‘That intrigues me, Vazkor. He’s never been so open. He’s risked much on this throw and won’t like to have lost. For the Emperor, he’ll turn his usual blind eye.”
There came a sudden dull clatter of harness and mail from
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the wood at our backs, and riders with closed Masrian lanterns showed between the trees. Sorem smiled.
“Yashlom and some of my jerd, from the sound of it, a minute or so too late, if it had not been for you. Still, we’ll have a safe conduct to the Citadel.”
The party of soldiers reined up, and the leader called out to Sorem. Even spies had been spied on, apparently, and these fifty jerdiers had been dispatched to intercept Basnurmon’s men, rather too late, as Sorem had observed. Now they inspected the dead, and gathered up their own. Presently the captain, Yashlom, brought up Sorem’s white horse, and he, courteous and graceful as the lord’s son at a feast, offered the animal to me.
I thanked him, and told him I did not mean to break Masrian law by riding white, and added that I could make my own way back into the city, being well able, as he might have noted, to protect myself. I had in fact no wish to cause a military stir on my return home; I was too far in the plots and snares of the Heavenly City already for my entire liking.
Sorem nodded, probably aware of my reasons. He took me aside and said, “I have my life because of you. We met as enemies, but that’s done. I won’t forget this night’s work.” He offered his hand, which I gripped Masrian fashion. Then he mounted up and rode off with his men toward the Citadel and his precarious safety. Tomorrow she would hear, that blue-eyed lady, that he lived through me.
I had no fears of the dark disgorging further enemies, and went up the hill to the shrine of the unknown goddess, and sat down there in order to think. Yet my thoughts were aimless enough. This city of the south seemed intent to trap me and keep me from my purpose. Its women, its scheming. With some uncharitable bitterness, I reflected on the loyalty of Sorem’s men, the four who died for him in the Lion’s Field, the others who had burst on us with strained, angry faces, anxious for his defense. I was remembering the warriors of the tribes, even those I fought with in the Eshkir ruin, who forgot my leadership so swiftly. I had very often been aware I had no man I could trust my back to, and had none yet. Charpon the shark, and Long-Eye, dead. Even Lyo, my slave, had run away.
Then, looking down the northward slope to where the faint line of the ocean was penciled in above the seawall, I put re-
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flection aside. A green light had opened there, and against its color shapes were moving. I was to have company.
My psychic armament was recharged in me, though I had retained one of the black cloak’s short blades besides, which I now drew and kept in readiness. Soon I could make out the foremost of the several men who climbed toward me-Lyo.
He raised his arm and shouted to me in Seemase, “Lord! Wait, Lord Vazkor.” He ran the last yards and flung himself down before me. “Your Power,” he said. “I feared your Power, and ran away.”
“I thought it was fourteen men and their knives you feared.”
“No, lord.” He lifted his head and stared at me. “I saw you kill them.”
“Who have you brought with you?”
“Hesseks,” he said. “Lord Vazkor, they were in the groves, watching what you did. They kept back till the jerdiers were gone.”
“Yet more spies,” I said.
“No, lord,” Lyo said. It seemed to me he looked frightened, not of me or the watchers who had returned here with him, but of something less tangible, less avoidable than men.
The others were coming up now. There appeared to be five of them, but their own lamp was shining behind them, which I did not care for.
There were withered flowers lying on the altar stone, black opium poppies filched from some merchant’s field. I loosed the energy from my fingers to set this offering burning and give me light to see by.
The Hesseks halted at once. A brief whispering went over them, like dry leaves blown down an alley. They were not speaking Masrian or Seemase, or the Bar-Ibithni argot so many got by on, but Old Hessek. I hardly needed the light after all to show these were not slaves or free scavengers from the docks, but the semi-outcast denizens of Bit-Hesseeover-the-marsh.
Ragged dirty garments, which had initially been greenish tunics not of Masrian style, were open at the arms and sides and laced with rope lacings, rusty belts of green copper links without knives in them-the law-yet strange morbid toys dangled there, catapults and little knotted strings and pipes and pouches of flints. Otherwise they wore no ornament, not even the Hessek prayer necklaces of red beads common to
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the dockland. Their hair was long, matted, and wild enough to break a wooden comb, if they had ever tried one on it, which I doubted. Their skins were the swarthy white of all true Hessek flesh; even their marsh-hunting had not tanned it.
I had never come on their like before in the city, at least, not dressed for their part openly. One of them I had certainly met previously, camouflaged in sailor’s gear, later in my own livery. I recognized him now straight off: Ki, the man who saw me walk the sea, who vanished with Lellih out of my courts, who had left a dead and bloody crow at my door.
He moved near to me, kneeled, and touched the earth with his forehead. From that position he said, “You remember Ki, my master? I was your first witness and I was not believed.” It was ridiculous, this speech delivered by a man on his face with his rump in the air. I told him to get up, and asked him what he wanted.
“To serve you,” he said. “Let us serve you. There may be danger from the Masrian lords. If you wish a safe hiding place, we know of one.”
He did not need to tell me where.
They smelled of danger, of lawlessness, those men, and of suspense and religion, too. It was not hard to find the pattern. Ki had spread legends of me, and taken Lellih to his people as a proof of my magic. His was a race like Long-Eye’s, accustomed to gods, perhaps awaiting them.
I did the thing then that had been on my mind to try to do some while, the thing from which I shrank. I looked deliberately into his thoughts to be sure of him.
I had glimpsed the brain of Lellih briefly, but then I had been armored with hubris, the contact accidental and vague. Now I only brushed the surface of Ki’s inner world, yet the alien country turned me cold to my groin. To enter another’s head was no trip to be undertaken lightly or often. Still, having done it, I learned something.
For an instant I was Ki, saw through the eyes of Ki. What he was seeing in me was a god, a god darker than shadows.
Events, my own meditation, had unsettled me. There stole up on me a feeling of dread that must be explored.
I nodded to the Hesseks.
“Bit-Hessee then,” I said, “Let’s visit this outlaw city of yours.”
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7
Their green lantern burned on the seawall, where crumbling steps led down into the water. The remains of a watchtower stood there, its beacon long unlighted, and at the half-rotten pier were moored two ghostly boats, sailless Hessek craft constructed of the bound tough stems of the great marsh reeds. Poles rested on the thole pins, of some notched black wood, their blades muffled with swathes of cloth.
Three of the five Hesseks got into the nearer boat, Ki and another man took the oars of the second vessel and offered the passenger’s place to me. As this went on, Lyo broke away and fled up the slope. I told them to let him go, which they did. He had been at best an unnecessary companion, whose nervousness put me out of patience.
The papyrus boat was rowed from shore a few moments later onto the black breadth of the ocean.
The Hesseks steered their course about three quarters of a mile out to clear the shipping and the docks of Bar-Ibithni. There was no moon, the liquid dark almost absolute except on the left hand, where the coast glimmered with the silver fog of lamps that marked the city and the port. Nothing lay in our path save two tall galleys anchored outside the bar, which presumably had been unable to make dock before sunset closed the toll-gate. They had the deathly stillness of all benighted ships, only the red signal lights popping on their rails and spangling in the sea. The Hessek boats drifted between them, unchallenged, on the muffled oars. Unwelcome in its own country, Old Hessek had learned caution to the last letter.