Dancer's Lament: Path to Ascendancy Book 1 (6 page)

Shalmanat climbed the marble stairs to the palace doors. Tall and slim, dressed all in white, to his eyes in the heat of the power she emanated she resembled an intense pale flame. Well could he sympathize with the Burn priest’s agitation. For many in the streets of Heng were of the opinion that the city did indeed possess a new patron goddess who kept it safe from marauding bands of raiders, foreign armies, and even the man-beast Ryllandaras himself. They worshipped her at altars, street shrines, and temples: Shalmanat, patron goddess of Heng, whom some even named Queen.

When the tall double doors of the palace closed he and Ho turned away to walk the crackling gravel path back through the gardens. ‘What of this Hood worship?’ Silk asked. ‘She gave no orders.’

‘Give them a first warning.’

Silk nodded his agreement, pursed his lips in thought. ‘Why doesn’t she allow the Grey Walker? It is an established creed. Multitudes of other gods are welcome.’

The mage shrugged his thick knotted shoulders. ‘Don’t know. Never asked.’ Silk felt a vague irritation at the man’s myopic indifference to all except his arcane researches. ‘Take Smokey and Koroll with you,’ Ho added. ‘Just to make our point.’

Silk nodded again; those two, and Mara, the other three of the city mages, handled the arm-twisting and day-to-day enforcement of the Protectress’s will. Their presence would impress far more than his own rather . . . well, rather less than imposing appearance.

* * *

One night Dorin Rav returned to the gabled barn roof of Ullara’s family. Nothing more than a whim, he told himself, and a plain errand of business: he owed her, after all. And he paid his debts. He found it as before, the wooden shingles creaking and ticking as they gave off the day’s heat, and streaked in bird shit. And said birds roosting in rather alarming numbers along the roof crest and gables. He ducked within the vaulted attic. The bright amber eyes of more birds than he cared to count gleamed from the shadows of the beams and distant perches of boxes and crates. Distantly, from below, came the snorts and neighing of horses together with the jangle of tack. Men called to one another, their voices indistinct as they floated up from the streets: the night stalls were opening for another eve’s business.

He took out a leather bag of coins – not so few as to be insulting, but not that many, as she was after all only a stabler’s daughter – and hefted it. He decided, then, that he would hand it over in person together with his thanks rather than merely leaving it behind. He put it down and set to practising while he waited.

He snapped his wrists and twinned blued blades in sheaths hidden up his sleeves slipped into his palms. These he slashed about him as he spun, crouched, jumped and rolled between the heaped boxes and the narrow alleys of dusty crates. The raptors’ fierce gazes followed him as he wove through the dark and they raised their wings, wary, whenever a dodge or a roll brought him near their perches.

Sweaty now, he straightened and pushed the throwing blades back into their sheaths. He grasped his leather belt, spun quickly, and a slim cord leaped from his hand to lash about a timber post. He yanked on it, testing the firmness of the hold. Then he walked up to the timber, rewinding the cord of woven black silk as he went. He fought for a time to unknot it from its grip upon the post, and when he finally freed it the many twisted ends clacked and clattered as tiny lead weights affixed there knocked among themselves.

‘They use cords like that to capture birds,’ said a girl’s voice from the dark and Dorin flinched, startled.

He turned, raised a brow. ‘You are quiet. There are few who could sneak up on me.’

Ullara approached from the shadows. She wore her same old dirty smock, her feet bare and dusty. She came quite close to stare up at him and he was vaguely troubled to see how her eyes seemed to shine in the dark just like the birds that surrounded them. ‘You came back,’ she said.

He nodded, embarrassed for some reason. Her closeness made him conscious of his laboured breath and he struggled to suppress it.

‘I was watching. You move so gracefully and effortlessly,’ she said. ‘Like a dancer.’

Memories of years of pain-filled training sessions enforced by blows slid across his mind and he smiled thinly, stepping aside. ‘I’ve worked on it.’ He retrieved the small leather bag. ‘I have something for you.’

‘Oh?’

He held it out to her. ‘Payment. For your help.’

She did not reach for it. Instead, her steady gaze went from the bag to his face. For an instant he saw something there, hurt and a flare of anger it seemed to him, before she quickly turned away. She wrapped her arms round her slim chest and crossed to the open window. After a time she murmured, her voice low: ‘Thank you, sir, for your consideration.’

He set the bag down on the wooden slats of a box. ‘I just wanted to say thank you.’

‘You have.’

He frowned into the dark. ‘Don’t you want it?’

‘You can leave it there.’

‘We’re even, then?’

From the far gable, she turned her face to him, her expression unreadable in the shadows. ‘Yes. Even.’

‘All right, then. I guess I’ll go.’

‘Very well.’

He came to the gable’s open window. Her face was lowered. ‘Good eve,’ he offered. ‘My thanks.’

She looked away, blinking. ‘Good eve.’

He paused, then, thinking he should go, yet something held him back. He felt that he ought to do something more, but didn’t know what that should be. He cleared his throat instead, nodding, and stepped out on to the roof.

‘Be careful,’ she suddenly called after him and he stopped where he crouched at the roof’s lip.

‘Careful?’

‘The rooftops are crowded these days,’ she whispered.

‘Crowded?’

‘The Nightblades of Kan are here.’

He laughed – quietly – at that subject of song and stories. It was said that the fearsome Nightblades, servants of the kings of Itko Kan, flew through the dark at a word from the king, penetrated the very walls, and slew his enemies. He waved a hand. ‘Those are just stories.’

Her warning gaze was fierce. ‘No, it is true! Kan is coming. They are here. I have seen—’ She stopped herself, glanced back within the attic and lowered her face once more. ‘That is, I have – heard – in the market.’

Dorin knew he spent too little time listening to the talk in the streets below. He knew this was an unavoidable flaw deriving from his strengths – and weaknesses. By nature and preference the rooftops were his territory. And he was a solitary hunter. He shrugged, allowing, ‘Well . . . I have heard nothing. But . . . my thanks.’ He ducked over the lip and began lowering himself down the wall.

Knowing he would not hear, Ullara murmured, ‘Have a care, my Dancer,’ then retreated within. She tightened her arms about her chest as if fighting to keep some vast explosive force constrained. She fell heavily on a crate and rocked herself, her head lowered. Finally, as if no longer able to suppress a burgeoning eruption, she flung her arms outwards letting loose a great cry and at once every bird of prey leaped to the air, echoing her call with their shrill hunting shrieks, and sped off into the dark. Alone now among the churning dust she fell to the timber floor and curled herself up into a protective ball to lie panting and weeping.

*

Dorin traced the rooftops of the Outer Round. This was not as difficult as perhaps in other large cities such as Unta or Cawn, for space within Heng’s walls was at a premium and every building pressed up against its neighbour – most, in point of fact, shared common walls. At one moment he ran the knife-edge of a lead-sheathed roof crest and here he paused, thinking he heard the call of a raptor. This troubled him, as most night-hunters, he believed, were silent. He studied the star-dusted night sky, the bright sickle moon, then ducked and hurried onward. He knew his path was taking him once more to his usual night-haunt: a compound a good third of the way round the walls, close to the north gate. Here, a large warehouse and yard carried out a seemingly aboveboard trade in timber, clay for bricks, and other such mundane building materials.

But this compound was the property of the black marketeer Pung the child-stealer. Here children captured from across the lands were held, and here they were assigned to their various fates: to work chained in mines where almost none would live to see their fifteenth year; to be cast among the poisonous chemicals of the leather-curing and dying vats where most choked out their lives even sooner – or to be broken to the sex trade where many met their ends in even worse manners.

This compound Dorin now overlooked from the flat brick roof of a three-storey tenement across the Plains Bourse, a sprawling smoky marketplace specializing in leather goods and metalworking that wound its course to abut the north gate.

He crouched behind the shallow lip of the flat roof and renewed his study of the compound’s buildings and the comings and goings of Pung’s guards and hirelings. Behind him, in piled rattan cages, pigeons cooed to the night. How to get in? That was the problem. Three times he’d tried an approach, and each time he’d been spotted long before getting close enough.

He edged forward to peer down into the torchlit crowded market below. The main warehouses were closed for the night, but food stalls lined the way, and inns and drinking houses were just now picking up business – most drawing trade from travellers who’d entered from the vast Seti Plains to the north. He settled in for another long watch. Eventually, one of these nights, his quarry would show himself. The bastard couldn’t stay hidden in there for ever, surely.

For even he had heard the stories making the rounds of the taverns and corner idling-spots.

The news that Pung had hired the services of a new mage. Some had him a towering magus with eyes of fire; others, an aged oldster crippled and bent from the soul-twisting horrors of his wizardry; still others named him only a faint voice in the darkness whispering of things that made one’s blood freeze. Some swore he could kill with a look, or a word. His Warren was variously speculated to be that of Rashan, D’riss, or Thyr; some claimed that he was a mystic shaman, or a necromancer with access to Hood’s own paths.

Yet upon one feature all these differing accounts were in accord: the mage hailed from the sun-scorched savannahs far to the south, from Dal Hon.

It was his man – that slippery youth. The damned prick might disguise himself as an oldster but Dorin knew better. It was he. The one who’d laughed at him. Who’d cheated and stolen from him.

And no one got the better of Dorin Rav. Ever. It simply could not be allowed to stand.

So he eased down to his shins for yet another fruitless eve’s watch, hoping to catch sight of his quarry out along the crowded bourse. The night darkened, the hours passed, his head drooped. Startled, glancing up, he noticed a tall shadow at the roof corner – a figure that had not been there before.

He watched while keeping himself absolutely still. Behind him the pigeons had all gone quiet. His hands slowly rose to cross his chest and close on the roughened grips of the slimmest throwing daggers pushed through his baldrics.

The big brass bell in the main temple to Burn began to ring out the mid-night hour. The shape stirred itself, broad wings unfolded, and it fell away to glide off in utter silence. He let out a long breath and relaxed his grip – what had that been? A mere bird? As tall as a youth?

The sight left him uncharacteristically unnerved. Was this the source of all the recent strange night sightings of unnatural daemons, spirits, and flying creatures? Some large predator, lost or imported? Perhaps Ullara knew of it; he’d have to ask . . . his thoughts shifted away, however, as a new sound reached him from the street below: the tapping of a thin sharp walking stick against stone flagging.

He jumped to his feet and ran down the length of the roof’s edge, searching the shifting crowds below. Was it he? What might he be wearing now? He’d been a short fellow – but that stick! That stupid vanity of a walking stick . . .

He thought he caught the glimpse of a short dark figure far down the street before it disappeared from the flickering torchlight. He ran for the side of the building over a narrow alleyway and threw himself over the side to climb down.

In the market he walked swiftly – not too swiftly – yet resolutely towards the north gate. Weaving round wanderers and revellers, he congratulated himself once more on his personal choice not to wear clothing that would mark him outwardly as anything other than one more poor labourer in search of a night’s entertainment: a hookah of d’bayang, perhaps, or the attentions of the lowest of prostitutes. Camouflage, stealth and deceit – such were the superior skills of his trade; only the failure ends up having to knife his way out of a corner. And only the fool advertises his vocation.

So he walked, deferring to the gangs of swaggering Hengan toughs who refused to yield any way, and to the entourages of baton-wielding guards clearing paths for their masters or mistresses in gaudy shaded litters carried by hulking bearers sweating despite the cool of the night. He passed a troop of down-on-their-luck Untan street performers: jugglers, musicians and child dancers. The sight of the painted boys and girls, the cheap bronze bangles ringing on their wrists and ankles, drew unhappy memories of his own training in similar circumstances – both for the punishing physical conditioning and the convenient cover. A smattering of lesser coins glinted among the cobbles before their bare shuffling and slapping feet.

Yet all the while he kept an eye to the east where the swirl of the traffic betrayed a figure making slow progress – one too short to be seen. He moved on. A courtesan stood beside the open door to her quarters, the colourful gauzy scarves of her calling wrapped about her. She beckoned him with the supple twist of a wrist, ‘Delights of the Perfumed World await within, O champion.’

Dorin knew this type: too old now to maintain a coterie of steady clients, or remain a mistress. Such ones were reduced to eking out a living here on the streets.

Grinning, he motioned ahead. ‘My sweetheart awaits beyond.’