Irona 700 (45 page)

Nobody could be certain what was burning so far away, but it would take a major blaze to brighten the sky, so either the beached fleet or the city of Tombe was in flames.

The implications were terrifying, and the racket outside told her that the troops had seen that too. She knew what was happening out there even without having to decipher Ebulobo's babbling: her troops were panicking, fleeing back to the sea. They knew that without the ships there was no road home, but what could they possibly accomplish when they reached the shore? The burned galleys would be cold ashes, any seaworthy craft would have fled, and the enemy arsoniats would be waiting.

“Let them go!” she said. “Every man for himself.”

Veer and Ebulobo both protested, shouting over each other, but she insisted, and obviously it was too late to stop the stampede—the camp was falling quiet already.

“Your litter, ma'am,” the captain said, turning to leave. “I'll round up some—”

“No!” she said. “You go. Follow your men and try to form them up in some sort of order. I'm afraid they'll be ambushed on the way and picked off. Go! I'm staying here. I'm waiting for someone.”

Still he argued. “Your Honor, I will not—”

“Save your men, Captain! The fleet will arrive tomorrow or the next day, but get your men back to the coast. There may be Shapeless out there, poisoned arrows out of the dark, thousands of vengeful Muhavurans …”

He protested again, and it was Veer who shouted him down, bellowing “Go!” and looming over him, unarmed but very big.

Ebulobo spun on his heel and disappeared into the night.

Now there were only two. Veer lit a couple of lamps. Irona stretched out on her cot, and he sat down on his, not even bothering to dress. He stared very hard at her.

“Well?” he said. “What's going on? Who fired the ships? The allies? Malevolence? The Muhavurans?”

“Who knows? I don't know what's happening down at the shore now, nor up at the headwaters.” And she might never know.

“But you think you know what's going to happen here? Who're you waiting for?”

“Podakan.”

“He's dead, surely?”

“Yes,” she said sadly. “My son has been dead for years.”

“Don't be chicken stupid, as he used to say. Pardon me while I find my comb.”

The flap opened. Raung, son of Romeral, stepped in through the gap, holding a sword and naked, clad only in beads, feathers, and war paint. Lantern light flickered on the deadly blade and caught the eerie blue of his eyes.

“Greetings, mother of Podakan. I was sent to kill you.”

She looked up at him in dismay. Just squalid murder by this boy savage? Maleficence, as the Gren, had managed to sniff her out at Didicas, so she had stayed here as bait to draw Podakan, not this barbaric youth. It was too soon for her to die. She wasn't ready to die yet. There was still too much to happen, too many questions unanswered, too many tears unshed.

She pushed herself up and lifted her game leg off the bed in an effort to rise. “Very heroic! How big a tattoo do you get for killing crippled old ladies?”

He scowled. “None. My father promised me he will not tell anyone who brought him your head, but he says you are dangerous, so you must die and be known to have died.”

Veer flung a pillow at the boy's face and snatched up a sword from behind the cot.

Irona screamed, “Stop!” for Veer was no warrior. Had she known of that sword, she would have taken it away from him.

The young tribesman caught the pillow and threw it away. Then he laughed and spread his arms. “Go ahead, fat man—kill me.”

Veer tried, thrusting the sword at his opponent's belly. Raung's parry came so fast that it was barely visible, knocking the blow effortlessly aside.
Clank!

“That's one. You get two more tries.”

Veer stepped closer, towering over him, and slashed two-handed, putting all his strength into the move.

Clank!
Raung blocked that blow as easily as the first. “Two down. Last chance.”

Perched on the edge of her cot, Irona had managed to retrieve her crutch from the floor. She lurched to her feet with its help, a move she had not attempted in years, then raised it to point at the Muhavuran, resting the pad against her shoulder, and keeled forward one step, using the crutch like a lance, remembering how the marines had used lances to defeat the Gren, long years ago.

The result was pathetic. Without even seeming to notice her, the boy just caught the crutch with his free hand and stopped her dead. Meanwhile he parried Veer's sword aside for the third time, before sliding his own blade into the older man's chest. Veer looked astonished. Without a sound he crumpled to his knees and then toppled forward on his face. Raung twisted the crutch out of Irona's grip and tossed it aside. She staggered, clutching at a tent pole for balance.

The killer frowned down at the corpse. “My first score, but I can't claim it. He was too easy. A good kill, though. Did you see? A clean cut; he felt no pain.” He retrieved the pillow to wipe his sword, smearing it with Veer's lifeblood.

“Oh, thank you,” Irona said bitterly, and somehow she meant it; it was a comfort that he had not suffered—Veer who had never wanted to hurt anyone. Veer gone? No more loving? No more of that divine art? She could not imagine life without Veer Machin. But she did not have to, did she?

“Now you. Ready?”

“Stop,” said another, lisping, voice. Hayklopevi climbed into the tent. The Beru seemed even more enormous than Irona remembered it, too tall to straighten up in there, even less human, more reptilian. Its gray hide was bare, flecked with mud and bloodstains, and it carried no weapon. As she well knew, the Gren needed no more than their own claws.

The young Muhavuran screamed in terror, leaped over Veer's corpse, and up on his cot, as far from the monster as he could get. He turned at bay with his sword extended. The point wavered. His eyes were stretched impossibly wide.

Irona was surprised to hear her own voice as if from a long way away. “You haven't met? Raung, son of Romeral, this is Maleficence itself, I think. Also known as the late Hayklopevi, Beru of the Gren. And by other names.”

“Certainly we are legion,” the lizard man lisped. “And we know the lusty son of Romeral. Long have we wanted to kill that fat one ourselves, Raung, so that he could appreciate the experience. Having denied us the pleasure, you will suffer in his stead. Come to us.” It beckoned with a hand of six talons.

The boy croaked, “No!”

Hayklopevi advanced one huge pace—there was no room for more—and reached for Raung. This battle was as one sided as the one before, with Raung now on the losing side. He slashed at the nightmare, but the sword made no impression on the monster's hide. He screamed as it hauled him to it. Blood oozed from its grip on his arm; his sword fell free. The monster lifted him by an arm and a leg as if he weighed no more than a child. “Go away and die!” it said, and hurled him bodily out of the tent. His screams continued.

“There!” the lizard turned to face Irona.

She reeled back, tripped, and fell full length upon her cot. The impact half stunned her, wrenching her hip where the brace was strapped, and knocking all the air out of her. But the fall put her hand near the pillow and the jade-handled dagger hidden under it.

The Beru laughed. It began to melt and bubble. It changed color, shrinking, emitting a rank animal odor, and became Podakan. Yet the tent was still crowded, and he seemed larger than she remembered him in life.

“Greetings, Dam.” It … he … it spoke in the familiar rumbling voice he had inherited from Vlyplatin, not the Beru's lisp. He was naked and lividly dead, but not putrefied, and his only visible wounds were the scars of the long gouges the Beru had cut in him in the hovel at Didicas, long ago. They looked quite recent, though, and he was once again the adolescent who had died there, not the mature man who had sailed off to Vult. “Can you get up?”

“No. Help me!”

“Wouldn't dream of it. You could call Raung back in, but he's in too much agony to be useful. In an hour or so, his remains will be ready to take our orders. Meanwhile you can lie there and despair. Very instructive, despair.”

“You and the Muhavurans are allies?” she asked. Her voice sounded quite calm to her, although she knew she was not going to escape from this alive. She probably did not even want to.

“Everyone is our ally, and the bare assed are no more aware of it than most. You have been one of the most helpful.”

“When did you recruit Podakan? At Didicas, when you took his shape and pretended he had slain you? Or earlier?” She had a desperate need to keep him talking, to postpone the inevitable.

“It began at Vult. You did it.”

“No!” She squirmed to ease the pressure on her spine and let her fingers find the hilt of the dagger.

“Yes, you did. When you were in labor—terrified, writhing in agony, bleeding, all alone—you screamed curses at us. Curses are very potent in Vult!”

“But before that you had perverted Vlyplatin. You drove him mad with guilt. You made him rape me.”

Podakan rumbled with laughter. “That was funny, wasn't it? Yes, the rape was when we gained a real entry, as you might say. But why not go even further back and ask why he was suffering so much from guilt? Or think of later, in Benign, when this host was growing up. When you taught me how you had betrayed your principles.”

“When I what?”

He … it … smiled a parody of Podakan's rare smile. “You used to tell us how you hadn't wanted to be a Chosen, how once you had believed the Seventy were evil tyrants. By then you thought that was comical. You thought you had learned better. But we could see how they had bought you, Dam. They twisted you and made you one of themselves. You taught us a good principle there.”

She must not let herself be seduced by Maleficence's lies. It wanted to make her feel responsible. It wanted her to suffer. “They taught me how the Empire is a force for good.”

“A force for good?” it said with all of Podakan's grating scorn. “Oh, spare me! We wish we had time to discuss this at length just now, but you will understand when you have joined us. We shall consume you, and something of you will dwell in us forever. The Empire is evil, through and through. It kills people for their own good. It takes their money for their own good. It benefits only Benign itself. It follows Craver, and Craver delivers it to us, as he always does.”

“If Benign is so evil, why are you against it? It prevents wars between the states. It gives them justice and culture.”

“Stupid! It takes their young men to fight its own enemies. It imposes its own justice and its own culture, destroying theirs and demeaning their heritage. The Empire is evil and we are going to absorb it—helped, of course, by all our allies, who were your allies until you drove them away. By next year Benign will barely be a memory. Dust will blow over its ruins, and we shall turn our attention to Genodesa, Vyada Kun, and all the rest, as they turn on one another. Chaos is our ally and our reward.”

The corpse advanced a step and leered down at her. Fear drove her to keep it talking, although she had no hope of rescue.

“All your doing, son?”

“Of course. Evil has purpose, but it needs direction.”

“What happened in Didicas? You killed the Beru or it killed you?”

It laughed again, with Podakan's deep, scornful laugh, but its breath was Beru carrion. “We combined forces. The rapes were both a reward and a test of our new partner's dedication. Flogging us the next day was a clever idea. The pain almost drove us out of that shape. Was that what you were hoping for?”

She shook her head. “And at Kell? You knew when the Kingdoms' fleet would be coming?”

“Of course. That king of kings was one of ours. We recognized each other the moment we met. I far outranked him by then, of course. He was still human enough to breed sons. Look where that got him!”

“So he gave you Koriana. And who fathered her children?”

The monster chuckled. “Not this body, Dam, not Podakan! After we consumed it at Didicas, the Podakan part of us could not create life and we didn't want people wondering why. It amused us to pimp the king of kings's daughter like a free harlot. She was the nightly prize for good behavior, and the Muhavuran lads were very well behaved. If she complained, we just sent for a few more. But it doesn't matter now. She and all her litter are dead, killed by your benevolent Empire—on the orders of your Reverenced First.”

She said, “You are enjoying tormenting me, but I see through your lies, as I have always seen through them. One more question. When you had Podakan put the spider in Fagatele Fiucha's bed, that night in Achelone City, did he know it might bite?”

The monster scowled. “You should ask rather why it didn't bite him.”

“That answers my question. It didn't bite him, or he would have known it was dangerous. He might have died, and Maleficence didn't want that, did it? But Podakan thought it would be a good prank to make his tutor wake up screaming with a hairy, many-legged thing in under his sheet with him. It turned out otherwise. He was a very humble, repentant little boy for months after that. For a while I almost believed he was going to grow up to be a decent, honest man.”

“You didn't try hard enough, so we didn't, I'm glad to say. Now, you will join us.” He reached down and gripped her shoulder.

“No!”

“Yes. We are ready to consume you, Irona 700.” He opened his mouth and bent to her throat.

She stabbed her son's image, ramming the dagger into its ribs. It straightened up, laughing and making no effort to remove the gruesome trophy protruding from its chest. The wound did not bleed. “You think that will stop us, woman?”

“It is the blade that cut your birth cord.”

“Why should that matter? But we shall keep it as a souvenir,” it said, looking down admiringly at the hilt. Then the Podakan thing shimmered one hand back into a Gren's taloned paw and slashed her breasts.