Across the Long Sea (24 page)

“Peter,” she hissed. “I hear voices. Is it the temple at last? Peter!”

“Be calm, lady,” Russel said from her place by the door. “It's no one. The corridor's empty.”

But Peter's wife was already struggling to rise, kicking away the silk coverlet, and tripping on the hem of her morning gown. Peter and Avani both reached at once to still her struggle. Lady Shean struck out at their hands, embarrassed and hysterical both at once, and her mending basket fell from her lap, overturning on the patterned rug, spilling yarn and thread and bits of flannel onto the floor.

“The Aug cull us all,” her ladyship gasped, and suddenly began to weep, shoulders heaving. “Fergus! My Fergus!”

Peter wrapped his arms around his wife, murmuring comfort. Russel scrambled to collect straying skeins of yarn. Avani knelt on the rug, scooping up lace and dainty stockings and soft pieces of flannel. She stretched to retrieve a wad of fabric from beneath the brocade chaise, then stilled.

“What is it?” Russel asked, pausing over a tangle of yarn. “Avani, what's happened?”

Using the tips of her fingers, Avani tugged her find out from beneath the chaise. Then she sat back on her heels.

“It's a dolly,” Russel said, peering around. “Nicely made, that one. Not a crofter's rag doll, that, look at its face. And a proper knight's halberd.” She paused. “Come to think of it—­”

“I've seen one just like it before,” Avani said. “In the temple infirmary. And there was another, a baby doll with green ribbons, recorded in Mal's journal.”

Peter looked at the doll, puzzled. “Fergus's toy,” he said. “It was all he wanted as a Winter Ceilidh gift. There was a merchant, at the Fair.” Peter swallowed. “He made them for an easy price, and did them up to a child's wish, the colors and the faces. He did good business. The lads and lasses went mad for them. Alice,” he looked down at his stricken wife, “I didn't know you kept it.”

The glare Lady Shean shot her husband was cold in spite of her fever. “I certainly did,” she retorted. “I keep it close. It's the last thing I have, that smells of him still.”

The hair on Avani's arms prickled.

“May I borrow Fergus's doll, my lady? I'd like to take a closer look.”

Lady Shean looked as though she wanted to argue, but Peter nodded permission. “The doll?” He ran fingers through his graying hair. “You think the sickness is summat to do with the doll? But it's been in our household since early winter. Fergus kept it in his bed.” His knees gave out, and he sat on the chaise next to his wife.

“I've no reason yet to know one way or the other.” Avani rose. “Do you have a bit of cloth, or . . .”

“Here.” Russel unslung her cloak. She tossed it over the doll, then scooped the small bundle up, grimacing. “What are we doing with it?”

“Mal's cold room,” Avani replied. She caught the well of tears on Lady Shean's lashes and felt a pang of sympathy. “My lady, I'll send Russel back with a tea for your fever, and an ointment for your arms. Please don't fret yourself. I'll see Fergus's toy is kept safe and returned to you.”

“Is it cursed?” Russel wondered, when they stood alone in the hall. She held the bundled doll away from her body. Avani could hear Lady Shean begin to weep behind the closed door.

“Goddess forfend,” Avani said, taking the doll from Russel before the soldier could drop it. “And damn Mal if he's been wrong all this time.”

A
FTER
HOURS
OF
inspection, as far as Avani could determine, Mal hadn't missed any sorcery. The doll, a lonely wad of fabric and thread on Mal's slab, seemed innocent. Avani tested it first with Andrew's ring, passing her hands over the cloth-­stuffed body as she had the door in the tavern floor. The yellow jewel was unresponsive, and Avani's magic lay dormant. Nor did the Goddess send a bolt of understanding or even a single twitch of vision to suggest Avani was on the right track.

“
Ai
, impossible.” Avani propped her elbows on the table and scowled down at the toy. She chewed at her lip and scratched at her palm, trying to chase back dark disappointment. She'd almost begun to think herself Mal's equal. She was managing the trouble with the
sidhe
gates, was it too much to hope she could also put down the Worm before all of Wilhaiim was devoured?

She scratched again at her hand, cursing the chill, wondering if she need ask Deval for a different mix of easing herbs. Her thumbnail caught on a piece of grit, crunching. Avani shivered in revulsion. The tavern cellar had been awash in dust and silt. She needed a hot bath, but not before a meal, and mayhap a short rest.

She walked to the sink, turned her hands under the spigot, then paused and scratched again. There was black under her thumbnail, a speck like a sliver of crushed peppercorn or  . . .

“Louse,” Avani said. She whirled, darting back to Mal's slab. She snatched a pair of tweezing tongs from the table, used a sharp tip to scrape her nail. The grit came away in a squash of oily black, an infinitesimal smear of red blood.

“Nay, not a louse.” She wheeled again, dashed to the pyramid of shelves against the cold-­room wall, hauled out the long, flat wooden box housing Mal's double-­lensed scope. The box was heavy, and she forced herself to return more slowly to the slab.

She sprung the bronze latch and unpacked the box, carefully lifting first the lenses and then the optic apparatus from a cushion of straw.

“Sand flea, sand flea.” She'd seen the scope used only once before, just after she'd first made home in the city, and Mal had sliced a tiny square of heart-­valve from a corpse, used the lenses to see what the human eye couldn't; the gathering of white granules in the dead man's ventricle.

Avani screwed the metal apparatus into place, filled the bulbous flask with water from the spigot, and lit the attached oil lamp with a murmured cant. Then she cut a bit of halberd from the doll, and a bit of the yarn hair. She spread the red fabric on the specimen holder, clamping it in place.

Then she put her eye to the apparatus, twisting the focusing screw, breath held.

And there they were, knitted with glistening red fiber into the wool, gray eggs in tiny colonies, nestled in tight groupings that reminded Avani of the cluster of pustules on Lady Shean's forearm. She counted ten times four miniature eggs on the small square of fabric, but couldn't determine if the young had yet hatched.

She switched the piece of halberd for yarn, readjusted the focusing screw, found more eggs on the snippet, and this time two adult insects, laying or tending, secreting red as they anchored egg to yarn.

“Oh, ugh.” Avani backed away from the slab in helpless revulsion. She'd seen enough of sheep lice to recognize the voracity of parasitic biters. She put her hand to her head, scratching in reaction, then groaned and forced herself back to the scope.

She didn't know sand fleas but from the brief mention in Mal's journal. The mature insects on the sample were much smaller than a sheep louse, so small a person might easily overlook their presence. If she screwed the apparatus to its closest setting, she could count six legs on an oblong, glistening body. She couldn't quite focus enough to determine eye or mandible.

“The sting of a sand flea, and the raised blisters after. It was only a notion . . . a bit of childhood Lord Malachi recalled.”

“Goddess keep us.” She glanced away from the apparatus, at the doll, then, teeth gritted, back to the scope. “Malachi Doyle, you had the right of it all along.”

 

Chapter Twenty

T
HERE
WERE
GHOSTS
in the
oryza
fields, standing silent beneath the light of a round, blue moon. They shed no reflection on the still water. Brightly colored fish swam through their wavering forms. Mal felt the blue burn of their gaze between his shoulder blades as Tajit led them down a narrow track between dikes. Jacob drifted overhead, a brighter flash of ebony between the moon and the water, then flew away east. Mal wasn't sure whether he felt relief or disappointment as the raven disappeared into the night.

Most of Roue's haunts wore the enamel of warriors lost in battle; a few still gripped phantom swords or spears. But there were peasants dead in the fields as well: entire families, watching, expectant. One young woman in a bloodied silk shift offered Mal a ghostly flower, bowing her head over her hands. He ignored her whispered greeting and the gift, then banished her with a gentle word.

That only sent the regiments of dead to moving, hurrying through the still water, grasping at Mal until he was forced to look away and walk the center of the path to avoid the brush of their desperation. He hadn't the reserves to send them all to rest, nor the time.

Liam noticed Mal's dismay. The lad peeked from beneath the dark
basarati
he wore against the light of the moon. Tajit had shown both Liam and Mal how to wrap the ends of the long capes across nose and mouth, leaving only a narrow swath of freedom for the eyes. Then he'd darkened the skin around their lashes with ashes. He'd done the same to the backs of their hands.

“For concealment?” Mal had asked, sniffing at the ash, smelling
oud
.

“No,” Tajit said, a grin cracking his misshapen face. “And yes. It's the uniform of my forefathers, now adopted by the desert wolves for sneaking and peeking. And this, for your eyes.” He held up a tiny vial of amber oil. “Burns like fire, but will turn the whites of your eyes yellow as the admiral's.”

“Not for all the gold in your three towers,” Mal argued. “It's not needed. I'll but cast a warding and no man living is like to notice our passing.”

Tajit had been loudly impressed, Liam less so, and walking now between ranks of quietly desperate spirits, Mal wished for a greater concealment.

“Angry, are they?” Liam whispered, glancing uneasily from side to side. Mal looked at him sharply, but the lad didn't so much as flinch when ghostly fingers slipped across his scarred cheeks.

“You don't see them,” Mal said.

Liam shook his head. “And glad I am of that. But I don't think the fish like them much, my lord. Nor the crop. And I know the face you make when you're seeing things you wish you didn't.”

Tajit, leading the way through the fields, glanced over his shoulder.

“Quiet,” he said. “Khorit Dard has spies about, day and night, and they've ears.”

Mal didn't bother trying to explain, for the third time, the convenience of a magus. The warding he'd wrapped around their small party shone silver to his eye; any scout or wandering crofter would mayhap glimpse a bit of shadow across the field, but even that was unlikely. As for noise, even the mice running the dikes took no notice of their passing.

They crossed a second field, cutting in front of a farmer's stilted cottage. A single square window under the red peaked roof flickered candlelight. A mangy orange cat sat at the base of a narrow ladder, just above the flood, and watched darting fish with lazy interest. The cat yawned wide when they waded past, and curled its mottled tail about its paws.

In silence they climbed atop a dike wider than most. Tajit led them along the mounded earth, away from the mountain. He jerked a thumb toward the southern edge of the forest, and Mal nodded acknowledgement. He thought, not for the first time, that the job would be much easier without the older man and his preconceived notions of warfare, but the Rani had insisted on Tajit's inclusion.

“He knows the land, he knows the army, he knows Khorit Dard,” she'd said as she'd watched Mal select a knife from her cache of blades. She'd seemed surprised by his choice, and he supposed she'd expected him to take the biggest blade of the lot. For Liam he found a ser­viceable sword, battered about the enameled pommel, but with a blade sharp and well oiled.

“He's not necessary,” Mal replied. “It's a risk he needn't take.”

“He'll go with you,” she insisted, cold, and Baldebert, watching from his place on the bench, hadn't argued.

“As you wish,” Mal said, and showed Tajit his teeth. If the other man thought to put him down after the Lord of the Poppies was dispatched, he'd be sorely disappointed. Mal had every intention of returning home, Liam safe at his side.

T
HE FOREST DRIPPED
and rustled. Tajit used the edge of his sword to push back giant broad-­leafed plants and vines thick as Liam's arm. The vines were covered with large white flowers, furled for the night but still smelling pleasantly of honey. Tall evergreen trees pierced the forest canopy. Many of the trees bore great wounds where the bark had been cut away, exposing heartwood to the damp. In the shifting moonlight the wounds bled dark blood. Mal dipped a finger into a weeping bole, and it came away sticky with pungent sap.

“
Oud
,” murmured Tajit. “Roue's farmers tend the trees, milk the resin for trade and ceremony.”

Mal wiped his finger clean on a broadleafed frond.

The haunts seemed unwilling to pass the edge of the forest, but kept pace with Mal along the border until the green parted around a single memory keeper. The monument crouched half in the forest and half in a field. Mal thought the boulder had grown out of the earth on its own, the elaborate golden spire added much later. Garlands of fragrant flowers and strings of uncut red and green stones looped the spire. Several small flat bowls ringed the base of the metal structure, nestled in the boulder's natural crevices. The bowls were empty: the offering accepted.

Tajit led them around the forest side of the small monument. The haunts in the field milled about in groups, but refused to cross the boulder's line. They were soon left behind in the shadow of the golden towers.

“What's it for?” Liam asked. His boots squeaked on the wet forest floor, and damp dripped from the tip of his nose, ignored. He looked back at the memory keeper, now fading into the trees.

“To honor the forgotten,” Tajit replied. “That one, the Battle of the Broken Pledge, long before Roue was Roue, when the clan lords battled for control of Old Man Mountain. Entire families were lost, now their honored bones fertilize Roue's fields.”

They drifted south, farther into the forest. Liam drew his sword, mimicking Tajit, cutting passage in the undergrowth. Mal heard the rush of water before they broke through a wall of vine onto a crumbling bank. The bank overlooked a wide creek. Fish traps bobbed just off the shore, cages woven of dried branches or vine, and anchored in place to the trees on the bank. The traps were empty, but recently baited with chunks of fresh meat. A narrow stone bridge arched the water near the traps.

Tajit scowled. “Not our cages,” he said, meaning the traps. “The fish here are sacred, not for food.”

Mal scanned the bank. “Whoever it was, they're gone for the now.”

Tajit pursed his lips and eyed Mal sideways from beneath the dip of his
basarati
. Then he shrugged and hopped the bank. He ignored the bridge, wading straight through the flowing water, cutting free the tethered cages as he went. Liam crossed the bridge to spare his already sodden boots. Mal paused on the bank, glancing up through the forest canopy. The moon gleamed back.

“This way,” Tajit whispered. “We're close. Camp spoor, here, and desert wolf on the wind.”

Mal looked away from the sky. He crossed the bridge in four long strides, stood at Tajit's shoulder. He sniffed the air, but tasted only the verdant perfume of fertile land. Liam had edged ahead, between gently waving fronds. He ducked back around the weeping trunk of an evergreen tree, eager.

“My lord,” he said. “Come and see. ­People everywhere. Don't think we can sneak through, my lord, there's not a handspan of free space.” He brightened, “Mayhap you'd best turn us into birds, like Jacob, and we'll fly overhead.”

Tajit went stiff as rock. “Can you do that?” he hissed. “Turn a man into an animal?”

“Not today.” Mal said. He ducked past, pretending he didn't hear Liam's muffled amusement.

Khorit Dard's camp spread across the eastern side of Roue, sheltered in the curve of low foothills. Snowcapped peaks rose behind the foothills, toothy barriers on the gray horizon. Camp tents squatted in rutted fields, many lit from within. Silhouettes moved between lantern light and fabric. Mal caught the drift of muffled voices and the clink of weaponry in the night, and when the wind shifted, the stink of sewage and charred meat.

“It's not a camp, it's a city,” Liam said, hushed.

Mal grimaced. The lad wasn't wrong. Khorit Dard's troops were well settled in the mud, tents and cook fires nearly back-­to-­back and side-­by-­side. It would be difficult to slip through the camp unnoticed, and much easier as one man than three.

“Our last assassin, he went around the edges,” Tajit suggested quietly. “Then battled through to the middle, where it's said the Lord of the Poppies keeps his tent and courtiers close.”

“Right safe in the middle,” said Liam, nodding in approval. “S'how I'd plan it, my lord.” The lad shifted beneath the edge of the forest, squinting thoughtfully. “What'll we do? Your shadow magic won't do us good in a space so busy; someone will catch on quick enough when they're stumbling over us, invisible or no. Begging your pardon, my lord. There's no hiding.”

“There is.” Mal jerked a chin toward a tent, one of several nearest the edge of the forest, dark but for a banked cook fire. He knotted the edges of his
basarati
securely about his waist, then drew his knife. “In plain sight. That one, there, Tajit. And the next one over, if need be.”

Mal's warding served them well enough on the edge of camp. The two mercenaries sleeping in the first tent screamed as Tajit took them through an eye and the throat, respectively, but the lone soldier dozing the next tent over neither heard nor noticed, not until Mal ran his knife up through his third and fourth rib, neatly piercing the man's heart. The gush of blood made the mercenary's tunic useless, but his cape and leather helm were disguise enough.

Tajit stripped off his
basarati
and quickly dressed in stolen gear. Liam hesitated only briefly before tugging jerkin and wool cloak off a stiffening corpse. The lad's hands shook as he dressed, but when he looked Mal's way, his mouth was set in a determined line.

“All right?” Mal asked. Tajit nodded. “It's a busy camp. The trick is in convincing yourself you belong. Stay close, look sharp, be bold.”

Liam muffled a nervous giggle. Mal waited until the lad had got himself under control, then banished the warding. The silver light dissipated, and the noise of the mud city grew louder.

“This way,” Mal decided. He strode from the tent, hands clasped casually at his back, and took the closest thing he could see to a path; a churn of well-­traveled eastward trail. Liam hurried after, leather halberd creaking. Tajit followed more slowly.

Mal let his eyelids drift almost shut. Even with the moonlight to guide them, it was easier to follow the constellation of life in his head. The mercenaries and their attendants were stars in Mal's skull, brighter and sweeter by far than the lesser corpse-­spirits drifting alongside. Living energy, flagging in the elderly or ill, muted in the sorrowing or lonely. Here and there an angry flare of red madness, or a darker cast of bitterness.

The brightest stars shone at the center of the tent city, a veritable bonfire of healthy energy. The strong and the hale, Mal thought, gathered protectively around the most important man in the camp, Khorit Dard.

They paused, standing off to the side as a small group of men trooped past. The mercenaries spoke in low voices amongst themselves, vowels liquid and unfamiliar. They paid Mal and his companions no attention. Mal smelled the faint, sweet perfume of flowers burnt in temple offering.

“
Opion
,” Tajit said when the mercenaries were out of earshot. “The poppy. It's said Khorit Dard snares his newest recruits with promises and a pinch of the black pulp, just a taste of false paradise.”

Mal squelched revulsion and moved on.

As they drew closer to the center of camp, he began to worry. Even in the middle of the night the mud city was alive and awake. Servants trotted past on business, brushing elbows and arms in the tight space. Yellow-­eyed men with great shaggy beards squatted in groups around fire or in the dark, silent and watchful. There were women, malnourished camp followers lurking on the edges of busy spaces, hollow-­cheeked and skirted, breasts bared to the air in the custom of desert whores.

Once or twice Mal caught the burnt-­flower stink of
opion
, quickly gone.

When the constellation in his head became too bright to distinguish one star from the next, he stopped. Tajit eyed the bustle ahead from Mal's side.

“We'll not escape notice in that,” he said. “No matter how bold. No matter all the yellow eyes,” he nudged Mal pointedly, “look at their tunics.” Each man, no matter his age or apparent station, wore a stylized red silk flower pinned to his right shoulder.

“We won't get away with thievery again, my lord.”

Tajit met Mal's eye. “You'll be needing a distraction, I think.” Mal startled, but Tajit only smiled, ugly face creasing. “Why do you think Isa insisted I come along, necromancer? Not for the pleasure of a walk in the mud.”

Mal opened his mouth on protest, but Liam tugged his sleeve in warning. “My lord,” he whispered. “That one over there, he's coming our way. Best do something quick, he's wearing a nasty scowl.”