Authors: John Maddox Roberts
“How did he impress you?” Ironwood asked. “As to his loyalty, I mean.”
“He was resentful of Kyaga’s sudden rise among the nomads and made little secret of the fact. Overall, though, I found him loyal. I think my offers of wealth and honors had little effect on him because he felt he would soon have those things anyway. He was full of confidence that Kyaga would be victorious. Speaking of which, I must see to it that this conquest does not take place, so if you will now excuse me…”
“Just a moment more,” Nistur said, holding up a hand. “What were your dealings with the other two?”
“My dealings were the same with all,” he said impatiently. “Guklak rebuffed me out of hand. It seemed that his loyalty was unshakable. Shatterspear is a corrupt fool and seemed much more interested than the others, but he has not contacted me. I suspect Yalmuk’s killing has put him on his guard. Now, will that be all?”
“For the moment,” Nistur said.
“Excellent.” Councilor Rukh began to stride toward the door, and a servant cast a black velvet cloak across his armored shoulders. “Good fortune in finding your killer.” He paused and turned. “If I were you, I’d start with the man whose seal you wear. My steward will show you out.”
“Another faithful servant of the crown,” sighed Nistur when they were out on the street.
“He’s an odd one,” Ironwood said. “I was surprised you didn’t want to question him further.”
“We would have got absolutely nothing from him except for the little suspicion he tried to plant. He is a
schemer of iron purpose, like the lord himself. Besides …” His voice trailed off in a bemused silence.
“Besides what?” Ironwood asked.
“I think he may have been the one who hired me to kill you.”
The next name on the list was Councilor Melkar, but as they wended their way toward his house, a liveried servant ran up to them.
“Gentlemen, I serve the great Councilor Alban, and he urgently desires your presence at his mansion.”
“He’s far down the list,” Nistur told the others. “I suspect the lord doesn’t consider him much of a threat. But it would be agreeable to talk to someone who actually desires to talk to us.”
“I agree,” Ironwood said. He turned to Shellring. “This one is supposed to be the richest of the lot, but don’t steal anything while we are there.”
She shrugged. “What these people own is mostly too big to carry, anyway.”
They followed the servant to a town house flanked by other similarly lavish homes. Whatever this one’s wealth, he did not choose to spend it on fine grounds. The servant opened the door and conducted them through a house full of bizarre sculptures, paintings, anatomical specimens, skeletons, charts of land and sky, and instruments of no discernible function.
“It’s like Stunbog’s cabin, only a hundred times as big and crowded!” Shellring said wonderingly. They ascended a stair carved in the likeness of a coiled dragon, every scale rendered with loving care and unsurpassable craftsmanship. Finally they reached a room on the third floor, and the servant knocked. From the panels of the door, a variety of strange beasts frowned at them.
“Enter,” someone called.
They passed into a room impossibly cluttered with
magical tomes, instruments, specimens, and apparatus. There were also some five or six men and women there, all dressed in robes spangled with magical symbols. They were gathered at a long central table, bent over scrolls and charts like a general’s staff planning a campaign over maps of enemy territory. At one end of the table sat a small, elderly man who looked up at their approach.
“Are you the investigating officers?” he demanded. They held up their seals, and he beckoned them closer.
“Come here, then. You are not what I expected.” The old man had pushed his formal mask onto the top of his head where it rested, apparently forgotten.
“I am sorry we disappoint you,” said Nistur, long since inured to snubs.
“No, no. I expected far worse, some court toady or blundering constable. You look as if you might know your work.”
“We flatter ourselves that we have done well so far,” Nistur said.
“Well, you may not do so well in the future without help. Look at this.” He swept an arm over the table. By the light of lamps wrought in the form of fire-breathing dragons, they saw charts upon which stars and constellations were connected by straight lines and arcs, parchments covered with arcane writing and symbols, or across which liquids had been splashed, seemingly at random. There were metallic charms of various sorts, along with crystals, bones, and feathers. Scarcely a square inch of tabletop was visible.
“Hmm, I see,” said Nistur. “If I may crave your indulgence, Councilor Alban, what are we looking at?”
“Why, this is proof of my greatest fears, fears that the lord has laughed at and considered to be unfounded! It is proof that Kyaga Strongbow is possessed of great sorcerous power!”
“One ignores such evidence at great peril,” Nistur agreed. “Do your studies and your advisors inform you of the nature of this power?”
“It is most strange,” said Alban. “All the indications are that Kyaga arrived here with a talisman of great potency, one that lends him abilities denied to most humans.”
“I see. Does your research reveal any connection between this talisman and, say, the death of Yalmuk Bloodarrow?” He had decided it was worth a try.
Alban waved a hand dismissively. “That is a matter too petty for my deliberations.”
“Nonetheless, we are charged with investigating his murder. Did you, along with the other councilors, entertain the nomadic envoys?”
“Yes, but there was only one who interested me.”
“Shadespeaker,” Ironwood said.
“Yes. The tribal wizard intrigued me.” Alban picked up a handful of glittering crystals and let them trickle between his fingers. Somehow, they arranged themselves on the table in the semblance of a five-pointed star. “In their ignorant fashion, these primitive shamans are sometimes privy to secrets of distinct power.”
“I believe my lord exaggerates,” said a white-haired sorcerer who wore a tall, pointed hat of gray silk. “The shamans do little except communicate with a limited range of tribal spirits, and they profess to speak with the voices of dead ancestors. Even these petty skills are for the most part fraudulent. Barbarians as a whole dislike and distrust the Arts. They have little use for genuine sorcerers.”
“I disagree!” cried a very fat woman who wore a moon-spangled black gown the size of a nomad’s tent. “I have consulted with shamans of the wasteland who had at their command fiends of vast power. Their practice is
strange to us, but that is because it is passed down by word of mouth, and nothing is written.”
“But that is not this one,” said a tiny man whose face was as wrinkled as a dried apple. “If Shadespeaker possesses great wizardry power, then he must also posses a spell or talisman that masks it!”
“And yet,” said Councilor Alban, instantly silencing their bickering, “our spells of seeking have deterrnined that the enigmatic relationship between Shadespeaker and Kyaga is in some strange fashion linked with the warlord’s power.”
“We learned from the barbarians that Shadespeaker traveled among them as a prophet, foretelling the corning of Kyaga,” said Nistur. Ironwood and Shellring looked on with expressions of distaste. Apparently, neither of them had much use for sorcerous doings. Nistur, on the other hand, was interested in anything that might aid their task.
“Yes, and it was most strange,” Alban said. “I could not persuade the man to elucidate it to me. Apparently, it is the custom for shamans to communicate with the spirits in an ecstatic trance. It is most unlike them to walk about in a seemingly ordinary state of consciousness, proclaiming words of prophecy as they travel.”
“Why didn’t it make the nomads suspicious of him?” Ironwood asked.
“It did,” answered the aristocrat. “But, as I have told you, Kyaga and Shadespeaker possess some mysterious power, and it is this that turns aside the natural suspicions of the barbarians and makes them lay aside ancient enmities to fight in his cause.”
“Not with perfect efficiency,” Nistur assured him. “There is much resentment of Kyaga among the chieftains, and their feuds are ever ready to resurface.”
“If he had the power to control people utterly,” said the wizened wizard, “he would not need a conquering army
at all. He could rule all Ansalon through sorcerous power alone.”
“An excellent point,” Nistur conceded.
“No,” said Alban, “this talisman gives him an advantage, no more. But he has parlayed this advantage to become a genuine power in the world.”
“What does this signify?” Ironwood demanded. “If you have nothing save questions and conundrums, this is of very little help to us.”
“Who said that I should be of use to you?” Alban demanded. “It is you who should be of use to Tarsis! Our enemy is Kyaga Strongbow, and we must know the source of his strength!”
“Your pardon, sir,” said Nistur, “but we have not been retained for purposes of military intelligence. The lord of this city wishes us to solve Yalmuk Bloodarrow’s murder. Having done so, we will perhaps have removed Kyaga’s pretext for hostilities, or at the very least we shall have bought Tarsis a little time to strengthen its defenses.”
“Nonsense!” Alban snapped. “He is a warlord with a plan for conquest. Do you really think he will alter his schedule to his disadvantage for the sake of this trifling homicide?”
“It seems unlikely,” Nistur admitted, “but our orders are to proceed upon that assumption.”
“Have you spoken with Kyaga and Shadespeaker?” Alban asked, his mercurial mind apparently now working in another direction.”
“We have,” Nistur said.
“Describe this to me.”
“My lord,” Ironwood said, “our orders are to report to the Lord of Tarsis, not to you.”
“Peace, my friend,” said Nistur, “this will not take long, and it may yield results.”
While Nistur rendered a brief description of their
interviews in the barbarian camp earlier that day, Alban’s coterie of wizards went over the three investigators as if searching for interpretable signs, although they did this in ways that were completely incomprehensible. A very tall, thin man who wore layers of gauzy black cloth sprinkled them with glittering powders, muttering to himself as the powders changed color. The fat woman squinted at them through a lens of purple crystal that she held before her left eye while the fingers of her right hand traced complicated symbols in the air. Shellring drew back a little as the woman seemed to peer up her nostrils. The wizened old man touched their garments with an instrument consisting of ivory arcs connected with golden struts and engraved all over with groups of tiny dots.
When Nistur’s tale was concluded, the assembled sorcerers huddled around Councilor Alban, and there were several minutes of collective muttering, interspersed with gestures that apparently had some sort of mystical meaning. Eventually, Alban addressed the investigators.
“It is even worse than we had feared. Your interview with Kyaga and the shaman left traces on the three of you indicating that you have been in the presence of terrible power and what might be termed, in layman’s language, ‘spells of deception.’ However, the exact nature of the talisman itself is not yet clear. Because of the phase of the moons and the alignment of certain baleful stars, we will need the rest of the night, the coming day, and perhaps half of the following night to interpret the evidence.”
“You had better make that the entirety of tomorrow night, Councilor Alban,” said the tiny wizard.
“We shall look forward to the results of your studies,” Nistur said.
“Yes, I’ll dispatch the news to you as soon as we have it.” He was already poring over a star chart and reaching for a quill and ink. “Run along now.”
With this dismissal, they took their leave. Back on the street outside, Shellring ran a hand over her bristly scalp. “Is that old coot as crazy as he sounds?”
“I fear so,” said Nistur. “But that alone does not mean he isn’t onto something. From the first, I have felt there is too much magic involved in what should have been a simple killing. It annoys me when people complicate things needlessly.”
“What do you make of his little pack of wizards?” Ironwood asked him.
“Wizards! These are amateur practitioners, my friend, little better than the mountebanks who entertain the gullible at country fairs. They wear none of the insignia of the great Orders of Magic, nor the robes of the Orders. It does not mean they utterly lack knowledge or ability, but they lack the discipline to master that difficult and dangerous Art. The world is full of would-be mages, I fear, folk who have read a few books, perhaps learned a handful of spells, and think that is all there is to being a wizard.”
Ironwood smiled ruefully. “Like the village braggarts who strut about in armor, draped with weapons during peacetime, but who are never to be found when the war trumpets blow.”
“Exactly. It may be that, with their minor abilities and eccentric talents, they have discovered something important, but how are we to know?”
“So do we go to Councilor Melkar’s now?” Shellring asked, yawning.
Ironwood studied the paper the lord had given them. “It says here he’s on duty at the fort until the third gong of the night, which is rung an hour before dawn.” He rerolled the paper and stuffed it into his belt pouch. “Karst says Melkar is the one councilor who takes his soldiering seriously, so he’s probably at the fort or out
inspecting the walls. Shall we look for him or wait until he returns home?”
Nistur dusted snow from his hat brim. “We could spend the whole time chasing him down. I recommend we go to the hulk, get warm, have a snack, and see if Stunbog has made any headway in his studies. Then we can return to the hunt refreshed.”
“You may be refreshed,” Shellring said, yawning once more, “but I’m going to need a nap before I feel like doing any hunting.”
They returned to the hulk to find an unexpected sight: tethered to one of the supporting beams that kept the vessel upright was a horse. They exarniried the beast with some wonder. It was a shaggy creature, its mane and tail untrimmed, its hooves unshod in the fashion of the nomads. Its saddle, bridle, and other gear were likewise of nomad style.