The Warlord's Domain Page 6

  "Where is he, sir, and how do I find him? The usual way?" Tagen always made sure to ask that before the Commander told him how; it sounded better when people could hear you had been thinking for yourself. He knew he wasn't clever the way Commander Voord was clever, but he could talk well about weapons and armor and mountain-climbing and feats of strength and all the things that he was good at if he was given a minute to think of what to say.

  "The usual way. Contact the tulathin, pay them what they want and find out what their spy-net knows. Then go and get him."

  "And if he's not alone, sir? The usual again?" Tagen was hopeful, because if he was finding out things from the tulathin then this business was a secret, and there was only one good way to keep a secret.

  "Yes. Leave no witnesses. Go do it, Tagen. Dismissed."

  * * * *

  The kortagor and his squad clanked through another salute before they faced about in drilled unison and left Voord alone again. He was smiling a little, but nothing like the grin which Tagen had been wearing, a happy expanse of teeth similar to those of an attack hound offered fresh raw meat. Voord always felt slightly inadequate when dealing man to man—or man to doom-machine, which was how it often felt with Tagen. The soldier, intimately close and twelve-year-faithful friend though he might be, seemed sometimes no more than a weapon in human form, an intelligent petrary missile to be launched against one's enemies, and no more capable of recall. There had been times before, as there would doubtless be times again, when Voord had cause to wonder what would happen if the need arose to call him off, and whether Tagen would pay heed to any countermand without the presence of the man he had called "The Commander" for eleven years regardless of existing rank. Turning him on was easy; he reacted to the phrase Enemy of the State as an oil-filled lamp reacted to a burning taper, but so far as turning him off again was concerned, Voord had no idea how to snuff out Tagen's fire once it was lit.

  He relaxed a little, and was wondering whether to call for wine or just get out of this damnably uncomfortable chair and fetch it for himself when Hault reappeared in the doorway. "Engeul Gernai, my lord," the guard announced, stepping aside to let a stocky man into the room and continuing to speak without regard for how this new listener might receive the words. "I searched him myself. He's clean."

  The man was indeed as unimpressive as Hault's earlier disparaging description had suggested. He was small and balding and prosperous, if prosperity meant a roll of fat around the waist. For all the fatness there was a haggard look about him, as if he had missed several nights of sleep. But he wasn't the class of person who usually requested to see a senior Kagh' Ernvakh officer; more often it was the Secret Police who wanted to have words with people like him.

  "Well?" Voord was getting tired of being stared at and he was also growing hungry. "Well," he said, "what do you want?"

  "I wanted to see you, sir," the man said hesitantly, plainly afraid of the company he had asked to enter. "I'm a merchant. Of Jouvann."

  Voord blinked, bored already. If all this creature wanted was some sort of license to sell his wares, then why in the Name of Darkness had he been allowed to get in here and waste important time which could be spent in doing other things, like eating. He lifted one eyebrow wearily, wondering if the change of expression would be noticed or if he would need something rather less subtle—like having the merchant beaten out of the citadel—and it was as if that single eyebrow was the floodgate that released a stream of babbling.

  "I sell wine, my lord." Gernai made the announcement as if it meant something important. "All the wine of the Empire and the Provinces, and some excellent spirits. You may buy from me by the single bottle, or my merchant company can provide for the needs of any gentleman's cellar. At present I can offer you Seurandec, Brightwood, Briej, Hauverne Kingswine—where I can give you both a three-year and a seven-year vintage, one to offer to acquaintances, my lord, and the other to keep for yourself and your friends—red and white Teraneth, and—" The man's flow of words tailed off as Voord held up one hand for silence.

  "You don't need to speak to me, Gernai. From the sound of it, the castellan would be more your man. But I'm curious; why did you ask for Eldheisart Voord?"

  "I used the name and the rank I knew, my lord. Are you not that man? My apologies for wasting my lord's time…"

  "Your information is several-months out of date, man; several months and several promotions. You address the new Grand Warlord of the Empire!"

  "Oh, I see."

  The Jouvaine merchant sounded much less impressed than Voord had expected him to be. And there was something else, something niggling that he couldn't place just now. One of those annoying little matters which nag at the back of the mind, evading sleep until the answer comes just before dawn. Voord tried to dismiss it, but the question would neither become clear nor go away.

  "But are you the same Eldheisart Voord that I was told to find, my lord… ?"

  The man was persistent at least. "Yes, I am, was, whatever," Voord snapped. "Come to the point of all this before I have you thrown out." And what was the matter with… ? His accent, that was it. "You have a Jouvaine name. Why don't you have a Jouvaine accent?"

  "My lord is wise—" Engeul Gernai began, prelude to some oily flattery, and was cut short when Voord interrupted with none of the studied courtesy he had been trying to maintain.

  "What goes on here?"

  "My lord sounds afraid." The man calling himself by a false name made a forceful gesture with one hand and uttered a grunt of effort like someone lifting a heavy weight. Behind him the tall doors of the chamber quivered once from top to bottom and slammed shut with a heavy boom. The double clank as both bolts shot home into their reinforced slots was almost an afterthought in the wake of that huge noise. "My lord is well advised to fear."

  "Your accent is Vreijek," Voord said.

  "I never had the knack of simulating other voices, Lord-Commander Voord. How did you come by the new style and title anyway? Your usual method? Never mind. I didn't come here to see the Warlord; I came to see the officer who was Imperial Military Adviser to Lord Geruath Segharlin—the man who was so friendly with my daughter…"

  "Ar Gethin." The crows were coming home to roost with a vengeance.

  "Yakez Goadec ar Gethin. Her name was Sedna. She was beautiful…"

  "Who told you to ask for me?" There was threat here no matter what Hault had said—he would be dealt with later—but Voord was still little enough concerned to have some room for curiosity.

  "Another of your women, Voord Ebanesj. Another of the many, boys and men and girls and women, whom you used for your own purposes and twisted up and threw away. Kathur the Vixen sends you greetings, and says you should have killed her."

  "So I should indeed." Voord looked at the fat little Vreijek and stretched his mouth into a smile like a snarl. "That error can be remedied more easily than the slut will believe possible."

  "Kill. That's all you know, Voord—just as that was all you could think to do when my daughter found out the truth behind your scheming—"

  "Scheming? Scheming? Yak'ardec ar Gethin, you have a mind like a playwriter! Twisted enough to give challenge to Osmar himself, I think." Voord had been sitting up very straight in the harsh Warlord's chair; now he allowed himself to relax, unconcerned, innocent of whatever accusations this stupid old man was flinging about like seeds at planting-time. "Listen to me, merchant, father and"—a glance at the still shut and bolted doors— "passable sorcerer, I had nothing to do with your daughter."

  "Had you not, then? So why is she dead and you alive and higher than you were?"

  "I am being patient with you… very patient. More patient than my custom with irritating provincials and far more patient than your manners deserve. Now shut your mouth and listen, because I'll say this only once: I did not kill your daughter. I barely knew your daughter. She was the mistress of Crisen Geruath, son of the local Overlord, while I was no more than Imperial Adviser for the Segharlin and Jevaiden
Military Districts. There was no love lost and almost no communication between—"

  "Liar. Liar! I had expected more courage from you, or at least more originality. If you were Imperial anything at all, then why do I find you in a position of such authority here in the Woydek-Hlautan, the Warlord's Domain where the Emperor's mandate is ignored? Answer me that!"

  "Ah." Voord's slouch of studied relaxation froze as if a poisonous reptile had appeared in the room—or one of those reptilian lesser demons of far-too-close acquain-tance. "You prepared your arguments quite well, ar Gethin, didn't you?"

  "Yes, I did. It was stopping my ears to what I learned that I found hard. Your name appeared at every turn, and each time it appeared there was more blood on it. Crisen Geruath is dead, his father the old Overlord is dead, Prokrator Bruda who was your senior officer while you pretended to be a member of the Emperor's Secret Police—he's dead, too; Kathur you raped and broke with your fists…" Yakez was working himself into a passion that would end in one of two ways; either he would attack with whatever that cretin Hault had let slip through his search—Voord's right hand moved inside his tunic and found the knurled-steel grip of the slender dagger that went everywhere with him—or he would break down…

  Fingers still tight around the dagger-hilt, Voord watched dispassionately as the old man dropped on to both knees and folded over his own anguished sobs. There was an exposed place the size of a florin coin on the exposed nape of ar Gethin's neck, and Voord was torn between driving his knife-blade into it or using the pommel to stun so that the Vreijek could be sliced to dripping shreds later and at leisure. He debated too long for either chance, because the old man straightened abruptly with more energy in his short fat frame than anyone of such a shape had right to own.

  Someone… several someones were hammering at the outside of the door, jolting it on its hinges and making the wrist-thick bolts clatter derisively. Apart from the noise, they were producing no effect. Yakez Goadec ar Gethin stood up very straight, and for all that he had to tilt back his head on its thick neck, he looked Voord in the eye. "There are so many things that I would like to do to you," he said, "but all of them would end in death. Kill, die, death, that's all you know, that's your only solution. Voord, I am no sorcerer. I learned only the two spells: one for the door, to let us have this little chat without interruption, and one other. Because I looked at what was left Of Sedna when you and the thing you conjured up were done, and I read the books in her locked library cabinet…"—Voord's narrowed, watchful eyes went wide—"and I decided to be merciful. I decided to take death away from you."

  He reached into the money-purse strapped to his belt and pulled out its lining in a chiming shower of coins. A lining that was fine, smooth leather, as fine as the binding of the book that still rested on Voord's lap. The same leather, even to the grain…

  "NO!" Voord's voice soared to a scream as Yakez flung the flap of woman's-leather at him and he felt it strike his face, felt it stroke against his cheek as warm and soft as the innermost skin of a lover's thigh. The scream was drowned by a monstrous crash as the doors, their bolts snapping back in response to the same gesture which had first locked them, flew open under the weight of shoulders pressed against them.

  Tagen was first in, his regulation shortsword already clear of its sheath and lacking only something to cut. Voord supplied that something; flinging out his hand, he pointed at Yakez as the small man smiled up at him and roared, "Take that one!"

  Whatever the meaning of the order, no matter what words were in it, Tagen heard only the words which he had always heard in a command uttered with that urgency. His balance shifted as he ran forward, the fist holding his sword swung back, reached the high point of its swing and came whirring down. He didn't hear what the small man was saying, or make sense of the Commander's frantic shout, but saw only that his target neither dodged nor ducked, and corrected the arc of his sweeping stroke as much by deadly reflex as intent.

  "And my death will seal—" Yakez had begun to say.

  "Don't hurt him, you damned—" Voord had begun to shout.

  But the sound of Tagen's sword as it sheared off the Vreijek's head made a thick, wet nonsense of all the words. Blood splattered everywhere, over the steps, on the newly-scrubbed floor, onto Tagen's armor and all over Voord's feet as Yakez Goadec ar Gethin's severed head smacked against the stone between them.

  The torso didn't remain upright the way they sometimes did; it didn't stagger, sway or even reel, but slammed straight down after its own head under the impetus of the blow. Breathing hard, Voord looked at it for perhaps a hasty count of five and then glared at Tagen.

  "I said no, Tagen. You disobeyed my direct order."

  "Commander, I heard you cry out and I saw this one in a threat position. If I had waited, he might have—"

  "Enough. It doesn't matter." Small use having a perfect instinctive killer like this one and then expecting him to behave like someone normal … "Be about your duties."

  The itch was just a tingle on his skin, an irritating need to scratch. Voord's wave of perfunctory dismissal became an unembarrassed raking of his ribs that was such a relief, that felt so good… until his fingers sank to the knuckles in the sorcerously healed stab-wound that suddenly reopened in his side. He looked down and saw it, and went chalk-white with shock. Then the pain hit him, all the rending anguish of a sword-thrust in the belly, so that his back arched convulsively and a reflexive jerking in the muscles of his legs sent him tumbling from his seat down on to the bloodied floor.

  There was no blood of his own, only the gash with his hand in it and the sickening wash of agony that was worse even than when he gave the use of his left hand in sacrifice to the Old Ones. Voord had thought his maiming was the most terrible pain that he had ever borne until this moment.

  He was wrong. Even as he squirmed on the blood-greased tiles, first one hole opened in his head and then a second in his neck; the ragged punctures left by Alban telek darts. There was a crater of splintered bone above his right eye, and beneath his chin the clearly visible cartilage of his gullet had been perforated so that even his screaming sounded strange.

  Some of the soldiers who had come running to the rescue choked, and retched, and fled, while others remained but clenched their teeth and gazed in every direction but at the man they had thought to save… who, pierced by wounds that should have killed him three times over, still writhed and shrieked and tried without success to die.

  Chapter Three

  The sword was red oak, straight and smooth and polished, and it had been in his hands since the gray time just before dawn. More than two hours of striking-practice, with only enough rest breaks to prevent his muscles from cramping in protest as they blurred the sword through cut and thrust, parry and block, or brought it to those snapping stops which require as much control as any sweeping stroke.

  He had spent years learning how to be lethal with a sword. Years of focusing the force of a strike; years of learning how to bring steel edge and human anatomy together with an executioner's rather than a surgeon's skill; years of learning how to deliver the classic cuts with no thought for what they did.

  To face a human being perfect in the eyes of the Power which had made it; and to strike it with a sword perfect in the eyes of the smith who had forged it, in a movement perfect in the eyes of the master who had taught it. From the sum of all that perfection, defeat left only food for worms.

  And what—or Whose—was the purpose behind such a consequence as that… ?

  Aldric looked at the wooden taidyo braced in his hands. Even now, ostensibly relaxed and with his thoughts turned inward, he had adopted the ready posture of mid-guard-center, a stance from which he could develop three separate killing forms. He breathed out through his nostrils, the breath drifting away in twin plumes like smoke on the cold air, and lowered the weapon's point with slow deliberation to the ground. Only then did his gaze shift to the left, to where she awaited his attention; and all at once the winter's chill
ground through the glow of well exercised muscle. He shuddered, just once, but with such violence that it brought both rows of his teeth clattering together.

  The taiken lay an arm's length from where he stood, resting on an austere sword-rack of unvarnished pine. Black lacquer, black leather and black steel, all a stark contrast against the snow and the cross of straw-pale wood.

  Isileth.

  Widowmaker…

  The blade, in its many-times-refurbished mountings, was twenty centuries old. Aldric looked at her, as he had often looked before, and wondered again in silence: How many widows? How many lives? How much blood have you drunk in your two thousand years of life, my cold mistress?

  She would drink his blood, given the chance. Or Kyrin's. Or anyone's. For all the courtesy that they were granted, taikenin were never so proud as the men and women who carried them. Whether of prince or of peasant, any death—all death—served as their nourishment. He leaned his weight on the taidyo, driving it down through the churned snow between his feet and into the dirt beneath, and decided that this morning at least he would leave Isileth at rest within her scabbard.

  "Brooding again, are you?"

  Aldric jerked sideways to face where Kyrin, well wrapped in a deeply-hooded, fur-trimmed overrobe against the snow that hung in the leaden sky, came stepping delicately through last night's ankle-deep fall. He hadn't heard the sound of her feet, and her voice had made him jump; this in itself precluded any denial of her gentle accusation. Even though he tried.