Sung in Blood (7 page)

He paused to scatter pop seeds at the elbow of the L, then moved to Odehnal’s door. He listened, sensed. The dwarf seemed to be sleeping.

He examined the doorknob minutely. The crystal's light revealed no trap.

Below, he heard the slightest breath of sound. Sunlight poured inside. He saw a shape the size of Chaz slip inside, followed by one of Su-Cha's slightness. He frowned. It was too soon for them to come.

Move quickly!

He turned the doorknob, passed through the doorway swiftly ... and stopped, startled, awed.

The room was as opulent as an eastern potentate's private quarters. Odehnal lounged upon huge down-stuffed pillows, face asmile and dreamy. Burnt opium embittered the air.

Quickly, now!
Before Chaz or Su-Cha called attention to their presence.

He cast a small spell which sealed Odehnal’s lips. He used a modified form of the same spell to join the dwarf's ankles, then his wrists, and even his fingers one to another.

Odehnal stirred once, but only to make himself more comfortable.

A gong hammered in the rear of the house.

Rider hurtled out of the room, into intense light. Chaz stood upon the trap step, a dumb look on his face.

Two men charged out of rear rooms, weapons in hand. Su-Cha materialized between one's legs. He pitched off the balcony with a shriek. The other saw Rider, whirled, charged into the room where Rider knew Caracene and another man to be.

Rider followed, pop seeds exploding beneath his feet. He hurled a shoulder at the door. It burst inward. Chaz breathed down his neck as he entered a room outshining Odehnal’s. A thrown knife ripped between them.

In the rear of the room, in shadow, Caracene stood with hands at mouth, looking down. The man who had preceded Rider slammed her out of the way, dropped like a badger plopping into its hole. Caracene scrambled ...

Then Chaz had hold of her and Rider was staring down at a man thrashing through brown water, chasing a boat which meant to waste no time on him.

Rider's gaze fixed on the man in the boat, a lean, powerful oriental with astonishing green eyes. "Shy key, Vlazos said," he murmured. "Shai Khe." One hand came from a pocket clutching a phial. He hurled it.

The man in the boat dropped his oars, raised hands, loosed a warding spell. The phial plopped into the river.

The man saved himself from the misery in that fluid, but lost his oars. He drifted at the mercy of the current.

Rider heard shouts. Soup and Greystone. They had spotted the fugitive. Someone threw a line to the man abandoned.

The Oriental's long fingers began weaving sparks. Rider snapped, "Out of here, Chaz. Take the woman. Su-Cha. Get Odehnal." His tone brooked neither questions nor argument.

He drew on the web, began binding it around the sorcerer. Chaz and Su-Cha pounded away.

Too late Rider realized what the oriental was doing. Not attacking him directly at all.

A piling snapped like a twig. The house lurched. Another piling went. The house began to shift, to groan, to tilt toward the river.

Rider did not hesitate. He dropped through the hole, hit the water feet first. He drove himself deep with one powerful stroke, then swam with the current. His strokes were strong and practiced.

The water screamed with the sound of the building collapsing. The scream grew to a roar. But no building comes down in seconds.

When Rider surfaced he was beyond danger of the collapse. Indeed, the structure's main mass smashed into the river as he came up. It raised a wave that lifted him five feet. From the wave's crest he looked at the man in the boat.

The sorcerer's face betrayed frustration. His fingers began weaving again. But the wave caught the boat and toppled him into its bottom. When he recovered Rider had made the riverbank. The oriental wasted no time on an enemy in a position to best him. His boat flew away as though upon a lightning current.

Rider clambered between houses, to the street, where he settled on a stoop to dram his boots.

Chaz settled down beside him, Caracene held almost negligently in one arm. "Who was
that
guy?"

"Shai Khe," Rider replied. "I should have thought of him when Vlazos tried to tell me. He said Shai Khe and I heard shy key."

"That's his name," Chaz said. "But it don't tell me nothing about him." They watched Su-Cha drag Odehnal their way. The dwarf remained imprisoned in his opium dream.

"I know only one thing more," Rider said.

"Uhm?"

"My father was afraid of him."

Chaz looked startled.

"Yes. He wouldn't talk about it. Shai Khe is some great terror in the east. He commands an empire more vast than Shasesserre's. But that does not satisfy him. He wants it all."

Wreckage from the collapsed building drifted away. Rider's men assembled. Neighbors came to watch from a distance safe from shantors.

"More prisoners," Greystone said. The man who had jumped into the river was trying to talk Soup and Spud into turning him loose.

Rider caught his eye. "You're luckier than your friends." He indicated the wreckage. Two men were in it somewhere. To his own men, he said, "We've done what we can do here. Take these people to the Citadel. We'll question them later. Spud, Su-Cha, Preacher, come with me."

"Where we headed?" Su-Cha asked.

"Airship yards. Before we left the Citadel I sent word for a ship to be readied. We'll use it to hunt Shai Khe. Particularly if he runs to his own ship."

Shai Khe, not Kralj Odehnal, had killed Vlazos and escaped in an unlicensed airship.

Chaz stepped close as Rider was about to leave. He whispered, "What about the girl?"

"Treat her the way she wants you to treat her. If she doesn't suspect she's marked for the web, arrange it so she can escape again. She could lead us again."

"Right. Will do."

Rider and those he had chosen hurried a quarter mile, to where a pair of chariots waited. They shed their shantor's robes as they went.

XIII

Rider's ship was ready. It was a light vessel, capable of carrying just a ton of crew and freight, designed for speed. Rider and Spud went to the control array. There were great magicks involved in the airship's propulsion, but much of its control was mechanical. Spud had helped refine the system.

"Ready to cast off," Rider called to the ground. "Dump ballast, Omar." Rider was the only one of the group to use Spud's proper name. And he forgot much of the time.

Spud tripped levers. The ship began tugging at its restraining lines. "Cast off!" Rider shouted.

The ship lurched upward. Rider murmured to the demonic body, spellbound and beguiled, which constituted its motive force. The airship turned toward the river, began to slide forward like a fish through water.

Aft, Su-Cha and Preacher hastened to take in the mooring lines.

"He was headed Henchelside when last I saw him," Rider said. "And downriver. We'll start looking where Deer Creek Drain runs into the river."

"Keep an eye out for his airship, too," Spud said, making an adjustment to levers which controlled flaps on the ship's sharklike fins. "Be hard to hide something that big."

Rider nodded.

The airship's balance shifted as Preacher and Su-Cha came forward. Spud adjusted with the fins. "Any sign of him?" Su-Cha asked.

"Too soon to tell," Rider replied. The river along Henchelside was crowded with the boats of fisherfolk. Rider directed the demon to follow the shoreline south toward the
Golden Crescent
. "Take us lower, Omar. I want to see their faces."

There was no tension in the web. Shai Khe was not using his power.

The fisherfolk all looked up as the airship passed over. Rarely did one drop so low.

In time the riverbank curved away westward. The land grew marshy and wild. "Not going to find him this way," Spud said.

"We'll return a ways inland, looking for somewhere where he might have put his ship down," Rider said. So they ran inland again, as far as that part of the city on Henchelside opposite the Protte rookery. Still they found nothing.

Rider persisted till nightfall made continued search pointless.

"You could turn a hand with this one," Soup complained to Chaz, as they faced the stair to the laboratory. Soup was carrying Odehnal.

"I could. But I like the one I've got just fine." He had Caracene over one shoulder. She was thoroughly bound despite Rider's admonition to treat her well. She wriggled, and squeaked behind her gag. Chaz just grinned at his companions.

Greystone prodded his man with the tip of a sheathed dagger. That fellow never quit protesting his innocence of anything and everything.

At the laboratory door Greystone said, "Somebody tried to get in while we were out. Evidence of attempted entry was obvious. The effort had been a failure, though."

Chaz said, "Vlazos' friends, no doubt."

Greystone popped a signet ring into a small hole in the wall some feet from the doorway. Each of Rider's men wore identical rings. The door responded with a down-scale, musical whine. "Should have done something like this a long time ago."

Soup countered, "When the old man was running things nobody had the guts to try getting in. It'll be that way again when they get used to Rider."

"Let's hope."

One small lumber room had been converted to a cell for the prisoner already on hand. Odehnal and the other man joined him. "Have you some dinner in a few minutes," Soup told them. "Except you, Odehnal. You'll have to wait on Rider."

The dwarf's eyes smouldered.

Chaz released Caracene in another room. He told her, "Couldn't give you special treatment in front of the dwarf. Sorry."

She did not answer. There was an odd, measuring look in her eyes. She watched him closely still when she sat down to eat with the three men.

"Shai Khe," Greystone said. "An ill name out east. One that strikes terror everywhere. I wouldn't have thought his interest in Shasesserre to be so intense as to bring him here personally." He glanced at Caracene.

She said, "Shasesserre is all that stands between Shai Khe and creation of the greatest empire the world has known."

"He the one gave you to Odehnal?" Chaz asked.

"Yes."

"What can you tell us about him?" Greystone asked.

"Nothing. While he lives, nothing."

"Me, I lost something somewhere, beautiful lady," Chaz said.

"I am his slave." She said that as though it explained all. In her native land, perhaps it did.

"Who?" Chaz insisted. "Odehnal or Shai Khe?"

Caracene bowed her head. Softly, she replied, "Shai Khe."

"Why? You're in Shasesserre."

"There are no slaves in Shasesserre?"

Chaz had to think his way around the side of that. "He is an enemy of the state. As such he has no rights. You have been freed. We could get you manumission papers by tomorrow."

She looked at him with eyes in which tenderness warred with exasperation. "Paper has no meaning while Shai Khe lives."

Gallantly, Chaz offered, "I'll kick his head in, then. Just tell me where he is."

"I cannot betray him. He is my master."

Soup snickered. Even Greystone smirked.

"I give up," the northerner said. He began muttering about "Women!" under his breath. He cleared his plate and cutlery away, then prepared a tray for the prisoners.

During the afternoon and evening he made every opportunity for Caracene to escape. She did not seize her chance.

Rider reached the laboratory quite late. He examined the prisoners while the others prepared themselves a supper. "Any message from the King?" he asked.

"Nary a word," Chaz replied. "Nothing from anybody."

"I suppose that means he's decided to accept me as Protector—to the extent that he'll ignore me. Till he wants something."

"That's what most of them did with your father. How long you reckon Belledon will last?" Few Shasesserren kings fulfilled normal lifespans. Some years there were three or four self-coronations. Jehrke had held the opinion that the city was its empire's worst enemy. The Protector had provided more stability and continuity than the crown.

"He could be a good one. If he stays alive. Suppose we skip the hired hands and deal with Odehnal directly?"

"A truth-drawing?"

"Get it ready. I'll eat first."

Odehnal’s eyes were wild. He was hopelessly caught, for the first time ever at another's mercy. Judging his captors by himself, he was frantic.

"Ought to be interesting," Chaz said, closing the lumber room door. Softly, "The girl wouldn't run."

"I noticed. We'll find him another way."

After eating they brought a more composed Odehnal into the library and strapped him into a chair the twin to that Greystone had used to monitor the web. Rider exercised the utmost caution while unbinding the spells which restrained the dwarf. Odehnal was dangerous still.

"Bit backwards from the way you're used to?" Rider asked. "You willing to tell me what I want to know?" Fear still lurked behind the dwarf's eyes. "Got in over your head when you joined up with Shai Khe, didn't you?"

Odehnal betrayed a flicker of surprise.

"Oh, yeah," Chaz said. "We know about your friend and his pirate airship."

"That being the case, you have no need to question me," Odehnal concluded with a snarl.

"Where is he?" Rider asked.

Silence.

"Do you consider yourself more valuable than Vlazos? He killed Vlazos."

Again Odehnal betrayed a moment's surprise. Vlazos, Rider believed, had been the foot in the Shasesserren door, the lone contact between outsiders and conspirators.

"Let's get on with the truth-drawing, Rider," Su-Cha chirruped. "I love it when they squeal." His cherubic face darkened. "And this one has abused so many of my kind. Let me have him when you're done."

Kralj Odehnal was not to be manipulated by psychological maneuvers. He was old and tough and tempered, and knew all the games interrogators played. He believed he had invented some himself.

Rider shrugged. "Since we have no choice, then."

Greystone placed a contraption on a stand in front of the dwarf. Odehnal looked puzzled. "Spud's special design," Greystone said. "More efficient than candles and mirrors."