The Tritonian Ring and Other Pasudian Tales (4 page)

             
He shouted: "Get out!" and kicked at one of the royal goats who had somehow wandered into the castle.

             
"Prince Vakar!" said a low voice from the shadows.

             
Vakar whirled, clapping a hand to his hip where his sword-hilt would have been had he been armed. It was
Söl
the spy.

             
"Well?" said Vakar.

             
"I—I couldn't speak out in council-meeting, but I must tell you that
...
"

             
"
That what?"

             
"You guarantee my safety?"

             
"You shall be safe though you tell me I'm the son of a sow and a sea-demon."

             
"Your brother is in league with the Gorgons—
"

             
"
Are you mad?"

             
"By no means.
There's proof. Go ask—
urk!"
Söl
jerked as if he had been stung. The man half-turned and Vakar saw something sticking in his back.
Söl
gasped: "They—he—I die! Go tell
...
"

             
He folded up upon the stone flooring, joint by joint. Before Vakar could have counted ten the spy was huddled motionless at his feet.

             
Vakar stooped and pulled the dagger from
Söl's
back. A quick examination showed the spy to be
dead,
and also that the dagger had been thrown so that the point had stuck in the muscle covering the man's right shoulder-blade: a mere flesh-wound. Holding the dagger, Vakar moved quickly down the corridor in the direction from which the weapon had come, his moccasins making no sound. He neither saw nor heard anyone and presently turned
back,
cursing himself for not having run after the assassin the instant
Söl
fell.

             
He returned to the
victim
whose eyes now stared sightlessly up, reflecting tiny highlights from the nearest lamp. Vakar held the dagger close to the lamp and saw that the bronzen blade was overlain with a coating of some black gummy substance, covering the pointward half of the blade. This stuff was in turn coated by a faint film of blood for a half-inch from the point.

             
Vakar, his blood freezing, pondered his predicament.
Could Kuros be playing so deadly a double game? Somebody bad shut
Söl's
mouth just as he had been about to reveal matters of moment. If S
ö
l were right, what could Vakar do? Accuse Kuros publicly? His woolly-headed father would scoff and his brother would ask whether he, Vakar, hadn't murdered
Söl
and then
invented this wild tale to cover the fact. Whatever the proof S
öl
had spoken of, Vakar had no access to it now.

             
At last Vakar wiped the dagger-point—lightly, so as not to remove the substance under the blood—on the edge of
Söl's
kilt and tiptoed away. As he entered his outer chamber he heard Bili's voice:

             
"Is that you, my lord and love?"

             
"Aye.
Don't get up."

             
He picked up the lighted lamp from the table and held it close to the row of daggers and axes and swords that hung upon the wall. He took down one of the daggers and tried the murder-weapon in the sheath. He had to go through most of the collection to find a sheath that fitted.

             
"What are you doing?"
came
the voice of Bili, whose curiosity must have been aroused by the snick of blades in their sheaths.

             
"Nothing.
I shall be along presen
tl
y."

             
"Well, come to bed! I'm tired of waiting."

             
Vakar sighed, wondering how often he had heard that. Much as he esteemed Bili's lectual accomplishments, he sometimes wished she would occasionally think of something else. He replaced the dagger-sheaths on their racks, hid in a chest the dagger in whose sheath he had placed the murder weapon, and went into the bedchamber.

-

             
Before dawn Vakar was awakened by a knock on his door and a voice: "Prince Vakar! There's been a murder!"

             
It was the captain of the castle guard. His noise partly awakened Bili, who stirred and reached out. Vakar eluded her embrace, tumbled out of bed, and pulled on some clothes.

             
They were all standing around the body of
Söl,
even that fisherman whom Kuros (normally more rank-conscious than Vakar) claimed as a personal friend to be entertained at the cas
tl
e. King Zhabutir said:

             
"Terrible! Do—do you know anything about this, Vakar?"

             
"Not a thing," said Vakar, and looked hard at Kuros.
"You, brother?"

             
"Nor I," said Kuros blandly.

             
Vakar stared into his brother's eyes as if in hope of seeing through them into the brain behind, but could make nothing of
the
man's expression. He turned away, saying:

             
"Perhaps Ryn can make something of this. I have to collect my gear for departure."

             
He went back to his chambers, but instead of packing at once he took down the murder-knife from the wall-rack, hid it in his shirt, and went down into the courtyard. The East was pale with the coming dawn and the wind whipped Vakar's cloak. A dozen swine lay in a mud-wallow, huddled for warmth, chins resting on each other's bristly bodies. An old boar grunted and showed his tusks. Vakar kicked him out of the way and grabbed a half-grown shoat, which burst into frantic struggles and squeals.

             
With a quick look around Vakar drew the murder-dagger from his shirt. He clamped his teeth upon the sheath, drew the blade, and pricked the pig's rump with the point to a depth of a quarter
-inch. Then he released the ani
mal, which raced across the court. Half-way across it began to slow down. Before it reached the far side its legs gave way under it, and it lay twitching for
a
few seconds before it died.

             
Vakar stared thoughtfully at the dagger as he sheathed it and hid it in his shirt. If the venom worked so fast upon
a
beast notoriously resistant to poison, there was no doubt of what it would do to
a
man. He started to return to his chambers,
then
paused as another thought struck him. It would not do to have this poisoned porker fed to the castle's dogs, or even more so to have it unknowingly fried up for the royal breakfast. Vakar walked over to the pig, picked it up, and carried it to the outer gate. There the usual pair of guards leaned on their zaghnals or dagger-halberds: pole-arms with knife-like triangular bronze blades.

             
"Which of you is junior?" he said. When that question had been answered he handed the shoat to the startled young man, saying:

             
"Get
a
shovel from the tool-house and take this pig outside the city and bury it: deeply, so no dog or hyena shall dig it up. And don't take it home for your wife to cook unless you wish a sudden death."

             
At that instant Drozo, King Zhabutir's treasurer, appeared at the gate on his way to work. Vakar went with him to pick up a supply of trade-metal. Drozo gave him gold rings and silver tores and copper slugs shaped like little ax-heads, then handed him a semicircular piece of bronze, saying:

             
"If you get to
Kernê
and are pressed for funds, go to Senator Amastan with this. It's half a broken medallion whereof he has the other half, and will therefore identify you."

             
Vakar went back to his room. Bili called from the bedchamber:

             
"Aren't you coming back to bed, Vakar? It's early—
"

             
"
No,"
said Vakar shortly,
and
began rummaging
through his possessions.

             
He took down one dagger for which he had rigged
a
harness of two narrow strips so that the sheath was
positioned in front of his chest. He switched this harness to the sheath that now housed the poisoned dagger, took off his fine linen shirt, strapped the harness around his torso, and donned the shirt again.

             
Then he began collecting garments and weapons. He assembled his winged
helmet of solid gold with the li
ning of purple cloth; his jazerine cuirass of gold-washed bronzen scales; his cloak of the finest white wool with a collar of sable. He looked over his collection of bronze swords: slender rapiers, heavy cut-and-thrust longswords, short leaf-shaped barbarian broadswords, and a double-curved sapara from far Thamuzeira, where screaming men and women were flayed on the altars of Miluk. He picked the best rapier, the one with the gold-inlaid blade, the hilt of sharkskin and silver with a ruby pommel, and the scabbard of embossed leather with a golden chape at the
end
...

             
At this point it occurred to Vakar that while he would no doubt make a glittering spectacle in all this gaudery, it would be useless to pretend that he was but a simple traveller of no consequence. In fact he would need a bodyguard to keep the first robber lord who saw him from swooping down with his troop to seize this finery.

             
One by one he returned the pieces to their chests and pegs and assembled a quite different outfit. As the rapier would be too light to be effective against armor he chose a plain but serviceable longsword; a plain bronze helm with a lining of sponge; a simple jack of stiff-tanned cowhide with bronze reinforcings; and his stout bronze buckler with the repousse pattern of lunes: work of the black Tartarean smiths. Nobody in Lorsk could duplicate it.

             
He was pulling on a pair of piebald boots of shaggy winter horsehide when Fual, his personal slave, came in. Fual was an Aremorian of Kerys who had been seized by Foworian
slavers and sold in Gadaira. He was a slender man, more so even than Vakar, with the tight skin of the more northerly peoples and a touch of red in his hair that suggested the blood of the barbarous Galatha. He looked at Vakar from large melancholy eyes and clucked.

             
"
...
and why didn't you call me, sir? It isn't proper for one of your rank to work for
himself
."

             
"Like Lord Naz in the poem,"
grinned
Vakar:

"Slavishly swin
ki
ng,
             
             
weary and worn
...

"If it makes you unhappy you may complete the job."

             
They were stuffing extra clothing into a goatskin bag when Bili, scantily wrapped in a deerskin blanket, appeared in the doorway, looking at Vakar from brown bovine eyes. She said: