Tales From the Vulgar Unicorn Part 10

Samlor cried, 'and the Mind that gave it shape; By the rown of this hilt and the silver wire that laps it; By the cold iron of this blade and by the white-hot flames it flowed from; By the blood it has drunk and the souls it has eaten - know thy hour'

Samlor hurled the dagger. It glinted as it rotated. The blade was point-first and a hand's breadth from the smiling face when it exploded in a flash and a thunderclap that shook the city. The concussion hurled Samlor backwards, bleeding from the nose and ears. The air was dense with flecks of paint and plaster from the frescoed ceiling. Dyareela stood with the same smile, arms lifting in triumph, lips opening further in throaty laughter. 'Mine for a sacrifice!'

A webbing of tiny cracks was spreading from the centre of the dome high above.

Samlor staggered to his feet, choking on dust and knowing that if he was lucky he was about to die.

Heqt's gilded bronze head, backed by the limestone spire, plunged down from the ceiling. It struck Dyareela's upturned face like a two-hundred-ton crossbow bolt. The floor beneath disintegrated. The limestone column scarcely slowed, hurtling out of sight as the earth itself shuddered to the impact.

Samlor lost his footing in the remains of Regli's coachman. An earth-shock pitched him forwards against the door panel. It was unlocked. The Cirdonian lunged out into the street as the shattered dome followed its pinnacle into a cavern that gaped with a sound like the lowest note of an organ played by G.o.ds.

Samlor sprawled in the muddy street. All around him men were shouting and pointing. The Cirdonian rolled onto his back and looked at the collapsing temple.

Above the ruins rose a pall of s.h.i.+ning dust. More than imagination shaped the cloud into the head of a toad.

THE FRUIT OF ENLIBAR.

by Lynn Abbey

The hillside groves of orange trees were all that remained of the legendary glory of Enlibar. Humbled descendants of the rulers of an empire dwarfing Ilsig or Ranke eked out their livings among the gnarled, ancient trees. They wrapped each unripe fruit in leaves for the long caravan journey and wrapped each harvest in a fresh retelling of their legends. By shrewd storytelling these once proud families survived, second only to the S'danzo in their ability to create mystery, but like the S'danzo crones they flavoured their legends with truth and kept the sceptics at bay.

The oranges of Enlibar made their way to Sanctuary once a year. When the fist sized fruits were nearly ripe Haakon, the sweetmeat vendor of the bazaar, would fill his cart and hawk oranges in the town as well as in the stalls of the bazaar. During i those few days he would make enough money to buy expensive | trinkets for his wife and children, another year's lodgings for his mistress, and have enough gold left to take to Gonfred, the only honest goldsmith in town.

The value of each orange was such that Haakon would ignore the unwritten code of the bazaar and reserve the best of his limited supply for his patrons at the Governor's Palace. It had happened, however, that two of the precious fruits had been bruised. Haakon decided not to sell that pair at all but to share them with his friends the bazaar-smith, Dubro, and his youngwife, the half-S'danzo Illyra.

He scored the peel deftly with an inlaid silver tool meant especially for this one purpose. When his fingers moved away the pebbly rind fell back from the deep-coloured pulp and Illyra gasped with delight. She took one of the pulp sections and drizzled the juice onto the back of her hand, then lapped it up with the tip of her tongue: the mannerly way to savour the delicate flavour of the blood-red juice.

'These are the best; better than last year's,' she exclaimed with a smile. 'You say that every year, Illyra. Time dulls your memory; the taste brings it back.'

Haakon sucked the juice off his hand with less delicacy: his lips showed the Stain of Enlibar. 'And, speaking of time dulling your memory - Dubro, do you recall, about fifteen years back, a death-pale boy with straw hair and wild eyes running about the town?'

Haakon watched as Dubro closed his eyes and sank back in thought. The smith would have been a raw youth then himself, but he had always been slow, deliberate, and utterly reliable in his judgements. Illyra would have been a skirt-clinging toddler that long ago so Haakon did not think to ask her, nor to glance her way while he awaited Dubro's reply. Had he done so he would have seen her tremble and a blood-red drop of juice disappear into the fine dust beneath her chair.

'Yes,' Dubro said without opening his eyes, 'I remember one as that: quiet, pale ... nasty. Lived a few years with the garrison, then disappeared.'

'Would you know him again after all this time?'

'Nay. He was that sort of lad who looks childish until he becomes a man, then one never sees the child in his face again.'

'Would you reckon "Walegrin" to be his name?* Ignored, beside them, Illyra bit down on her tongue and stifled sudden panic before it became apparent.

'It might be ... nay, I could not be sure. I doubt as I ever spoke to the lad by name.' Haakon shrugged as if the questions had been idle conversation. Illyra ate her remaining share of the oranges, then went into the ramshackle stall where she lit three cones of incense before returning to the men with a ewer of water.

'Illyra, I've just asked your husband if he'd come with me to the Palace. I've got two sacks of oranges to deliver for the Prince and another set of arms would make the work easier. But he says he won't leave you here alone.'

Illyra hesitated. The memories Haakon had aroused were still fresh in her mind, but all that had been fifteen years ago, as he had said. She stared at the clouded-over sky.

'No, there'll be no problem. It may rain today arid, anyway, you've taken everyone's money this week with your oranges,' she said with forced brightness.

'Well then, you see, Dubro - there's no problem. Bank the fires and we'll be off. I'll have you back sweating again before the first raindrops fall.'

Illyra watched them leave. Fear filled the forge, fear left over from a dimly remembered childhood. Visions she had shared with no one, not even Dubro.

Visions not even the S'danzo gifts could resolve into truth or illusion. She caught up her curly black hair with a set of combs and went back inside.

When the bed was concealed under layers of gaudy, bright cloth and her youth under layers of kohl, Illyra was ready to greet the townsfolk. She had not exaggerated her complaints about the oranges. It was just as well that Haakon's supply was diminis.h.i.+ng. For two days now she had had no querents until late in the day. Lonely and bored she watched the incense smoke curl into the darkness of the room, losing herself in its endless variations.

'Illyra?'

A man drew back the heavy cloth curtain. Illyra did not recognize his voice. His silhouette revealed only that he was as tall as Dubro, though not as broad.

'Illyra?-1 was told I'd find Illyra, the crone, here.'

She froze. Any querent might have cause to resent a S'danzo prophecy, regardless of its truth, and plot revenge against the seeress. Only recently she had been threatened by a man in the red-and-gold livery of the Palace. Her hand slid under the folds of the tablecloth and eased a tiny dagger loose from a sheath nailed to the table leg. - 'What do you want?' She held her voice steady; greeting a paying querent rather than a thug.

'To talk with you. May I come in?' He paused, waiting for a reply and when there was none continued, 'You seem unduly suspicious, S'danzo. Do you have many enemies here. Little Sister?'

He stepped into the room and let the cloth fall behind him. Illyra's dagger slid silently from her hand into the folds of her skirts.

'Walegrin.'

'You remember so quickly? Then you did inherit her gift?'

'Yes, I inherited it, but this morning I learned that you had returned to Sanctuary.'

'Three weeks past. It has not changed at all except, perhaps, for the worse. I had hoped to complete my business without disturbing you but I have encountered complications, and I doubt any of the other S'danzo would help me.'

'The S'danzo will never forget.'

Walegrin eased his bulk into one of Dubro's chairs. Light from the candelabra fell on his face. He endured the exposure, though as Dubro had guessed, there was no trace of youth left in his features. He was tall and pale, lean in the way of powerful men whose gentler tissues have boiled away. His hair was sun bleached to brittle straw, confined by four thick braids and a bronze circlet.

Even for Sanctuary he cut an exotic, barbarian figure.

'Are you satisfied?' he asked when her gaze returned to the velvet in front of her.

'You have become very much like him,' she answered slowly. 'I think not, 'Lyra.

My tastes, anyway, do not run as our father's did - so put aside your fears on that account. I've come for your help. True S'danzo help, as your mother could have given me. I could pay you in gold, but I have other items which might tempt you more.' He reached under his bronze-studded leather kilt to produce a suede pouch of some weight which he set, unopened, on the table. She began to open it when he leaned forwards and grasped her wrist tightly.

'It wasn't me, 'Lyra. I wasn't there that night. I ran away, just like you did.'

His voice carried Illyra back those fifteen years sweeping the doubts from her memories. 'I was a child then, Walegrin. A little child, no more than four.

Where could I have run to?'

He released her wrist and sat back in the chair. Illyra emptied the pouch onto her table. She recognized only a few of the beads and bracelets, but enough to realize that she gazed upon all of her mother's jewellery. She picked up a string of blue gla.s.s beads strung on a creamy braided silk.

'These have been restrung,' she said simply. Walegrin nodded. 'Blood rots the silk and stinks to the G.o.ds. I had no choice. All the others are as they were.'

Illyra let the beads fall back into the pile. He had known how to tempt her. The entire heap was not worth a single gold piece, but no storehouse of gold could have been more valuable to her.

'Well, then, what do you want from me?'

He pushed the trinkets aside and from another pouch produced a palm-sized pottery shard which he placed gently on the velvet.

'Tell me everything about that: where the rest of the tablet is; how it came to be broken; what the symbols mean - everything!'

There was nothing in the jagged fragment that justified the change that came over Walegrin as he spoke of it. Illyra saw a piece of common orange pottery with a crowded black design set under the glaze; the sort of ware that could be found in any household of the Empire. Even with her S'danzo gifts focused on the shard it remained stubbornly common. Illyra looked at Wale-grin's icy green eyes, his thought-protruded brows, the set of his chin atop the studded greave on his forearm, and thought better of telling him what she actually saw.

'Its secrets are locked deeply within it. To a casual glance its disguises are perfect. Only prolonged examination will draw its secrets out.' She placed the shard back on the table.

'How long?'

'It would be hard to say. The gift is strengthened by symbolic cycles. It may take until the cycle of the shard coincides...'

'I know the S'danzo! I was there with you and your mother -don't play bazaar games with me. Little Sister. I know too much.'

Illyra sat back on her bench. The dagger in her skirts clunked to the floor.

Walegrin bent over to pick it up. He turned it over in his hands and without warning thrust it through the velvet into the table. Then, with his palm against the smooth of the blade, he bent it back until the hilt touched the table. When he removed his hand the knife remained bent.

'Cheap steel. Modern stuff; death to the one who relies on it,' he explained, drawing a sleek knife from within the greave. He placed the dark-steel blade with the beads and bracelets. 'Now, tell me about my pottery.'

'No bazaar-games. If I didn't know from looking at you, I'd say it was a broken piece of 'cotta. You've had it a long time. It shows nothing but its a.s.sociations with you. I believe it is more than that, or you wouldn't be here.

You know about the S'danzo and what you call "bazaar-games", but it's true right now I see nothing; later I might. There are ways to strengthen the vision - I'll try them.'

He flipped a gold coin onto the table. 'Get what you'll need.'

'Only my cards,' she answered, fl.u.s.tered by his gesture. 'Get them!' he ordered without picking up the coin. She removed the worn deck from the depths of her blouse and set the shard atop them while she lit more candles and incense. She allowed Walegrin to cut the pack into three piles, then turned over the topmost card of each pile.

Three of Flames: a tunnel running from light to darkness with three candle sconces along the way.

The Forest: primeval, gnarled trunks; green canopy; living twilight.

Seven of Ore: red clay; the potter with his wheel and kiln. Illyra stared at the images, losing herself in them without finding harmony or direction. The Flame card was pivotal, but the array would not yield its perspective to her; the Forest, symbolic of the wisdom of the ages, seemed unlikely as either her brother's goal or origin; and the Seven must mean more than was obvious. But, was the Ore-card appearing in its creativity aspect? Or was red clay the omen of bloodletting, as was so often true when the card appeared in a Sanctuary-cast array?

'I still do not see enough. Bazaar-games or not, this is not the time to scry this thing.'

'I'll come again after sundown - that would be a better time, wouldn't it? I've no garrison duties until after sunrise tomorrow.'

'For the cards, yes, of course, but Dubro will have banked the forge for the night by then, and I do not want to involve him in this.' Walegrin nodded without argument. 'I understand. I'll come by at midnight. He should be long asleep by then, unless you keep him awake.' Illyra sensed it would be useless to argue. She watched silently as he swept the pile of baubles, the knife, and the shard into one pouch, wincing slightly as he dribbled the last beads from her sight.

'As is your custom, payment will not be made until the question is answered.'

Illyra nodded. Walegrin had spent many years around her mother learning many of the S'danzo disciplines and rousing his father's explosive jealousy. The leather webbing of his kilt creaked as he stood up. The moment for farewell came and pa.s.sed. He left the stall in silence.

A path cleared when Walegrin strode through a crowd. He noticed it here, in this bazaar where his memories were of scrambling through the aisles, taunted, cursed, fighting, and thieving. In any other place he accepted the deference except here, which had once been his home for a while.

One of the few men in the throng who could match his height, a dark man in a smith's ap.r.o.n, blocked his way a moment. Walegrin studied him obliquely and guessed he was Dubro. He had seen the smith's short aquiline companion several times in other roles about the town without learning the man's true name or calling; they each glanced to one side to avoid a chance meeting.

At the entrance to the bazaar, a tumble-down set of columns still showing traces of the Ilsig kings who had them built, a man crept out of the shadows and fell in step beside Walegrin. Though this second had the manner and dress of the city-born, his face was like Walegrin's: lean, hard, and parched.

'What have you learned, Thrusher?' Walegrin began, without looking down.

'That man Downwind who claimed to read such things...'

'Yes?'

'Runo went down to meet with him, as you were told. When he did not return for duty this morning Malm and I went to look for him. We found them both ... and these.' He handed his captain two small copper coins.

Walegrin turned them over in his palm, then threw them far ' into the harbour.

'I'll take care of this myself. Tell the others we will have a visitor at the garrison this evening - a woman.'

'Yes, captain,' Thrusher responded, a surprised grin making its way across his jaw. 'Shall I send the men away?'

'No, set them as guards. Nothing is going well. Each time we have set a rendezvous something has gone wrong. At first it was petty nuisance, now Runo is dead. I will not take chances in this city above all others. And, Thrusher...'

Walegrin caught his man by the elbow, 'Thrusher, this woman is S'danzo, my half sister. See that the men understand this.'

'They will understand, we all have families somewhere.'

Walegrin grimaced and Thrusher understood that his commander had not suddenly weakened to admit family concerns.

'We have need of the S'danzo? Surely there are more reliable seers in Sanctuary than scrounging the aisles of the bazaar. Our gold is good and nearly limitless.' Thrusher, like many men in the Ranken Empire, considered the S'danzo best suited to resolving love triangles among house-servants.

'We have need of this one.'

Thrusher nodded and oozed back into the shadows as deftly as he had emerged.

Walegrin waited until he was alone on the filthy streets before changing direction and striding, shoulders set and fists balled, into the tangled streets of the Maze.

The wh.o.r.es of the Maze were a special breed unwelcomed in the great pleasure houses beyond the city walls. Their embrace included a poison dagger and their nightly fee was all the wealth that could be removed from a man's person. A knot of these women clung to the doorway of the Vulgar Unicorn, the Maze's approximation to Town Hall, but they stepped aside meekly when Walegrin approached. Survival in the Maze depended upon careful selection of the target.

An aura of dark foul air enveloped Walegrin as he stepped down into the sunken room. A moment's quiet pa.s.sed over the other guests, as it always did when someone entered. A h.e.l.l Hound, personal puritan of the prince, could shut down conversation for the duration of his visit, but a garrison officer, even Walegrin, was a.s.sumed to have legitimate business and was ignored with the same slit-eyed wariness the regulars accorded each other.

The itinerant storyteller, Hakiem, occupied the bench Walegrin preferred. The heavy-lidded little man was wilier than most suspected. Clutching his leather mug of small ale tenderly, he had selected one of the few locations in the room that provided a good view of all the exits, public and private. Walegrin stepped forwards, intending to intimidate the weasel from his perch, but thought better of the move. His affairs in the Maze demanded discretion, not reckless bullying.

From a lesser location he signalled the bartender. No honest wench would work the Unicorn so Buboe himself brought the foaming mug, then returned a moment later with one of the Enii-bar oranges he had arranged behind the counter.

Walegrin broke the peel with his thumbnail; the red juice ran through the ridges of the peel forming patterns not unlike those on his pottery shard.