The Tower of Fear (12 page)

“What’s the rumor?”

“A guy named Ortbal Sagdet got himself killed down there last night. That’s a fact. I checked. The rumor is, he was the Living’s number one boy down there. Thieves got him, looks like. Thieves usually know enough not to mess around where there’s gonna be comebacks that’ll get them dead.”

“How soon can you get a confirmation on whether or not this Sagdet was what rumor says?” Cado’s piggy little eyes were sparkling.

“Never.”

“Eh?”

“How am I supposed to get your confirmation?”

“You belong to the Living.”

“I’m what they call a ground-level soldier. The bottom of the heap. And I’m never going to be anything more.”

“Why not?”

“The Living is an Old Boys outfit. I got three marks against me. The big one is, I wasn’t out there to get my butt kicked at Dak-es-Souetta. The other two are I didn’t get it kicked at the Seven Towers or on the Plain of Chordan, either. So it won’t ever matter who I am or what I could do for them, I’ll never be anything but a spear carrier.”

Cado got up and went to a window. Physically he fit the stereotype of the Herodian ruling class. He was short, bald, and plump. He could posture, be pompous, and was vulnerable to flattery. Like the rest. Unlike most, though, there was a razor-sharp mind under his shiny pate. “Where were you in those days, Rose?”

“Out of town.”

“You did say you used to be a sailor, didn’t you? That that was how you learned Herodian. And there’s little room on the seas these days for Qushmarrahan ships. Well, no matter. We’re here, and it’s now. If there is a way to identify Sagdet positively as a high officer of the Living, I’d be generously grateful.”

“If there’s a way I’ll find it, sir.”

“I know you will. And what of our friend the Eagle? Anything to report there?”

“I screwed up. I got me a job grooming horses for them but the first day, one of them got to mouthing off about city people and I broke both his legs for him. I didn’t figure it would be smart to hang around after that.”

“You’re a man of great violence, aren’t you?”

“Sometimes that’s the only way to get a message across. I never saw you guys sending out missionaries to spread the One True Faith.”

“A point. I…” Cado went red with anger.

Azel faced the window as an ensign invaded the room, so excited he hadn’t bothered to knock, so young he still had hair. “Sir!” he exploded. “Signal from the South Light. The new governor’s galley is in sight.”

“Damn! The bastard would have good winds coming across, wouldn’t he?” Cado kicked a stool across the room. “Machio, don’t you ever bust in here like this again. If it’s the end of the world in five seconds you knock and wait. Understand?”

“Yes sir.”

“All right. Thank you. Get out.”

The ensign went, tail between his legs.

“Our troubles redouble when we’re least prepared to handle what we already have. Rose, I want you to stick with me today. I want you studying this Sullo pig from the beginning. He’s the first one they’ve sent who could be genuinely dangerous.”

“Stay with you? For the public reception and everything?”

“Yes.”

“Too dangerous. There are people who would recognize me. I’ll have no value if anyone suspects I work for you. Not to mention it might shorten my life expectancy.”

“I want to explore your thoughts about what al-Akla might be up to in the Shu. I’ll have you outfitted as a soldier in my personal bodyguard. You’ll pass. Nobody looks at the men behind the commander.”

“In the Shu? He isn’t up to anything in the Shu that I’ve heard, sir.”

“He sent Joab and more than a hundred men into the maze down there this morning. You hadn’t heard?”

“No sir. I was working the Sagdet angle.” Azel was disturbed. This was not good. He did have to find out what it meant. Soon. But it looked like Cado was going to keep him tied up all day. Damn!

He should not have come.

5

Aaron removed the last of the clamping straps that had held the parts of the mast step motionless while the adhesive between joins and around the holding pegs had set. He waved to the men working the hoist. They began lowering the harness that would lift the mast step so they could swing it over and drop it into the ship’s half-completed hull.

The new Herodian foreman, Cullo, who had not yet been on the job two weeks, came to inspect the finished product. “Perfect,” he pronounced it. “I’ve never seen more perfect joins, Aaron. They’re cabinetry quality.”

“That’s the sort of work I was taught, sir. And what I’d be doing if I was well off enough to do whatever I wanted.”

“Forget that. Stay with us. In five years you’d be a master shipwright.”

“Yes sir.” The way the Herodians were stripping the little forest on the hills south of Qushmarrah there would be no timber left in five years. Under the old regime every tree taken had had to be justified and every ounce of it put to some use. If he could find no other reason to dislike Herodians, Aaron could dislike them because they were locusts, stripping resources and wealth wherever their armies were successful. He suspected greed moved them more than did religious fervor.

He helped secure the harness, then stepped back. There would be nothing to do till the laborers had the mast step ready to drop into the hull. Cullo was on to someone else, so he went and found Billygoat where he was pounding and tamping caulking rope into laps of clinker planks with a wooden mallet and wedge. The old man was quick and deft. He was ten feet ahead of his assistant, who was sealing the laps with hot pitch.

“That stuff stinks,” Aaron told the old man.

“Pitch? You get used to it. Gets to smell damned good if you’re out of work for a while. You dogging it?”

“Hoisting the step.”

“Uhm.”

“They decided what to name her yet?” Billygoat knew everything before the foremen did. There was a battle going on at the top over the name of the ship. A struggle between zealots and practical merchants who knew she would be entering ports where the Herodian god would not find a warm welcome.

“Nope. Something on your mind, Aaron?”

“Yeah.” He did not know how to broach it without sounding like an old woman, so he just had at it. “Remember when you told me about they found those lost kids out by Goat Creek?”

“Uhm.” The older man’s hands never stopped moving.

“You ever heard about them finding any other ones?”

“Worried again?”

“Some. Not for me this time. Friend of my wife had her little boy taken yesterday. An only child.”

“Uhm.” Billygoat paused to look at him directly. “You got one hell of a big determination to let this business fuss you, don’t you, Aaron?”

What could he say? He couldn’t mention the dreams and the nightmare certainty that something would happen to Arif. After all your precautions? they would ask. You have to be crazy.

Maybe he was.

“Now you bring it up, though, Aaron, yeah, it seems I do remember hearing about two, three other kids that turned up the same way. Good clothes, good health, short on memories of what happened to them while they was missing.” Billygoat’s hands were busy again.

“They knew their families?”

“I never heard anything said otherwise.”

Aaron sighed a sigh that started right down in the roots of his soul. There was something to hang on to and nurture.

“Good, then,” Billygoat said. “And what else do you have on your mind this morning, young man?” Part of Billygoat’s charm was his assumption of the old man’s role, though he was far from elderly.

Aaron was startled. Was he that obvious when he was troubled?

“Yep. The old man’s a mind reader. What the hell did you expect, Aaron, moping around here all morning? Nobody pays attention? Come on. Spit it out.”

“It isn’t that easy, Billygoat. It’s one of those things where you’ve got to make a choice, and even ignoring it is a choice, and no matter what you choose somebody is going to get hurt. So what you have to do is pick who gets it.”

“Yeah. Those kind are a blue-assed baboon bitch, ain’t they? Homar, it’s time you broke. You’re getting tired and sloppy trying to keep up. I see a couple places you’re going to have to do over.”

Aaron couldn’t see anything wrong with Homar’s work. Neither could Homar, he suspected, but Billygoat’s assistant cleaned his tools, put more charcoal on, broke up a couple of pitch billets and put them in to melt, then went away.

“So, Aaron. Let’s talk about it.”

“What do you know about the Living?”

Billygoat’s eyes got wary. “As little as I can. Knowing too much could get you a chance to swim across the bay with a hundred pounds of rocks tied to your toes.”

“Yeah.” He hadn’t thought of that angle. “What I meant was, are they something worthwhile, or are they just a bunch of diehards making it rougher for the rest of us?”

Billygoat smiled. “You don’t get me that easy, Aaron. It’s in the eye of the beholder. Why don’t you lay out the problem and if I see something I’ll say so and if I don’t I’ll forget you even asked.”

Aaron thought about it a minute, but there was not much going on inside his head. All he wanted to do was puke it up, get it out of his gut before it poisoned him.

“Say there was a guy who betrayed Qushmarrah in a way that was just as important as what Fa’tad did, only hardly anybody noticed, and only one guy knew, and the traitor didn’t know he knew, and one day years later suddenly it looked like the traitor was now somebody real important in the Living. If he worked for the Herodians before…”

“I see.” Billygoat raised a hand for silence. He had stopped working. “Say no more.” He turned inward for several minutes. Then, “With the years intervening there would have grown up knots of personal considerations and complications, not so? The fight for Qushmarrah is over and lost. The traitor probably has a family now, all completely innocent, who would suffer terribly from any belated justice. Yet if he were indeed high in the councils of the Living, and still a tool of Herod, and the Living are a worthy group of men with a real chance of restoring Qushmarrah’s independence and glory … Yes sir, Aaron, truly a blue-assed bitch baboon of a problem.”

Someone up top yelled at Aaron to come on. The men on the hoist were ready to lower the mast step.

“I’ll think about this, Aaron. For every no-win situation I’ve ever seen there’s always been an extra way out if you could just back off and look at the whole map from a skewed angle. Talk to me later. Get up there before they get pissed.”

“Thanks, Billygoat.” Aaron trotted to the nearest scaffolding, clambered up, crossed the ship on a work deck of loose planks, checked that everything he had brought up earlier was still handy. His helpers were ready. “Lower away!”

The step assembly came down slowly. The men helping turned it, aligned it, guided it into place. Aaron beckoned the foreman. “It looks like a good fit. But let’s check the join points to make sure.”

Ten minutes later he was puffed with pride. Only one place did he need to plane a bit off a beam end. Cullo told him, “You have to stay in this business, Aaron. We’d get the contracts filled in half the time.”

Aaron shrugged, went to the side, had the men on the hoist lift the assembly a foot and a half. His helpers started brushing all the join points with adhesive. He let it set up a little, then had the assembly dropped into place again. His helpers started driving adhesive-soaked pegs immediately, four to the join, of which there were twelve: four at deck level, two to the side; four halfway down a pair of the midships ribs, two to the side again; and four on the keel itself.

“A successful experiment,” the foreman told Aaron. “It’s saved us a week over putting it together in place, piece by piece. I’m sure you’ll get a fat bonus. How soon can you start on the steps for the cargo booms?”

“I still have to finish this. After the glue seasons I have to cut the pegging flush, sand the joins smooth, layer on some more glue, then cover everything with lacquer.”

“All stuff that could be done by somebody else, under your supervision, while you’re getting the other steps. What the hell is going on?”

Men were gathering in the bow of the unfinished ship, chattering and pointing toward the harbor. Aaron followed the foreman forward to see what was up.

A huge galley was working her way in. She wore the gaudiest sail Aaron had ever seen. “Who is it?”

“Must be the new civil governor. Early. And now everything goes to hell while we fake up celebrations to show him how overjoyed Qushmarrah is that he’s finally come.”

Aaron leaned on the rail, watching the Herodian galley, and smiled slightly, remembering how cynical his father had been about government and those who governed.

*   *   *

Bel-Sidek was hard at it, holystoning the foredeck of a tubby merchantman out of Pella, a Herodian tributary where friends of the Living worked the docks. Behind him, stevedores shuffled to the dock and back aboard, loading and unloading at the same time.

Sacks of something were going off and sacks of something else were coming on and bel-Sidek could not quite see the point because he could not distinguish one group of sacks from the other. But inside a few of those coming off there would be lethal tools for the Living.

Someone hailed him from the dock. The voice was breathless. For a moment he feared it was going to be a warning that the customs goons were coming and he would have to get his men scattered before they could be identified. But when he got to the rail he saw one of that very select group of men entrusted with carrying messages between the khadifas. The man pointed toward the bay and shouted, “The new governor’s ship is coming in.”

Bel-Sidek cursed and signaled his understanding. “Early. The bald-headed little bastard would get here early.” He tried to look for the ship but all he could see in that direction was the tips of the lighthouses atop the Brothers. The Pellans had taken the cheapest commercial wharfage available. That put them behind a jungle of masts and spars belonging to Qushmarrah’s fishermen and sponge and pearl divers. And small-time smugglers. If there was any distinction between the bunch.

He limped off the ship and got himself to the nearest height where he could see the harbor. After a minute he began to chuckle. Other gawkers looked him askance. He controlled himself.