Bleak Seasons (31 page)

No. The odor came from the stairwell behind me.

I recalled dropping a lamp. Recalled a confused cacophony of wheres and whens.

“I’m all right. Just had a dizzy spell.”

Laughter from across the street.

The Shadar glanced back but otherwise seemed indifferent. He did not want to
believe my story. He wanted to find something wrong right here right now. He did
not like foreigners. And us northerners were all madmen and drunks. But,

unfortunately, we were also very much in favor with the Palace.

I got up. I had to get moving. My mind was clearing. The truth was coming back.

I had a desperate need to get to the old familiar entrance to the Palace because
I had to get to my apartment in a hurry.

The moon suddenly splashed its light down into the street. It had to be past
midnight. I saw the woman watching from across the way. I started to say
something to the Shadar but a sharp whistle came from the distance, in the
direction the monster had seemed to be moving. Another patrolman needed
assistance. He said, “Take care, foreigner.” He jogged away.

I ran too, not pausing to take the elementary step of closing the sally door.

I reached my customary entrance. Something was wrong. Cordy Mather’s Guards
should have been on duty there.

I was unarmed except for a belt knife. I drew it, pretending I was a fierce
commando. There was no way Mather’s gang would leave an entrance uncovered. You
could not bribe those guys to screw up.

I found the sentries in the guard room. They had been strangled.

No need to question the prisoner further, now. But who was the target? The Old
Man? Almost certainly. The Radisha? Probably. And anyone else important that
they could get.

I fought panic, managed to keep from baring off blindly. Thai Dei and Uncle Doj
were up there, anyway.

I stripped the shirt off one dead guard, wrapped my throat. That should afford
some protection against a Strangler’s scarf. Then I bounded upstairs like a
mountain goat who was long out of practice. I reached my own floor so winded I
had to lean against the stairwell wall and strain to keep from puking. My legs
were jelly.

Alarms banged everywhere now. It was happening as I stood there. I got some wind
back, left the stairwell for the corridor and tripped over a dead man.

He was filthy and undernourished. A blade had laid him open from left shoulder
to right hip. His right hand lay ten feet away. It still clutched a black rumel.

There was blood everywhere. Some still seeped from the corpse.

I stared at the scarf. The dead man had murdered many times. Now Kina had
betrayed him.

Such treachery is one of the goddess’s more endearing qualities.

Only Ash Wand could cut that clean and deep.

Another corpse lay near my apartment door. A third lay in the doorway itself,

holding the door open.

All the blood was fresh. The corpses still bled. As yet few flies were in
evidence.

Knowing I did not want to do so I entered my quarters ready to sink bare teeth
into anything that moved.

I smelled something.

I spun and stabbed as someone skinny and brown and unwashed flew at me, hit me,

threw me backwards. A black rumel spun around my neck but failed its function
because of the shirt wrapping.

I hurtled backward into my worktable. There was a sharp pain in the back of my
head. Inside I screamed, “Not again!”

Darkness closed down.

Pain awakened me. My arm was on fire.

My crash into the table had overturned a lamp. My papers, my Annals, were
burning. I was burning. I leaped up shrieking, beating my arm, and when I had
that extinguished I began jumping around trying to save the papers, I saw
nothing else and thought of nothing else. This was my life, going up in smoke.

And beyond the smoke there was only the house of pain, only the bleak seasons.

Way, way over there, like down a long, cruel tunnel, I saw Uncle Doj kneeling
beside Thai Dei. Between them and me lay three dead men. The floor was invisible
beneath their blood. Two of the dead showed Ash Wand’s characteristic precision
cuts. The other had fallen to a cross cut that betrayed a hint of raggedness.

The swordsman had been in the grip of an uncontrolled rage.

Uncle Doj held Thai Dei’s head against his chest. Thai Dei’s left arm hung as
though broken. His right surrounded To Tan on his lap. The five-year-old’s head
was tilted at a bizarre angle. Thai Dei’s face was pale. His mind was not in
this world.

Uncle Doj rose, came toward me, stared into my eyes, shook his head, then
stepped close and wrapped powerful arms around me. “They were too many and too
fast.”

I collapsed.

This was the present. This was today. This was the new hell where I did not want
to be.

. . . fragments . . .

. . . just blackened fragments, crumbling between my fingers.

Browned page corners that reveal half a dozen words in a crabbed hand, their
context no longer known.

All that remains of two volumes of Annals. A thousand hours of labor. Four years
of history. Gone forever.

Uncle Doj wants something. He is going to make me drink some strange Nyueng Bao
philtre.

Fragments . . .

. . . all around, fragments of my work, my life, my love and my pain, scattered
in this bleak season . . .

Darkness. And in the darkness, shards of time.

Hey there! Welcome to the city of the dead . . .

The apartment was overrun with guards. What was going on? I was confused.

Another fainting spell?

Smoke. Blood. The present. The hard present that breathed pain like a dragon
breathes fire.

I became aware of the Captain’s presence. He came from the back of the apartment
shaking his head. He eyed Uncle Doj curiously.

Cordy Mather blew in looking like a man encountering the worst horror show of a
long and unhappy lifetime. He went straight to the Old Man. I heard only “ . . .

dead men all over the place.”

I could not catch Croaker’s response.

“ . . . were after you?”

Croaker shrugged.

“You just moved out last . . . ”

A Guard rushed in. He whispered to Mather. Mather barked, “Listen up! We’ve
still got some live ones out there. Be careful.” He and the Old Man moved a
little closer. “They’re lost in the labyrinth. We’ll need One-Eye to find them
all.”

“The excitement never ends, does it?” Croaker sounded really tired.

To no one special Uncle Doj announced, “They have only just begun to pay.” His
Taglian was excellent considering he had been unable to speak a word the day
before.

Mother Gota came from the back, bent and moving slowly. Typically of Nyueng Bao
women dealing with disaster she had brewed tea. This was quite possibly the
worst day of her life. It would be a good pot.

The Captain gave Uncle Doj another searching look, then knelt beside me. “What
happened here, Murgen?”

“I’m not sure. I walked in in the middle of it. Stabbed a guy. That one. Got
thrown across a table. Tripped and fell through a hole in time. Maybe. Woke up
on fire.” I still had charred pages around me. My arm hurt like hell. “There
were dead people all over. I lost it. Next thing I knew it was now.”

Croaker caught Mather’s eye. He used a rocking motion of his right hand to
indicate Uncle Doj.

Cordy Mather asked Uncle for his story. He spoke perfect Nyueng Bao.

It was a night of a thousand surprises.

Uncle Doj said, “These Deceivers were skilled. They gave no warning. I wakened
just an instant before two fell upon me.” He explained how he had evaded death,

breaking a neck and a spine in the process. He described his kills clinically,

even critically.

He spoke harshly of both himself and Thai Dei. He was down on himself because he
had allowed himself to be tempted into pursuing other Deceivers when they fled.

Their flight proved to be a diversion. Thai Dei, who had not been drawn away,

received criticism for showing the instant of hesitation that had cost him his
broken arm.

“Cheap lesson for him,” Croaker observed. Uncle Doj nodded, missing the
Captain’s sarcasm. He had to face the cruel cost of having allowed himself to be
deceived.

There were fourteen corpses in my apartment, not including those of butchered
Annals. Twelve had been Deceivers. One had been my wife and one my nephew. Six
perished by Ash Wand, three at Thai Dei’s hands. Mother Gota gutted two and I
pigstuck one when I walked in.

Grasping my shoulder in what was meant to be a comforting gesture, Uncle Doj
said, “A warrior does not slay women or children. That is the work of beasts.

When beasts kill men all men are constrained to hunt and destroy them.”

“Nice talk,” Croaker said. “But the Deceivers never claimed to be warriors.” He
was not impressed by Uncle’s speech.

Neither was Mather. “It’s religion, Old Timer. Their Path. They are the priests
of death. The sex or age of their sacrifices doesn’t mean squat. Their victims
all go straight to paradise and never have to take another turn around on the
wheel of life, no matter how buggered up their karma was.”

Uncle Doj’s mood grew blacker by the minute. “I know tooga,” he muttered. “No
more tooga.” Nobody was revealing any mysteries to him.

Cordy smiled wickedly at the swordmaster. “You guys probably won a high spot on
their desirable victim list by killing so many of them. If you’re a Deceiver
there’s big status to be gained by killing somebody who has killed a lot of
people.”

I heard Mather’s blather but it did not register as sense. I muttered, “Tooga
ain’t no crazier than any other religion around here.”

That seemed to offend everyone equally. Good.

Mather turned to fuss at his Guards. They had failed their trust. My own
disaster was just one of several. Others were still happening.

Numbly, I said, “You can’t defend against this kind of thing, Mather. These guys
weren’t commandos.” I swatted the nearest corpse with the charred sheets I was
holding. “They came in here expecting to make it to paradise by midnight.

Probably didn’t even have an escape plan.” In a softer voice, I said, “Captain,

you might better check on Smoke.”

Croaker frowned like I had given away everything but asked only, “You need
anything? Want somebody to stay?” He understood what Sarie meant to me.

“This is where I came from. When I kept falling back. I got family with me,

Captain. If I start to go bugfuck in the head they’ll cool me down. You really
want to help? Fix Thai Dei’s arm. Then go do what you got to do.”

Croaker nodded. He made a small gesture that, in normal times meant “Go!” but
which meant a good deal more now. “Narayan Singh is going to wake up some
morning and realize that he has reaped the whirlwind. There is no safe place for
him anymore.”

I rose. Grimly, I set out for my bedroom. Behind me, Thai Dei groaned as Croaker
set his arm. The Old Man paid him no other mind. He was busy issuing orders that
meant a major intensification of the war.

Uncle Doj followed me.

The reality hurt less than the anticipation had. I indulged in the pointless
gesture of removing the rumel from my wife’s throat. I stood there with the
scarf dangling, staring. This Strangler must have been a true master. Her neck
was not broken, nor had her throat been bruised. She looked like she was
sleeping. There was no pulse when I touched her, though. “Uncle Doj. Can I be
alone?”

“Of course. But drink this first. It will help you to rest.” He handed me
something that smelled really nasty.

Did we do this already?

He went away. I laid down beside Sarie for the last time. I held her while the
medicine began to course through me, calling forth sleep. I thought all the
usual thoughts, nurtured the usual hatreds. I thought the unthinkable, that it
might be best that this had happened before Sahra learned what it really meant
to be Company.

I reminisced the great miracle. Ours was a match that never should have been. A
match neither ever regretted for an instant, yet one created by a force so
slight as the unspoken whim of an old woman cursed with hysterical, unreliable
precognitive visions.

I thought both sanely and crazily and commenced the process of beatification
that is inevitable after any untimely death. I slept. But even in Nod I could
not escape the pain. I dreamed cruel dreams I could not reclaim when I awakened.

It was almost as if Kina herself were mocking me, telling me that triumph was a
costly deception.

Sarie was gone when I awakened, my head throbbing with a medicinal hangover. I
stumbled around until I ran into Mother Gota. The old woman was fussing over
some tea and talking to herself exactly the way she talked to the rest of the
world.

“Where is Sahra?” I asked. “Tea. Please. What happened to her?”

Gota looked at me like I was mad. “She is dead.” No pulling punches for her.

“I know that. Her body is gone.”

“They have taken her home.”

“What? Who?” Anger began to rise within me. How dare they . . . ? Who was they?

“Doj. Thai Dei. Her cousins and uncles. They have taken Sahra and To Tan home. I
am here to watch over you.”

“She was my wife. I . . . ”

“She was Nyueng Bao before she was your wife. She is Nyueng Bao now. She will be
Nyueng Bao tomorrow. Hong Tray’s fantasies cannot change that.”

I gained control before I exploded completely. Gota was right, from a Nyueng Bao
point of view.

Also, there was not a lot I could do about it right now. Not without coming up
with a lot more ambition than I had this morning. All I really wanted to do was
sit around feeling sorry for myself.

I went back to our room with my tea. I settled on our bed, picked up the jade
amulet that had belonged to Hong Tray. It seemed very warm this morning, more
alive than I. I had not worn it for a long time. I slipped it onto my wrist now.