Murder in Tarsis (28 page)

“I have killed no one,” Melkar said with contempt. “But neither of you truly cares who the killer is!”

“Silence!” barked the lord. “Do not compound your guilt with a futile lie!” There was snarling from the nomad camp, nervous shuffling among the Tarsian party. Despite all pledges, open violence was in the air.

“Hold!” Ironwood bellowed, striding between the two parties. “This man is innocent! We, the investigators charged in this matter, have determined the truth.”

All gaped at the strange little group that had sprung from nowhere to stand between the hostile parties. The Lord of Tarsis was first to speak.

“You! Where did you come from? You were not among my following.”

“And they did not come past my sentries!” Kyaga said. “What is the meaning of this?”

Nistur removed his feathered hat and fanned himself nonchalantly. “We, sir, are investigators. Such feats are our stock-in-trade.”

“No matter!” cried the lord. “I dismissed you from my service when you found that Melkar was the murderer. Go or risk my severe displeasure!”

“We still wear these,” Ironwood said, holding up his seal, “and this means that we still hold your commission. We were charged to ferret out the truth, and we have done so. Will you hear us?”

“You are baseborn rogues and frauds!” Kyaga said. “You have no place in dealings between rulers!”

A man rode forward from the nomad horde. It was the Foul Spring subchief Laghan-of-the-Axe. “I want to hear what they have to say!”

“Aye!” cried a robed chieftain. “So do I!” There came a roar of assent from the chiefs ranged behind Kyaga. While this was going on, Stunbog studied Kyaga and Shadespeaker, frowning as he looked from one to the other.

Kyaga’s expression was unreadable behind his veil, but every line of his body revealed agitation. “Very well!” he barked. “Speak your piece and be quick about it! My men are eager for war!”

“I think,” said Nistur, “that it might be better if all interested parties dismounted and retired to the great Chief Kyaga’s tent. What we have to relate will take some little time, and all should be free from distractions, the better to attend what we say.”

“This is far beyond my pledge to you, Lord of Tarsis!” cried Kyaga. Then he eyed his restive chieftains. “I will permit it, but do not try my patience.”

“How do I know that this is not just another trick?” the lord demanded.

“A moment,” said Stunbog. He went to Councilor Alban’s cluster of wizards and spoke for a while. They dismounted and stood in a circle between the two parties. “We will require a lance,” Stunbog said. The lord pointed to one of his guards and snapped his fingers. The man rode to Stunbog and handed him a twelve-foot lance, which the healer thrust into the ground so that it stood perfectly upright. Alban’s magicians began to chant solemnly.

“These learned mages are raising a curtain of peace,” Stunbog said. “All here are now bound by it. You see where the sun stands now.” He pointed to the great orb somewhat more than halfway to zenith. “If any violates the peace before the sun is straight overhead, so that the shadow of the spear disappears, the most terrible of divine vengeance will fall upon all who are here today.” He looked at the green-painted man beside Kyaga. “Perhaps the most revered Shadespeaker would care to aid their wizardry labors?”

Surprised, the man shook his head violently, making his strings of amulets rattle.

“Our shaman deals with the spirits of the Plains,” Kyaga said, “not with decadent city wizardry.”

“A pity,” Stunbog said. “I should have liked to see him at work. Come, my lords, the shadow shortens even as we speak.” His pointing finger indicated the small bar of darkness extending westward from the base of the lance.

Amid shuffling and muttering, the lords and chieftains dismounted and walked toward the great tent. The companions spoke in low voices as they made their way there.

“That man beside Kyaga is no shaman,” Stunbog said. “In fact, he is a mute. I know the signs. And there are no sigils painted on his hands.”

Nistur’s eyebrows went up. “Several have remarked that he never speaks in Kyaga’s presence.”

Now Ironwood grinned, an expression much like a shark’s. ” ‘False eyes,’ Granny Toadflower said. ‘There is one,’ she said!”

“I trust her ravings make more sense now?” Nistur queried.

“Just watch closely and back me,” Ironwood said.

Inside the tent, the Lord of Tarsis and his councilors ranged themselves along one side, Kyaga and his chieftains on the other. All glared at one another with barely suppressed hostility. Ironwood, Nistur, Shellring, and Stunbog walked into the center.

“Speak and do not try our patience,” Kyaga commanded.

“My justice will be terrible if you play us false,” promised the Lord of Tarsis.

“Have no fear,” said Nistur, gesturing grandly with his hat. “We shall provide you all with an entertainment surpassing your highest expectations. My good companion shall now address you.” He gestured toward the mercenary and whispered, “Make this good!”

“I am Ironwood the mercenary, special investigator by appointment to the Lord of Tarsis. In seeking out the

murderer of Yalmuk Bloodarrow, and later of Guklak, the following are my findings.” He glared around him, the center of all attention. Then he turned to the Tarsian party.

“My Lord of Tarsis, some days ago you entertained the envoys of Kyaga Strongbow. The chieftain Yalmuk Bloodarrow was to conduct negotiations on behalf of the absent Kyaga Strongbow until Kyaga’s arrival in the nomad camp. Is this not so?”

“It is so,” the lord affirmed.

“It was not so,” said Ironwood. “That was the first of many lies in this web of deception. Kyaga was not absent; he was present the whole time. In fact, he had been in Tarsis for some time before the envoys arrived in the city!”

At this, an excited babble broke out. “He lies!” Kyaga shouted.Ironwood rounded on him like an angry lion.

“Hear me, and then call me liar, if you dare!”

“Go on!” shouted Shatterspear, already weaving with drink at this early hour, but clearly enjoying the spectacle. “I want to hear more!”

Now Ironwood turned back to the Tarsian side. “And you, Lord of Tarsis, tried to sow dissension between Yalmuk and Shadespeaker, setting them one against the other. You instructed your councilors to entertain the chieftains individually, and to try to subvert their loyalty to Kyaga.”

The lord spread his hands in an appeal to reason. “It was but diplomacy. What responsible ruler does not do these things?”

“That is a chancy game, for your own lords played you false. But then, all of you were but doing the work of Kyaga Strongbow.”

“Now you are babbling!” said the lord.

“Not at all,” Ironwood retorted. “Councilor Rukh”— he pointed toward the man in ornate armor—”told you Guklak was fanatically loyal to Kyaga, did he not?”

“He did.”

“Yet when we questioned other chiefs here, we learned Guklak’s loyalty was not strong. In fact, he was ready to sell out. Rukh was holding that back, to use the man for his own advantage. You yourself knew of Yalmuk’s wavering loyalty.”

“And how does this indicate that Kyaga was in the city when I thought he was far away?” the lord demanded, glaring daggers toward Councilor Rukh, who looked back at him with an expression of bland innocence.

“To begin with …” Ironwood strode toward Shadespeaker. Before the man could draw back, the mercenary grasped a handful of the dangling amulets and pulled. The broad hat came away, and with it the wig of dangling locks, revealing a man whose real hair was short-cropped, his face smeared with green paint. His brown eyes darted toward Kyaga, bright with fear. “This is no shaman. This is a tongueless slave who wears the shaman’s garb while in public with Kyaga!”

“He spoke well enough at my banquet!” the lord objected.

“You did not speak to Shadespeaker,” Ironwood announced. “The man you spoke to was Kyaga himself!” With a panther-swift movement, he grasped Kyaga’s wrist with one hand and with the other yanked the glove from the chief’s hand, revealing a complex sigil traced on its back. With a swipe of the glove he turned the sigil into a featureless smear. The brilliant green eyes, wide with hatred, began to fade.

“When he wanted to be Shadespeaker, his spell turned his eyes brown. As Kyaga, they were green. Now you see their real color.” The eyes had faded to a dull blue. Ironwood smiled at the chieftains ranged behind Kyaga. “There never was any Shadespeaker. This man announced his own advent among you.” The expressions of chagrin

on their faces were almost comical.

“Not only is there no Shadespeaker, there is no Kyaga Strongbow, either!”

“Then who is he?” demanded the lord, at his wit’s end.

Ironwood snatched away the veil, revealing a vaguely handsome but rather nondescript face over which fear crept like advancing fog. “No one you, or any other here, would know, save for me. His name is Boreas. He is a rogue, a harpist, and an actor. Once, in another land, he was my friend. But he betrayed me and left me for dead.”

“Hah!” Shellring said excitedly. “Granny Toadflower said it was the musician behind all this! ‘False eyes,’ she said. ‘There is one,’ she said.”

“When he realized Yalmuk and Guklak were ready to betray him,” Ironwood went on, “he decided to murder them in an advantageous fashion. He would make it look like the Tarsians had done it so that his chieftains would be bound closer to him in their desire for vengeance.”

“Infamous!” said the lord.

Ironwood favored him with a humorless smile. “He sought further advantage by framing Councilor Melkar for Guklak’s killing. He wanted you to hand him your most capable military commander. He knew your kind well, my lord. He knew you would seize the flimsiest excuse to be rid of a potential rival.”

The councilors gazed upon their lord with little favor, but he ignored them. “I am not yet convinced.”

“For an actor like Boreas, imitating a Tarsian noble was child’s play. He met a number of them personally and was helped by the fact that they frequently wear masks in public. He could move freely throughout the city, even through the gates after hours, impersonating one lord or another. That was how he lured Yalmuk to the square before the Hall of Justice. Just another Tarsian noble, ready to sell out his lord or offer a bribe for Yalmuk to do the

same. He got the man passage through oneof the gates— your guards are eminently bribable, my lord—and led him to the square, where the mute slave was waiting on the pedestal of the statue of Abushmulum the Ninth. One or the other of them whipped the noose around Yalmuk’s neck, and the two of them hauled him up. That was why all the blood was on the pedestal.”

He grinned into the man’s face. “I suppose a wire garotte is a natural weapon for a harpist, eh, Boreas?” He looked up. “Find his harp. I’ll warrant it’s missing a string.”

“And Guklak?” a nomad chief demanded.

“Easy,” said Ironwood. “He probably killed him right here in the camp, then passed through one of the gates as a nobleman on military duty with the corpse wrapped up on a pack animal. Patrols pass through the gates at all hours. The guards had orders to keep out nomads and other strangers, not nobles of their own city.”

“This man spins lies!” shouted Kyaga. His outburst was greeted with stony silence.

Shellring turned to Nistur again. “That was how he passed the truth-fiend! ‘Shadespeaker didn’t kill Yalmuk,’ he said. It was true! There never was a Shadespeaker!”

Nistur nodded. “Let this be a lesson to you. Never trust a man who refers to himself in the third person.”

“We could not have been gulled so easily by such a rogue!” protested a chieftain.

“I think I may be able to elucidate,” said Stunbog. “In fact, here comes one of my colleagues with the proof.”

The wizened little wizard appeared from a rear compartment of the tent. “I found it,” he announced, holding up a brass-bound casket. This he handed to Stunbog.

The enormous woman in the spangled robe emerged likewise from the rear of the tent. “There was no harp,” she announced, “but I found this.” She held aloft a

long-necked lute, from which a string was plainly missing.

“I suppose a harp would have been too awkward to carry about in his travels,” Ironwood said.

“Some years ago,” Stunbog announced, “these two men, Ironwood and Boreas, had a fateful encounter with a young black dragon. Ironwood slew it, but was terribly wounded. Boreas, who must have hung back throughout the struggle, removed its heart and fled, leaving his companion to die. Behold the heart of the dragon.”

He threw back the lid and held the casket high. Even the hardened nomads and the schemers of Tarsis gasped. Revealed within, on a nest of satin, was a grayish-red organ larger than that of a full-grown bull. Though its owner had long been dead, the heart pulsed with an uncanny life-force, throbbing audibly.

“The heart of a black dragon,” Stunbog went on, “properly activated by one who knows the Arts, confers a spell of glamour upon the possessor, bestowing upon him great charisma, making the merely capable seem superb, the merely adequate seem great. Why just be a great actor, Boreas thought, when with this talisman he could act on the world stage?”

“Ah!” Nistur said. “Now I know you!” He walked to Ironwood’s side, took a purse from within his tunic, and tossed it at the feet of Boreas. “I must return your fee, for I failed in my commission.” He addressed the assembly. “This man, attired as yet another Tarsian nobleman, hired me to kill my friend here, whom I had not yet met. The one who calls himself by many names has an affinity for underhanded homicide. He even hired a gang of thugs to ambush us in the Old City.”

“He had more than mere murder on his mind when he commissioned that attack,” said Stunbog, “just as he had more than mere conquest in mind when he moved against Tarsis.”

“What could be more important than conquering Tarsis?” the lord demanded haughtily. “Not that I would have permitted such an outrage, of course.”

“It seems that Boreas devoted much time to studying the lore of black dragons. They are creatures far more complex than their dismal reputation would suggest. He had the heart, but Ironwood took the skin of the dragon. These two items, together with a spell from a very ancient and obscure tome, would make him powerful beyond his wildest dreams. Somewhere beneath the ruins of the Old City of Tarsis lies the great Library of Khrystann; this is widely known among scholars. If that spellbook is to be found anywhere, it is in the old library.