Snare (52 page)

The actress playing this Lieutenant Diamante seemed to have no real understanding of how such a mind worked. She was continually laying her hands on her forehead and rolling her eyes to indicate that she was in the process of memorizing something. That Zayn could ignore, however, in return for the sheer flood of information. The other characters took her mind for granted; they asked her questions, showed her things that she should be remembering, referred to her special training and spoke of her inborn talent.

Inborn. He had learned the word earlier, but in the players’ mouths it took on a vast new significance. At first he couldn’t quite understand why the characters shuddered or made some other gesture of fear when they spoke it, but a long speech from the young officer who loved Diamante finally answered his question. Her mind was no lucky accident. Somehow or other, the Settlers had managed to give children certain skills or characteristics by breeding, the same way that a gardener would produce pink roses from red and white. After those traits appeared, then the Recaller traits bred true, provided, of course, that both parents were Recallers. In the play, the young officer would never be allowed to marry the woman he loved simply because he was an ordinary human being.

Now and again the Narrator in Black, or so Zayn was thinking of the man with the mask, would appear at the side of the action and give a speech, generally concerning some obscure point of history that the rest of the audience seemed to understand. Once, however, he spoke a couple of lines that made Zayn’s blood run cold.

‘Did we not hate and fear the Inborn, they who knew so much more than we would ever learn? Did we not fear and hate the Inborn with other gifts, those whose minds fed upon numbers, those whose minds melded with their ships? Did we not hate and fear those as well who had created them in their mothers’ wombs? Sorcery, some called it, and the work of devils, though we knew it was but knowledge applied by ruthless men.’

Some called it – Agvar and his followers. Ruthless men? The
Ancestors, Zayn supposed. What had driven the Ancestors to create the Recallers and those number feeders, whatever that meant? As the play continued, it referred to other classes of H’mai who had been altered the same way, created or engineered as the play put it, but it never gave them convenient names. The complicated plot threads began to twine together, shoving raw information aside.

All at once Zayn realized that he was beginning to feel nauseated, as badly as if he’d stuffed himself with rich food. He also realized that he now knew why, if the play was to be trusted. Recallers felt information in their bodies just as normal H’mai felt emotions. For a moment he nearly did vomit, but he caught control of himself and began to work his way out of the crowd. He could guess that he looked ill by the hurried way the audience parted to let him through.

Down by the river the air smelled clean and cool. Zayn stood for a moment, breathing deeply, letting his mind settle and his stomach with it. Overload – Diamante had called the nausea overload. Too much data too soon. Zayn filed the word away and remembered lying in Ammadin’s tent, reading the Vransic dictionary, an extravagant pleasure, almost sexual, a gift from the talents – this curse of talents that had been laid upon him hundreds of years before he was born.

The crowd began streaming past; the show had ended. Loy looked over Ammadin’s shoulder and saw the Kazrak striding towards them. He was a good-looking man, Loy thought, with his dark skin and curly hair, but there was something brutal about him as well. She couldn’t quite place it – a hard look about the eyes, an animal wariness in the way he moved. Ammadin, who had never turned around to look, suddenly smiled.

‘Here’s Zayn now,’ Ammadin said.

‘How –’

‘His scent,’ Ammadin said. ‘Everyone smells different, you know.’

Ammadin got up and grabbed her saddlebags just as Hassan joined them. Loy stood, too, and brushed flecks of purple grass off her leggings with the side of her hand. Ammadin and Hassan spoke in Hirl-Onglay, but Loy could follow it well enough, since Ammadin was only making a simple introduction.

‘Good afternoon, Mada Millou,’ Hassan said in perfect Vranz. ‘I’m glad we found each other so easily. Did Ammadin tell you about old Onree’s recommendation?’

‘Yes, she did. What did you think of the Recallers?’

Hassan blinked several times, then looked her over with a dark stare that verged on the frightening. ‘Very interesting,’ he said at last. ‘I enjoyed it.’

The silence hung between them like a threat. Ammadin turned to Loy and spoke in her heavily accented Vranz. ‘Let’s go somewhere quiet, where we can talk. What about our hohte?’

‘If you don’t mind, yes,’ Loy said, ‘that will be fine.’

They were staying in a hohte near the city gate, not a splendid place, but clean and fancy enough, Loy supposed, for people who were used to sleeping on the ground. The pale yellow room held a bed, two chairs, a table; on the back wall a window gave them a view of purple grass and a scarlet lace-leaf tree. They’d piled their saddles and other gear in one corner on the faded green rug. The room stank of horses, from the saddle blankets, Loy assumed. Ammadin laid her saddlebags on the table, then sat next to them in one of the chairs and gestured at Loy to take the other.

Hassan hovered by the door. ‘Would you like some wine? I can get some from the maiderdee.’

‘Yes, thank you,’ Loy said. ‘White for me, please.’

He nodded and left, hesitated just outside, glanced around as if for enemies, then shut the door behind him.

‘Zayn can be frightening,’ Ammadin remarked in Tekspeak. ‘I hope he’s not troubling you.’

‘Oh no, no.’

‘Really?’ Ammadin raised one eyebrow. ‘You smell terrified.’

Loy gawked.

‘Don’t you have the spirit powers?’ Ammadin said.

‘I’d forgotten about that,’ Loy said. ‘No, not all of them. You spirit riders are the only sorcerers who do have them all, actually. But I’ll stop trying to be polite. Your man scares me half to death. I don’t even know why.’

‘You’re more sensitive than you think, is why. Zayn can be kind of dangerous.’

‘Kind of.’

Ammadin laughed. ‘We’re just passing through Dordan,’ she went on. ‘I don’t want to cause trouble or have trouble caused for
me. If no one bothers Zayn, he won’t bother them, but I do have to warn you, he’s very good at violence. Most comnee men are. All right?’

‘All right. Believe me, trouble is the last thing any of us want.’

‘Good. But about the spirit powers? I may have them, but I’ve come to realize that you sorcerers know a great deal more about the crystals than we do.’

‘Um, yes.’ A hell of a lot more, Loy thought, but I don’t dare tell you. ‘From what I’ve heard I’d say that’s true.’

‘The reason I’m asking is Zayn has to go off on his own, where I can’t follow, if he’s going to complete his quest. That means I won’t be able to hide him from Yarl’s scanning. Yarl must know that Zayn’s going to kill him when he finds him. By the way, will you mind?’

‘Only because I won’t be there to watch.’

Ammadin’s smile became a good bit warmer. Loy began to feel as if she were chatting with a longtooth saur.

‘But what I was wondering,’ Ammadin went on, ‘is whether there’s some sort of crystal that Zayn could carry, something that would keep working the Hide Me command even though I wasn’t there.’

‘Yes, there certainly is. It’s called an interference pattern generator.’

‘A what?’

‘Sorry, that’s a very long name for a particular kind of very small spirit. We call them imps. They do all sorts of different things.’

‘Is there somewhere in Sarla where I could buy one?’

‘Please, let me get it for you. I’ll enjoy giving your man something that’ll help him deal with Yarl.’

‘Well, thank you. That’s very generous.’

‘No, it’s not. It’s vengeful, and I love it.’

Outside something bumped the door and someone cursed. When the door swung open, Loy nearly yelped, but Hassan came in, hands full of glasses, with two pottery bottles tucked one under each arm. He set them down on the table and spoke to Ammadin in Hirl-Onglay about the wine. For the first time Loy noticed that he was wearing a knife on his belt, which, judging from the sheath, had a blade nearly two feet long.

‘Zayn, Loy is the mother of the girl Yarl Soutan raped,’ Ammadin said. ‘We were discussing it while you were watching
the Recallers. I think that’s why Onree gave you her name.’

‘Most likely, yes.’ Hassan was busy filling glasses; he handed Loy a glass of white wine with a flourish like a waiter. ‘I’m very sorry to hear that.’

‘So was I, yes.’ Loy took a sip from her glass, a surprisingly decent wine for a hohte like this one. ‘If you kill him, tell him I hope he ends up in hell, will you? While he can still hear.’

‘I’ll be glad to.’ Hassan gave Ammadin a glass of white, took one of red for himself, then sat on the floor at Ammadin’s feet.

‘Well,’ Loy made herself stop staring at the knife. ‘What brings you to Sarla?’

‘A quest,’ Hassan said. ‘I can’t tell you for what. It’s Bane. Killing Soutan’s not part of it, so Onree told me to ask you about him.’

The conversation progressed in Vransic sentences kept simple enough for Ammadin to follow. Loy told them that Soutan had been a loremaster and a teacher, a good teacher at that, although there had always been unpleasant rumours about his personal life. He’d never had a long-term love affair or marriage with anyone, female or male. He preferred to visit female prostitutes who would put up with a certain level of violence, though he always travelled to other towns to do so. In fact, a street girl in Kors, a city in Burgunee, had turned up dead after one of his visits, but money had changed hands, facts had been suppressed, and no one at the college had heard of the incident until years later, during the official investigation into Rozi’s rape.

After the Kors incident, however, Soutan had taken a year-long sabbatical and disappeared. Although he never told anyone where he’d been, he came back changed, obsessed with finding old magic. He was sure, he told the Loremasters Guild, that with old magic he could return everyone to the lost homeland. Most members of the guild had tried to talk him out of his obsession, but he’d won a few converts.

‘My daughter Rozi, for one,’ Loy said. ‘He held special classes, as he called them, for his believers. He had a way of gaining the confidence of young people, you see. He’d pretend that he disliked them or looked down on them at first. Then later he’d tell them he’d been wrong; they’d proved they were really smart. The double flattery really hooked them.’

‘Tell me something,’ Ammadin said. ‘Is Rozi the only student he attacked?’

‘No. There were two others. One of them refused to testify against him after we found out about the whore in Kors. She was afraid he’d kill her, too. The other one did testify, and so did Rozi. That’s when he jumped bail and ran from Sarla, two years ago now. We didn’t know he’d ended up in Kazrajistan.’

Hassan’s grim stare darkened further. He stood and held out his hand for her glass. ‘The Three Prophets tell us that a man like that should be beheaded. More wine?’

‘Yes, thank you.’ Loy gave the glass over.

‘Do you know where in Burgunee he’s staying?’ Hassan asked.

‘Oh yes, just over the border, near Kors. There’s a woman there, Marya her name is, and she’s a dookis, very rich, owns a lot of land. She took Soutan in, because she collects magic, even though she isn’t a sorcerer.’

‘Isn’t that against your laws?’ Hassan said.

‘Yes, it certainly is. When you’re rich enough, the laws don’t seem to apply.’

Hassan gave her back her glass, refilled. ‘That’s all very interesting,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose the dookis has taken in any other strangers.’

Ammadin snarled at him in Hirl-Onglay, furious words spoken so fast that Loy couldn’t understand them. For a moment Hassan went as still as death; then he forced out a smile and answered her in the same language.

‘Excuse me,’ he said to Loy in Vranz. ‘I shouldn’t keep bothering you with questions.’

Loy was about to tell him that she didn’t mind, but something about the set of Ammadin’s jaw and the cold look in her eyes stopped her. ‘That about sums Yarl Soutan up, anyway,’ she said instead. ‘He can really fool people. He keeps his nasty side for the women who attract him.’

‘I’ve met men like that,’ Hassan said. ‘Good soldiers, loyal friends, as long as you’re another man. Women are just prey to them, nothing more.’

‘Yes. I used to wonder what Yarl’s mother was like. A real horror, I bet.’

‘He’s not from around here?’ Ammadin said.

‘No. He came from down in Pegaree. People there do tend to be a little strange. It’s kind of isolated.’

Hassan took his full glass in one hand and the bottle of red in
the other. He sat down once more at Ammadin’s feet, leaned against her chair, and proceeded to drink steadily for the rest of the conversation. Loy decided that she preferred not to know what sort of man he was when drunk, but what Ammadin had to tell kept her in the hohte room.

‘I know where Soutan went when he went east,’ Ammadin said in an oddly casual tone of voice. ‘Chof country, where he persuaded some of their young males to present him to the full court of the Great Mother. By the way, you do know that their own name for themselves is Chof, don’t you?’

‘Yes, I do, but most people here just use ChaMeech, even at the college. Habit, I guess.’

‘All right. Soutan’s looking for something called the Covenant Ark. He told the Chof that if he had the Ark, all the H’mai would leave this world and let them have it back. Going home, he called it. The Chof didn’t believe him.’

‘Good, because he was lying. Well, he might want the Ark, too, but he’s really after the magic ship that brought the Kazraks here.’

‘So the Chof were right, then. Now they’re afraid that he’ll bring Kazraki soldiers with him to help him search for it.’

‘Oh my god!’ Loy nearly choked on her wine. ‘That would be disastrous.’

‘The Chof feel that way, too. Especially now that he’s shown up with two Kazraks. Do you know what this Ark thing is?’