Dark Crusade (3 page)

"Draw sabres," he ordered. "Forward to clear the square."

The guard pushed forward, horses at a walk, against the rioting thousands. The failing sunlight touched their grim faces and razor-honed sabres. Angry faces snarled up at their approach.

"Disperse! Clear the square!"

The mob wavered, pushing back into its already packed ranks to avoid the menace of hooves and steel. A few looters began to break for the alleys.

Then a clarion command. "For Sataki! Strike and kill!"

"Sataki!" the mob echoed. "Death!"

Stones and clubs began to fly, and a sprinkle of arrows. Knives and weapons sprang to defiant fists.

"Forward!"

Sabres slashed downward into enraged faces. Hooves struck out at writhing bodies. Before the horsemen, the forefront of the mob crumpled, stretched bleeding and broken across the stones. But pressure from the rear forced the mob relentlessly forward. They were too tightly packed to flee, and the press was too thick for the guardsmen to maneuver.

The city guard struggled forward and into the clawing masses--crimson-drenched sabres rising and falling with deadly skill. Still the mob surged forward, breaking the mounted ranks in suicidal rushes, trapping small groups of horsemen within its seething mass. Horses screamed and went down, carrying then riders to brutal death. Stones and hurled weapons cleared saddle after saddle. Like scorpions against an army of ants, the guardsmen slew and slew, and in slaying were pulled down.

In an eddy of the slaughter, where the mob cared more to pillage the jewellers' pavilions than to face slashing steel, the last of the city guard regrouped. Less than a score remained, exhausted and wounded. They were surrounded by the howling mob--murderous beasts united by the Prophet's unleashing of man's inborn lust for violence.

Lieutenant Anchara was half-blinded from a gash over his eye. Mechanically he tied a bandage about his head. "Can we break free from them?" he asked dully.

Fordheir glanced toward the distant streets, where murder and looting already spread, and the maelstrom of feral bodies that struggled about them. He ached in every joint, and he wished for a pitcher of ale.

"I don't think we can," he said. "For every man there comes a time for death. I think that time has come for us."

The thin-faced man ducked through the open doorway of the Red Gables in Sandotneri of the southern kingdoms. Instantly he turned and craned his long neck to examine the street he had just quitted, where men went about their business in the heat and dust of late afternoon. Furtively he turned again to stare at those who sought refuge from the sun in the inn's public room. A bony hand wiped sweat from a sunken face where hunted eyes glared from dark hollows. He gazed questioningly at the innkeeper, who shook his head. Then, with a final scrutiny of the room, the frightened man darted for the stairs and disappeared into the rooms overhead.

"That one looks like he's scared of his own shadow," commented one of the drinkers at the bar.

The innkeeper looked at him significantly. "He is."

"How's that?"

The innkeeper shrugged his squat shoulders. The Red Gables was not a hostelry where the affairs of its guests greatly concerned the management. Still...

"Scared of his shadow. Bolts his door soon as the sun gets low, stays there until it's broad daylight. Keeps the room lit bright as day--must burn up fifty or more candles in a night, I don't know."

"Burns candles all night?"

"Yeah. Got ten, fifteen maybe burning all at once, got them all around his bed. And three oil lamps. Damn good luck he doesn't burn the whole place down. I'd throw him out, but his money's good."

"So what's he afraid of?"

"Shadows." "Shadows?"

"That's what he muttered one morning when he stumbles down here, crazy drunk and looking for more. 'Shadows,' he said."

"But it's the light that makes the shadows."

"No, it's the light that lets you see what the shadows are up to." The hosteler tapped his balding head. "He says."

"Seen them like that before," another allowed. "Things coming after them. Generally it's things that come out of a pipe or too many mugs of old 'here's how.' " He tossed off his mug.

"Sometimes they come from elsewhere," said the blackrobed figure no one had seen enter.

The frightened man hurried down the hallway, a heavy bronze key ready in his hand. The Red Gables was one of the few inns in this quarter of the city to offer rooms whose doors were equipped with such locks. It cost more, but there were some who would not begrudge the expense. Thus it was with some sense of security that the frightened man fumbled with the lock and slipped into his room.

He closed the door and gave a small scared bleat at the sight of the man who waited inside.

His visitor was not a reassuring figure. At rather more than twice the thin man's bulk, he sprawled half out of the room's single chair. His massive frame exuded an aura of almost bestial strength. The figure might have been that of some great ape, clad in black leather trousers and sleeveless vest. Ruthless intelligence showed in the brutal face, framed by nape-length red hair and a beard like rust. A red silk scarf encircled his thick neck, and belted across the barrel chest, the hilt of a Carsultyal sword protruded over his right shoulder. The savage blue eyes held a note in their stare that promised sudden carnage should that huge left hand reach for the hilt.

But it was with relief that the frightened man breathed, "Kane!"

The big man raised a craggy eyebrow. "What's wrong with you, Tapper? You're as jumpy as a cat in a butcher shop. You haven't made some slip...?"

Tapper shook his head. "No, nothing wrong, Kane."

"I hired you because the word was you were a man with nerve," Kane's voice held a note of warning. "You act like a man who's about to break."

"It's not this business, Kane. It's something else."

"What, then? I'm running too close to the edge here to risk everything on a man who can't carry his end."

Tapper nodded nervously, licking dry lips. Maybe it was time again to start running. If he could make the coast...

"I'm all right," he maintained sullenly. "Thoem, Kane! You don't know what it was like getting out of Shapeli. The Satakis are everywhere--nothing can stand up to them! I showed my heels to Ingoldi hours before they slaughtered the guard and looted the city. Got away from Brandis the same night they surrounded the town and burned it. I barely escaped the slaughter at Emleoas by putting a Sataki armband on and joining the looters--and I passed over what they'd left of General Cumdeller's mercenaries in riding for the border. The Prophet's got tens of thousands under his banner, Kane. When it's a choice between join the pillagers or die in the ashes, they don't even need to listen to that devil's spiel to swear their souls to Sataki!"

"There's a hundred miles of savannah between Sandotneri and the forests of Shapeli," Kane reminded him drily. "I hardly think Orted Ak-Ceddi will look for you here."

Tapper started, glancing at the other sidelong to judge whether Kane's remark implied more than scornful jest. Although Tapper's betrayal of the former bandit leader was not common knowledge in the southern kingdoms, Kane was incredibly well informed.

The frightened man shuddered, tried to repress memories of weeks of terror-haunted flight. Sataki's shadowy tentacles reached far. Time and again the Prophet's hordes had rolled over towns where Tapper sought refuge. And the nights... The nights were worst. The bounty gold had not lasted long, nor had the money that came to hand afterward.

Then out of Shapeli and into the southern kingdoms, where the shadow of the Dark Crusade had not reached. For the spy and the assassin, there was always ready gold in the southern kingdoms. Gold enough to reach the coast, to buy passage to the Southern Continent or lands beyond.

The southern kingdoms was a geographic designation more grandiose than actual. South of Shapeli's forestland, the Great Northern Continent curved westward as a broad region of savannah around the Inland Sea to the north and the Southern Sound on the south--then northward past the western shore of the Inland Sea, where the grasslands rose into the Altanstand Mountains. Beyond their rocky bourne the greater portion of the continental mass sprawled out over some four thousand miles, eventually to join the Northern Ice Sea. Centuries before Halbros-Serrantho had attempted to unite this northern portion of the continent, but the Serranthonian Empire now lay broken in decay, and the only other formidable attempt to lay claim to the whole of the Great Northern Continent was the fading memory of Ashertiri's ill-fated war with Carsultyal in mankind's youth.

The southern kingdoms might number fifty or a hundred, depending on the most recent marriages and inheritances, annexations and secessions, alliances and civil wars. Scattered across a 2500 mile stretch of sunscorched veldt, the stubbornly independent hereditary holdings were constantly at odds over territorial and water rights. Fierce border wars and deadly court intrigues were hallowed tradition in the southern kingdoms. A man like Tapper might grow wealthy in a single night. Or he might die in an instant.

Tapper uneasily considered his visitor. But the gold he needed demanded certain risks, and the frightened man knew darker fears than the dangers of political conspiracy. He noted with dread the greying skies outside the bulls-eye panes.

"How'd you get in here?" he asked in alarm. The window, unshuttered but securely bolted, overlooked a fifteen foot drop to the street below.

"I got in," Kane told him unhelpfully. He scowled impatiently while the other man fretted about the room, lighting candles from the oil lamps that burned throughout the day. The tiny room stank of tallow and soot and fear.

"You don't like the dark," Kane observed sarcastically.

"No. No, I don't. Nor shadows."

"A spy who fears the dark!" Kane sneered. "I'm rather afraid I made a mistake when I entrusted you to..."

"I'm all right, I tell you!" Tapper insisted. "I took care of my part!"

Kane smiled. "Ah! Did you now? Let me see."

"You've got the gold?"

"Of course. I told you I pay well for useful information." Kane drew a heavy almoner from his belt. It chinked when he tossed it in his broad palm.

"All right. You know the kind of risks I'm running," Tapper muttered, sitting on the edge of the bed.

"We're both running. What do you have for me?"

"Well, it's true that Esketra is receiving Jarvo secretly in her chambers," Tapper began.

"Which I knew when I hired you."

"No--only surmised. You wanted me to find out how Jarvo passed from his house to the palace without being seen by any of your men."

"Well?"

"I've found out how."

"For that information I will pay."

"You were right when you guessed it would have to be through some hidden passage," Tapper told him. "And you'd figured right on the rest of it, too."

"Esketra does have the chart!"

"Esketra did have it," Tapper grinned. He drew a square of folded parchment from inside his doublet. "But not since this afternoon."

Kane tossed him the almoner. "There's more for you if this is what I hope it is."

"It's what you were after," Tapper proudly assured him, extending the yellowed sheet. "Got the whole story and the map from one of her maids--who'll be wanting more of your gold, too. When she couldn't see Jarvo as she wanted without compromising herself, Esketra got into Owrinos' secret papers and stole the old chart of the palace's hidden ways. She traced a passage from her chambers to under the wall and out through the royal crypts at the temple of Thoem. Jarvo had a tunnel driven to connect his house with the cellars of the apartment block across the way. When he wants, he slips past your watchers and ducks off for the temple--makes his way to Esketra's chambers through the old network of passages. Esketra kept the chart as guard against getting lost in the maze--then never bothered to risk replacing it. The maid stole it from her."

Eagerly Kane unfolded the ancient parchment. The document was all he had dared hope for--an architectural diagram of the Palace of Sandotneri, outlining completely the network of secret rooms and hidden passageways within the huge stone structure. Every palace has its hidden ways, and frequently their builders died because of their knowledge. It was a secret closely guarded, entrusted by father to heir. Sometimes its complexity necessitated a map such as this that now lay outspread before Kane's scrutiny.

"Excellent!" he complimented the thief. "But you'll need to see it's returned before it's missed. I'll make a copy.

"Returning it will be an added risk."

"For which you'll be paid. Send down for pen and paper. I'll copy this immediately."

Kane waited impatiently for writing materials to be brought up. This had been a rare piece of fortune.

Owrinos was presently king of Sandotneri and the lands to which that city lay claim. But his health was failing, and without male heir his throne must soon fall to a cousin. The matter of succession was hotly contested by two powerful branches of the royal family, whose factions were popularly designated the Reds and the Blues. Kane, a foreign mercenary who had risen to generalship of the Sandotneri cavalry, was a powerful supporter of the Reds. Jarvo, who claimed distant kinship to Owrinos, was a firm adherent of the Blues, whose faction was gaining in prestige. He was also a bitter enemy to Kane ever since Owrinos had appointed Kane to generalship over Jarvo in recognition of the outlander's brilliance in recent campaigns.

At best Kane had hoped with this piece of intrigue to discredit Jarvo and the Blues by exposing the younger officer's liaison with Esketra--denouncing such as an effort of the Blues to win influence through seduction of Owrinos' daughter. But Kane's greatest hope, based on certain information and careful deduction, had been to get his hands on just such a document as now lay on the table before him.

Kane concentrated on copying the yellowed parchment, while Tapper per anxiously paced the room and stared at the candles. His huge hands plied pen and ink with far greater dexterity than might have been expected from a mercenary. In his mind's eye Kane envisioned the hidden passageways filled with his men, secret doors springing open to emit his assassins...