Iced On Aran (13 page)

Read Iced On Aran Online

Authors: Brian Lumley

BOOK: Iced On Aran
6.54Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Hero looked into the seer's eyes and saw what Eldin had tried to describe: which is to say, he saw nothing. Those eyes were deep as the spaces out beyond the farthest stars. And that was how cold they looked, too.
Hero felt that if he stuck a finger in one of them, then that finger would go brittle as a crystal and snap off in a single instant. “Bottomless!” he gasped.
“Aye, almost,” the seer agreed. “They went this way a moment after I was born. They are my legacy. I'm a mentalist and my eyes are my crystal balls—or my crystal eyeballs, if you like! You see, my mother cast runes and my father was a dream-reader.”
“A what?” said Hero.
“Oneiromancer,” sighed the seer.
Hero frowned, scratched his head. “What the hell's a one-eyed romancer?”
Eldin's turn to sigh. “A piratical tall-tale-teller!” he rumbled. And to the seer: “What's this about enemies?”
The seer glanced dartingly this way and that. “Didn't Kuranes tell you anything? He did send you, didn't he? Or maybe my sendings reached you?”
The questers looked at each other; Eldin gloweringly, Hero half apologetically and with the ghost of a shrug. “Kuranes told us, er, very little,” the younger dreamer said.
“Truth to tell,” Eldin added disgustedly, “damn all! What's all this about sendings?”
“Dreams!” said the seer. “I've been sending you dreams. Didn't you dream that you'd meet me here?”
“Er, why yes I did,” said Eldin. “But I also—”
“Shhh!”
the seer held up a cautionary finger. “We're under scrutiny. You see those Kledans there?” He nodded almost imperceptibly across the room. “They—”
At which point there came a
phttt!
from the open window, followed immediately by the noise a soft-bodied fly makes thudding against a window-pane. The seer said, “Ah!” and jerked straighter where he sat.
Hero glanced at the window, thought he saw a dark face disappearing there. The seer slumped, fell face
down, sprawling on the table. A long feathered dart, the merest sliver of wood and fluff, stood up from the thin rags on his back. Then—
Chaos!
Hero was on his feet, lips drawn back in a snarl, curved sword whispering from its sheath more magically than any wand. He sprang to the window and looked out—and ducked back. A second blow-dart zipped past his ear like an enraged wasp, stuck quivering into a ceiling beam. But out there in the night, pulling away, a pair of burly blacks worked hard at the oars of their boat; and dangling down from the window-frame, a knotted rope suspended from its grapple. In another moment the boat disappeared out of the light from the window, became a shadow, was lost in the mild summer mist.
Meanwhile:
The Kledans the seer had pointed out had come to their feet, started toward the table where their almost-accuser lay face-down, lifeless. “What?” cried one gutturally, in feigned surprise. “Murder? What have you two done to him there?”
The second black said: “How's that? Stuck him with a dart, did you?”
Every head in the
Craven Lobster
was turned now in the direction of Hero, Eldin, and the ex-seer. Then the first of the black slavers closed with Eldin, snarled his enmity and snatched at his knife. An enormous error.
Eldin reached out swift as lightning and grasped the man's knife hand, bearing down on it and holding the knife safe in its scabbard. At the same time he butted the black in the mouth, heard teeth break and lips squelch into tatters. The second Kledan dragged out the dart from the seer's back, turned with it upraised to strike at Eldin.
Meanwhile:
Hero had turned from the window, taken in the scene at a glance. He stepped forward, caught at the descending wrist, deflected and added impetus to the blow. The Kledan stabbed himself in the groin and squealed like a stuck pig.
By now the first slaver was in big trouble: face bloody and only half-conscious, he was whirled for a moment across Eldin's broad shoulders, then released like a shot from a sling against Lippy's recently repaired wall. The
Craven Lobster
shuddered hugely as the Kledan crashed through in a splintering of timbers.
Meanwhile:
The slaver with the dart in his groin had gone to his knees; white froth started from his lips; he was dead before he toppled. The poison on the dart had been
that
effective! Eldin grabbed at the limp body of the seer, tried to sit him up. Useless, the seer flopped off the bench on to the floor. He lay on his back staring blindly up at Hero and Eldin, and as they stared back, so his invisible eyes filled in. There was a scene in them, mobile, like the reflection in a mirror: moving pictures
of Ula and Una, fighting in the grip of a pair of bully-boys who grinned and fondled them detestably!
Then—
The scene vanished as the seer's eyes turned scarlet and flooded over. Blood dripped from their rims.
By now everyone in the place was on his or her feet, all eyes turned accusingly on the questers. No one had seen the face at the window except Hero, but all had heard the shouted Kledan accusations. The seer was dead, likewise a slaver. Another slaver was either drowning or fighting off scabfish. And there was a damned great hole in the
Craven Lobster's
rear wall.
It had all taken a handful of seconds; and meanwhile:
Lippy Unth had been holding his breath. Holding it so long his great ebony face had turned more nearly black, then dark green, finally enraged purple. What's more, his huge lips were protruding in such a pout as was never before seen. He swung himself over the bar and landed four-square, more like a bull gorilla than a man, and straightening up advanced shamblingly on the questers where they stood astonished.
“What?” roared Eldin as Lippy charged, scattering tables and benches and customers and anything else that happened to be in his path, tossing all aside like so much chaff. “What? You blame
us
?”
Lippy bellowed like a behemoth, bore down on Hero, who at once took cover under a bolted-down table. Lippy crashed into the table (more shudders from the
Craven Lobster
, and dust falling from ceiling-beams everywhere), sprawled across it, reached down arms like treetrunks and grabbed Hero's ankles. Which was when Eldin picked up a bench and hit him with it. Lippy stopped bellowing, stood up, fell down stiff as a log.
A moment later and Hero scrambled into view; he was white as a sheet from the closeness of his shave. Then the two were fighting for the door, kicking, biting and fending off blows and oaths with more of the same. Somehow they made it unscathed and turned to look back.
A man could die in the
Craven Lobster
(if he did it quietly) and it probably wouldn't be noticed for a while. Slaves might well be bartered there, and no one would turn a hair—not even Lippy, who'd once been a slave himself. But only spill a man's drink, or interrupt the interminable fables of some old legend-monger, or (worse far) interfere with the service …
The questers had done all three with great gusto, and the
Craven Lobster
's clientele did not approve. Amid
the reek and shambles of the place a ring of scarred, furious faces slowly became visible. Knives glinted dully, and bronze knuckle-dusters were slipped over the ridges of horny fingers; and out of the sudden lull came an abrupt, renewed burst of violence. Lippy's son, big as his father and just as dangerous, smashed through the narrowing circle and hurled himself headlong upon Hero and Eldin as they backed off.
Nimble as a cricket, Hero stepped aside, tripped him. Gooba Unth said,
“Oops!”
He flew forward, horizontally now, and was smacked soundly, double-fisted, on the side of his head by Eldin. His flight diverted, Gooba struck a doorpost like a torpedo and knocked it loose. The overhead still sagged and the ceiling groaned as it settled a few inches, while beams popped and more dust fell in threatening rills from the higher rafters.
The questers glanced at one another, grinning maliciously through clenched teeth. They looked again at the circle of muttering faces, and their eyes gleamed as they turned them on the remaining upright. “Me or you?” the Wanderer queried.
Hero shrugged. “Be my guest,” he said.
As the crowd surged forward like a tide, Eldin drop-kicked the doorpost out into the night. Hero ducked through at the last moment, untangled his friend from the moaning heap that was Gooba Unth, and hastened him along the catwalk to the dockside proper.
Behind them, the
Craven Lobster
uttered a curious sigh and several creaks and grunts: the death-rattle of ill-used timbers giving up the ghost. Then, to a chorus of “Timber!” from the duo, the roof settled slantingly as walls buckled and one sadly defunct tavern slid off its piles into the greasy harbor water. Last to go was the catwalk itself.
“What now?” said Eldin.
“We've a date, remember?”
“What? But surely we want to keep the girls out of this—whatever ‘this' is!”
“They're already in,” said Hero fatalistically. “You saw what I saw, in the seer's dead eyes, didn't you?”
“Yes, but—”
“But nothing. You asked me recently if I thought dreams mightn't be prophetic. Well, yours obviously was—so what are we to make of what the seer showed us in his eyes?”
Eldin made no answer. He didn't have one.
 
 
They made their way into a maze of steep, narrow alleys, climbing rapidly through several street levels into brighter, more friendly districts. Cats in the night, they were gray and insubstantial as shadows, fleet and silent as moonbeams. But stepping at last from shade into the welcoming glow of multi-colored lanthorns strung above the stalls and wares and thronging crowd of a street bazaar, they reverted to being just men again, and no one seeing their beaming faces and the elegance of their gestures and movements would ever guess the disorder so recently left in their wake.
“D'you think the law will get after us?” Eldin gruffly inquired, the while smiling at an old lady who fried honey pancakes and shaped them into hearts for courting couples.
“What, for sinking the
Craven Lobster
?” Hero shook his head. “We could end up on the city's roll of honor!”
“No,” Eldin grunted, “for killing the seer. Not to mention a Kledan—or possibly two Kledans.”
“We didn't kill the seer,” said Hero. “And the slavers tried to kill
us!
That was self-defense.”
They crossed the street between stalls, avoided bags
of sweets thrust at them by a man dressed as a toffee-apple.
“We
know that,” said Eldin. “But what about that gang of cutthroats we left in the swim back there?”
“Oh, yes?” said Hero scornfully. “And can you honestly see one of that lot reporting the matter to the law? They might eventually be
questioned
about it—I mean, someone's bound to notice sooner or later, the loss of an entire tavern and whatnot—but they'd hardly go volunteering the information, now would they? I'll bet every man-jack of 'em has a record long as your gangly arm!”
Eldin reckoned he was probably right.
By now they'd reached the foot of a wide wooden staircase, set back from the street, that led up an otherwise sheer cliff face to a cavern eatery. In the back, the choicest dishes of dreams were prepared by a team of experts; out in front, on a great balcony under a mighty red-striped awning, said viands and morsels and gobbets were gobbled by Bahama's most demanding gourmets. A hand-painted sign made an arch over the stairway, saying:
Not the cheapest restaurant by any means, but Ula and Una were worth it.
Ula and Una were the twin daughters of one Ham Gidduf, a rich merchant of Andahad, a small but opulent seaport on the far side of Oriab. They'd shared adventures with the questers before—indeed they'd been with them in the affair of the Mad Moon—and there was an ongoing amorous affair, too, however sporadic. Now, hearing coos and giggles, Hero and Eldin stood at the foot of the stairway and elevated their eyes to the balcony under the awning. Seated at a table on the very
rim, their pretty elbows on the ornate stone balustrade, Ula and Una waved down at them.
The questers grinned, waved back, started up the steps. On the way Eldin queried: “Now say, am I all spruce? I mean, will she look right on my arm?”
“You're fine,” said Hero. He heaved a sigh of relief. “And obviously they're fine, too. So the seer's vision hasn't come to pass just yet. And if we stay close to the girls—keep our eyes peeled, our swords ready and senses alert—then when it does happen we'll be there to make a quick end of it.”
“Yes, yes, all of that's understood,” said Eldin. “But are my boots shiny? Is my jacket tucked into my belt at the back? Are my eyes bright?”
“You're a vain old bugger,” said Hero matter-of-factly, eyeing the other up and down. “But yes, all of those things are correct—and your seams are straight, too.”
“Eh, seams?”
“Er, ‘seems all's in order,'” Hero answered, for already the source of his remark was fading in his mind. A revenant of the waking world, he supposed. “Anyway, what about me?”
They reached the landing that opened on to the balcony. Fabulous food smells invaded their nostrils, tickled their saliva glands, activated their appetites. “What about you?” asked Eldin, his mind on other things. With his eyes fixed on the girls, beaming as he went, he began to make his way to them between tables choked with delirious devourers.
“Am I in good order?” Hero growled under his breath.
“Hell, no!” said Eldin, with the merest glance of disapproval. “Disgusting!” Then they were at the girls' table.
Ula and Una, as fine and desirable a pair of ladies as ever the dreamers had lusted after (and “won,” however contrived—by the girls themselves—the double “conquest” had been) were obviously delighted that Hero and Eldin had shown up. The girls knew this pair for what they were, questers, and that their adventurings often took them away, at a moment's notice, into far strange parts and ports.
Dark-haired, green-eyed, and delicately elfin-featured (despite their very worldly prominence in other areas) the girls were supple but something a little more than willowy, and they were very plainly excited to be back in the company of these two likely lads. They stood up laughing as the pair closed on them, and:
“'Lo,” said Hero. “Who's who?”
Eldin, on the other hand, bowed low and with a sweep of his arm said: “The brightest stars of night are fallen on Oriab, and come now into Bahama in the shape of these lovely Loreleis. Good even', O fairest of the fair; but pray, before the festivities commence, may we not inquire which witch is which?”
Then Ula threw herself into Hero's arms: “Oh!” he murmured, almost caving in under her onslaught, “and that's you, is it?”
And Una, hanging on Eldin's neck, saying: “Can't you tell us apart yet, great oafs? I've a slightly longer neck than Ula!”
“All the better for necking, my dear,” growled Eldin, in good imitation—indeed in perfect imitation—of a great wolf.
“And I'm a bit longer in the leg,” admitted Ula.
“Do you mind if we go into that later?” said Hero, which set the girls giggling again. And so the two pairs stood, locked in each others' arms—but only for a moment more. Then the girls glanced at each other, drew
back and smoothed down their pretty frills, finally seated themselves and lifted their noses not a little disdainfully. Their green eyes left the faces of the questers, looked elsewhere, settled for gazing out over the lanthorn-lit city.
“Oh?” said Hero and Eldin together. “And what's all this?” They sat down, each beside his lady.
“Do you need to ask?” Una sniffed. She drew her elbow sharply away as Eldin tried to stroke it. The Wanderer raised bushy eyebrows, glanced at Hero and found his likewise peaked.
“Of course we need to ask,” said the younger quester, not unreasonably. “Else how'll we get to know?” But in his secret mind:
Have they heard about our diversion in Dylath-Leen?
And in Eldin's:
P'raps someone's mentioned our carousing in Karkellon!
Hero: Was it my serenading in Serannian?
Eldin:
My how-d'ye-do in Hlanith!
And together, out loud: “Our consciences are clear! So out with it—what's your complaint?”
“We are maidens,” said Ula, her glance biting where it fell on Hero's handsome, frowning face, “and yet we are
not
maidens!”
“Shh!”
said Eldin at once, peering this way and that in only half-feigned alarm. “Last time you two said things like that you brought all Bahama down on us!”
“But it's true,” insisted Una, pouting prettily. “You made us women, and yet have
not
made us wives! Are we toys to sit around waiting for the children to come and wind us up? Then dance for them and sing for them and … and …”
“And do other things for them,” prompted Ula.
“That, too,” Una gave a sharp nod of agreement,
“—until they're tired of the game and go off to play at something else?”
“I swear you're my only plaything!” cried Hero to Ula.
“So do I!” said Eldin to Una.
“That's not what we meant!” Ula stamped her foot. “We meant simply that …” She tried again. “That …”
“Not so simple, eh?” said Hero.
“That we can't marry a pair of questers!” Una finished it for her sister.
For a moment the comrades were silent, astonished—but in the next their frowns turned to beaming smiles. And: “Thank goodness for that!” sighed the Wanderer. “For a while there we thought it was something serious!”
“Buffoon!” cried Una. She jumped to her feet and gave Eldin a ringing clout on the ear.
Hero stopped grinning just in time to receive Ula's punch in his eye. Half-deaf (Eldin) and half-blind (Hero), they too staggered to their feet. At which point—
“Hold!”
came a deep, throaty voice—the unmistakable Voice of Authority—from close at hand. For while the questers had been involved with their lady-loves, there had been several late arrivals at
Pazza's Pantry.
The girls, furiously miffed and still not aware of anything untoward, made to stalk off, but were grabbed at once by a pair of gray-clad Regulators. As the questers reached for their swords-an almost entirely automatic reaction on their part-so a party of pikemen stepped forward, formed a circle around them. And.
Pazza's Pantry
was suddenly still, with not a chomp to break the silence. As the pikes closed threateningly, so the questers relinquished their grips on their swords, looked to see who led this party of law officers.
And there stood the one who had spoken: a slim, pale fellow of aristocratic mien, his gray uniform complemented by a short cloak of moss-green. And green was the color of high officialdom in Bahama.
“What now?” the stranger throatily inquired, his dark eyes made darker by the pallor of his flesh, his face expressionless. “First mayhem and vandalism on an unprecedented scale, and now rowdyism in a public place? You two are for the jump, I fear!”
“Mayhem?” Eldin tried to look innocent. Almost impossible. His scarred, less than gentle features had “rogue” written all over them.
“Vandalism? Rowdyism?” Hero stood up straighter, radiated indignation. “We were sharing a jest with our fiancées here, that's all.”
“How
dare
you!” cried Ula, suddenly coming to life and struggling in the grip of her Regulator. “We're the daughters of. Ham Gidduf, and he'll—”
The pale police chief turned on her, cut her off with a snarl. “He'll do nothing at all, my dear! There are laws in Bahama, and I enforce them.
I'm
the one who takes care of lawbreakers and their women, not Ham Gid—”
“Man,” said Hero quietly, but with something in his voice that attracted the Chief Regulator's attention. “Whoever or whatever you are,” Hero continued, his eyes steely as to strike sparks, “and whatever you ‘take care' of, ‘ware! You've a nasty tongue. These are ladies, not women, and we're King Kuranes' questers, not lawbreakers. Now if you've more noises to make, make 'em and be on your way. And you two,” his eyes drilled into the pair who held Ula and Una, knew them at once as the men in the dead seer's eyes, “you two ‘gentlemen': be careful how you handle those ladies. You
should know that I'm David Hero, Hero of Dreams, and my friend here is Eldin the Wanderer.”
Now Eldin spoke, his voice the soft rumble of a pregnant volcano: “Be advised,” he said to the bully who held Una's chin aloft, “not to bruise that lass. I'm a very gentle soul and the sight of a bruise on her would give me nightmares for a month. But you'd be lucky, for your nightmare would be of the very shortest duration …”
“Treats, too!” said their cold-eyed chief. He glanced around at Pazza's gaping patrons, shrugged uncomfortably. “So you two are the famous—or perhaps infamous—Hero and the Wanderer, eh? Very well, maybe it would be best if we saw about all of this in private.” And to his party of Regulators: “Right, lads, bring 'em along!” He stared directly into Hero's eyes for a moment: “Their
women
, too,” then turned on his heel.
Hero and Eldin smoldered as they looked at each other, at the pikes, the gray-clad pikemen. Beyond the balustrade was thin air, one hundred feet of it. Only one way into this place, and the same way out. And down there at the foot of the stairs, another party of Regulators. They began to breathe again, letting out the air they'd been holding on to in a great double-barrelled sigh.
“So be it,” growled Eldin. “Lead on.”
But the Chief Regulator was already leading on, and the questers, deprived now of their swords, could only allow themselves to be poked and prodded along in his wake …
 
 
In the main, Bahama is built of porphyry, from its wharves to its topmost terraces. Its streets are frequently
arched over, by bridges or co-joining buildings, and go up in a great “V” from a central canal which, landward, passes through a tunnel and a series of shallow locks into an inland lake. The land about this lake is mainly desert, for its waters are tidal and therefore impure; but there are several oases and even a village or two, though these stand all on that side toward Bahama. For on the far side of the lake, called Yath, there lie ruins prohibiting the presence of men. They are lonely and silent, those ruins, and all of great clay-bricks: the tumbled building-blocks of some primal city whose name is not remembered. Or which used not to be remembered. Except that lately …
Tellis Gan, father of the present Law Officer-in-Chief, Raffis, had been Bahama's Lord Regulator for more than twenty years, as had his father before him. He had seen the city through some strange times and had been much respected in his day. In the Bad Days he'd set himself and his force of Regulators firmly against the squat, wide-mouthed “traders” who came in their black galleys from “somewhere east of Leng,” keeping a watchful eye on all their dubious doings in Bahama and Oriab in general; and driving them out
en masse
when their kinship with dreamland's enemies became more fully realized. He had been a great-hearted man, Tellis, earning all the trust of the city's elders and keeping their laws wisely, the way laws should be kept.
When the elders had come down on slavery, Tellis Gan and his Regulators had put an end to the slavers' markets on Silver Street; and when the elders taxed muth-dew for the upkeep of Bahama's twin lighthouses, Thon and Thai, (following which, the muth became subject to much illicit importation) Gan was the man who gave the smugglers short shrift. The populace had faith in him; his Regulators, apparently, had loved him to a
man; not once had he used his position except in the interests and to the welfare of his fellow men, and those of Bahama itself.
Alas, but just a year ago, in a brave assault upon a slavers' den, Tellis had been mortally wounded; sad too that it could only be some traitor among his own Regulators who gave advance warning to the Kledans; sadder still, perhaps, that Gan's only son—who would assume his father's rank and position as his birthright—was spoiled and mean, with little or nothing of his father's love for the rightness of things. But so far Raffis Gan had proved himself efficient; as yet he had given the city elders no reason to demand his resignation from office, as was their right; indeed, apart from his love of legend and archaeological matters (his spare-time wanderings in Bahama's hinterland, poking in the old ruins there, especially on the far shore of Yath), he seemed to go about his duties zestfully and with no small measure of enthusiasm.

Other books

Seagulls in My Soup by Tristan Jones
An Uncertain Dream by Miller, Judith
Girl, Interrupted by Susanna Kaysen
A Sprig of Blossomed Thorn by Patrice Greenwood
Honourable Intentions by Gavin Lyall
Night Forbidden by Ware, Joss
The Spider Bites by Medora Sale