Doom's Break (16 page)

The two-master came on, slowly but directly into the harbor. A space was kept clear on the inner side of the mole. Cogs with heavy cargo could unload there before moving off to their own berths farther down. The ship was clearly heading for that spot. This implied that the ship expected to be welcomed peaceably.

As yet there was no sign of warlike intent, but the watching crowd remained uneasy despite their curiosity.

The little ship had slowed considerably now, her last sail taken down. The rudder pulled hard to starboard, swinging her right in to nestle against the side of the dock.

Several figures onboard were waving madly. Others were up in the rigging.

Stepping forward onto the dock came the harbormaster, a brilby in traditional costume of gray, fuscous fustian. "What ship?" he called in the tongue of the Land.

"The
Sea Wasp
, of Gzia Gi," came back the reply from a mot high up in the crosstrees of the foremast.

The crowd gasped. There really were mots aboard the ship!

Other figures onboard were moving forward with oars and poles in hand as the boat sidled slowly up toward the dock. A brilby ran up to the forepeak and threw a heavy line ashore. It was caught by the harbormaster, who turned it quickly around the big bollard. The ship came up against the line with a hard tug, then stilled and backed up against the dock.

Another line was thrown ashore astern, by a tall grey-haired man. The sight of a man caused the crowd to recoil a step or two, but a boatmot took the line anyway and made it fast. Here and there in the crowd behind him, mots and brilbies instinctively checked their belts for knife and shortsword.

"Mots and men on the same ship?" said many voices in the widespread confusion.

The
Sea Wasp
was hove tight against the dock, her gunwales four feet above the stone jetty.

A figure jumped up onto the gunwale. They clearly saw him, a mot with a scarred face, wearing the scraps of what had once been an officer's coat. Beside him was a brilby with an even more battered face. Then a third joined them, a mot whose face looked as if it had been beaten in with a club, which it had.

This trio of the battle-scarred made folk uneasy, too.

"Who are these scarred strangers?"

"Be they mots of the Land? They have the look of demons."

Then Thru Gillo jumped down from the ship and knelt and kissed the stone of the jetty.

At that very moment, Nuza came running up from Dock Street to join the crowd. She heard nothing but muttering around her. On the stern of the vessel she could see a tall figure.

The ship was decidedly not of the Land. And the figure at the stern was a man. More than that, the man had an incredible resemblance to the Emperor, Aeswiren the Third.

Nuza felt her heart thudding in her chest. A tremor went right through her body. Why was the Emperor here, and in such a ragged state?

She was still staring at Mentupah Vust, brother of Ge who had mounted to the purple many years before and become Aeswiren the Third, when the crowd thinned in front of her and another figure came stumbling forward. His eyebrows had jumped almost over the tip of his head.

It was Thru.

Nuza locked eyes with him for a long, astonished second, while her mind circled helplessly around and around like a whirligig. Then everything blanked out as she slid to the ground.

Thru Gillo's reappearance in Dronned sparked a huge celebration. Bonfires burned on the dunes while mots and mors, drunk on early summer brew, whirled and twirled. Ostensibly this outpouring of joy was to celebrate Thru's return, for he was still recalled as the hero Seventy-seven-Run Gillo, of the bat-and-ball game. But, in reality, the folk of Dronned were celebrating the certain end of the war.

If a ship crewed by men mixed with mots had sailed all the way from Shasht, then anything was possible. The Emperor had withdrawn his forces. The raids had ceased, though the army of the Land still watched the coasts. Now it seemed they really could trust the reports. The war was over.

The mots from the
Sea Wasp
were treated as heroes, and the men, after a cautious period of examination by the throng, were welcomed in the manner of the Land, which meant with food, ale, and song. The party went on all night, sputtering out only with the dawn.

Thru awoke with the first light. Nuza was sleeping beside him on the narrow bed in her room at the palace. They had had a great deal of catching up to do. They had had no time to spare for anyone but each other as they renewed their love. Sometimes they just lay there and laughed in each other's arms.

"Fate has played a strange game with us," said Nuza at one point.

"I suppose we should regard it as an honor."

They laughed again, giddy with joy.

"Nuza and Thru," said Thru. "We'll end up as a saga sung at winter festival."

The memory of winter stopped the laughter in Nuza's throat. She squeezed his hand between hers, and tears flowed down her cheeks while he kissed them away.

Thru told her what he had seen in Shasht, the sheer desolation of their land. "They use the world, plundering, never giving anything back. Their land is bare. There is no game in their forests."

When Nuza told him of her own strange adventures, Thru fell silent for many minutes. Nuza had become a favorite of the Emperor and been kept hidden in his palace. Thru did not know how to respond at first, and he was troubled by a strange sense of jealousy. Nuza had performed to entertain the Emperor. The Emperor had told Nuza he loved her.

The twinges of jealousy left Thru shaking his head. Nuza had told him everything. He understood that she had not reciprocated the love of the Emperor. Nuza was a mor, Aeswiren was a man, and in Nuza's words they "were not meant to be lovers in this world." And yet Thru was still jealous. He disliked this smallness in himself, and when he thought of what he and Simona had shared, he felt a pang of guilt such as he had never suffered before. It confirmed the wisdom of his decision not to tell Nuza the complete truth about what had taken place between Simona and himself.

When she kissed him and asked him why he was so quiet, he shrugged and dissembled, and in this he hated himself, too. "I can only give thanks that we survived. The Spirit must have been watching over the two of us. The Spirit must have a purpose in mind. No, it must be true. Consider this: You met the Emperor, and I met the Emperor's brother and became his friend."

Nuza gaped at him. "Brother?"

"Mentupah, the younger brother of Ge who is now called Aeswiren."

"I am amazed."

"You came back here on the Emperor's ship. I could not have made it back without the navigation skills of Mentu."

Nuza gasped and clapped her hands together. "You must be right about the Spirit. But the Emperor never mentioned his brother to me."

"Perhaps he was too ashamed. Because he imprisoned him for twenty years."

Nuza blinked, brought up short. Was Aeswiren capable of that?

"Why?"

"To prevent someone using him as a pawn or an impostor to replace the Emperor."

Nuza nodded, understanding the kind of intrigue that could flourish in Shasht politics. "Yes, that I can see. It is the way of their world."

Later, by great good fortune, Nuza was facing away from Thru when he told her that Simona had been aboard the
Sea Wasp
. When she looked back to him, she was able to hide the things she'd guessed at just from the way he spoke.

"She came back to the Land?"

"She wants to live here among us."

"I see." Nuza deliberately kept her voice neutral. Simona was a friend of Thru's, and so he must never know the truth. Nuza realized at once what her friend had done for her. If Simona had told Thru about Nuza being in the custody of the Emperor, he would have gone back to the city and been murdered on the altar of the dire God of Shasht. Simona had saved Thru's life, and Nuza knew she must protect that secret.

"And the others?" she asked.

"Janbur will probably go and live among the Emperor's men. Mentu has a more difficult road ahead. He does not trust his brother all that much."

While Nuza slept, Thru arose and scouted through the palace for the kitchens. He secured a tray of hot buttered scones, two tubs of chowder, and a pot of tea, which he took back to Nuza's room.

"This is the first breakfast we've had together since that morning in my house in Sulmo," she said with a smile.

"On Whiteflower Lane, I remember it well."

Nuza looked down, struck by sadness once more. The house and everything around it had been burned when the outer ward of Sulmo was captured by the Shasht army.

After breakfast, a message came for Thru. He was requested to attend a meeting with the Assenzi. They had many urgent questions for him. Thru had expected the call. He knew it would be the first of many. Others would want to talk to him, Toshak among them.

He kissed Nuza farewell. She had her own tasks to attend to, and they would meet again at the end of the day. He navigated the mazelike corridors of the palace and found a long, narrow room on an upper floor of the east wing.

Three of the ancient little beings were waiting to see him: Melidofulo, Acmonides, and Utnapishtim. Of this trio, Thru knew Utnapishtim best. At Highnoth he had taken Utnapishtim's classes and then accompanied him on a perilous trip into the Farblow Hills.

Utnapishtim was overcome with emotion at meeting Thru once again. He embraced his former pupil while his eyes glistened with tears of happiness. "It is a miracle, and I thank the Spirit."

Thru laughed. "A miracle indeed, in fact several of them. The Spirit intended all along for me to survive long enough to come back."

Three young mors with earnest expressions entered the room with trays of parchment, ink, and quills. They set them on the table to write down everything that transpired. There was no escaping the importance the Assenzi attached to this meeting.

"What do you want to know, Utnapishtim?"

"We want to know everything, Thru Gillo, everything you can remember."

Thru, well taught in the Assenzi way, had expected this answer. The questioning was in minute detail.

Hours went by. Occasionally young mots and mors in palace livery entered with trays of hot tea and wedges of bushpod pie or salted beeks with pots of mussel stew. At such times, the young mors set down their quills and ate heartily, and Utnapishtim or Acmonides took up a quill in their stead. The Assenzi ate but lightly, a bisk here, a mouthful of stew there. The young mors of the Dronned civil service were stunned to see the old Assenzi take their place, but Thru was not. He knew the Assenzi were not averse to work.

After Thru had described the canal trip across Shasht and then his precarious life through the winter, holed up in caves and lodges in the mountains, Utnapishtim wiped his eyes with a handkerchief.

"It is just as I'd expected, Thru Gillo. I knew you were destined for some great undertaking. Don't you see? You have become our eyes and ears, peering into the world of our enemy."

Thru smiled. "I think I was merely the agent of the Spirit. Because now the war is over. There will be peace, thanks to the Emperor."

Utnapishtim put away his handkerchief. "Ah, well, that may not be so. Our real enemy has not made peace."

Thru stared at them for but a moment. He understood. "You mean that thing we saw in the pyramid? The Old One?"

The Assenzi said nothing, regarding him with their huge eyes.

"The message you sent, which Simona took, it was not for the Emperor, was it?"

"No. Our message was ineffective. Karnemin ignored it."

"Yes, that was the name you spoke once before. Who is this enemy that we never knew existed?"

"Who is Karnemin?" repeated Utnapishtim softly, and he looked over to the other Assenzi, who shrugged.

Utnapishtim turned back to Thru. "As to who he is today, well, none of us has any idea. As to what he is, of that we are better informed."

Acmonides spoke as if reciting a well-known text: "Karnemin is the last survivor of the Groybeel Vaak, a clique of wizards, shapechangers, and mindstealers. This clique was one of many that flourished in the last days of Man. Social morality had broken down. Sorcery obsessed the last wizards. They formed secret societies devoted to necromancy, cannibalism, and dark forms of magic."

Thru shivered. What great evil was this?

"Men felt the cold chill of extinction coming upon them. Their numbers had dwindled steadily for many centuries. In their despair, they turned to evil."

"Then what is this Karnemin you speak of?"

"An evil wizard, Thru. A thing that is no longer really human, yet inhabits a human body. There were others, terrible creatures such as Pinque or Namooli of Thoth. But they had all died off by then. Karnemin is the last."

"It is a parasite," said Acmonides, "a man who delved too far into dark arts and became debased. It learned to move its mind into the bodies of others, thus it could defeat death. It became long-lived and lost all sense of humanity."

"It lives on forever in the flesh of other men."

Thru stared at them, horrified.

"Once," murmured Utnapishtim, "we knew him well. Our masters at Highnoth imprisoned him."

"It was in the first period of the ice," said Acmonides. "Karnemin was already very old by then. He was kept locked in a high room in the Red Tower."

"I remember," added Utnapishtim. "The High Men numbered only ninety-nine then, and they were beginning to die off. Karnemin was insane. But he was cunning. He inveigled Cusewas, whispered words of poison in his ears."

"Cusewas helped him escape, there is no doubt of it," said Utnapishtim somberly.

"That was but the beginning. The struggle went on for thousands of years. Eventually his power was smashed. We thought he was lost in a crevasse in the great glacier of Kabal Mountain. But it was not so."

"He fooled us. It was some poor devil, one of his slaves. He escaped and fled south. We knew no more of him."

"Somehow he got along. Perhaps he dwelt among the pyluk, though we think they would have eaten him, having no memory of their creator. However he did it, he crossed the world and found the primitive men of Shasht. He must have dwelled among them for tens of thousands of years, taking one of them every so often to renew his own life."