The Book of Silence (9 page)

Garth turned back; the apparition was still there, hanging motionless, as if waiting.

“What are you? Why are you here?” Garth demanded. “Speak, O vision, and explain yourself!”

The face grinned and replied, “Greetings, Garth. It is good to see you so untroubled that you can share a drink and pass the time with this doddering old fraud.” The voice was a low rumble, lower than any human voice and not easy to understand; it spoke with an accent unlike that of Skelleth, but one that Garth had heard before.

“Who are you?” Garth asked.

“Do you not recognize me? Have you never seen my likeness?”

“You are familiar, but I cannot place you.”

“Ah, so, feeble a memory, and in an overman! It is scarce three years since you invaded my home and destroyed my altar.”

“Aghad!” Garth remembered now where he had seen that face; it had appeared on the small, carved idols sold in the Dûsarran market. The accent, too, was Dûsarran.

“You do remember! I am flattered!”

“Filth!” Garth spat. He did not give any serious consideration to the possibility that this might be the god himself; he was quite sure that it was some sort of trickery contrived by the cultists. He shifted, so that the table would not impede him, drew his sword, and rose to his feet.

“I had feared that you would be displeased by my paltry attempt to return the favor you did me, but I suppose you must have tired of your bitch years ago. Perhaps you would like to thank me for freeing you of her?” The thing grinned again.

Garth's sword came up and slashed through the image in a single smooth motion. It cut a narrow swath through the ethereal substance of the thing, but the speaker did not seem perturbed. In fact, it did not seem to notice his action at all. Garth had hoped for some sort of magical feedback.

“I notice that you haven't troubled to bury her; were you planning to feed her to your warbeast? You need not fear for its health; we used no poison. Nothing that could harm a warbeast, at any rate; we did not want to hurry her death. She took quite a long time to die; we found it very enjoyable. Would you care to guess whom we plan to kill next?”

Garth growled low in his throat and slashed at the image again, striking vertically this time. The sword passed through without resistance, leaving the floating image divided into quarters, but still unconcerned.

“You're not guessing, overman,” the voice rumbled. “Will it be another of your wives? One of your children? Your cousins, or your uncle? Your friends on Ordunin's City Council? Perhaps the next won't be an overman at all; maybe we'll kill one of your friends here in Skelleth. The old man might do for a start. Or perhaps we might take the best of both worlds and kill your traitorous comrade, Galt the swindler. Will you guess, overman? Will you guess, or will you just wait and see?”

Garth hacked at the thing again, splitting it further and leaving six fragments. The face was no longer clearly visible; the edges of each segment were blurred, and the whole image seemed to be distorted.

It grinned and vanished completely, with a sound of fading laughter.

Garth stared at the empty air, then looked about, seeing no sign of any further supernatural manifestation. The sword still in his hand, he announced, “Hear me, Aghadite scum! I have had my fill of you. You owe me a life for my wife's death, and a hundred more for the manner of it. I swear that I will find you and destroy you, wherever you may hide. I will return to Dûsarra, smash your temple, and grind it into the dust. Your magic will not protect you; your god will not save you. I swear this, by everything I hold dear.”

There was no answer but the silence of the almost-empty tavern.

Chapter Seven

After a long, wary moment, Garth finally admitted to himself that he could do nothing more immediately. He sheathed his sword, flexed the bruised knuckles of his right hand, and sat down again.

The apparition's words rankled, particularly the remarks about leaving Kyrith's corpse untended. One didn't bring a cadaver into a taproom, however, and he had hoped that the Forgotten King might resurrect her; that had seemed more important than providing the body with an appropriate rest.

He glanced at the Forgotten King. The old man wasn't going anywhere; Garth could come back here later if he decided he had to speak with him further. Without any more conversation, he rose and marched out the door. The King said nothing and made no move to stop him.

A crowd had gathered in the market, clustered about Kyrith's body. Garth was tall enough to see over their heads and noted that they were maintaining a respectful distance. A young boy had clambered up on the base of the statue that stood near the center of the market, a statue that had once been a young thief who had been petrified by a basilisk by the order of the previous Baron of Skelleth.

The crowd's presence irked Garth; it did not seem fitting that these members of an inferior species should cluster around Kyrith's remains like a pack of wolves around a dead warbeast. “Get away!” he bellowed. “Go home, all of you!”

Startled, the townspeople's faces turned toward him, but no one moved to depart until he picked up two women on the northern fringe, one in each hand, grasped by the shoulder, and placed them off to either side. They backed away, rubbing where his hands had gripped, and the rest of the villagers backed away as well.

“Go home!” Garth bellowed again; he drew his sword for emphasis, and people began vanishing into houses and down streets. A moment later no one remained in the square but himself and Saram, both standing over Kyrith's body. Koros stood nearby, as it had stood since its arrival in the market, the copper gull gleaming dully on its back.

Saram watched Garth closely, waiting for him to speak.

The overman spent a few seconds staring down at his dead wife's face. It was sinking in that she was really dead, gone forever. She had always been his closest companion in Ordunin, much more so than his two remaining wives; he regretted, now, that he had spent so much of the last few years away from her.

Word would have to be sent to Ordunin. She had kin there, not just her sister and co-wife Myrith, or her other co-wife Lurith, but two brothers and a few nephews and nieces. At last report, her mother was still alive. Kyrith, alone of Garth's wives, had no children; Garth had regretted that before, but now it seemed almost comforting somehow. Fewer people would grieve over her loss.

The overmen of the Northern Waste were not much given to elaborate ceremony and did not bother with funerals after the human fashion; since most had no belief in an afterlife of any sort, there was no religious necessity for them. The custom was, rather, to combine the disposal of the body with the division of property, whether by the reading of a will or by adjudication. The body itself was ordinarily sunk in Ordunin's ocean or buried in more inland regions, without fanfare, once the property settlement was announced and no doubt remained of the subject's identity and death.

That would not be appropriate here, Garth decided. Shipping the body home would be difficult and unpleasant, and the people of Ordunin would think it wasteful and eccentric, at the very least. Holding the reading of the will in Skelleth would seem equally bizarre to all concerned, since, save for himself, none of her heirs were present or likely to turn up; to the religious and sentimental humans, it might well seem callous and disrespectful.

There was certainly precedent for separating the ceremony from the burial; overmen who died at sea were simply tossed overboard, and the ritual of legacy was performed later on shore. A death in a foreign land, it seemed to Garth, would follow the same pattern. He would see the body interred in Skelleth, and Kyrith's other family would hold the ceremony in Ordunin, without either Garth or the corpse.

To keep up the dignity of his species among the humans of Skelleth, Garth knew that some sort of ceremony, though perhaps not a real funeral, would be in order. He would have to devise something.

For the present, however, there was no hurry. He knew that humans waited as much as two or three days before burning or burying their dead. He wanted to use that time to consider how best Kyrith's memory might be honored. He recalled what he had heard of human customs and broke the silence by saying, “She must lie in state.”

Saram had been waiting for some such indication of Garth's plans. “I will have a bier prepared immediately, in my audience chamber,” Saram said.

Garth nodded, and the Baron hurried away.

Once in his house, Saram summoned the nearest courtiers he could find and sent them to locate an appropriate platform and fine cloths to cover it.

He knew that running errands for the overman would not help his image as an authority figure, but he didn't much care. Garth was, after a fashion, a friend, and he had just received a terrible blow; one had to forgive him for failings of etiquette under the circumstances. Saram did not resent being manhandled and ordered about. He knew that he would behave no more politely or rationally if his own wife had been murdered.

The very thought of Frima's death gave him a moment's discomfort; he shook it off and began planning what he could do to eliminate the cult of Aghad from Skelleth.

In the square, Garth knelt and studied Kyrith's body. It was not immediately obvious what had killed her; the wounds on her forehead and bound wrists were quite minor, really. He felt her throat, and although it was bruised and lacerated, she did not appear to have been strangled.

He moved a hand to her chest and felt broken ribs.

He stopped, withdrew his fingers, and stepped back. He had decided that he didn't really want to know the extent of what the Aghadites had done to her; it was enough to know that she was dead and that they were responsible.

The marks on her forehead would have to be covered, he thought, while she lay on display in the Baron's house. The blood would need to be cleaned off her face. If he was going to subject his wife's remains to human ritual, he would do everything he could to ensure that the ceremony remained as dignified as possible.

Koros growled, and a shadow encroached at the edge of Garth's vision. He looked up to see a human, covered by a loose, heavy, red robe, face hidden by an overhanging hood, standing nearby. The overman could not tell if the figure was man or woman.

The people of Skelleth did not ordinarily wear robes or cloaks; the people of Dûsarra did, and this robe was the color of dried blood. Garth's hand fell to the hilt of his sword.

“What do you want here, human?” he demanded.

“Greetings, Garth,” the creature said. Its taunting voice was male, Garth decided, and the man spoke in the guttural manner of the Dûsarrans. “I came to bring you a message.”

“What message? From whom?” The overman wrapped his hand around the sword's hilt.

“We heard your oath just now, and your offer to come and visit us in Dûsarra.”

Garth drew his sword, but did not attack; he was wary of unseen menaces.

“You will be welcome, of course. We would be delighted to have you stay with us; on your last trip you rushed off so quickly! This time you really must stay to dinner.”

Garth saw no sign of any hidden threat, yet the Aghadite messenger simply stood, speaking calmly, ignoring the overman's bare steel.

He was probably armored, Garth reflected. He thought that padding and metal would protect him. The heavy robe was to conceal the helmet and gauntlets that would have been exposed by the sort of tunic normally worn in Skelleth.

“We have a request, though,” the Aghadite said as he extended a long, bare finger and pointed it at Kyrith's body. “You bring the meat.”

With a wordless bellow, Garth swung the sword.

The blade struck the man's robe and instantly exploded in a burst of red flame and splintered steel, leaving the overman clutching the useless hilt. The Aghadite laughed, but even in his state of unreasoning fury, Garth could detect the nervousness in that laugh, its forced quality. The man was not as sure of himself as he wished to appear.

Garth tossed the broken sword aside and reached for the Aghadite with his bare hands.

A wisp of red smoke swirled up from empty air between them; Garth ignored it as the man backed away hurriedly. The Aghadite was not yet running, merely stepping back, away from Garth's outstretched hands. Garth knew that he could catch the man; no human could outrun an overman. He grinned and advanced; the Aghadite continued to retreat.

The red smoke thickened and grew, gathering about the human, and Garth belatedly remembered seeing a similar mist once before. With a growl, he lunged forward, wasting no more time. His fingers closed on the edge of the red cloak, then passed through, holding nothing but air. The Aghadite had vanished.

Furious, Garth whirled, looking for other enemies, and with a cry of anguish saw Kyrith's body disappear in a red cloud.

He ran, but in the second or so that it took to reach it the corpse had vanished as completely as the Aghadite or the image that had spoken in the King's Inn.

He staggered to a halt in the center of the market, staring about wildly. Several of the people of Skelleth stood watching him, clustered in small groups in the streets that led out of the square. They muttered among themselves. Garth realized that they had seen the entire affair, had seen him humiliated, had seen Kyrith's body stolen. They had done nothing; no one had moved to aid him.

But then, he thought, why should they? He was not their kind, and the Aghadites were. At least none had joined in taunting him.

“Leave me!” he bellowed. “Get away from here!”

A few of the villagers obeyed, retreating out of sight; more did not. Garth glared at them, and a few more backed away; others met his gaze without flinching.

Seeing no practical alternative, he resolved to ignore them. He turned and stooped to pick up the stump of his sword. As he did, Saram came running from the door of his house. The entire altercation had lasted only moments, and he had not at first realized that the noises outside were of any real concern.

“What happened?” he called.

“Shut up,” Garth replied.

Frima's head appeared in the doorway, but she said nothing. Saram came to a stop, looking about the market, his eyes returning regularly to the spot where Kyrith's body had lain. He glanced at Garth, but did not care to venture a question.

Garth stood, glaring at the hilt and the jagged shard that projected from it. Somehow the Aghadites had acquired powerful magic. They had apparently possessed some sorcerous devices or methods at the time of his previous encounter, in Dûsarra, but it had been his clear impression that they had relied primarily on trickery and simple machinery. Now, though, they seemed to be using real wizardry. The red mist that caused people to vanish had been used by the council of wizards he had fought, but never before by the priests of Aghad. The protective spell that had shattered his sword was nothing he had ever seen them demonstrate before, and the floating image that had spoken to him in the tavern was also new.

He knew that ordinary weapons were not enough against magicians. He had defeated the wizards only by wielding the Sword of Bheleu, and it had been the sword that he used to slay the high priest of Aghad.

He had given the Sword of Bheleu to the Forgotten King to free himself of its power, but now, he decided, the time had come to take it back. He would use it to destroy the cult, and then, he told himself, he would return it to the King's keeping. He knew that Bheleu would try to reassert his authority, try to take over Garth's body and possess him utterly, but he believed that he would be able to resist, to direct Bheleu's destructiveness, long enough to do what he had to do. The Aghadites had angered the chosen of the god of destruction, and they would be destroyed in consequence. Garth would use any means needful to make sure of that.

He obviously no longer needed to waste time on Kyrith's funeral arrangements, with her body stolen; he marched north across the market and into the King's Inn.

Behind him, Saram, Frima, and several other people watched him go. When he had vanished through the tavern door most of them went on about their business, but Saram and Frima followed him.

At his table in the rear, the Forgotten King sat exactly as he had sat when Garth left the inn. The overman made his way across the deserted taproom and seated himself, as if he, too, had never departed the place. Saram and Frima found seats at a nearby table, but did not intrude or do anything to draw Garth's attention.

The room was silent for a moment. Garth was aware of the two humans behind him, but did not care to acknowledge their presence. The King acknowledged nothing, merely stared at the table, as he usually did, his eyes fixed on the little spot of mismatched wood near the center. The Baron and Baroness watched, making no attempt to hide their concern for Garth; they watched, but said nothing.

Finally Garth spoke, addressing the yellow-robed old man.

“Greetings, O King,” he said.

The King said nothing.

“I have come,” Garth continued, “to ask that you free me from my oath, given three winters back. Return to me the Sword of Bheleu and release me from my commitment to aid you, and all will be as it was.”

The old man gave no sign of replying, but Saram burst out, “Garth, have you gone mad?”

“Silence, human,” Garth said without turning. “This is not your affair.”

“Garth, that thing will possess you again and drive you mad! You might destroy Skelleth again, and that means it
is
my affair. I cannot allow you to take back the sword!”