Hand of the King's Evil - Outremer 04 (23 page)

Jemel frowned, opened his mouth to question - then closed it again and shook his head. Marron guessed that he didn't, wouldn't, couldn't understand.

'My wine, though — that was welcome enough, after the beer they brewed below. They loved me for my wine and took me in, but never beyond the first court. Little use that knowledge is; we must rely on my errant Elisande, I fear, to find the way to Julianne. And then come back to tell us. Now,' again, clapping his hands as Jemel did this time take the camel's reins from him, where are you taking me?'

'Uh, I'm not sure where Hasan has gone, with the chiefs...'

Are you not? I am. Haven't you found the priests' house yet? I remember that, at least. The next building behind the great temple; every house hides its secrets here, but some at least reveal that they have great secrets to hide. This one has gates of bronze, etched with the words of the prophets. All the elders of all the temples live there in its safety, cut off from the sight of alluring women and the noise of those vexatious boys. That's where they'll take Hasan and his entourage, there's room enough. As an unbeliever — even a Surayonnaise unbeliever, and they've had some dealings with me and mine, a great many dealings over the years - I'd be no more let in there than you would, Marron, with your eyes on show. No, take me to Coren, wherever you've left him, and let us mourn together over our missing daughters.'

Jemel led both camel and guest towards their rented quarters, while Marron trailed some distance behind. The camel must needs be bedded down in the small yard outside the house, where every family in Selussin kept what livestock it might possess: a mule, a few chickens, perhaps a goat or two. That would make it difficult for Marron to pass in and out without raising panic in the beast, which was foul-tempered enough already, groaning and tossing its head, balking at every tug. No help for it, though: there wasn't even a window that opened to the street. These Selussids kept their secrets locked behind high blank walls — but then so did Marron, or so Jemel claimed. That boy was good at learning secrets, though, and hearing names not spoken. He had reason enough to leave a veil over Marron's heart, when he knew what lay behind it.

When they came to the house it took both Jemel and Rudel to force the camel through the narrow gateway and into the yard. Marron watched uselessly until Rudel went inside, leaving Jemel still struggling to settle the unruly animal.

Til go to the market,' he called out, 'buy her some feed.'

A wave of the hand was all the response he won, assuming that the curses that came with it were not also directed at him. He grinned and turned and walked away, accompanied for some distance by Jemel's opinions on the camel's birth and breeding. Without those, so loud and fluent as they were, he might have been able to eavesdrop on the older men's conversation inside the house, but no matter. He knew some part of what they'd say, the stories they had to tell each other. What more they might say or decide or discover, he could learn later from them or from Jemel.

At one t
ime, the marketplace at Selussin must have been a sight to rival any in the Ekhed empire, when the town was a trading station as well as a centre for learning. The great open area below the temple would have been like a confluence of many waters, where caravans came together from all over the known world; big as it was, it could barely have been big enough. It must have seethed with crowds, with colour, with merchants crying the value of their silks and jewels, their spices, their camels and slaves. Now the people traded only with themselves, and only what little they could spare. One family had killed a goat, perhaps, and couldn't eat all the meat before it turned, couldn't spare the salt to keep it good; another had a precious harvest of apricots from a pair of trees nurtured in the yard, but needed oil.

So the women would gather as the sun came down, setting out their stock on a blanket in one shaded corner of the wide and wasted space and haggling almost desperately with their neighbours, trying to eke any benefit they could from their meagre goods.

No one traded halfa-reeds, of course, when they were free to gather; besides, Marron wasn't sure that even a camel would eat that wiry stuff. But here was a woman with a sack of withered greens, the outer peelings of her morning s harvest. Elsewhere they might have been thrown on a dung-heap to rot; on his uncle's land they might have been fed to the pigs, but never sent to market. Here they had value, they could be traded. No pigs to eat them in this town, of course; there were donkeys, though, as well as goats. Now, there was a camel.

She was an elderly woman, or looked it from what little Marron could see of her body, eyes and hands. One of the eyes had a cast in it and both were rheumy, crusted with dry yellow matter; the hands were twisted and their skin was loose and wrinkled, heavily ridged with scars across the palms. The hunch of her back as she sat suggested that there'd be no straightness in her when she stood. Perhaps it wasn't age that had bent and shrivelled her, perhaps it was only hard years of work and hunger under the hot sun, children and disease and all the ill chances that come of being poor, for no god has ever loved a starveling; but Marron could deal with the world only as he saw it. Peering beneath the skin of things was a trick for
subtle
men, for Coren and Rudel and others. One other in particular, but this was no place nor time to be thinking of him. Marron wanted no sharp mind probing beneath his own skin; enough that they saw his one ghost burning behind his eyes. Who else haunted him was a private matter, emphatically not for sharing.

And the world was what it was, what he saw, no
subtle
ty or deception; he crouched politely and said, 'Old woman, I think I may have what you are seeking.'

She snorted, showing him a mouthful of good hard teeth as she said, 'Not so many years ago, boy, I might have had what you are seeking.'
Not so old as all that,
she was saying; the world never was what he saw or thought it ought to be, however hard he tried to treat it so. 'All I seek now is dung to make my fire, and I do not think you have so much of that.'

He couldn't begin to guess what she was seeing, with her gaze so twisted and her infected eyes; not the blaze of his, though, that seemed certain. There was no trace of fear or question in her voice, only a dismissive contempt.

He found that familiar, reassuring; and besides, he felt a sudden flood of joy at the simple economy of her bargain. She would provide fuel, feed for an animal; she would take fuel, what came out at the other end, what her greens were converted to.

'Actually,' he said around his grin, 'we have a camel, and you are welcome to the dung if you will feed the beast for us, as long as we are here.' Which he hoped, he prayed would not be long at all now. 'I hadn't thought your needs would be so simple, or so simply met; I'd meant to offer silver...'

He trailed that expectantl
y, and watched her gape: silver, for a mess of sun-shrivelled greens? She might not have touched a coin in months, in years; this was not a money mart. In truth he'd handled little enough himself, lifelong. The coins in his pouch had come from Coren, and still seemed like an alien gift.

The woman recovered tongue and wits sooner than he'd expected. 'Silver? And so you shall offer silver, boy. One camel's daily dung won't keep my fire, nor earn its food. Show me your silver ...'

He fingered out a few small coins, wondering if they were too few or too many, willing to give her the whole pouch if she asked for it. As he leaned forward to offer them to her, he heard slow footfalls at his back. Three people stepping uncomfortably close, standing silent above him; his blood fizzed with the sense of danger, the Daughter waking to it, just a moment before the woman went entirely still before him. Briefly he thought he saw a faint shadow of smoke touch her sick eyes. Then she toppled over, to lie sprawled across her sack of greens.

Marron stood, and turned. Two men and a woman, one Patric and two Catari and none of them a warrior, each of them simply dressed with that same lean look and weathered skin that spoke of a lifetime's labour for small reward. There was a blankness to their faces, though, that had nothing to say of their lives at all. Their bodies were present, and a very real threat; their souls he thought were somewhere else altogether.

That emptiness seemed to suck at him, almost to sing to him, a greater danger than the blades they drew. None of them was a warrior, perhaps, but each of them had a knife.

Well, so did he; and his vow not to kill was no hindrance here. With the strength and speed he borrowed from the Daughter, evading these slow strange creatures shouldn't be a problem. He was more worried about the woman unconscious at his back. He'd brought this trouble on her; if he ran, she'd be abandoned. She'd get no aid from her fellow Selussids. All about him, he could hear the cries and panic of the other women at the market as they snatched up their goods and fled. Even if their menfolk came, they'd surely come too late for her. And there had been too much abandonment already.

Besides, Marron had another, a better weapon than his knife, and he shouldn't need to use it. The threat should be enough to drive these hollow people back to whatever hole they'd crept from. He could guard himself and the woman both, if he just released the Daughter.

His blade was in his hand. A touch of the point to the ever-unhealing wound in his arm, blood and red smoke issued forth while pain coursed inward, through his bones. He had a momentary memory of another smoke, a black smoke insinuating itself into the woman's eyes; and then the Daughter shaped itself in the air between him and his three opponents.

They made no move, and neither did he. It felt to him like a long, long time that they stood there, gazing at each other through the scarlet haze of the Daughter's almost-body.

He thought that he might have to escape with the woman into the other world, as they seemed to lack the intelligence or the will to flee what was far more potent than themselves. But there was a chill biting suddenly at his bleeding arm, different from the pain that he was used to; it sapped his strength, and his own will also. He felt it strike deep into his body, numbing and draining where it passed; he dropped onto his knees, too heavy to stand any longer, and a grey fog clouded his sight. It clouded his thoughts, too. He was vaguely aware that the Daughter was losing its coherence, shifting into smoke and flowing back through his wound, into his blood again; it was hard to focus on how strange that was when he had not summoned it, harder to remember why it mattered.

And then it was within him, and the Daughters heat met his cold invader; and had he thought that he knew pain before? He rolled on the ground, dimly aware that he was screaming; that hands were seizing him, lifting him, gripping with a strength that defied even his bucking struggles; that rags were stuffed into his mouth to silence him to the world as he was carried away.

8

An
Exchang
e
of
Knives

It was children who came running to carry the news to Jemel. He was waiting at the open gateway, watching for Marron's return and keeping a careful distance from the grumbling camel; he'd finally got her couched and tied, but any close approach brought her head whipping round and her teeth snapping. His robe was liberally spattered with her saliva, and he'd barely missed losing another finger in a careless moment. He had hopes that food might pacify her, but t
hose hopes were not strong. Mostl
y he only wanted to have Marron safely back at his side. There was - or should be -little danger to the Ghost Walker within the walls of Selussin, but that didn't stop him worrying.

He looked for the familiar silhouette of his friend turning into the lane, burdened with any luck by a bale of fodder; instead he saw three small figures racing pell-mell around the comer. Just boys at a game after lessons, he thought at first. But they slowed as they came closer, and he saw how their eyes were wide and their skins were flushed with more than exercise.

They came to a staggering, hesitant halt just a few paces from him; their leader, a scant finger taller than his fellows, forced a few words out around his panting.

'You are his man.'

'Yes.' No need for Jemel to pretend,
whose man?
or
I am no one's man,
no need for the boy to name him,
Ghost Walker
or
red-eyed whiteskin.
Of course the boys would know, where and how this foreign party lived; of course Jemel would understand them. 'What has happened, did he send you to me?' Fishing for hope now, for something short of disaster; pretending after all, perhaps, because their faces denied him before he'd even shaped the question.

'Strangers came to the market,' the boy said, 'and a woman fainted. He called a demon, a creature of smoke, we saw it; but then it turned on him, he was hurt by it, and the strangers took him away.'

Jemel understood the demon, but nothing more: not why Marron would release it, nor how it could have hurt him. 'What strangers were these?' he demanded.

'Two men, and a woman; we had not seen them before,' and that was strange too, and disturbing. They couldn't mean the Sharai chiefs who came into the town with Hasan, nor anyone from the tribes camped outside, if one had been a woman; if there were other strangers in Selussin, the children surely would know.

There was one other group at hand, though. He said, 'From the castle?'