The Masque of Vyle (5 page)

Chapter Four

Hunting

High in the
forest canopy four lithe figures stood, lounged or sat as fancy took them on slender branches above the quite dizzying drop to the forest floor. Silent as statues they had watched the progress of the hunters on their rippling arcotheurs as they surged across the lawn and wove through the trees. Ashanthourus, Cylia, Hradhiri Ra and Motley noted the progress of Vyle and Kassais with particular interest.

The troupe members ran lightly along the springy boughs to keep the archons in view when they finally drew to a halt in a clearing. Cylia used her powers to conjure a tympanic membrane to allow them all to eavesdrop on the archons’ conversation about the problems of the realm and the Shrike Lord’s plans to combat them.

‘We should simply take them here and now,’ Hradhiri Ra whispered as he tapped impatient, bony fingers on the fluted barrel of his cannon.

‘Nonsense,’ Motley replied smartly. ‘We don’t know that either of them has done anything wrong.’

‘“Wrong” can be a highly subjective term,’ Ashanthourus observed. ‘Based on what we’ve just heard they both deserve death many times over. Why should we not grant it?’

Motley shrugged and drew up his legs before placing his chin on his knees. ‘I am only a fool,’ he said. ‘You are the great king, great wisdom is your prerogative.’

Ashanthourus tilted his grinning mask towards the slight, grey figure perched on his branch. ‘Just so, and great wisdom has taught us that to interfere without cause only brings more harm,’ the High Avatar said. ‘That and… suspicion.’

Motley grinned appreciatively at the king’s disquieting words. ‘Well quite, and suspicion serves no one in the long run – only the facts can bear fruit. Still, the noble Hradhiri Ra makes a salient point in an oblique fashion. Why not simply capture them and question them at our leisure? We could soon get to the bottom of things that way.’

Ashanthourus did not deign to reply so Cylia took up the gauntlet. ‘Because then we should be left with one guilty and one innocent, but we couldn’t simply let the innocent one go.’

‘Innocent also being a relative term in this case,’ Hradhiri Ra noted drily.

‘The truth is that neither of these delightful specimens may be the one we want,’ Motley nodded. ‘I mean yes, the trail from the craftworld leads here, and lo! Verily there are Commorrites on hand… but that’s the worst kind of circumstantial evidence. The attack itself may have emanated from here and have nothing to do with these two, although quite honestly I sort of doubt that. I do wish that you would have let me go with Lo’tos, we would have worked well together and might have found an answer by now.’

Ashanthourus looked down his mask’s long nose at Motley before responding. ‘The Master Mime has his own tasks to perform. If your role has a part to play in this performance then it will occur at the appropriate juncture and not a moment before.’

‘Ah now, look!’ Hradhiri Ra whispered. ‘While we procrastinate Nature takes a hand.’

‘Or Fate,’ added Cylia seriously.

From their elevated position the Harlequins could see what appeared to be a large, pallid shadow slipping between the trees. A big feline-like creature was creeping towards the clearing with surprisingly fluid grace. The archons seemed ignorant of its approach until the point where it pounced, its muscular body hurtling across the clearing with claws outstretched and fangs bared like a white-furred thunderbolt. The Harlequins fell silent and watched the ensuing battle through to its conclusion without so much as twitching a muscle.

In the depths
of the Onyx wing Olthanyr Yegara stopped nervously at a crossroads and glanced behind him. He listened carefully but there was no repetition of the sound he’d heard, or thought he’d heard. The Onyx wing was deserted. No slaves or servants would come there; they shunned the place with good cause, and no guards troubled to patrol the smoke-blackened corridors. Olthanyr strained his ears but he could only hear the distant hiss and crash of the waves striking the cliffs far below.

He soon hurried onwards, navigating the twists and turns of the Onyx wing unerringly even through areas of pitch darkness. Eventually he came to Qu’isal’s old chambers and pushed his way in through their warped ebony doors. Inside, cracks could be seen on the blackened walls and floor from the intense heat that had scoured the chambers at the height of the fire. The light and the sounds of the sea hissed in through ragged gaps where the outer wall had buckled and collapsed.

Olthanyr ignored the view of looming clouds and restless seas beyond the rents in the stonework and crouched in the centre of the chamber. He fumbled for a hidden stud and pressed it, causing a panel to slide aside at his feet. Inside the space revealed were four rounded shapes that shone dully in the light trickling in from outside. Olthanyr crooned as he scooped them out one after another: four round-bodied, beast-headed jars with
jewelled eyes.
Olthanyr arrayed them before him like a miniature court and sang to them in a low, twisting voice for a time before reaching out to caress them one after another: toad, lion, snake,
fish.

These artefacts had been one source of the Yegaras’ old power in the Sable Marches. Ancient pacts and rites had secured the future of the clan at the small cost of a little spilt blood and a few mumbled incantations. Some of the family had believed them to be a slow poison, a corrupting influence on the bloodline. After Qu’isal’s death they had been hidden out of superstitious fear.

After a moment of hesitation Olthanyr lifted the lion-headed jar in one hand and pressed its jaws against his other wrist. He hissed as its needle-pointed fangs took their sacrifice of blood and hurriedly placed the jar back down again. He whispered to the lion-headed jar fiercely.

‘Kill them. Send forth your children and kill them. A thousand sacrifices for your pleasure if it occurs as I desire. I swear this upon Qu’isal’s shade.’ Olthanyr heard nothing but the crash of the waves, saw nothing but the clouds scudding past outside, but he knew that in some distant place his curse had been heard.

Olthanyr hurriedly put the jars back into their hiding place. He took care to dust away any trace of the outline of the panel when he closed it. The last Yegara felt somewhat calmer now and left Qu’isal’s chamber to start retracing his steps. As he squeezed between the curved lips of the heat-warped doors he stopped dead in his tracks. The wedge of light spilling through the gap winked off something on the floor that had not been there when Olthanyr had entered just moments ago.

He bent down, reached for the object and then withdraw his hand as sharply as if it had been a venomous spider. It was a small rectangle of crystal no larger than his palm. On the surface of it Olthanyr could see two stylised faces superimposed at a jaunty angle to one another. One was laughing and the other was crying; both had the hollow-looking eyes and mouths of masks. Olthanyr straightened with a sharp intake of breath and looked around in fright. Nothing met his gaze but shadows and cobwebs.

Then he heard the sound again. It was the same noise he had heard when he traversed the Onyx wing to reach Qu’isal’s chamber; the noise he had dismissed as being his imagination playing tricks. He heard it again and it seemed closer now, almost beside him in the gloom. It was a whispering, hollow laughter that nestled in his ears and brought chills to his spine. Olthanyr picked up his skirts and ran for the Confluence.

The doors of
the greeting hall boomed open and a tide of diversely attired servants, guards, attendants and functionaries flowed in. At their head the archons Vyle and Kassais angrily cuffed away overly solicitous offers of assistance and commiseration from their minions. Kassais’s armour was torn across one shoulder and some of the blood splashed across it was his own.

The Shrike Lord’s eyes were hooded and his gaze darted suspiciously from one object to another as if he expected attack at any moment. He fastened on Yegara, who was standing shivering in the Confluence at the far end of the greeting hall, and began striding purposefully towards him.

‘My archon!’ Yegara cried out with convincing alarm and dismay. ‘What happened? Are you hurt?’

‘No,’ the Shrike Lord snarled, catching the flicker of disappointment that crossed Yegara’s features. ‘Kassais was foolish enough to let the reszix take a chunk out of him.’

‘I think we were both rather taken aback, to be fair,’ Kassais complained. ‘I don’t recall any cries of “Look out, Kassais, there’s a cat that’s sixteen times your size about to land on you!” What I can’t believe is that the damn thing managed to get away afterwards.’

‘They’re quick for their size.’ Vyle frowned. ‘And quiet, too.’ Yegara looked paler than usual – in fact he was looking positively albino and couldn’t seem to stop trembling. Vyle had put this down to overacting at first, but the little toad had been genuinely frightened by something. A brightly clad orrery of attendants and servants hovered uncertainly around the nobles at a discreet distance with fear writ large on every face.

‘The banquet is all prepared as I instructed?’ Vyle asked icily. At this Yegara’s flustered countenance cleared a little. It was clearly not the banquet that he was scared about; perhaps it was merely that Yegara feared the consequences of the botched hunting expedition falling on his own head.

‘Everything has been readied for you in the Amber wing, my archon,’ Olthanyr effused convincingly. ‘I’d thought that the most fitting place to start.’

Kassais furrowed his brow. ‘Amber wing?’ he muttered.

‘This dung heap has seven wings to it,’ Vyle explained. ‘Each night we’ll feast in a different one of the halls. By the time the week is out we can be assured that the locals will be in too weakened a state to do a cursed thing against us.’

Yegara seemed to become nervous again. ‘Not the Onyx wing, my archon. I advise against it, the Onyx wing is a most… disagreeable place for anything, let alone a feast.’

Vyle rounded on Yegara and struck across him across the face with a blow that sent him sprawling. ‘Never presume to tell me what to do,’ the Shrike Lord snarled. ‘I’ll dance and sport and puke in every one of your ancestor’s precious halls to make them my own, even your haunted black wing with all its worthless ghosts and ineffectual curses. Now get up.’

Yegara climbed unsteadily to his feet, his face burning where Vyle’s gauntlet had struck it. Kassais stood off to one side smirking while the Shrike Lord humiliated the last Yegara in front of his former servants and slaves. Vyle stood perfectly still, glaring at Yegara and waiting.

‘I’m very sorry, my archon,’ Yegara promptly stammered through torn lips. ‘I forget my place. You alone are the master of this house.’

‘That’s right, and you are my slave,’ Vyle said. ‘You’ve grown pretentious in the extreme when you presume to advise me.’

Yegara bobbed his head miserably in agreement, evoking a cruel smile on Vyle’s face. ‘Perhaps I should send you outside to wait for death with the natives – I’m sure they would welcome the last in the line of their old benefactors with open arms.’

Yegara flinched involuntarily. The kind of crude horrors the natives would inflict upon him if given the chance were less than nothing compared to what the Commorrites could do, but they filled his mind with fear nonetheless.

‘Perhaps we can proceed with the banquet now, Vyle?’ Kassais said a little plaintively. ‘Fast healing always makes me a trifle peckish.’

Vyle glanced sharply at the other archon and then nodded. There was still something hidden in Yegara’s face – one of many secrets he thought he was keeping from his new master. He consoled himself that there was plenty of time to break the weakling properly and find all the answers inside his rancid little skull in due course. In the coming week they would probably benefit from the additional diversion.

Chapter Five

The First Banquet

In the Amber
hall a magnificent table of richly polished wood had been laid out for a feast. The hundred-place-long table was groaning with platters of food. Silver-skinned fish there were in thousands, a myriad of different sizes and varieties from finger-long sprats to ocean-going leviathans, poached, fried, boiled, scalloped and raw. There were filigreed trays bearing wobbling piles of eggs, crustaceans, invertebrates and shellfish both in and out of their calciferous armour. Liveried servants in ochre and bronze stood around the walls in attendance while Vyle’s courtiers and concubines mingled warily with Kassais’s warriors and ex-Yegara clan functionaries.

The Shrike Lord lounged on a throne at the head of the table, with Kassais seated at his right hand and Olthanyr Yegara hovering anxiously nearby. He picked disinterestedly at the food set before him while he watched the baroquely attired throng. To his disgust many of the guests had chosen to attire themselves in shades complementary to the hall’s monochromatic theme. Amber, russet, umber and taupe were in far too much evidence, with more daring individuals veering towards charcoal or gold. It gave an effect of making the room appear to be full of soft, shadowy phantoms wavering in uncertain light. Defiant of such fripperies Vyle had chosen to clad himself in a tight vest of blood-red hue over a midnight-black body suit. A storm was building outside as if in reflection of his dark mood, and occasional spears of white light shot in through high, narrow windows and threw the scene into sharp relief with an accompanying grumble of thunder.

Although he would never admit it, Vyle had the ashen taste of fear in his mouth. He had gambled much to gain the favour of the Supreme Overlord and be appointed his seneschal in the Sable Marches. The Shrike Lord balked at no deed however heinous it might be, but he had been forced into measures that even he might admit were extreme to reach this point. The intractability of the natives, the grasping demands of Asdrubael Vect, the weakness of the Yegaras, all had conspired to push matters to a supremely dangerous pass.

Kassais sat watching Vyle narrowly, shifting occasionally in discomfort as the wounds inflicted on his shoulder by the reszix knitted with preternatural speed. He was careful to keep a look of amused disdain on his features, but behind this mask his mind was also working swiftly. For all the bravado he demonstrated the Shrike Lord seemed to be in over his head in the Sable Marches. If the gates were working, Kassais decided, he would already be long gone by now. As it was, Kassais sat and pondered how he might best turn the situation to his own advantage.

Olthanyr Yegara was fully engaged with just trying to keep his nerve. The crystal wafer he had found outside Qu’isal’s chambers in the black wing returned to the forefront of his mind again and again. Part of him wanted to tell the Shrike Lord about it, to confess his error in not mentioning it previously before he was found out. Another part warned him against such folly. The Shrike Lord was going to kill him if he found out. A third, insidious voice told him to do nothing and hope that the lightning would strike down his tormentor while he was left untouched. After all if it had been Olthanyr that invoked the curse, surely that meant he would be protected from it?

A particularly bright stab of lightning lit the hall seconds before thunder boomed close by outside. Yegara gasped and blinked spots from his eyes in the aftermath. Just for an instant the room had been rendered into white light and harsh shadows, making the guests and furnishings look like two-dimensional cut-outs. In that moment Olthanyr had seen another shape that hadn’t been there before, something spindly and unnatural-looking crouched beside Vyle’s throne. It was all he could do not to cry out in horror, but as his vision cleared he saw that nothing was there. Vyle glared back at him angrily.

‘What are you staring at, fool?’ the Shrike Lord snarled. ‘You look like you’ve seen one of your slack-jawed, inbred uncles come back from the dead.’

‘It was nothing, forgive me I – by the gods!’ Yegara exclaimed suddenly, shrieking the last words at a hysterical pitch. Vyle and Kassais bounded up from their seats in an instant, ready for action though they knew not from where. The other guests fell silent in shock and then craned their necks to see what new fit of madness was gripping the last Yegara.

‘What now?’ Kassais laughed after a moment. ‘I thought the cat-beast had come back for a second round.’

Olthanyr Yegara was gazing rigidly at the corner of the table where Vyle’s hand had rested only a moment ago. There, sitting innocently upon the rich, swirling grain of the wood, was a crystal wafer, the one from outside Qu’isal’s chambers or another just like it. The Shrike Lord followed his gaze and found the small gleaming rectangle immediately. With a muttered oath he bent and examined it.

Kassais swore softly. Another crystal wafer gleamed at the place where he had been sitting. Heedless of any potential danger he picked up the slim rectangle and looked at it. The twin masks rendered on its surface, laughing and crying, gazed inscrutably back at him with hollow eye sockets.

‘It seems you have some unexpected guests, Vyle,’ Kassais said after a moment, ‘unless this is some entertainment you’ve arranged and kept silent about, you sly dog.’

‘What... what does it mean?’ Yegara bleated. The hall was silent. The guests all had their cruel, beautiful faces turned towards Vyle, expectantly awaiting his pronouncement on the strange events. The Shrike Lord had picked up his own wafer and examined it. He threw it back down and smiled his wintry smile before replying.

‘It means I have been chosen for a particular honour, one that in my generosity I shall share with you, my guests and retainers,’ Vyle said loudly. More thunder grumbled behind his words as he continued, and he began to pace slowly along the table as he spoke. ‘We have been invited to participate in a Masque, and we shall see such sights that few even in Commorragh can boast of having witnessed.’

The Shrike Lord paused and flung his head back, calling out louder still. ‘I accept, do you hear me, Harlequins? I know that you’re listening. I accept your offer. Come, make yourself known in my hall.’

As the words left his lips there was a small flash and a ring of scarlet smoke puffed up theatrically beside Vyle. As the smoke rolled away upwards a spindly figure in tight, dark clothing was revealed, with its face hidden behind a swirling mask. It bowed lithely from the waist, bending almost double, and stepped smartly sidewise. As it did so, by some trick of vision there were suddenly two figures standing before Vyle. The mask of one of the figures now wore the stylised grin of Cegorach, while the other wore the tears of Isha.

Both apparitions bowed again and struck a pose, with one arm curved above their heads to touch fingertips while the other was held across their bodies to touch palm to palm. The two figures began to dance together to silent music. It was a courtly
pas de deux
that swept them around the hall, now solemn, now ridiculous as one and then the other took the lead. The smiling one’s tricks and missteps became ever more outrageous as its weeping partner attempted to keep it on the straight and narrow through the complex dance. The two leapt and rolled over one another with an agility that astounded and delighted their audience. They always remained in contact by palm and fingertips even when it seemed impossible that they could continue to do so.

The dance became faster, more frenetic with the Isha-masked dancer now trying to push away the smiling one. No matter how hard he was flung to the sides or up into the air the weeping dancer could never seem to rid herself of the smiling partner. Each time her unwanted suitor would always rush back as if drawn by magnets, their hands never parting. At the last he was flung upwards and held aloft, the two figures like mirror images with arms outstretched – one above and one below – balancing precariously. They held their pose for an impossibly long moment before the lower figure suddenly dropped her partner amidst gasps of dismay from the audience. In the act of falling the two figures collapsed together into a single entity in a swirling mask that rose and bowed to Vyle once more.

As the figure bowed there was a thunderous pounding on the hall doors. The spindly figure hunched and cocked its tumbling mask towards the Shrike Lord like a faithful hound. Vyle waved his hand indulgently.

‘Go and let them in,’ he said. ‘Let’s see what other worthies are in attendance amongst us this night.’

The lone Harlequin bounded up and raced to the doors. Kassais took the opportunity to lean over and murmur in Vyle’s ear. ‘Are you entirely certain this is wise, dear cousin? Letting another ship enter port, as it were?’

The Shrike Lord’s expression did not so much as flicker at Kassais’s show of impudence. ‘You should take lessons from Yegara, you share the same strange compunction to tell me my business within my own hall,’ Vyle growled back. ‘Would you have me turn a troupe of Harlequins away from my door and hang the consequences? I am not so great a fool as that!’

By this time the Harlequin had thrown open the doors with a mighty heave. They revealed the scene outside utterly changed from the dour dressed stone of the Confluence. There was now a woodland scene beyond, a green clearing basking in bright sunshine. Two figures rose from the centre of the glade. One was tall and clad in scarlet finery crowned with a golden mask. The other was slight and wrapped in a hood and mantle that seemed to be spun out of shadows. As this one rose it could be seen that her featureless oval mask shone like quicksilver.

‘Well met, my friends,’ the figure in red said in a marvellous, mellifluous voice that seemed to carry to every corner of the hall. ‘I am Ashanthourus, king to an ancient land now lost. This is Cylia, my inspiration and my queen.’

Taking Cylia by the hand Ashanthourus advanced into the hall itself, and the throng of Vyle’s guests gave back before his approach like frost before the sun. The fragrance of wildflowers drifted into the hall and with it came the sound of songbirds. Other figures suddenly appeared behind him and came streaming in through the doors bearing garlands, ribbons and floating silk banners. Moment by moment the orange hall was metamorphosed from a place of umber shadows into a bright, garish space that was wild and primitive in its aspect.

‘I thank you for your welcome of my errant servant, Lo’tos, and your acceptance of our Masque,’ Ashanthourus said to Vyle, and then nodded behind him. ‘Allow me also to introduce Hradhiri Ra and… Motley.’

The Shrike Lord looked and saw his own throne was now occupied by a slight figure dressed in archaic clothes covered in tiny diamond panes of black and white – the pattern known as motley, Vyle remembered. Behind the throne stood an imposing figure in a long coat and skull-faced helm – this would be the troupe’s Death Jester. Vyle smiled bleakly at the sight.

‘Greetings, Death,’ he said soberly to Hradhiri Ra. ‘I’ve always thought you stood at my shoulder, now I see that is true.’

‘Death stands at the shoulder of every mortal,’ the Death Jester rasped. ‘They are born only to wait for the touch of his bony fingers before passing from this realm. Today, tomorrow, it matters not – death comes for every mortal in the end.’

Kassais laughed aloud at that. ‘Perhaps in the world of mud you occupy that is true, but in the eternal city death has no dominion,’ he said.

‘Oh, I’d have to take issue with that,’ Motley said with a knowing grin. ‘I’d say the dominion of death is stronger in Commorragh than almost any other place in the universe. What you’re saying is that some people there simply don’t feel the pinch too often, but that isn’t true either. Everything, and I mean
everything
, dies one day. The real question is whether you can come back afterwards.’

‘Quiet, fool!’ Ashanthourus snapped. ‘These fine nobles have no patience for your philosophical blather! Get yourself gone from this company until you are called upon.’

Motley rose with a quirking smile, and bowed elaborately to all present – including the trays of shellfish – before sauntering away, whistling as he went. By this time the entrance to the hall had entirely disappeared behind gauzy draperies and loops of wire wrapped with a matching mesh. The overall effect was of a narrowing cave in natural rock, or the twisting heart of a tornado seen from above.

‘My lords,’ Ashanthourus said in a calmer tone, lowering his voice from its earlier regal clarion call. ‘I have introduced you to the principal performers in our Masque, but as you can see many others will serve roles within it; the dancers, the musicians, the chorus – even the stage itself – will be supplied by the members of our troupe as needed. I ask that you and your noble guests do not interact with the performers as they go about their duties unless invited. To do otherwise might be… dangerous. Likewise once the performance is begun it must proceed to its completion without interruption. Can you… will you agree to these terms?’

The Shrike Lord’s eyes narrowed shrewdly at the Harlequin troupe-master’s words. ‘I can agree to them but I’ll offer no absolute guarantee that you won’t be interrupted or molested. I can issue orders and punish any of my guests or servants that disobey me, but I’ll take no responsibility for chance, fate or the gods themselves intervening.’