maleficence had corrupted Zajic and most of his garrison, although not all of them. Why had Vly succumbed so quickly and tragically? He had been unhappy about her decision to accept the appointment, but it had been her choice, not his. If anyone was to blame for Vly's death, it was Ledacos 692, who had tricked her into it. Had there been any truth behind the stories of black feathers and efforts to poison him? No doubt he was now stalking around Benign in a Seven's purple—at her expense.

There was nothing she could do about Ledacos now, but she would survive. She would live to fight another day.
Revenge needs a well-sharpened knife
, said the proverb.

When morning light peeked through chinks in the shutters, Irona dressed and prepared to face the worst. She cleaned the blood from the floor and burned the stained nightgown.

The wind still gusted, but the rain had stopped. The predawn sky was lurid green and purple, especially to the north. She could see a silhouette of hills that way, the hills around Eldritch. What she couldn't see, not anywhere, was Vly. A bugler emerged from the guardhouse and blew the reveille, as if anyone up there needed it or anyone below would hear it. The rest of the night guard followed him out, surly and unshaven, but obviously relieved to find her still alive. They insisted they had not heard Vly—and couldn't have done unless he'd beaten on the bronze door with a sledge. No one had gone in. No Vly.

A few wisps of smoke were rising from Svinhofdarhrauk. … Irona's brief glance suddenly became a stare of wonder. There were trogs in the water, a line of them, up to their waists. Barely visible in the half-light, they were heading west, but in a few moments the leader turned south and the rest followed. She had assumed they came and went between islet and rock by boat. No one had told her that Lake Eboga was fordable, but she had never asked. It might have silted up since Eboga's time. She filed the fact away for later action and continued her hunt for Vly. Nothing else mattered, and yet cold reason insisted that he had gone; she was never going to find him alive.

The parapet around the edge of the compound was in just as bad repair as everything else. A man could step over it in most places, scramble over it anywhere. The sides of the rock were nowhere truly vertical, so a falling body would bounce and roll and eventually slide down steep slopes of sharp gravel. Nowhere would it have landed in water, neither in the moat to the south nor Lake Eboga to the north, so his body must be down there somewhere. If he were still alive, he must be horribly injured. She ran back to the sentries and told them to sound the alarm.

Quebrada Bericha was furious. Morale was already dismal and now the governor's boy toy had fallen or jumped—driven over the edge by monsters from the Dread Lands, no doubt. After what she had heard in the night, Irona herself was inclined to believe something along those lines, except that she thought the monsters had been inside his head.

Eventually they found where he had gone over. Daun's sharp eyes noticed a smear of blood on the edge of the low parapet, at a spot where it was barely knee-high. Another smear of blood on the first rock below showed where he must have struck, and bounced. If he had jumped to his death, he would have first stepped up on the wall. Instead, he must have walked into it, barked his shin, and toppled. After that he could only have tumbled and rolled all the way to the ground, arriving both dead and shredded by the sharp gravel of the scree slope. His corpse was not there now, nor was his sword.

Whose name had he screamed to Bane in his death curse?

Morale sank even lower. Irona's efforts to belittle the ghouls and banshees had failed utterly. The only reason the governor was not interrogating her on suspicion of murder was that she
was
the governor. That, and the lack of a body.

But when Commander Bericha suggested she choose new quarters, the cross-grained stubbornness she had inherited from her father reared up like a grizzly bear. “Never!” she said. “I have made my choice and here I stay. I do not walk in my sleep. And I am not scared by banshees.”

The thought that Vly's rotting corpse might return some other night was not to be considered.

All day Bericha kept both garrisons, old and new, feverishly cleaning up the base. Crews gathered reeds from the delta to make brooms, which served until they fell to pieces. Much of the bedding, and even furniture, was only good for burning, and some of it made a handy contribution to the governor's woodpile.

Irona chose a barren little shed next to the reception hall to be her study. That might have been its original purpose, for it had a fireplace and parchment-covered windows that provided more light than the fungus down in the tunnels. Except in very heavy rainstorms, she could see well enough to write and was reasonably, if not comfortably, warm when she wore her furs.

She had set Daun Bukit to work packing the departing governor's possessions, because Zajic seemed incapable of doing anything now. Sazen Hostin was still grubbing among the rats in the archives. She could procrastinate no longer.

She ought to write to Velny Lavice, Vly's mother, but she had nothing to tell her except that Vly had disappeared.
Sea Dog
would leave on the morrow, because the fortress was grossly overcrowded, but
Sea Death
and
Sea Danger
would arrive soon, so that letter could wait until there was more definite news.

Nothing should be harder to write than a letter telling a mother her son was dead, but Irona's obligatory report to the Seven came close. She had arrived and assumed her post. What else was she to say? That Maleficence had infected the fortress with an epidemic of idiocy? That after a few weeks here both she and the men under her command would probably succumb to the same? That her mission was doomed to fail before it even began? She did not know how to fight an evil as deadly and insubstantial as the north wind.

The door flew open. Sazen and the wind entered together. He was filthy, unshaven, and red-eyed. He had probably not eaten, slept, or even drunk since the day before, but he was croaking in triumph, waving a tablet.

“Sit down!” Irona commanded, striding across to the door to shut it. “What have you found?”

Sazen took her chair, as it was the only seat in sight. “It had to have started in Redkev's first term, right? Whatever it was, that was when the change took place. Twelve years ago.”

Irona leaned against an empty bookcase. “Makes sense.”

“I found this. It's part of a journal the governors used to keep. It says, ‘Although they are not human, the trogs' pitiful deaths upset the men and are bad for morale. I ordered that the garbage and offal be tipped into Lake Eboga instead of the moat, so the trogs can retrieve it without going near the moat eels.' That's it!”

“It is?”

He turned the slab over and peered at the minute writing. “Almost. There's this, a few months earlier. ‘Trogs have been seen on an islet about three hundred paces north of the fortress, in Lake Eboga. The men call it Svinhofdarhrauk, which apparently means something funny in Osopan.'”

Yes, yes, yes! Sense at last!

“Oh, well done! We must find you something to eat. Have a drink first.” Irona handed him a bottle of wine she had just unpacked from her luggage. Then she took him out into the wind and down to the former governor's quarters, where she found Daun Bukit stuffing dirty clothing into a chest. Zajic had been confined in a cell, deeper in the rock, and was reported to be almost catatonic.

“Leave that for now,” she said. “Sazen desperately needs something to eat and a place to catch up on his sleep and he doesn't know his way around yet. Will you help him, please? And get word to Commander Bericha that I need to speak with him urgently.”

Daun said “Yes, ma'am!” very happily. He looked as if he were about to add something about what he had been doing, then changed his mind, repeated, “Yes, ma'am!” and dashed out.

Irona was back on the summit making notes for her report to the Seven when Bericha banged on the door, walked in, and slammed it behind him. Her face must have given her away because his lit up at once.

“You've found him?”

“What? No, not Vlyplatin. But Sazen's discovered what happened. Back in Redkev's first term, twelve years ago, trogs turned up and settled on that tongue-twister sandbank. The garrison used to throw its trash in the moat—so the river would carry it away, I suppose—and the trogs would try to scavenge it and get eaten by the eels. So Redkev told the men to throw it into the lake.”

The commander was not as stupid as he looked. He nodded approvingly. “Then the brutes started making themselves useful, the marines were happy to let them do the grunt work, and pretty soon the Empire's finest were lying around, rotting, doing nothing all day long!”

No doubt human laziness had been part of it, but Irona was certain that there had been other, more sinister, influences at work also. “Do you know how the trogs come to work in the morning?”

Bericha opened his mouth and then shut it again. There had been no canoes or coracles lying on the shingle yesterday. “No, ma'am.”

“They wade. The Eboga wall is only a couple of feet high. There will be deep channels, I'm sure, but most of the lake must be very shallow. This place is not as secure as we thought, Commander.”

“So what are you ordering me to do, ma'am?” His smile was menacing, but she did not feel that the threat was directed at her.

“Drive out the trogs. Kill them if they won't go. Burn that settlement of theirs down to the mud. Patrol the lake to make sure they don't return.” She was encouraged by his grudging nods of approval. “Dump the daily trash in the moat or, even better, somewhere far away down the channel. Double-check every grating to make sure trogs aren't feeding people to the worms, or even nesting here under our feet.”

“Done that. We found one loose grill, only one. It's tight now.”

One would be enough.

“And then, I think, we should give this place the most thorough cleaning it's ever had. Before we left I asked the Office of Decency what fixes actually looked like, and they said almost anything: lotions, ointment, nonsensical writing, bats' nests, drawings on a wall, dirt in a corner, rat shit …”

The commander shrugged bull shoulders. “Polish till it shines, then? Aye, ma'am.” He saluted her, which was a first, and spun around to leave.

“And, Commander?”

He turned.

“I suspect that strip-searching the departing garrison is not going to find anything. I don't think they've been bribed, I think they've mostly been stupefied until they don't care. The fixes probably aren't
sold
at all.”

He looked at her as if she had gone insane.

“Don't you see?” she said. “Whatever horrors live at Eldritch or anywhere else in the Dread Lands don't want our money. Why would Shapeless need money? They leave their vileness somewhere as a free gift for someone. When the supply boats from Fueguino arrive, watch to see if they make any detours coming through the delta. You might even organize a hunt for marked caches before they get here. Or fishing boats, coming in to sell their catch. If there's smuggling going on, I think that's how it has to be done.”

Quebrada Bericha barked, “Aye, ma'am! Brilliant, if I may say so.” He marched out, looking happier than she could ever recall seeing him. She had given him something for his hands to do.