Lord of the Isles (54 page)

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Authors: David Drake

BOOK: Lord of the Isles
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“‘
W
isely, God hides future outcomes in a mist of night,'” Liane read from Celondre's
Odes
.
There was a metallic hiss from the tomb behind them where Tenoctris worked alone. The sound was very faint. Liane paused a half-beat, then resumed, “‘God laughs at mortal hopes and fears. Remember to accept whatever comes with a calm mind!'”
The slim volume was the one unnecessary item Garric had brought with him from Barca's Hamlet. He'd had to leave most of his past behind. Celondre remained to anchor him in simpler times, when all Garric or-Reise needed to worry about was what the sheep were doing and whether his father would shout at him for being slow starting his chores in the stables.
Celondre's
Odes
had remained the same for a thousand years, and they would be the same for thousands of years more: outlasting bronze, as Celondre himself had rightly said. That vantage point put all present problems into perspective, even those problems of life and death.
If Tenoctris was right, the danger threatening the cosmos would sweep away even the
Odes
this time. Garric believed the old woman, but at an emotional level Celondre's civilized truths seemed eternal.
A chime climbed a full octave by half-steps within the tomb. Liane listened, tension evident in her controlled face. She and Garric had waited all day on the bench in front of the tomb. The ivy-grown fence surrounding them formed a sort of arbor that would have been pleasant under other conditions.
The last note faded. Liane set the book down and gave Garric a trembling smile.
“I'm afraid,” she said simply. “I don't want anybody else to be hurt because of me. You and Tenoctris are my only friends now.”
Her smile failed. “And I keep thinking about what happened to my father,” she said.
“Tenoctris isn't like your father,” Garric said. “She does everything one step at a time. And she said this wasn't going to be dangerous.”
He couldn't imagine Liane as someone who was afraid. She'd always gone straight ahead with whatever was required: calm, quick, and decisive, despite the fact that she'd watched a demon appear out of thin air to disembowel her father.
“I used to play here when I was a little girl,” she said with a smile. “It was always fenced off from the rest of the grounds, though the inner gate wasn't locked then. I didn't think about it being a tomb, of course, but it wouldn't have mattered. I didn't think about death at all until my mother died.”
Being afraid didn't change anything about her. If another demon stepped through the doorway in place of Tenoctris, Liane would be stabbing for its eyes with her writing stylus for want of a better weapon.
He nodded. Traffic on the boulevard a few hundred feet away was a constant sound though not an obtrusive one. Only very rarely had anybody come down the alley past them: a group of female servants from another mansion; a coachman driving his empty vehicle to the stables; a delivery boy whistling and running a stick along the rods of the fence. The boy had screamed when he saw Garric and Liane looking at him through the ivy.
“I hadn't thought it would take this long,” Garric said. They'd eaten at the inn near the harbor before they left in the morning, but he had a young man's appetite and the midday meal was usually the main one of the day. It was verging toward evening and Tenoctris hadn't come out of the tomb with a report.
The door squeaked. Garric leaped to his feet. He reached
first for the door handle, then for his sword hilt, and in fact touched neither of them for fear of making the wrong decision.
Tenoctris stepped into the sunlight, looking more tired than Garric had ever seen her before. Smoke oozed from the doorway with an oily odor: she must have burned a score of the wax candles she'd taken into the windowless tomb with her.
She smiled at her younger companions. Neither of them was willing to ask what had happened inside.
“I found where the gold came from,” she said. Both of them helped her as she settled herself onto the pavement, first kneeling and then crossing her legs beneath her. “It wasn't difficult, exactly, but there were more steps than I'd expected.”
Tenoctris had used a tendril of ivy as an athame. She still held it, though the curled tip had begun to droop in the hours since she plucked it.
“I should have known better,” she said. She looked at Liane and then Garric as they hovered to either side of her. “It took a long time because it's on a plane separate from this plane. I should have known that it would be. The Hooded One couldn't have survived in our time,
my
time, if he'd stayed as the sea rushed in.”
“What do we do next?” Liane asked calmly. A candle still burned on the floor of the tomb, its light a yellowish contrast to the waning sun.
“I think,” Tenoctris said, “that someone should go to the plane and see what is there. I wish I could go myself, but I'll have to hold the gate open here.”
“I'll go,” Liane said.
“No,” said Garric. He stood up, feeling more comfortable than he had since facing down Captain Aran and his crew. He had something to
do
. “I will. Will it be like the other place, Strasedon's place?”
“I don't know,” Tenoctris said. “I need you to describe the location to me. Then I can plan the next step.”
She grinned with half her face. “For that you have to return,
Garric,” she said. “There's nothing you can do that's as important as coming back. If there's any danger, turn and run. The gateway will be waiting for you.”
“No!” Liane said, standing also. “It's not right that he goes! Benlo was
my
father, so the risk should be mine!”
“If it were only your father I wouldn't be doing any of this,” Tenoctris said from her seated position. “I'm sorry, Liane, but this is a matter for the whole cosmos. Garric is the better choice. I'll need your help with the responses.”
She looked at Garric with affection and something more, a kind of sad respect. “Garric is perhaps the best choice of anyone alive, which is another of those things that shakes my faith in the random nature of the cosmos. It's a terrible thing to have my beliefs dashed at my advanced age.”
Garric laughed with the exultant shadow of King Carus. They'd be together, he and Carus, wherever it was they were going.
He bent down and lifted Tenoctris to her feet. “Now?” he asked. “Or do you need to rest, mistress?”
“Now would be best,” she said. “Half the work has been done, you see.”
She put her hand on Liane's forearm. The girl was trembling with anger and frustration.
“There's plenty of risk to go around, Liane,” Tenoctris said. “For you and the cosmos as well.”
“
J
ular bor-Raydiman!” announced the maid, bowing as she passed the titular head of Erdin's City Patrols into the drawing room where Ilna waited on a couch beneath the south windows.
Jular bowed as Ilna rose to greet him. “Mistress Ilna,” he said. “Such a pleasure to meet you at last.”
The nobleman wasn't often up this early—didn't often
get
up this early, though sometimes his nights ran this late. A summons from the mysterious Mistress Ilna wasn't something he cared to turn down, however.
The windows were ceiling-high. Jular had expected tapestries; after all, the woman was supposed to be a weaver. There was nothing of the sort, just a shawl of gray-shaded wool over the couch. The furnishings were limited to a pier glass; a wardrobe chest of burl walnut, well made but of simple design; and the couch. Jular's eyes turned to the couch instinctively.
“No,” Ilna said as she walked toward the wardrobe, “that's not why you're here, Master Jular.”
She was an attractive little thing. Stiff-backed, but he rather liked that sort. When they finally broke there was no reserve, no spirit left.
Ilna turned to him and smiled. Jular hated spiders, feared them worse than he feared death itself. For an instant—
The world was normal again. Jular lowered the hand he'd instinctively clutched to his heart.
“I told you,” the woman said, “that's not why you're here.” She opened the lid of the chest.
Jular was a fleshy man but still young enough to appear handsome in a bad light. The light in this east drawing room was very good indeed. He was breathing hard after the shock, the
illusion
, and he'd have sat down without asking if there'd been a chair available.
There was only the couch. He'd rather have died than sit there.
“Come over here,” Ilna directed as she closed the wardrobe and laid the three packets she'd taken out on its lid.
Part of Jular's mind told him that he ought to be angry at being ordered around by a commoner—and a woman besides. That wasn't why he hesitated, though.
Ilna gave him a grin that was just short of a sneer.
“Come,” she repeated. “I won't bite you. I need you, the position you fill at least.”
Jular obeyed because he was afraid of what would happen if he didn't. He hadn't spoken since his initial greeting, a time that seemed from a former life.
“I want two people arrested and brought to me,” Ilna said, unrolling one of the packets of cloth. “I don't want them harmed—”
She fixed Jular with a look of anger that he'd done nothing to justify.
He'd done nothing!
“Under no circumstances are they to be harmed,” she said. “Do you understand that? Answer me.”
“I understand,” Jular said after swallowing. “Ah … mistress? I think you may misunderstand the extent of my involvement with, ah, the duties of arresting people and this sort of thing. In fact—”
“Yes, I know,” Ilna interrupted. “You're a fat fool who probably doesn't know where the city's prison is. You have the title simply because other nobles think that one of their own sort should be in charge of important ministries on paper. But they'll take orders from you if you give them, won't they?”
Jular had been called many vile things during his life. The inflection this woman put on “sort” made it far the worst insult he'd ever heard.
He cleared his throat. “Well,” he said. “Yes, I suppose they will. I've done favors in the past, of course … .”
For others of my own
sort.
Ilna nodded as she spread two of the rolls of cloth on the wardrobe. “That's what I assumed,” she said. “A ship chartered by Benlo bor-Benliman arrived in port the day before yesterday. These two persons were probably aboard it. They're the ones I want brought to me. If they've left Erdin, I want to know where they went.”
Jular looked at two portraits in fabric; they were astonishingly realistic. They were of a young man with an unfashionably
dark complexion, and of a strikingly beautiful black-haired woman.
“They may be going by the names Garric or-Reise and Liane os-Benlo,” Ilna said. “You can have these sketched by artists so that every member of the Patrols has a copy of both pictures.”
“Yes …” Jular said. He'd have agreed that he was the son of a donkey driver under the present circumstances. “I suppose they have people who can do that.”
Ilna rolled the portraits again, each within its separate covering of baize. “I suppose you're wondering what's in this for you?” she said as she worked.
All Jular was thinking about was how he was going to get out of this house, away from this
woman
. He didn't know what would happen if he ran. There were a number of husky male servants in the mansion, but it wasn't them whom he feared.
She handed him the portraits and weighed the third roll of fabric in her hand. “This is for you when you've accomplished your task,” she said. “It's exactly what you need for your off-duty pursuits.”
Her brief smile was insulting, but Jular was beyond insult by now. “You've heard about my work, no doubt?” she added.
“Yes,” Jular said, interested despite all the negative emotions boiling through his mind. “Yes I have, mistress. This cloth—”
He gestured but didn't try to touch the roll.
“—has the effect on women that your other cloth is said to have on men?”
“No,” Ilna said curtly. “For that you'd have to go to another weaver, a man I suppose—if anything of the sort exists. But this can be used to the same effect.”
She unrolled a length of the fabric and held it over the back of her left forearm as though she were a shop assistant and he a customer. Objectively it was black lace of gossamer
delicacy, valuable no doubt to a person who cared about such things.
Subjectively it lit in Jular a desire such as he had never imagined could exist. He
wanted
this woman, wanted to abase himself before her, to surrender himself utterly …
And all the time he knew that her poison fangs would drain him dry and leave him an empty husk beneath her web. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered except that he had to have her.
Ilna covered the fabric again. Jular caught himself on the wardrobe with his palms flat. He looked out the window until he'd gotten his breath.
“This is of a much higher quality than the ribbons others have purchased,” Ilna said to his averted head. There was a cat's smile in her voice. “As a bribe, I think you'll find it more than satisfactory. Virtuous women who couldn't possibly be brought to your bed by gold will nonetheless meet whatever price you set for the chance to be irresistible to the man of
their
desires.”
Jular had control of himself. He straightened.
“I suppose they'll hold their noses while they're with you,” Ilna continued, “but that isn't a matter of concern, is it, Jular? You're just interested in adding them to your little list.”
Jular looked at her. He was no longer afraid: he'd achieved the safety of abject surrender. He would do absolutely anything for this woman in order to be free of her. She knew that, and she was still offering a payment for which he would have exchanged half his considerable personal fortune.
Jular weighed the two rolled portraits, unconsciously mimicking Ilna's gesture of a moment before. “Yes, I'll take care of this at once,” he said. “Why are you interested—”
He caught himself. “No, that's none of my business, of course,” he said.
He looked again at the rolls and shrugged. “The girl's a pretty thing, isn't she?” he said. “But that's none of my
business either, I know. That lace will suffice me for some time to come, I'm sure.”
“We understand each other,” Ilna said. She rang a small bell. “Good day, Master Jular.”
Jular saw himself in the pier glass. His smile was as foul as the expression on the face of a long-dead corpse. He didn't care; he knew what he was, and he didn't care.
“Good day, mistress,” he said. The maid opened the door for him. Jular was only peripherally aware that the maid was female. All that mattered was that he was leaving.
And that if he succeeded in arresting two nobodies, he would never have to face Ilna's smile again.

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