Thieves' World: Enemies of Fortune (12 page)

His guess had to be at least partly right. Though the alleyways and narrow streets through which they passed were not ones Pel normally traveled, he knew they were approaching the palace. Naturally, she did not advertise their arrival by marching up the long approach to the well-guarded gate. Instead, she joined the slow-moving queue of suppliers and workers who trudged toward the dimly lit postern gate and the kitchens. Pel would have thought that one among them would have turned to notice the bundle of bronze silk among them, as distinctive as a jewel on a burlap sack, but not one of them looked up from his or her burdens. Either they were well schooled with beatings or threats to ignore the sudden presence of their betters, or she carried some magical device on her to conceal herself. No, it wasn’t magic, he realized, as he shuffled forward in between a barrowload of cabbages and a herd of goats hoping to get at the sweet-smelling green globes ahead of them. It was fear. He’d heard of the Irrune response to those who failed to heed their customs. Pel could almost scent the waves of dread as the silk-clad figure pushed by, heading for a corridor that led off the main passageway to the right. He was well-familiar with the smell, having inflicted it on hundreds, if not thousands, of sinners during his life as the embodiment of Wrath.

A flash of gold in the flickering torchlight, and his guide slipped out of view around the corner. Pel pulled his satchel out of the mouth of a flat-faced goat, who was chewing vigorously on the strap, and hurried after her. He had taken only a few steps into the sudden darkness when the door behind him shut with a loud
clang!
All light was cut off. Pel spun back and tried to pull it open. The heavy latch had snapped behind a heavy bar. His fingers fumbled over a sharp-cut keyhole, but no key. He was trapped!

For a moment the events of his past life shot through his mind like an evil children’s picture book. Had he been lured here to join his former associates in humiliating and painful death? He fumbled in his satchel for the vial of poppy. He might have time to down it, and float off to eternity in peaceful oblivion, before they dug out his eyes and sewed him into a sack.

In that moment, he became aware of a soft blue light beside him no brighter than the phosphorescent glow of rotting fish. The glittering eyes regarded him above a palm-sized globe from which the gleam emanated. They looked amused.

“Stay close,” she said. The blue glow floated away into the blackness.

Willing his heart to slow down to a normal pulse, Pel obeyed.

Rumors of secret passages riddling the many levels of the ancient palace were proved true as the quivering light led Pel along narrow corridors of stone, up unexpected flights of stairs, and down ramps with low ceilings he never saw until his forehead impacted with one. Blinking stars of pain out of his eyes, he hurried to catch up with the will-o’-the-wisp who guided him. Far away he could hear noises and hollow voices like ghosts, but they never encountered another living creature. The rats avoided these passages as much as humans did.

After an eternity in the cold, damp darkness, he emerged suddenly into a warm, stifling blackness in which smoldered the red-gold coal in the heart of a single brazier. The blue glow vanished. Another smell, that of putrefying flesh, caught at Pel’s throat and made him cough.

A low voice, near to the fire, chuckled.

“Makes you sick, eh? I’m attached to it, can’t get away from my own stink.” The accent was Irrune, coarse and hearty.

“Who … ?” Pel began, but his own voice failed him.

“Call me … call me Dragonsire,” the man said. The joke appeared to please him. He chuckled some more. A pair of slender, fair-skinned hands appeared near the faint light and poured dark liquid from a slender-necked pitcher into a heavy goblet. Another hand, dark in contrast to the woman’s, reached out. The cup disappeared into shadow. “Ahhh! Wine, ser?”

“Er, thank you,” Pel said, realizing how dry his throat was. A cup was pressed into his hand by the unseen server. It was surprisingly heavy. Pel guessed that it must be made of gold. The rough shapes of stones studding the bowl scraped his fingers. He hesitated before drinking. “Er, how may I serve you?”

“Right down to business? Good.” The figure sat up. Pel thought he knew what to expect as the firelight touched its face, but he still gasped out loud. Arizak. “Do not fear me. Heh! If anything, I have more to fear from you.”

“What, ser?” Pel asked. Sweat filmed his face and palms. He had to grasp the big cup in both hands to keep it from squirting away from him.

“I don’t fear pain. No Irrune does. I don’t fear death. We welcome a good death. But this!” Arizak gestured at his leg with a disgusted hand. “This is not a good death. I am disgusted by it. It’s not a clean battle wound, an ax through the neck, a sword in the belly, a dagger tearing out your heart. No! It’s like being eaten alive by slugs. Look!”

He pulled a cloth off his lap. Beneath his left leg lay outstretched, the end propped up on a painted stool. There was no foot.

As nervous as Pel felt suddenly facing the ruler of his city he was taken even further aback by the limb the Irrune chief now revealed to him. The original wound must have been a fearsome one, but it had disappeared in seeping pillows of flesh that had been a healthy pink and had turned an angry red, even going black in small patches that Pel knew would grow. He sucked in his breath. The rot would have to be cut away if the limb was to be saved—if it could be saved at all. The leg must have been very painful. When he looked up, Arizak’s gaze held his, strong, confident, and weary.

“I have three sons,” the Irrune lord said. “Each wants to rule after me. My eldest is the strongest. He is not often here. He does not like Sanctuary. I don’t like it much myself. He came here at my behest this week—you may have heard. The greatest product of this place is talk. Everyone talks to everyone.”

“Yes, lord, I knew.”

Arizak slammed the heavy goblet down on the arm of his chair. “He did not show decent respect. I will not take that, not while I draw breath. I want to be whole again, healer, as whole as I can be. I want to ride out and teach my miserable offspring the truth about the name he bears. If he survives, well, maybe I’ll let him rule one day. When my time is over. But my time is not over yet. Not yet.” The face grew more craggy as from a throb of pain.

“Why me, my lord?” Pel asked, full of pity. “You have healers and magicians in plenty. The best in the land.”

The shrewd gaze met his eyes and locked them in place. “You must have been born in a basket, man,” he said. “They are all corrupt in this city, men and women alike. It comes from living inside these rotting walls. If you had the clean air all around, you’d have to be an honest man. Here, you can hide your sins.”

“He is honest,” said the soft voice of the woman who had guided him. Pel looked around for her, but the brazier’s light fell short. The shapes he saw beyond it could have been curtains or pillars or tapestries. The blue light reappeared, rising until it was between Pel and the unseen woman. “The stone affirms it. No great faults here—fewer than most men, as though he was a young child. I wonder why. Perhaps he
was
born in a basket.”

Pel opened his mouth and closed it again. To correct her he would have to explain his rebirth, and that admission would cost him his life. He knelt over the wound and prodded it gently. Every poke made the flesh twitch, but the Irrune lord said nothing. He had impressive self-control. He had to be in agony. Most of Pel’s patients moaned and cried over splinters in the thumb.

“Can you do anything?” Arizak asked, after a time. “You can say no, man, and leave here with your skin. I just want truth, that is all and everything to me. If you can cure me I will reward you well. If you cannot, I will be glad of your candor. I am so weary of the shite-eating hypocrites in this city, it would be worth a bronze wristlet to hear an honest answer.”

“I can try, lord,” Pel replied. The stink of the rotting flesh made his throat tighten. “Such a wound has to be treated inside and outside. If your constitution is hale enough, you may be cured, with Meshpri’s aid.”

“Pah!” The Irrune ruler spat a wine-tinged gob on the floor. “Keep your false godlings to yourself, Wrigglie. If you’ve got any skill in your fingers Irrunega put it there.”

“I apologize,” Pel said, and went back to his examination. Meshpri aid him, indeed! He had never seen such decay in a wound on a living being. Yet, he felt the flesh. In spite of the cold he felt warmth in them, and when he pinched a patch of intact skin down near the tortured ankle, the color rushing back to it was visible even in the poor light. Automatically he felt behind him for his pouch. Without his having to ask, the unseen serving woman came forward with the blue ball in her hands. Its illumination increased to a pure blue like a cloudless sky, easy for Pel to distinguish which herb packet was which.

“What do you need?” the soft voice of his guide asked from the shadows.

“Water and wine,” Pel replied, untying packets. “This will take more than one treatment, probably many. Best would be water drawn from an open stream under a waning moon, to assist in closing the injury. But we must heal the infection first, not shut it away inside your flesh.”

“Shut away, like me in this frog-filled city,” Arizak growled. “Go ahead, then.”

He sat back in the big chair. Pel could now see that it had been carved out of a single piece of wood, a master’s work. Dragons reared their heads under each of the ruler’s big hands, and another loomed up to form the chair back. From all accounts that was the way Arizak lived: surrounded by dragons, not one as benevolent as the wooden ones who supported him. Perhaps his truest supporters were here: the silent serving woman and the gold-eyed lady who waited in the dark.

The serving woman brought him a small table, and set the pitcher of wine upon it. A small metal pan, bronze by the glints of light the fire struck off its sides, was placed on the brazier to heat. Pel willed himself to concentrate, to allow his mind to step away from this dark and troubled place, to the hamlet where his life had started over. Instead of the Irrune ruler, he pictured a farmer whose leg had been sliced by his plow blade, and had been too stubborn and too busy with the planting to come in to have it seen to until his wife forced him. He glanced up into the golden eyes of the woman waiting by the wall, and guessed that this case was much the same.

P
el stood up and exercised his long back. Arizak had drained the cup of medicine he had mixed and was watching him with speculative eyes.

“What do you make of it, healer? You’ve eased some of the pain. Good start. Can you
cure
my frog-rotting leg?”

Pel opened his mouth to speak.

“Yes,” a woman’s voice interrupted him, at the same time a young man’s voice said, “No.”

Surprised, the healer looked around for the speakers. The ruler lifted an eyebrow.

“A mummer as well, you can throw your voice in two different directions. Give me a straight answer, and keep your ventriloquism to amuse those shite-eaters in the Maze. I want a straight answer.”

“I don’t know, ser,” Pel replied, getting his own voice back. “But I will try.”

“Good enough.” Arizak turned to the woman with the golden eyes. “Take him back.”

A
ll the way through the dark streets, Pel wondered whence had come the voices that had spoken out in Arizak’s chamber. Once the bronze-clad lady had illuminated the room with the globe she now held shielded in her hands he could see no one but the four of them. The old man had seemed surprised but not alarmed, so it was no one concealed behind the walls. Clearly, Arizak believed Pel had manifested them.

Pel had a different interpretation, though he scarcely dared even to think it: Meshpri and Meshnom had spoken, there in the small stone room. The healing gods had watched over him, and given him the ability to heal, this he knew, but they had never before manifested themselves. What did it mean? In the gentle goddess’s eyes, all patients were the same, with rank, age, wealth having no impact upon her gift to them. Yet not only did the gods speak out regarding this patient, but they disagreed on his prognosis. It meant to Pel that Arizak was at a turning point, neither too ill to recover nor guaranteed to live, and that his life must impact the health and well-being of many others.

The Avenue of Temples was silent this dark night. Voices and footsteps rang from the depths of the surrounding city. Only the soft brushing of their feet on the stones could be heard. Pel paused. Was that another set of feet behind them?

He couldn’t tell. When he stopped, they stopped. It might have been an echo in the man-made valley of stone. If she heard, his guide made no indication. Just before they reached Pel’s shop, he thought he saw a very small figure, darker than the darkness, slip in between two of the ruined buildings. A spy? A would-be thief? A patient in need of Pel’s services who did not wish to reveal him- or herself yet?

Inside, the woman set down her blue stone. It glowed gently, then faded.

“I leave this with you, healer,” she said. “When my lord has need of you, it will burn with the blue fire. Follow where it leads. It may not be to the same place as tonight—I do not know. Will you come?”

“I will,” Pel promised.

“And no word?”

“None.”

She inclined her head, and slipped out into the moonless night.

S
hiprisday bloomed bright and hot. Pel toiled as hard as any of his patients paying their debts; harder than some, of course. Once again, Miskegandros, fabric merchant and sufferer from gout from his overindulgence in the foods he loved and could afford, lounged at the side of the field shouting orders as though he was the master here. Pel should have insisted on cash from the Rankan, but Miskegandros was disinclined to part with any for his weekly dose, and, truthfully, Pel thought a day’s hard gardening would do the man more good.

“Up, good ser,” Pel said, playfully, urging the merchant to his feet with the flexible tines of the rake that the man had discarded. “By my reckoning you have five hours to go.”