The face of chaos - Thieves World 05 (22 page)

'Then why did you use just enough venom on your dart to destroy his mind but not enough to kill him?'

The Beysib woman laughed melodically. 'He overstepped himself. He thought to arouse Shupansea's rage by slaying Sharilar, her cousin, while they walked along the wharf. But he killed not only Sharilar, but Prism - and that we could not forgive.'

'But you could have killed him outright. Wouldn't that have been the true vengeance of Bey?'

'Bey is a goddess of many moods; she is life as well as death. This is a lesson for everyone: for town and Beysib. They will respect each other a little more now. Shupansea, herself, needed to pronounce this judgement. She must rise to rule here or Turghurt will be only the first.'

There was a collective gasp from the crowd and Yorl drew back the curtain for the third time. The Beysa was holding a small, bloody knife, while her serpent wound around her arm. Turghurt was already dead. The crowd broke into cheering, just as Yorl felt the sharp prick of fangs on his own neck. Poison burned and gripped him in hands of red-hot iron. The sunlit courtyard grew dim, then black. The homed gateway to the seventh level of paradise shone before him. The ancient magician's spirit stumbled forward and fell, with the gate just beyond his reach.

Failure - and with the land of death almost within his grasp. He wept and brushed the tears away with a shaggy paw. The room was dark and filled with the odour from the pyre on which they'd immolated the criminal, depriving his spirit of eternal life within the goddess Bey. And Yorl was left with only the memory of death to sustain him.

David Drake

'Hai!' called the Beysib executioner as his left blade struck. The tip of his victim's index finger spun thirty feet across the Bazaar and pattered against Samlor's boot. 'Hai!' and the right sword lopped the ends off the fourth and middle fingers together, so that the victim's right hand ended in a straight line, the four fingers all the length of the least, the only one to which a fingernail remained for the moment. 'Hai!'

The auction block in the centre of the Bazaar had been used for punishment before, but this particular technique was new to Samlor hil Samt. It was new as well to many of the longer-term residents of Sanctuary, judging from the expressions on their faces as they watched. The victim had been spread-eagled, belly against a vertical wooden barrier. That gave the audience a view of the executioner's artistry, which an ordinary horizontal chopping block would have hidden. And the Beysib - Lord Tudhaliya, if Samlor had understood the crier was an artist, no doubt about that.

Tudhaliya held his swords each at its balance and twirled them as he himself pirouetted. The blades glittered like lightning in the rain. The Beysib bowed to the onlookers before he spun in another flurry of cuts. The gesture was a sardonic one, an acknowledgement of the audience's privilege of watching him work. Tudhaliya was not nodding to the locals as peers or even as humans. For his performance, the executioner had stripped to a clout that kept his genitals out of the way when he moved. His arrival had been in a palanquin, however, and the richly brocaded Beysib who stood by as a respectful backdrop to the activity were clearly subordinates. And at the moment, his lordship was slicing off the fingers of a screaming victim like so many bits of carrot. Well, the governance of Sanctuary had never been Samlor's concern. Blood and balls! How the Cirdonian caravan-master wished that he had no other concern with this cursed city either.

The first link of the information he needed had come from an urchin for a copper piece, sold as blithely as the boy would have sold a stale bread twist from the tray balanced on his head. The name of a fortune-teller, a S'danzo whose protector was a blacksmith? Oh yes, Illyra was still in Sanctuary... and Dubro the smith, too, if the foreign master's business was with him. Samlor's intended business was in no way with the blacksmith, but the information was none the less good to know. Before entering the booth, the Cirdonian set his thumbs on his waist belt and tugged the broad leather a fraction, to the side. That was less obtrusive than adjusting the belt-sheathed fighting knife directly.

'Welcome, master,' said the woman who had been reading the cards to herself on a stool. Samlor looped the sash across the doorway hangings. There were the usual paraphernalia and a table that could be slid between the S'danzo and the lower, cushioned seat for clients. The young woman's eyes were very sharp, however. The Cirdonian knew that her quick appraisal of him as he slid aside the curtain of pierced shells gave often as much information as a reading would require, when retailed back to the sitter over cards or his palms or through 'images'

quivering in a dish of water.

'You came about the luck of your return -' and Samlor would have said that his face was impassive, but it was not, not to her. 'No, not a journey but a woman. Come, sit. The cards, I think?' Her left hand fanned the deck, the brilliant, complex signs that some said reflected the universe in a subtlety equal to that of the icy stars overhead.

'Lady,' said Samlor. He turned up his left palm and the silver in it. It was uncoined bullion, stamped each time it was assayed in a Beysib market. 'You gave a man I met true readings. I need a truth that you won't find in my face.'

The S'danzo looked at the caravan-master again, her smile still professional, but something new behind her eyes. Samlor's boot heels were high enough to grip stirrups, low enough for walking, and worn more by flints than by pavements. He was stocky and no longer young; but his waist still made a straight line with his rib cage, with none of the bulge that time brings to easy living. Samlor's tunic was of dull red cloth, nearly the shade of his face. His skin never seemed to tan in the sun and wind that beat it daily. His only touch of ornament was a silver medallion, its face hidden until the man moved to show the bullion in his calloused palm. Then toad-faced Heqt flashed upward, goddess ofCirdon and the Spring rains - and the S'danzo gasped, 'Samlor hil Samt!'

'No!' the man said sharply in answer to the way Illyra's eyes flicked towards the doorway, towards the ringing of hot iron heard through it. 'Only information, lady. I wish'you no harm.' And he did not touch the hilt of his belt knife, because if she remembered Samlor, she remembered the tale of his first visit to Sanctuary. No need to threaten what his reputation had already promised, wish it or not. 'I want to find a little girl, my niece. Nothing more.'

'Sit, then,' the S'danzo said in a guarded voice. This time the visitor obeyed. He held the silver out to her between thumb and forefinger, but she opened his palm and held it for her gaze a moment before taking her payment. 'There's blood on them,' she said abruptly.

'There's an execution in the square,' Samlor said, glancing at his cuff. But it was unmarked, and even his boot had been too dusty for overt sign where the severed fingertip had touched it. 'Oh,' he said in embarrassment. 'Oh.' He raised his eyes to the S'danzo's. 'Life can be hard, lady... and there are matters of honour. Not my honour since I went into trade -' his lip quirked in a wormwood grimace - 'but of the family, of the House ofKodrix, yes. I've found little enough that brings me pleasure. But not that, not slaughter. Life is hard, that's all.'

Illyra released his palm. The silver clung to her fingers in what was almost a sleight of hand, professional in that, though the reading was no longer simply professional or simple at all. 'Tell me about the child,' the S'danzo said.

'Yes,' the stocky man agreed slowly. Little enough of pleasure, and none at all in some memories. 'My sister Samlane was ...' he said, and he paused, 'not a slut, I suppose, because she didn't bed just anybody, and the decision was always hers. And not a whore, except as a lark, as little coin as there was to be had in our House ... She had a disdain for trade that did credit to the noble House of Kodrix. Our parents were proud of her, I think, as they never were of me after I found an honest way to buy their food - and replenish their wine cellar.' The grimace again, calling attention to a joke that bit the teller like a shark.

The woman was quiet, as cool as the shells that whispered in the door curtain.

'But she was very - experimental. So we shouldn't have been surprised,' Samlor continued, 'that she'd whelped a bastard before her marriage, while she still lived in Cirdon. Samlane's personal effects were sent back after she, she died '

Six inches of steel, her brother's boot knife, were buried in her womb, and vision as clear in Samlor's mind as the edge of the knife with which he had replaced that one. 'I think Regli wanted to pretend she'd never been born. Alum won't hide stretch marks, but she'd passed for a virgin with Regli. I guess Rankan nobles are even stupider than I'd thought. The tramp! Gods! The worthless tramp!'

'Go on,' Illyra said with unexpected gentleness, as if she heard the pain and tortured love beneath the curses.

'The story was there in a diary, enough of it,' Samlor continued. He was deliberately opening his hands, which had clenched in fury at nothing material.

'The child was a girl, fostered with a maid of Samlane's, Reia. I probably saw her myself -' he swallowed '-playing in the halls with the other servants'

brats. You could get lost in the house, a whole wing could crumble over you and you'd never be found.' The hands clenched again. 'My parents tell me they never knew about the child, about Samlane, in that big house. Pray god I never learn otherwise, or I'll have their hearts out though they are my parents.'

The S'danzo touched his hands, relaxing them again. He continued, 'She's four years old by now. She has a birthmark on the front of her scalp, so the hair is streaked white on the black curls. They called her Star, my sister did and the maid. And I came back to Sanctuary -' Samlor raised his eyes and his voice, neither angry but as hard and certain as a sword's edge'-to this hell-hole, to find my niece. Reia had married here, a guardsman, and she'd stayed after the after what happened when my sister died. And she'd kept Star like one of her own, she told me, until a month ago, and the child disappeared, no one to say where.

'That's how late I was, lady,' the Cirdonian went on in a wondering voice. 'Just a month. But I will find Star. And I'll find any one or any thing that's harmed the child before then.'

'You've brought something of the girl's for me to touch, then?' said Illyra. Professional calm had reasserted itself in her voice as she approached her task. This was the crystalline core on which all the mummery, all the 'dark strangers'

and 'far journeys' were based.

'Yes,' said Samlor, calm again himself. With his right hand, his knife hand, he held out a medallion like the one around his own neck. 'It's a custom with us in Cirdon, the birth-token consecrating the newborn to Heqt's bounty. This was Star's. It was found in the mews of the barracks where she lived. Another child picked it up, a friend, so she brought it to Reia instead of keeping it herself.'

Illyra's hand cupped the grinning face of Heqt, but her eyes glanced over the ends of the thong that had suspended the medallion. The surface of the leather was dark with years of sweat and body oils, but its core at the ends was a clear yellow. 'Yes,' Samlor said, 'it had been cut off her, not stretched and broken. Help me find Star, lady.'

The S'danzo nodded. Her eyes had slipped .off into a waking trance already. Illyra's gaze stayed empty for seconds that seemed minutes. Her • fingers were brown and capable and heavy with rings. They worked the surface of the medallion they held, reporting the sensations not to the woman's mind but to her soul. Then, like a castaway flailing herself up from the sea, the S'danzo spluttered again to conscious alertness. Her thin lips formed a brief rictus, not a smile, at the memory of things she had just seen. Samlor had let his own breath out in a rush that reminded him that he had not breathed since Illyra entered her trance.

'I wish,' said the woman softly, 'that I had better news for you, or at least more. No -' for Samlor's face had stiffened to the preternatural calmness of a grave stele'-not dead. And I can't tell you who, master -' the honorific professional as habit reasserted itself'-or even where. But I think I have seen why.'

With one hand Illyra returned the medal as carefully as if it were the child herself. With the fingers of the other hand, she touched her own kerchief-bound hair. 'The mark that you call the "star" is the "porta" to some of the Beysib. A sea-beast with tentacles ... a god, to some of them.'

Samlor turned his eyes towards the curtain that hid the execution, as within him his heart turned to murder. 'That one?' Nodding, his voice as neutral as if all the fury at Lord Tudhaliya were not foaming over his mind as he spoke.

'No, not the rulers,' Illyra said positively. 'Not the Burek clan at all, the horsemen. But the fisher-folk and boatwrights who brought the Burek here, the Setmur - and not all of them.' The woman smiled at the trace of a memory so grim that its fullness wiped her face with loathing an instant later. 'There was,'

she explained, looking away from the caravan-master, 'a cult of Dyareela in Sanctuary in the - recent past. The Porta cult is like that. Only a few, and those hidden because it's sacrilege and treason to worship other than the Imperial gods.'

'The Beysib have closed the temples here?' Samlor asked. Her last statement had jarred him into the interjection.

'Only to human beings,' Illyra said. 'And the Setmur are human, even to the Burek.' She smiled again and this time held the expression. 'We S'danzo are accustomed to being animals, master. Even in cities Ranke conquered as long ago as she did Cirdon.'

'Go on,' said Samlor evenly. 'Do these Beysib think to sacrifice Star to their '