Sung in Blood (15 page)

He began running, confident none of his pursuers could stay with him all the way to his destination.

The toughest kept up for five miles.

Rider ran five more miles, at a slower pace. By then he was well into the farm country west of Shasesserre. He ducked into a woodlot and adjusted his disguise slightly. When he reappeared upon the road he looked to be just another farm laborer trudging along with hands thrust into pockets.

His trudge was deceptive. It ate ground quickly. And when he was sure no one was watching he ran.

It was the hard way to make this journey. The slow way. But Shai Khe's spies and eyes would not be watching for a man afoot. An airship or a dromon, yes. Perhaps chariots, coaches, or horsemen. But not a lone, stooped, tired farm hand.

At dusk he came to the ridge that formed the spine of Shroud's Head. He was more than forty miles from the Citadel. That much walking tired even him. He located a sheltered place and fell asleep immediately.

He wakened six hours later, in the ebb hour of the night, exactly as planned. He listened to cricket sounds. Nothing else was moving, a fact he confirmed by cautious extension of his wizard's senses.

Confident that he was alone and unwatched, he began working his way up and out the ridge. He avoided trails and easy traveling. In the dark even the most skilled of men could overlook some warning device.

He reached the crown of Shroud's Head without incident or discovery. Once there he settled himself and set his wizard's senses roaming in earnest.

There were guards, yes. And warning devices. And an incredibly complex net of spells meant both as alarm and trap ... And something more. Something dark, the nature of which he could not immediately discern.

There were only two men, though. One was asleep and the other was nodding. There should have been more. Unless Shai Khe had grown so short of manpower he had stripped his airship of its crew.

That must be it. Rider could detect no other human beings anywhere within reach of his talent.

That other thing, though ... He had begun to sense its outlines, its black formless form. And he had begun to suspect what it might be. And if it was, he had learned much about the horror that slithered within a man named Shai Khe.

If that thing were loosed, no single sorcerer, not even a Jehrke or a Shai Khe, would be able to bind it again. An army would be needed, and many of them would die in the struggle. Horribly. But for now it was confined and constrained and could, with relative ease, be returned to that foul place whence it had been summoned.

If Rider could untangle the net of spells shielding both airship and devil.

Now he knew why Kralj Odehnal had said "Devil's Eyes" instead of "Devil's Eye." The deep cave and hidden airship were only half the story. There was, perhaps, the approximation of a pun in confining the devil in the other, shallower eye.

Rider examined the nest of spells. His regard for Shai Khe, as a sorcerer, rose. It would be a long, arduous, interesting, dangerous job, penetrating that without leaving tracks. He settled in to do it.

He was through. He was safely inside unseen. He had done what he had come to do and had seen what he had come to see. And now he was trapped.

Just as he was about to leave, Shai Khe's airship crew returned, having come down the Bridge of the World by boat. And with them they had brought Caracene, Soup, and Greystone. How had they gotten to Greystone and the girl?

For the moment all three were safe enough. The airshipmen had orders to install them in the airship and keep them confined. Nothing more.

Rider wished he could get back to the City and learn what had happened. The airshipmen knew nothing. But he could not depart without being seen, or, at least, without leaving traces that would be instantly apparent to Shai Khe's eye.

He slipped into a shadowed cleft and rested, and waited for a chance to make a properly discreet departure.

XXIX

"The boat just vanished?" Chaz demanded, keeping one eye on General Procopio, who had his nose into everything in the laboratory. The general was as excited as a kid. Retirement had been a bore for him. "Right in the middle of the river?"

Preacher nodded. He was tired of repeating the story. "Then he used sorcery. Meaning he was willing to disturb the web and attract attention."

"Like maybe he hadn't been noticed so far?" Su-Cha sneered. "The boat only had to disappear for a couple minutes. Just long enough to get to shore and let those guys do a fade."

Chaz paced. He was concerned about Caracene, though torture would not have gotten him to admit that. He stared at the darkness beyond the laboratory window. The gruesome memorial that had been Jehrke Victorious watched over his shoulder. "Where is the boss?"

"Gone. Without saying where he was going. The way he does."

Chaz stared at the vermilion characters in the window glass. They had, according to Preacher, simply appeared while his back was turned.

Ride-master Jehrke: You no longer possess the pearl so precious to me. I now possess two gems priceless to you.

"What do we do now?" Chaz asked.

"We wait," Preacher said.

General Procopio was stirring through wreckage left from the recent raid. "What is
this
thing?" He indicated something that looked like a mummified gorilla head. "Ugly character."

"No telling," Chaz replied. "Jehrke had at least one of everything weird there ever was around here."

Su-Cha scooted past the barbarian. "Don't touch that!" he squeaked.

Procopio jerked away. Startled, Chaz asked, "What's the matter, little buddy?"

"That's nothing Rider or Jehrke ever had. That's a Koh-Rehn. We've been double-shuffled. Those clowns that broke in here left it for us. A little gift. A little nightmare come midnight, while you're all tucked safely into your beds, you think." He squatted beside the ugly head, studying it.

"Relative of yours?" Procopio asked, catching on more quickly than the others.

"In a manner of speaking." After a thoughtful moment, Su-Cha said, "Dirty tricks, eh, Shai Khe?" And after another moment, "We can play that game, too. Listen up, you guys. I've got an idea."

Midnight. A blinding flash lighted the window of Jehrke's laboratory. Tough though the glass there was, it disintegrated, showering the Rock with fragments. Roars and screams ripped out into the night. A man who might have been Ride-Master Jehrke could, for a moment, be seen battling a huge shadow. Then the screaming stopped.

One minute. Two minutes. Three. Two battered men fled the Citadel gate, a semi-conscious woman dragging between them. As they neared the edge of the plaza, the shorter man stumbled. He let go the woman to break his fall. The shawl wrapping the woman's hair and concealing her features fell away.

"Damnit!" Chaz exploded, but softly. "Watch yourself. They find out we've still got her, we lose our chance to pull this out without Rider." He re-wrapped the woman while Preacher muttered weary apologies.

They resumed hurrying through the night, following a circuitous path that in time led them to a new hideout at General Procopio's City house. The general had insisted. He wanted to be in the middle of things, and the Protector himself had proofed the house against sorcerous espionage. He said. Where better to stake out the goat and wait for the lion? he asked.

There were fragile indications to convince Chaz that they were being followed. He allowed himself one merry grin.

Good times and bad, chaos or disorder, there were comings and goings at the Citadel Gate. Day, night, the hour made no matter.

A curtained coach departed twenty minutes after Chaz and Preacher and their charge. Within were Spud, Procopio, and a stack of reports from the sergeant of the guard, who had not permitted a little thing like a raid to cancel his report-taking.

The coach hurried through the night, straight to Procopio's back gate, and so arrived there long before the others did afoot. They were in the darkened study, watching, to confirm the presence or absence of trackers when Chaz and Preacher arrived.

Those two burst in with their burden. "Well?" Chaz boomed as Su-Cha surrendered the Caracene shape and collapsed with a feeble plea for food.

"Two of the bloody beggars," Procopio replied. "One ran away to tell tales. One stayed."

"We ought to sneak out the back way and follow him home to Daddy," Chaz growled.

Spud, trying to spoon-feed Su-Cha in the dark, said, "We already know where to find Daddy."

"What? How?"

"All those reports the sergeant gave me? While you guys were loafing I was reading. There's wheat in amongst all that chaff, and it adds up to another waterfront warehouse. While we were killing time giving you guys a head start, the general called in some favors. As soon as Shai Khe's gang heads out, wherever, they'll hit the place and get Soup, Greystone, the girl, and whoever is guarding them. Then they'll lay for Shai Khe in case he gets lucky or gets away out here."

Chax grunted. It was an eloquent grunt, replete with sarcasm and cynicism. "And it all depends on Rider being somewhere handy, looping snares and nets into the web for when Shai Khe cuts loose, eh? Ingenious."

Preacher quoted something scriptural; predictably cryptic and confused; fierce, fiery, and deifically vengeful. He added, "It's falling together. We have that rat in the middle, between two terriers, and we'll choke him on his own arrogant overconfidence."

Perhaps the word
choke
occurred to him because of the strangling noises issuing from Su-Cha because Spud kept jabbing too-rapid spoonsful of food into the imp's mouth. Su-Cha finally got his message through. He was recovering. He was ready for the next stage.

They began their wait for the mad enemy.

XXX

When the alarms went off there was a tinge of grey in the night beyond the nose of the pirate airship. Men bolted to their weapons. There was panic in the air. The airshipmen's morale was low.

It was not about to improve.

A man appeared outside, hands raised, yelling at them to restrain themselves, that he was on their side, that he had a message, that they were to let him come inside.

They let him in. Not because he insisted but because some of the crew recognized him. Immediately he began chattering in a clicky tongue Rider recognized but could not follow. His message was received with groans and outrage.

A sleepy crewman leaned out of the airship gondola and demanded, in a language Rider could follow, "What's all the racket?"

One of the others replied, "The Celestial Lord wishes us to put our guests back on the boat and take them back to the city. Right now."

Puzzled, Rider watched preparations being made. When the airshipmen brought their "guests" forth he began to get a glimmer. Whatever had happened in the City, some of his associates had survived to counterattack. Through guile.

Caracene had arrived under loose, indulgent restraint, like a wayward child being shepherded home. She was departing in bonds, hung about with every piece of silver the airshipmen could muster. She went silently, aware that protest was useless and time the sole cure for this indignity.

Rider permitted himself a rare grin. Somehow, Su-Cha had convinced Shai Khe that Caracene might in fact be a certain nimble-witted shape-shifting imp.

The airshipmen hustled their prisoners out of the cave. Before they disappeared, Rider was at work preparing his own unnoticed departure.

A spell of minor scale—the one he had employed to escape the treasury vaults—blinded the stay-behinds to his presence. He then turned to Shai Khe's network of protective and detective spells. He saw instantly that slipping through would be easy. All the hectic in and out of airshipmen, prisoners, and messenger had left the magical artifact in a state of vibrant dissonance. It was a moment's work to confuse his own passage with that of those ahead of him.

A narrow, steep pathway descended the face of Shroud's Head. From a ship on the Bridge it looked like the thin scar that appeared on the faces of all the old king's statues and busts.

Rider reached the head of the path only minutes behind the others. They were just two hundred yards ahead. But he was stumped.

The pathway slanted down to a wooden jetty that would be invisible from the shipping lanes. Tied up to it was a small smuggler's ship with mast unstepped. From the Bridge it might look like a rock.

Rider's immediate concern was the fact that the pathway appeared to be the only way to reach the ship.

Or was it?

He set his mystic senses roaming.

There were handholds enough for a descent, but that way would be slow. And, shadow spell or no, he would be seen if exposed to enemy eyes that long. However ...

The alternative appeared mad even for a man as remarkable as Rider.

He cast his senses again.

And hesitated not an instant.

He retreated into the cave as far as he dared, took several quick, deep breaths, sprinted forward—right out into the nothing of a two-hundred-thirty-foot drop to the waters of the Bridge.

Shadow flickered around him. His plunge went unremarked—till he hit water a dozen feet from the jetty.

The airshipmen halted and gabbled at one another about the tremendous splash. Several of the more daring hurried ahead.

Rider's collision with the face of the sea left him stunned for a few seconds. Then he realized he was going deeper than he wanted, dragged down by the mass of gewgaws he carried. He swam upward with powerful kicks and armstrokes, slanting so as to surface beneath the jetty. He rose, gulped air, clung to a float just long enough to dispose of such devices as would have been ruined by the water. Then he went under again, stroking under the smuggling craft.

The ship was long and narrow and had a very low freeboard. Rider grasped the gunwale amid-ships, levered himself aboard. The spell of shadows guarded him from the eyes of the forerunner airshipmen, who were approaching the foot of the path. He slipped into shadows beneath a raised foredeck. Before concealing himself within a pile of old tackle and sailcloth he flung a small spell across the deck and gunwale. The dampness there evaporated.