“Brother!” Nnanji pleaded. “We have a victory. We must follow it up. The sutras . . . ”
That bang on the head—he couldn’t think, and his tongue was all over his mouth. “I ama theventh,” Wallie mumbled.
“Brother!”
“A Seventh!” Wallie repeated faintly. His knees were paper. The howling of the wind . . .
He was a Seventh. Muttering, they turned and headed back.
“Katanji?” Wallie said. The dock road was swaying nauseatingly, the storm drowning out everything.
“He’s on his way back.” Nnanji was beginning to look worried.
“Casualties?”
“Only Oligarro, brother. Not serious.”
Earthquakes, now; the dock was going up and down in great fuzzy waves.
“He’s got a little round hole through his shoulder,” Nnanji said from a far distance. “I think he’ll be all right, if there’s no curse on it.”
There was something very important that Wallie had to say, if he could only remember . . . He slid to his knees, and the World faded behind the gray roaring.
He thought of it again as they carried him on board
Sapphire
, when he saw the other pile of dead sorcerers. His orders to wound, not kill, had not worked very well. He tried to speak, to tell Nnanji to collect weapons. If he made the words they were not heard.
They laid him on a hatch cover and sailed away.
†††††††
He had been studying a fire bucket for some time—perhaps only a few minutes, perhaps longer. He had not been conscious of being unconscious . . . He remembered them cutting off his manacles, unbuckling his harness, and laying him gently on the cover. He was lying there now, on his side with his head in Jja’s lap. Delayed shock? Not the sort of thing that a hero was supposed to get. He tried to turn over, winced, and made do with twisting his head to look up at her. This was an interesting viewpoint, and he studied contentedly for a while, then looked beyond, to where her face hung against the sky, the most beautiful and certainly the most welcome face in the World, a miracle of golden brown against blue.
“That’s the sort of smile that drives men mad,” he said. The smile grew broader, but she did not speak. “What’s so funny, then?”
The smile became broader still. “Not funny, my love—happy.”
Again be tried to move and grunted with pain. “I don’t think you should smile like that when I’m dying. See that hole in my back? Those broken white things are ribs. The puffy pink things are bits of lungs.”
“There’s no hole in your back.” Soft as snowflakes, her fingers stroked from his shoulder blade down to the base of his ribs. “You have bruises, that’s all. A bump on the head. No bones broken, Brota says.”
Wallie said, “Brota can only look at the outside. Inside feels like a junkyard.” He decided that the smile was fifty percent relief and fifty percent the sort of smile she gave Vixini sometimes and fifty percent some sort of admiration. All the rest of it must be love. Hell, it was a good smile to be given. Yet . . . “What is so funny, wench?”
Jja snickered. “You have a mothermark. I know it wasn’t there this morning.”
Another battle won—after the last battle, his right eyelid had suddenly gained a swordsman fathermark, but his left had stayed blank, uniquely blank in the World.
‘Tell me,” he said, wondering what the little god had made of a crime reporter.
Jja’s smile broadened. “It’s a feather, my love!”
A scribe, of course. Or was the god playing his jokes again? The sorcerers were a lot more than scribes; they were also chemists, and the new Lord Shonsu was a blend of the old Shonsu the swordsman and Wallie Smith the chemist.
Very funny, Shorty! I thought you promised no miracles? What are the swordsmen of the tryst going to think when they see that?
Sorcery as technology? That was going to need some rethinking.
He had been thinking of spy stories, and whodunnits. But it had not been a whodunnit, rather a howdunnit. His eyes had told him, Katanji had told him, and he had paid no heed.
Gunpowder certainly—the smell alone confirmed that. What else did they have? Probably not much; Honakura had been right, they were mostly charlatans. Whatever had caused that ancient quarrel between the priests and the scribes, the swordsmen had sided with the priests. The scribes had been driven out and herded up into the mountains. In self-defense they had claimed magical powers and probably devised all sorts of clever little tricks, like the sleight of hand that could steal a sailor’s knife. That explained the sleeves and the hidden hands.
And sleight of hand explained the magical bird. Tomiyano had not opened the pot, because he had been holding it. The sorcerer had lifted the lid, and the bird had come out of his sleeve. Put a bird in a dark pocket, and it would freeze. That had not been all meaningless mumbo-jumbo, though. A pigeon could carry a message, but it could also be a signal. No message meant
send help
. The purpose of the exercise had been to release the pigeon, and the other sorcerers had shown up very soon afterward.
Burning rags? Lights in the forest? Phosphorus! Quite possible—middle sixteen hundreds on Earth, but not all technologies would make discoveries in the same order, so phosphorus was possible. Urine, both human and animal, would be the source of phosphorus, as well as of nitrates for the gunpowder. That was why the tanners and dyers were evicted; those crafts used urine, also, and the sorcerers wanted to corner the supply. Why had he not seen that? The scar on Tomiyano’s face was an acid burn, of course. What else? He would have to rethink everything he had learned and reinterpret it. Surely all of it would have a rational explanation now—sorcery or science, but never both.
It had all been there for him to see that day in Aus: distillation coils, sulfur, pigeons. Even earlier—what would be mined in volcanic terrain except sulfur? Dumb swordsman!
He had come so close when he had Kandoru’s murder reenacted. Had he followed his own logic through to its proper conclusions, he would have seen that the tune had been a stage prop, the fife a weapon. Then he would not have locked his mind into a belief in sorcery; things would have turned out differently then.
He twisted around and saw Nnanji and Thana standing by the rail watching him. so he made an effort, and Jja helped him to sit up. He had indeed been unconscious, and for some time, it seemed.
Sapphire
was already in among the islands north of the city, winding her way along a channel in a line of ships, all fleeing from Ov and the sorcerers’ wrath. The sun shone on blue water and the hot fall tints of dogwood and willows on those islands. White herons stalked the beaches. The massive white cloud over RegiVul was almost invisible in its remoteness, its shadows the same soft blue as the dome of heaven itself. Brota was humped by the tiller, probably finding her helmsman solitude relaxing after the excitement. She saw him move and raised a fat arm in salute.
Nnanji and Thana came hurrying over, hand in hand.
“Where’s Katanji?” Wallie asked.
“He’s below, resting.” Nnanji shook his head sadly. “It will take a real miracle to make a swordsman out of him now, brother! His arm is smashed. Brota says we can’t even put a cast on until the swelling goes down.”
“The Goddess rewards those who help us,” Wallie said awkwardly. “If Cowie went to live in a palace, then I think Novice Katanji will be looked after.”
Nnanji nodded, and Wallie asked what had gone wrong, what had happened. Very simple, was the answer—mosquitoes. Katanji had been slapping, like the rest of them, and had smudged his slavestripe. The fake sailor had noticed as Katanji edged close to see what was in the baskets. But Oligarro was fine, Nnanji said, a clean wound, no bones or arteries.
His grin would not stay away long: “And no one else but you got as much as a broken fingernail! We should have had minstrels with us, brother!” He hugged Thana tightly. “The first victory of your tryst, Lord Shonsu!”
“It’s not my tryst! Ouch!” He had moved again. “What’s that?”
Gingerly Nnanji held up a thin silver tube. “I found it on the dock. Is it safe, my lord brother? I can throw it overboard . . . ”
“Oh, it’s safe if there’s nothing in it! You didn’t pick up anything else, did you?”
“No, brother.”
Pity! Wallie took the fife and looked at it. There were only three finger holes, so it would not be capable of much music, but drilling finger holes without spoiling the bore must be tricky. He tried blowing, achieving a wince from himself and nervous cries from the others.
“Kandoru didn’t draw his sword, Nnanji, and he could have done, easily. He reached up and then he turned around, but he hadn’t drawn. He hadn’t been trying to draw!”
Nnanji looked blank.
Wallie sighed. “He thought he’d been bitten by a mosquito. But his fingers found a little dart sticking in him, and he turned round to see where it had come from.”
Of course, it had come from a blowpipe, a convenient short-range weapon. Good indoors, or when there was no wind—that was why he had seen one in Aus. The air had been still that afternoon, when the sorcerers had cornered Shonsu. It would have been as reliable as a pistol at close quarters, and more dramatic to the onlookers. The sorcerers were showmen, murderous tricksters!
Quietly the crew was gathering around, and Wallie explained the blowpipe, and poison darts.
“Give me my sword.”
They passed him his harness. In the middle of the decorated leather of the scabbard was a round hole, the edges burned. Wincing again, he drew the sword out, and there was a dark burn mark on the blade, very close to the image of a maiden stroking a griffon.
“Is that where the thunderbolt struck?” Nnanji asked solemnly. “I suppose a sorcerer’s spell couldn’t prevail against the Goddess’ sword?”
“Nor against Brota’s ingots. Did you look behind them?” Wallie asked. Nnanji shook his head and went to do so.
Wallie squinted along the blade, but there was no kink in it—a fine tribute to the metallurgical skill of Chioxin, for a lesser sword must surely have broken when hit by a musket ball. He would have to test it to make sure that the steel had not been fatally weakened. A fraction to the left or right and the ball would have missed the blade. Indeed if he had not been carrying Katanji, the scabbard would not have been pushed over to the left so far . . . hastily he dropped that line of thought.
He eased himself around and looked at the rail. There were two holes through it and big chunks had been blown out. Then Tomiyano saw him looking.
“We’ll have to charge for repairs,” he said solemnly. “Passengers aren’t supposed to damage the ship.” Then he laughed, which was almost unheard of.
“Don’t!” Wallie said quickly. “They’re honorable battle scars.”
Nnanji had managed to drag one of the ingots aside. He came back holding two shapeless lumps.
“I found these,” he said wonderingly. “They look like silver.”
“They’re lead,” Wallie told him.
“Why would you not let us go on to the tower, my lord brother?” Nnanji asked regretfully. “Fighting sorcerers wasn’t so difficult after all! Fifteen dead!” Then he paused and smiled suspiciously. “Or was it only fourteen?”
“Fourteen,” Wallie agreed. “I don’t think I killed the Fifth.” Nnanji shook his head in affectionate disapproval of this swordsman who didn’t like killing.
“We were lucky, Nnanji, very lucky! They aren’t much good at fighting are they? Did you count their mistakes?”
“Dozens!” Nnanji snorted. “Lining up across the path of a charging wagon? They should have let us go by them, then commandeered a ship. They should have dropped you in the River before we arrived, brother! Amateurs!”
That was worth knowing, though. The swordsmen were trained fighters, the sorcerers merely armed civilians. They had lost their heads. Yet Nnanji could not suspect a fraction of it. The tower doors were certainly booby-trapped. Defenders could drop antipersonnel grenades. A skirmish on a jetty was one thing; an assault on a tower would be another matter altogether. Then another piece of the puzzle fell into place—Katanji had reported bronze gratings at the tower doors and had seen a big gold ball on a column—an electrostatic generator, of course. Burglars were electrocuted.
“You saved my life again, brother,” Wallie said. “I thank you.”
Nnanji grinned. “I was rather good, wasn’t I?”
“Not good—magnificent!”
Once Nnanji would have blushed scarlet at that. Now he just chuckled and said, “Thinking?”
“Very fast thinking!”
“Judgment?”
“Great judgment!”
“Tactics?”
“Superb tactics!” Wallie laughed with him, and then wished he hadn’t. “Sum it up in one word, brother: leadership! You’re not just a Fifth in fencing, Master Nnanji, you’re a leader. You’ll be a Fifth and a good one!”
Where now was the gangling, awkward kid whom Wallie had found on the temple beach? Few swordsmen of any rank could have reacted fast enough and efficiently enough to have organized that rescue. Wallie had not thought of calling on the water rats as reinforcements, but Nnanji had, and thought of taking a wagon, too.
Thana was standing beside him; they had their arms around each other again. Now she spoke for the first time. “Sixth?”
Wallie tried to shrug and regretted that, also. “Soon,” he said. “Very soon.”
Nnanji’s eyes glinted. “We are going, on to Casr, then, brother?”
Yes, Lord Shonsu would have to return to Casr. He might have to face a denunciation for what he had done in Aus—but now he had a victory to set against it. He wondered what other time bombs might be ticking there, what buried mines his predecessor had left. “We are, if She wills it. You will get your promotion. You’ve earned it, and it will be our first business there.”
The rest of the crew was standing or sitting around—smiling in approval, waiting for him to recover, patient to hear what fate he had in store for them. He was admiral, he had been granted wisdom, he was the Goddess’ champion, he would decide their fate.
“And the tryst, brother?”
Wallie sagged his shoulders to seek a more comfortable position. Tryst? Now he knew how to fight sorcerers, but that did not mean he would succeed.