Liar's Island: A Novel (27 page)

Rodrick loped across the grassy hills toward the melee, and saw what he'd most hoped to see: Lais, grappling on the ground with Grimschaw. The latter was hopelessly outmatched when it came to fighting with hands and feet, her jacket flapping open and her face smeared with dirt and grass, but she managed to struggle free and ran awkwardly off toward the jungle without so much as a glance at her writhing band of villains.

Lais didn't give chase, just brushed herself off and waved to Rodrick. He caught up to her, and could tell by her wide smile things had gone well. “Did it work?” he said.

She held out her hand, displaying a more-battered version of the compass they'd found on the weretiger. “It was in the inner pocket of her jacket. She never noticed that I took it. Or that I slipped the diamond into another pocket.”

Dhyana landed beside them. “And did you find the map?”

Lais shook her head, smile vanishing.

The garuda made a disappointed sort of cluck. “That's unfortunate.”

“I'm sure she's committed it to memory as well as I have,” Rodrick said. “I doubt she needs the map to find the site of the treasure, so taking it away wouldn't stop her. But being pursued by the Knife in the Dark should slow her down. If she does decide to take another run at us, we'll see her coming easily with these compasses tracking her every move too.”

“Yes, but when the Knife in the Dark finds her, they'll find the
map
, exactly the thing Jayin was worried about,” Dhyana said. “I don't expect us to kill
all
of the cult, even with your plan, and if any of them get away, and get their hands on the scepter…”

Rodrick nodded. “I've been thinking about that. Our first goal, obviously, is to stop the Knife in the Dark, and take out as many of their number as we possibly can. But after that … we should look for the Scepter of the Arclords ourselves.”

“Do you still harbor dreams of becoming rich, treasure hunter?” Dhyana said.

“I can say, with total honesty, that I want nothing more than to present that scepter to the thakur,” Rodrick said, with actual total honesty. If the scepter was as powerful a legendary artifact as he'd been led to believe, it might be the way to buy Rodrick out of the trouble he was in. Even if he made it back to the Inner Sea, he didn't like the idea of having to duck his head and hide every time he saw someone Vudrani for the rest of his life, for fear it was an agent of the thakur's vengeance. If he could bring a powerful enough offering, and buy enough time to explain things …

“Hmm,” Dhyana said. “It may be best. If we survive the clash with the Knife in the Dark, we will see how well you remember this map of yours.”

“Yes,” Rodrick said. “Continued survival is a necessary prerequisite to any and all of my plans.” He glanced at the sun. It was getting lower. There might not be much daylight left, and he didn't relish the thought of braving the jungle by night. “So should we get on with it?”

“Should we dispatch the survivors first?” Dhyana asked.

Apparently gallantry and bloodthirstiness could coexist, Rodrick thought. “Do as you like, but Hrym's shackles will hold them for a while. We'll be done with all this, one way or another, before they break free.”

“Mmm.” The garuda cocked her head. “Then I'll save my strength for war.”

*   *   *

“Do you blame me?” Rodrick said, walking with Lais through the jungle. Hrym was sheathed on his back, his distinctive hilt wrapped with cloth to disguise him. Rodrick was wearing yellow robes and a cloak borrowed from Jayin's bedroom, both too short, but he doubted anyone would notice. The clothes didn't smell of blood and gore, not really, but Rodrick kept thinking they did. He was more comfortable in the devilfish cloak, but word of its distinctive texture and ragged hem might have reached Nagesh from those who'd tried to hinder his escape in Niswan, and the cultists might be on the lookout for it. Better safe. He wore a mask—a wide strip of yellow cloth with cut-out eyeholes, tied around his head—but he also had the hood of the cloak shadowing his face. Cutting off his peripheral vision seemed like a bad idea, but he wasn't sure the mask was enough to make him unrecognizable to Nagesh. He hoped the rakshasa was still in the capital, but if he was here with the other cultists, he'd probably recognize Rodrick, mask or not. Lais was attired in her usual way, apart from a mask of red cloth, and they both wore medallions taken from dead weretigers prominently displayed on their chests. “For … everything that happened, I mean.”

She frowned. “You didn't realize the cultists could track you, and I know you would have prevented my master's death if it had been in your power. The Knife in the Dark was operating so close to our home anyway, and I'd already clashed with them once … Well. I wish it had been otherwise, but I don't blame you, exactly. Jayin was a good man. His last command was for us to raise the alarm about this cult before they could acquire the Scepter of the Arclords, so they could be stopped. We're working to stop them, if not exactly in the manner he wished.” She glanced at the compass in her hand. It pointed behind them. If the thing gave any indication of how
close
the diamond was, in addition to the direction, they hadn't been able to figure out how to interpret it. If Grimschaw was following, he hoped she was doing it from a great distance.

This was the least planlike part of Rodrick's plan. They didn't know exactly where the cultists were gathered, but it seemed likely the crowd Lais had run into must have been coming from the meeting place or going toward it, so they planned to wander in the general vicinity and hope to find some signs of habitation.

They returned to the site of the fight, and Rodrick's stomach turned at the sight. None of the men they'd trapped had escaped before predators found them. There was little left of any of them except puddles of blood and their boots, still frozen in Hrym's ice. He didn't look to see if any of those boots still had feet inside.

Lais merely said, “That's a relief. If any of them had escaped, they might recognize me, even with this mask.”

And Rodrick thought
he
was the pragmatic one. “Still,” he said. “That's a terrible way to die. I know you snapped at least a couple of their necks in battle, and I've got no quarrel with that, but some of those men were merely unconscious when we froze them. To wake up to something
eating
you…”

“My mother came from the Impossible Kingdoms,” Lais said quietly, walking past the frozen boots without another glance. “She told me a story from our homeland. Once there was an orphanage, caring for scores of children whose parents had died in accidents or battles, a place run by monks devoted to a goddess of mercy. The children were taught to read, and to play music, and were educated nearly as well as children of the merchant caste. No one realized it, but the Knife in the Dark gradually infiltrated that orphanage over the years, until none who worked there were genuine followers of the Merciful Mother, but were all secretly followers of Vasaghati. Once they fully controlled the place, they…” She shuddered.

“Did they kill the children?” Rodrick said. A cult that organized the murder of scores of blameless young ones … people like that might deserve to be eaten standing in their boots.

Her laugh was bleak. “Oh, if only. No. The cultists
taught
the children. They continued to teach them all the things they'd been learning before, but they gave them other instructions, too. They taught the children to worship Vasaghati, until nearly all were made into acolytes of the Knife in the Dark. Their teachers showed them the dark joys of deceit, the thrills of trickery, the sweetness of revenge. Revenge against
everyone
, and against the whole world that had seen them orphaned, left friendless and alone. Those children who were resistant to the teachings had … accidents, usually engineered at the hands of other orphans they believed to be their closest friends. Such treachery was good practice, you see. Those well-trained children were then adopted by childless families, or by those who sought to help the less fortunate. The children went to work destroying those families from within, spreading lies and doubts, even sowing the seeds of murder when they could.”

Rodrick's mouth was dry. Murdering children was bad enough. Taking children who didn't know better and raising them to
be
murderers … he could think of few things more monstrous.

“The cultists who ran the orphanage were only discovered because one child pretended to be a good acolyte, doing unspeakable things to prove his loyalty. He was a brilliant athlete, quick to learn martial arts even at his young age, and when he was nine he was taken in by a wealthy family of the warrior caste, who thought he could have a future serving in the rajah's guard, with proper training. The boy told his new guardians the orphanage was infested by the Knife in the Dark, and when the rajah's ministers investigated, they found the dark goddess's signs hidden away, and some of the younger children confessed. The cult was finally burned out, but the dark monks managed to destroy all the orphanage's records, so it was impossible to find out for sure how many of their tainted students were sent to new families, or where they'd all ended up.”

“How long did the cult run the orphanage?”

She shook her head. “Perhaps as long as twenty years. They destroyed those records, too, and all the cultists who were captured told wildly contradictory stories. They wanted to sow doubt, you see, in the minds of anyone who'd
ever
adopted children from that orphanage—to make them fear their own children. The Knife in the Dark claimed to have established similar holds in other orphanages, too. There were investigations, and no other such infiltrations were found … but the doubt remained. Which is exactly what the Knife in the Dark wanted. They are bitter, vicious people, Rodrick, either by nature or because their brutal lives have made them so. Every one who is eaten by a monstrous lizard in this jungle could mean tens or scores or hundreds of lives spared in the future, saved from their influence. You must not hesitate to kill these cultists when you can. They have
chosen
evil.”

“Don't worry about us,” Hrym said. “We'll do what needs doing.”

Rodrick nodded. At least they were trying to ambush the Knife in the Dark at one of their secret gatherings—facing them head-on would be much easier than trying to root them out of their secret places, and this meeting robbed them of their main strengths, deception and treachery. Perhaps Rodrick and his allies really could deal the cult a decisive blow today.

And if the
rest
of his plan worked out, then they could still get off Jalmeray with a fat chest of gold after all. It felt strange that getting rich and getting away weren't the most important things on his mind. It may have taken some prompting from Hrym, but Nagesh's efforts to enmesh them in the Knife in the Dark's machinations, and killing the man who healed Hrym, really had made Rodrick angry enough to overlook pragmatism for once. Or at least add other motivations.

A figure dropped from a tree branch in front of them—not a weretiger, this time, but a scrawny man even paler than Rodrick, with greasy brown hair and a long nose dwarfed by a boil growing on one side. A black bandanna covered the entire top of his head and his eyes, with ragged holes cut in the cloth to let him see, but that nose was his most distinctive feature; he should've hidden
that
. The fellow was either a wererat or simply abominably ugly, and he looked like the kind of man who would pick his teeth with a filthy dagger. He wore a ring on his finger marked with the circle full of triangles, and he crossed his arms and grinned, showing them yellow teeth. “And where might
you
two delicious morsels be going?”

21

The Conclave of the Knife in the Dark

Lais went tense, compact violence ready to explode, but Rodrick just returned the ratlike man's grin. He hoped there wasn't a code word—they were counting on the medallions to get them past whatever security the cult had. He put on a Taldan accent, one of his most convincing, touched with haughtiness. “The same place you're going, I imagine.”

He nodded. “I'm stuck watching for late-coming stragglers like you. The archaka's address is at sunset, you know.”

Rodrick shrugged. “Some of us might have positions that require more care and concealment in order to slip away.”

The man snorted. “I'm sure, Your Majesty. Taldans don't have much influence on Jalmeray, last I checked. If you're more than a tourist or a visiting scholar I'll eat my own nose.”

“You're making us even later,” Lais said, voice low and dangerous, and the rat-faced man blinked.

“Go on then,” he said, shuffling aside.

They swept past him without another word, on the theory that cultists of the Knife in the Dark were most likely smug, insufferable jerks whenever they didn't have cause to pretend otherwise.

They stepped almost immediately onto a broken path, gray paving stones broken into rubble in some places by tree roots and still whole, if canted, in others. After a few dozen yards they encountered a stone obelisk, twice as tall as a man and as wide as Rodrick himself, leaned at a precipitous angle across the path. The monolith was wound heavily with vines, but Rodrick could still make out symbols carved on its face: wavy lines above a spiral, and a delicate leaf that seemed to be dripping water. Had he seen the latter on temples of Gozreh back home? Maybe, but he suddenly realized it was familiar because it looked a bit like the drawing on the treasure map, only the obelisk was a different shape, and there was a leaf instead of an eye. Not the marker for his treasure, then, but a hint of how it
might
appear. He'd keep his eyes peeled for more obelisks. This was roughly the right part of the jungle, if he remembered the map rightly.