Orb Sceptre Throne (67 page)

The man’s brows clenched as he bowed. ‘I understand. I am unworthy.’

Oh, Dark Mother! Please!
She turned away, snapping her fingers. ‘Palley! Where are you? My hair is drying! The court awaits me!’

Her maid rushed back into the room. When Envy glanced back the man was gone.
Thank the false gods! Really. How positively embarrassing
.

*

Madrun and Lazan Door were tossing dice against the steps of Lady Varada’s estate house when four masked Seguleh entered the compound. The two shared knowing looks as Lazan scooped up the dice.

‘Our taciturn kin approach,’ Madrun rumbled. ‘Perhaps we too should remain silent as well. We could stare at one another till the gods pack up the world and return from whence they came.’

‘And these would yet remain none the wiser,’ Lazan answered. ‘No, reflections of themselves these understand all too well.’ They straightened to meet the arrivals, the giant Madrun in his clashing patchwork clothes looming over all. ‘You are bold burglars, sirs,’ Lazan greeted them.

‘You two are known to us,’ one said. ‘Cause no trouble and you may remain.’

‘This is of no help,’ Madrun complained to Lazar. ‘Trouble has so many facets.’

‘Stand aside. We are here to search the premises.’

‘Does doing our job constitute trouble?’ Lazar enquired, smiling, revealing his silver-tipped gold teeth.

The four spread out. The spokesman stepped forward. Olive green dominated the swirls painted upon his mask. From the pattern Madrun and Lazan Door knew him to be of the Four Hundredth. ‘I shall enter,’ he said calmly. ‘If you interfere my companions will act. Is this clear enough even for you?’

Madrun raised his hand. ‘A moment, please. If you would. Am I to understand, then, that you mean to enter while your companions wait, poised, in case we should attempt to stop you? Is that what you are trying to explain?’

The spokesman remained silent for some time. From behind his mask his gaze stabbed between the two, blazing. He drew breath to speak again, reconsidered, and clamped his jaws against it. His hand went to his sword.

‘Gentlemen and lady …’ a sibilant voice quavered from the doorway, ‘may I direct your attention to what I have here?’

All turned to face the doorway where Studious Lock floated amid his gauzy layers of tattered wrap. He held in one rag-covered hand a glass sphere containing a dark mist. ‘Spores of the Even-tine fungus. Known as the Mind-gnawer among the clans of the northern Odhan. Inhaled, they germinate within, sending fibres stealing up into the brain and releasing pathogens that render the poor victim insane … before killing him … or her. My companions have of course been consuming an inoculating chemical regularly. I myself am immune for reasons I need not expound here.’

Inoculating chemical?
Madrun mouthed to Lazan.

‘So, gentlemen … and lady,’ Studlock added, nodding to the female Seguleh, ‘will you enter?’

The spokesman eased his hand from his sword. ‘We shall not press the matter now, Studious. But we shall return.’

‘Please do so. I look forward to expounding on yet another of my preparations. Or, perhaps, remaining silent and exploring the results in dissection. Always most edifying, that.’

The spokesman bowed, keeping his eyes upon Madrun and Lazan, then backed away.

Once the four had left, the gazes of the two guards swung to Studlock. The giant Madrun’s carried a degree of alarm. Lazan’s held grudging approval. ‘Well played,’ he murmured. ‘That orb, I presume, holds nothing of the kind.’

Studious, who had been admiring the object, now blinked at Lazan from behind his gauzy mask. ‘What’s that? Nothing of the kind? Not at all. It holds precisely that.’ And he threw it down to shatter on the steps.

Both guards leapt from the vicinity.

A good five paces off Madrun straightened his waistcoat and the billowing frilled shirt beneath it and cleared his throat. ‘This inoculating chemical you mentioned, Studious. Its efficacy is beyond reproach, yes?’

The castellan was examining the stone steps. ‘What’s that?’ He waved a wrapped hand. ‘Oh, that. There is no known antidote.’

‘No known …’ The gazes of the two guards met across the thirty feet between them. Lazan slapped his hand over his nose and capped teeth.

‘Well, that should be the end of them,’ Studlock announced, satisfied.

‘End of who?’ the giant Madrun fairly squeaked.

The castellan gazed at him, his masked head tilted. ‘Why, the ants of course! What else? Even-tine spores affect only them.’ He floated back inside. ‘Didn’t I say that?’

The two regarded one another for a time in silence. Lazan eased out his long-held breath. He raised a hand and shook it, rattling the dice. ‘The bones didn’t see that,’ he commented.

Madrun nodded in profound agreement. ‘Yes. Spores. Much too small to be seen.’

*

They took turns keeping watch at the ruined door to the bar. A barrier of a table and heaped chairs blocked it. A few of the regulars had banged on the table to be let in and Picker nearly speared one fellow who refused to believe the bar was actually closed and tried to climb in over the chairs.

Two days after the Seguleh entered town Blend was watching the street from a front window when she called out, ‘Trouble!’

Spindle snatched up his makeshift spear and ran for the front. He peered out between the slats they’d hammered across the window: the hunched mage, Aman, across the way. With him were several Seguleh. Spindle glanced back over his shoulder. The historian sat at his usual place. Picker had run for the rear. The bard was out. ‘Hood. We are so dead,’ he groaned.

He set aside the spear to pick up one of the readied crossbows. Blend did the same. ‘Raise your Warren,’ she told him.

‘My Warren’s no use here.’

Blend sent a scornful look from her window. ‘Your Warren’s never of any damned use. What about your
other
help?’

He was silent for a time, considering. Blend fired through the window. ‘The next one won’t miss!’ she bellowed. ‘Stay away!’

The mage, or whatever he was, Aman, remained across the street, watching, while the Seguleh advanced. Duiker came to Spindle’s side. ‘I’m unarmed. Perhaps I could talk to them …’

‘You could try,’ Spindle told him; then, to Blend, ‘My other help says we’re not alone here.’ He was forced to fire on an advancing Seguleh. The woman knocked the bolt aside with her blade.
Gods damn! From only twenty feet away, too
.

‘What are your terms?’ Duiker called from the scorched doorway.

‘Your heads are my terms,’ the mage shouted back.

A scream of surprise and terror sounded from the rear and Blend jumped. Picker? She threw down the crossbow and ran for the door to the pantry and kitchen. Duiker took her place, thrusting with a spear. He drew the haft back, surprised, to examine its cleanly severed end.

As Blend reached the door it was thrust open to reveal a Seguleh. She swung, her blade biting into the man’s chest. He responded by grasping her arm and twisting. She buckled, hissing her pain and leaving the long-knife standing from the man’s leather-armoured chest.

Spindle stared, then sniffed the air. Vinegar? Blades hacked at the wooden slats behind him. ‘Hey – it’s them pickled fellows from downstairs!’

Picker rushed out from behind the preserved Seguleh. She twisted its grip from Blend’s wrist and it moved on, ignoring them. Spindle and Duiker retreated from the front where the living Seguleh were pushing back the barrier. They watched in disbelief as three more of the slow-walking, deliberate creatures emerged from the rear and took up defensive positions with the one Blend had stabbed: two at the front and two others holding the windows. The rest, Spindle assumed, were covering the back. At the entrance the two attacking Seguleh thrust and cut so beautifully he could only watch, awed. But their preserved – undead? – brethren, while slower, possessed the insurmountable advantage of already being dead. And so blades sliced into leathery hardened flesh to no visible effect and the attackers could make no headway.

As the assault wore on it looked to Spindle as if their protectors would be literally hacked to pieces, so he went behind the bar to collect his kitbag. Then he jumped up on to a table in full view of the entrance, pulled out a wrapped object, shook off the layer of insulating cloth and held over his head his last remaining cusser. ‘See this?’ he shouted.

The attacking Seguleh flinched back a step – they indeed recognized what he had.

‘Don’t press me! You come in here, we all go together! Understand?’

‘We won’t just lay down our swords, y’damned fool,’ Picker yelled out of a window.

Dragging uneven steps sounded outside and the bent figure of the mage, Aman, appeared at the doorway. He pushed aside the two attacking Seguleh to study the frozen tableau first through one eye then through the other, much lower one; the Seguleh ready, weapons poised; their preserved undead fellows; Blend and Picker taking advantage of the lull to wind crossbows; Duiker already holding a loaded one; and Spindle, arms upraised.

‘You wouldn’t dare wreck this temple,’ Aman said.

‘Temple?’ Spindle said in disbelief. ‘This is a bar.’

‘A bar. You think this is a bar?’

‘It’s our bar,’ Picker said. ‘So we can blow it up if we want to.’

‘Privilege of ownership,’ Blend added, spitting to one side.

The mage turned to Duiker. ‘And what of you, historian? Are you prepared to die?’

Duiker levelled the crossbow on him. ‘I’ve already died.’

One of the mage’s mismatched eyes twitched and he frowned his acceptance of the point. ‘I see. Well argued. For now, then.’ He waved the Seguleh back.

Once they were up the street Spindle couldn’t help himself and he leaned out of the door to yell: ‘Hey, you Seguleh boys. You heel real well. Do you roll over too?’

It seemed to him that the four with Aman all missed a step with that comment, and their backs straightened. But he couldn’t be sure. He turned to the bar to find their preserved Seguleh guardians shuffling back downstairs. Everyone watched them go then lifted their heads to stare at him.

‘What?’

‘You’re not a proper saboteur, Spin,’ Picker said, and nodded to his hand. ‘Could you put that away now?’

He saw that he was still cradling the cusser in one hand. ‘This?’ He threw it up and caught it again to a collective gust of breaths from the other three. ‘Aw, don’t worry. It’s a dud. Hollow.’

Blend reached up as if to throttle him. ‘Well, you
ought
to let us know, dammit all to the Abyss!’

‘No. You shouldn’t know. Don’t you see? That would ruin the effect. They have to see the fear in your eyes to know it’s real, right?’

Picker waved him away. ‘Aw, shove it.’

‘Now is the time to gird one’s loins for the labour ahead,’ the diminutive fat man murmured as he walked the mud lane between leaning shacks of waste-wood, felt and cloth. He wiped his gleaming mournful face with a sodden handkerchief. ‘Yes indeed … the time has come to hitch up one’s trousers and be a man! Or is it to pull them down and be a man? I never could get that straight … Oh dear, I really should stop right there!’

He paused at an intersection of two lanes where a dog eyed him, growling. No hordes of unreasonably angry washerwomen armed with dirty laundry! Excellent. And the Maiten in sight where come curling currents from the plain where fates move as they do – forward, misplacing things as they go.

Seven dogs now surrounded him, muzzles down between forelimbs, lips pulled back from broken teeth.

Hoary old ones! Washerwomen preferable to this.

He drew a bone from one loose sleeve. ‘Good doggies!’ He threw. Though not nearly so far as he would have wished. He turned and ran, or jogged, puffing, in the opposite direction.

The next two corners brought him to the hut on the extreme western edge of the shanty town where he stopped, short of breath, and wiped his face.

‘And here he is panting in anticipation,’ the old woman sitting on the threshold observed around the pipe in her mouth.

‘Indeed. Here I am yet again. Your ever hopeful suitor. Slave to your whim. Prostrate in inspiration.’