Paragaea (23 page)

Hieronymus led the company through the wide avenues of the city, and as they progressed they felt the heat of the desert at their backs slacking, and the cool breeze off the waves slowly building, cool caresses on their sun-scorched faces. The avenues ran straight down to the sea, and through the milling crowds and overhanging awnings, Leena could catch postage-stamp glimpses of brilliant blue. Above the babble of voices she could hear the slow susurration of the waves lapping against the shore, and the distant call of seabirds.

When they were a few blocks away from the waterfront, Hieronymus stopped short in front of an unimposing structure. The canopy over the low doorway was tattered and bleached with age, and the room beyond the entrance was dark and gloomy.

“This has all the earmarks of a dive,” Balam said guardedly.

“Right you are, my furry friend,” Hieronymus said with a smile. “And this particular dive serves the best dinner you'll find in all Masjid Empor. And Leena will be happy to know that they've got the finest selection of spirits I've seen this side of Elvera.”

“So what are we waiting for?” Leena said, heading towards the door. Balam followed close behind, licking his black lips.

“Benu, will you join us for some refreshment, or will you hurry yourself on to the waterfront in search of transport?” Hieronymus laid a comradely hand on the artificial man's shoulder.

“I suppose, if you don't feel there's any especial hurry,” Benu said, following the others inside, “that there is no reason I can't rest myself with you.”

Leena had located the company a table near the center of the room, and as Hieronymus joined them, there came a shout from across the room.

“You!” A man dressed in the fine robes of a merchant, his beard oiled and trimmed, pointed directly at Hieronymus. His eyes wide, he jumped to his feet, almost overturning his table, and rushed frantically out the open door.

“What was the matter with
him?”
Leena said, turning towards Hieronymus.

Hieronymus did not answer, but shifted uncomfortably, his expression dark.

“He seemed to recognize you,” Benu said unnecessarily.

“Just what
did
happen the last time you were in Masjid Empor, Hero?” Balam asked, arching an eyebrow.

At that moment, nearly a dozen of the local constabulary rushed in through the open door, scimitars drawn and expressions fierce. They ringed the table in steel, shouting in thickly accented Sakrian for the company to remain seated and immobile.

Hieronymus scowled. “Something bad,” he answered.

Balam started to rise to his feet, his claws extending.

“Hold,” Leena said in a harsh whisper. “In such close quarters, with the numbers so far out of our favor, our chances of escaping without injury are slim. Besides, where are we to go, back into the desert?”

“Not the desert,” Balam growled under his breath. “I just had to wash sand out of holes I didn't know I had.”

“Perhaps we'd best go along with the gendarmes,” Benu said, “and see what the fuss is about.”

Balam and Leena nodded. Hieronymus didn't make a sound, immobile in his chair.

“Where are you staying in the city?” one of the constables asked Leena as he bound her hands behind her with a stout cord. The gem affixed to the front of his turban, and the deference with which the other constables treated him, picked him out as the leader.

Leena gave him the location of the inn, and the names under which they were registered, and the constable sent one of his subordinates to fetch their things.

“What is this about, anyway?” Leena asked, craning her head around. With his dark features and trim beard and mustaches, the constable presented a dashing figure, and Leena was surprised and a little ashamed that she found him considerably attractive.

“The magistrate will explain the charges against you and the punishment to be meted out when you appear before the tribunal.” The constable checked her bonds, and then moved on to secure Benu's hands behind his back.

“Don't you mean if we are found guilty?” Leena said.

The constable looked over at Leena, a confused expression on his face. “What do you mean,
if?
Your trial was held nearly a decade ago, and the ruling and sentencing phase concluded soon after.”

“But we've never even been to your city before,” Balam objected, his fangs bared.

“Perhaps not. But
he
has”—the constable pointed at Hieronymus—“and the verdict carries to any who travel in his company.”

The company was led through the city streets, through milling crowds that parted reluctantly for the constables, but who whispered eagerly behind their hands when they were passed word of who the four prisoners were. Leena could not pick out any words from the babel of voices, none of them speaking any language she knew. Whatever their
meaning, it was clear that the crime of which Hieronymus was accused, and which they all now stood guilty, was infamous.

Up the avenues, away from the waterfront, and across town to the city's center, where they came to a stout building that squatted like a predator amongst the less-imposing structures around it. Its crenellated battlements rose like stone teeth, and as they passed through the archway into its dark interior, Leena felt as though she were being swallowed whole.

The cell was small, no more than four meters on a side, with three walls of stone and one of ancient ironwood bars. A low shelf ran along the three stone walls, and a small window high overhead offered the only illumination. There was a drainage hole in the center of the floor, apparently the only concession to plumbing and biological requirements, to judge from the rank smell emanating from it.

“Paris of the Inner Sea's eastern shore, eh?” Leena said, wrinkling her nose and trying to find a comfortable sitting position on the shelf.

Across a narrow passageway was another identical cell, which held two prisoners. One was an indistinct figure wrapped from head to toe in damp robes, with only black eyes peering out between folds of cloth. The other was a fierce-looking, muscular woman, her light hair cropped short, with a smoldering gaze and a symbol carved into her left cheek, a figure X framed on three sides. Her skin was the color of wet sand, and her eyes were light beneath knitted brows. Her clothing consisted of hardened leather and straps, with a kind of cuirass of shaped leather, a heavy apron, and greaves on her shins and bracers on her forearms.

“Are you awaiting trial, too?” Leena called to the woman opposite, her tone enraged. She slammed a fist against the wall, and shot a sharp
glance at Hieronymus. “Or are you already judged unfairly in absentia and awaiting punishment?”

“Relax yourself, little sister,” Balam said soothingly. “You've nothing to gain from injuring yourself.”

“Is this what passes for justice in Masjid Empor?!” Leena leapt to her feet and began to pace. “Grabbing innocents off the street and locking them away in some gulag, awaiting who knows what tortures?”

“Silentio!” shouted the woman in the opposite cell in some foreign tongue, rubbing her temples. “Caput meum doleo.”

Hieronymus stood, and crossed to stand beside Leena, his expression unreadable. “Justice,” he said in a harsh whisper, taking Leena's hand and leading her back to the shelf, “in Masjid Empor, is a severe thing. A man caught stealing a fish has his hands cut off at the wrists. A man caught with another man's wife has his generative organs cut off. A man caught trading in forbidden knowledge has his ears cut off.” He paused, and with his eyes lowered, answered, “A convicted murder is publicly executed in the square.”

“What, then,” Leena asked, her eyes narrowed, “is the crime of which you are accused, the blame for which appears to extend to the rest of our company?”

“It had better not be adultery with another's mate,” Balam growled, cupping his groin protectively, “or you and I will have words, Hero.”

“No.” Hieronymus shook his head, and turned his back to his companions, looking up at the small window overhead. “Your organs will remain intact, of that I am sure.”

Balam breathed a sigh of relief, and patted his groin appreciatively.

“When they bury you,” Hieronymus went on, “I'm sure none of your constituent elements will be missing.”

Hieronymus turned, and Leena could see tears pooling in his eyes.

“The charge, I am ashamed to say, is murder.”

Leena, Balam, and Benu sat in stunned silence, regarding their weeping companion. Hieronymus, his shoulders hunched, collapsed onto the shelf at the far corner of the cell and leaned to one side, resting his head on the ironwood bars.

“Hero, I…” Balam left off, unsure how to continue.

“I'm not sure I understand,” Benu said, filling up the silence. “I take it the charge is a valid one, and that you feel some remorse over the incident. Which would be understandable, if I'd not seen you on previous occasions end another being's life without suffering the slightest effects. Those two in the canteen on the river Pison, for example. Did you shed a tear over them?”

“They deserved what came to them,” Hieronymus said in a ragged voice, “as do any who raise their hands in violence. I've killed many others in my days, and none that didn't deserve killing, in one form or fashion. You could argue that, when my number is up and someone gets the better of me, I'll deserve it just as much, considering how many I've
sent to their graves. But this one of whose murder I stand convicted deserved no such thing. It was no righteous killing, but murder, pure and simple. And for my sins, the blood is on my hands still.”

His name was William Greenslade,
Hieronymus said
, and he was an Englishman, like me. He was also a sailing man, though a marine and not a naval officer, as I'd been. He'd sailed from Plymouth in 1768 aboard Captain James Cook's HMS
Endeavour
, thirteen years before I first squalled bloody on my mother's sheets. But with the vagaries of the passage of time between Earth and this world, he was but a boy of twenty-one years when first he set foot on Paragaea, while I was already approaching the end of my third decade when we met.

The way Greenslade told the story, the
Endeavour
was three months out of Tierra del Fuego, in the southern seas in search of the mythical
Terra Australis Incognita.
Holding the rank of private, it was Greenslade's turn on sentry duty rotation, and so he stood guard outside one of the ship's cabins, keeping watch over the ship's supplies. A sailor was working amongst the supplies that night, cutting pieces of sealskin to make tobacco pouches. Greenslade asked the sailor if he could have one of the pouches for himself, and the sailor refused. With the weakness of character that one often finds in the young, Greenslade resolved that he would have one of the pouches, come hell or high water, and when the sailor's back was turned, he stole a piece of the sealskin. The theft was discovered shortly after Greenslade went off duty, and came quickly to the attention of his superior, a Sergeant Edgecombe. While the sergeant conferred with the captain, Greenslade began to reconsider his decision to purloin the sealskin, and slunk off to the forecastle to try to think a way clear of his fix.

When first I heard Greenslade's story, I wasn't sure how much of it
to credit, and in later days, I was given cause to reconsider my assessment of the man. But I think, in retrospect, that my first impressions of him had been correct, and that he was, at heart, a decent man, led astray by impulses which his strength of character was not sufficient to suppress.

In any event, it is impossible to say whether Greenslade would have stood before the mast like a man and taken his punishment, for circumstances contrived to keep him from that fate. Standing in the forecastle, the South Seas stretching out before him and the starry sky arching overhead, Greenslade was startled to discover that a star seemed to have fallen from the sky, and hovered just before him. It was a small, silvery sphere, like a mirror curved into a ball, that hung in midair just a few feet in front of him.

All of us, of course, know precisely the import of this mirrored sphere, but young Greenslade had no conception, any more than Leena or I did when first we saw one. So he reached out a tremulous hand, touched the surface of the sphere, and was immediately translated to a world not his own.

I was, at that point, living amongst the people of Drift, the floating city of the Inner Sea. This was some time before Balam and I met, and I had been in Paragaea but a short number of years. I had learned enough of the local dialects to make myself understood in Sakrian, Sabaean, and the language of Drift, and had seen much of the shores of the Inner Sea at all points of the compass. I was eager to see what the land had to offer, and so bid my farewells to my adopted kin of Drift, and went ashore in Bacharia. That proved as disastrous a choice as you might expect, but it was fortuitous in at least one regard, for it was during the unpleasantness with the Bacharian Polity that I first encountered Greenslade.

He'd arrived in Paragaea only a few days previous, and had not weathered the experience well. Knowing nothing of the local language or customs, with no currency in his purse, and no earthly notion where he might be, he was literally at wit's end. He was like a crazed thing, more mad animal than man, and had I not chanced upon him, he'd
have ended his days as a gibbering lunatic, haunting the back alleys of Bacharia until starvation or violence took him, whichever did first.

As it was, I heard his maddened cries, and recognized immediately the sound of a fellow Englishman in distress. I ran to his aid, and with my saber fended off the locals with whom he was embroiled. Greenslade was understandably relieved to meet a countryman, and when I suggested we make a hasty retreat from the city-state into more hospitable climes, he quickly assented.

We stowed away on a freighter bound for Masjid Kirkos, and managed to remain undetected until we reached the southern port. Hidden there in the hold, I told Greenslade what I knew of Paragaea, and instructed him in the rudiments of the local languages and customs, while he familiarized me with his origins, relating to me the story I've just retold.

Jumping ship in Masjid Kirkos, Greenslade and I clasped hands and resolved to travel together, seeking adventure where we might. In the months that followed, more than a year all told, we ranged across the eastern reaches of the Paragaean continent, from Parousia to far Croatoan, until our journeys led us finally to Masjid Empor.

Not to put too fine a point on it, Greenslade and I had plied the trade of the thief, working our way through desert emirates and the coastal cities and towns, stealing gems and crowns and scepters, fencing them, and then carousing on the proceeds. Even at the time, I knew it was wrong, but it was an exciting, adventure-filled pursuit, and so suited my cast of mind in those days. Besides, Greenslade and I never stole anything from anyone who could not afford the loss, and so in that regard we were more involved in the redistribution of wealth than in anything that might properly be termed thievery.

All that changed one hot night in Masjid Empor, when we stole from the local calif something that could never be repaid. Greenslade had always been of a somewhat vicious temperament, I had found, and for my sins I was not much of a role model. We had come to Masjid
Empor for what I then considered one last big score. The calif's signet of authority was an emerald the size of a man's fist, and Greenslade and I concocted a plan to sneak into the calif's palace and steal the gem. We had performed similar burglaries dozens of times, if not more, sneak-thieving our way into sleeping houses and making off with valuables without anyone in the residence being the wiser until morning came and we pair of thieves were far away. On rare occasions, we were forced to contend with guards and gendarmes, but those ended up concussed at worst, most of the time; and if from time to time one of the fallen guards was injured fatally, at least they had been hired for the purpose, and when their faces and dying screams haunted my restless slumber, I could at least take small comfort in that.

On this particular occasion, though, Greenslade and I were caught in the process of stealing away by the calif's eight-year-old daughter. We were at a high window, on the verge of slipping out and over the sill, when the little girl, still rubbing the sleep from her eyes, chanced upon us in her sleeping gown. Greenslade at once snatched up the girl and stifled her cries before she was able to call for help.

“We should leave the girl,” I told him in hushed tones, “and make good our escape.”

“We wouldn't make it a dozen steps if the bitch raises the alarm,” Greenslade answered, his eyes flashing. “We throw the girl from the window, dash her brains out on the flagstones, and
then
we escape.”

The calif's palace is the tallest building in all of Masjid Empor, standing four stories tall. Diminutive compared to the towering structures of Laxaria or Hausr, but certainly tall enough that a fall from its height would do grievous injury to an eight-year-old skull.

“Let the girl go,” I told him, bristling.

“Have you gone mad, Bonaventure?” Greenslade spat. “It's her life or ours.”

“I'd sooner kill you myself than let you bring harm to that child,” I said.

“You
have
lost your senses!” Greenslade hissed.

“I may only be regaining them, William,” I told him, my grip tightening on the hilt of the scabbarded saber at my side.

Greenslade did not waste another moment in conversation, but made his move towards the window.

I lunged forward, whipping my blade free of its scabbard and driving it into Greenslade's chest in one smooth movement, the point piercing his breast just centimeters from the girl's right ear. He was fatally wounded, my saber slicked with his blood, but it was too late. As Greenslade tumbled backwards, he dragged the doomed girl with him, and they plummeted together through the open window, the girl screaming and Greenslade's last breath rattling in his throat.

I stood at the open window, looking down on the red ruin on the flagstones below me. I didn't think, just sheathed my sword, raced to the opposite window, and leapt from the window onto the top of a sheltering canopy only two stories below. From there I made it intact to the ground, and ran, numbly scrambling away into the hot night.

I found myself the next morning miles outside the city, standing at the shores of the Inner Sea, tempted to throw myself into the waves. But I realized that would be the coward's way out. Nor could I conscience returning to Masjid Empor, where the executioner's blade would too quickly release me from my torment. The only just punishment for me would be to live and bear the guilt of that poor girl's death.

I held in my hand the fabled emerald of Masjid Empor, cutting red lines into my palm. I scarcely remembered carrying it with me from the calif's palace, much less holding it all this while. With contempt, I hurled it into the surf, and it sank without a trace.