Joel Rosenberg - [D'Shai 01] - D'Shai Read online

  No. I couldn’t let him. Fhilt was a better acrobat than I was, but if he couldn’t see something as obvious as which room was the armory, he didn’t have the right kind of mind to figure out what was evidence.

  “No,” I said. “I’m good enough, and I’d better do it.”

  There was a long silence, and then Enki Duzun nodded. “I’ll go and get Large Egda. You’re going to need him.”

  “Now?” Fhilt asked.

  “Now,” she said. “We don’t have much more than an hour until the show, and Large Egda has to be back for it.”

  I had finished checking the gear. It was fine. “Let’s go.”

  Less than an hour left to showtime, and the show must go on.

  “Again, Egda, again.”

  I guess I must have let a trace of my frustration show in my voice, because he dropped the rope and sighed.

  “I am not that clumsy,” he said, “except with things that I haven’t practiced. I haven’t practiced this, Kami Khuzud.” Slowly—deliberately slowly—he tried again, throwing the end of the rope in a long arc.

  Nobody was watching us; the security within Lord Toshtai’s walls lies in the walls themselves, and in the watchers on the walls, and in the warriors surrounding Lord Toshtai.

  This time, the rope snaked over a branch better than the best-trained of Evrem’s pets.

  But it wasn’t the branch I was going to walk over on; it was the branch just above it.

  “Egda, you put it on the wrong—oh.”

  Oh. Of course; that was precisely the right branch to be looping it over.

  He smiled, tolerantly. Large Egda is usually patient with the rest of us, even when we’re not patient with him. He let me get a good grip on the rope and then hauled away, just like it was part of the act. I sailed up and into the air, and dropped down onto the limb.

  For a moment, I teetered, and almost lunged for the trunk.

  But an acrobat keeps his balance, and I had to be an acrobat, so I reached down into me, and found balance, if not kazuh. Balance alone would have to do.

  Waving Large Egda away, I pulled the rope up, and coiled it.

  Time to reconnoiter, if I could do it. I was a bit low; I couldn’t quite see into the armory, so I climbed to the limb Large Egda had used as a fulcrum, skinning my shins in the process.

  It looked good—there was a clear space on the marble floor inside the armory, lit by the lamps overhead. The only trouble was that I couldn’t tell whether or not there was anybody inside the armory; the fact that the lamps were lit was a suggestion that, whether or not there was anybody inside, the armory wasn’t shut for the night.

  Then again, armorers are renowned for working late, and for having to keep long hours, for the same reason that smiths have to.

  What could I say if he caught me?

  “Well, good evening to you, Lord Refle, and how is Your Lordship this evening? Theft? No, no, Lord Refle, my entry here is just a new routine in the ever-expanding attempts of the Troupe of Gray Khuzud to give new entertainments to our beloved ruling class.”

  No. I could probably come up with better last words than that.

  It was time either to commit myself or to give up.

  I took the coiled rope and pitched it into the armory, through the open window. Now I would have to go get it. It would be good to raise kazuh, but I wasn’t a kazuh acrobat.

  But perhaps, even if I couldn’t raise kazuh, I could make everything real.

  It’s important to visualize, I remembered Gray Khuzud saying, to make a routine concrete in your mind before you do it.

  You have to—

  —see the world spinning around you as you tumble through the air,

  —hear the roar in the rush of blood to your head as you pull yourself into a tuck, spinning the world around you twice,

  —taste the dryness of your mouth as the catcher pulls you out of the sky,

  —feel the unyielding smoothness of the trapeze beneath your hands and the resilience and vigor of the wire beneath your feet,

  —take the stuff of dreams and fantasy and spin it around your mind, twisting it into reality, making it happen.

  I lowered myself to the branch and visualized the routine, just as though I was planning a tumbling run.

  Two little steps, and then one big bound, and then a push and dive—if it all worked right, I’d catch myself on the windowsill, and complete the tumble, rolling gracefully to my feet, sorry that there was no appreciative crowd to give me my well-earned applause.

  I visualized it, tried to spin reality out of my wanting: the first step, my shod foot slipping on the rough bark—

  No, that wouldn’t do.

  I slipped my shoes off and set them in a branch crotch, trusting to my bare feet to grip the bark tightly.

  So: I would—

  —take the first step, rough bark hard beneath my bare foot, my body’s inertia resisting the motion as I pushed hard with calf and thigh, to

  —move myself into the second step, arms out to my side for balance, my speed increasing, the second step fading into a

  —bound, giving momentarily at the knees, while I took in a last breath of air, and then

  —spring, putting neck, back, buttocks, thighs, calves, ankles and toes into a leap that would

  —push me outwards in a flat arc, somersault me over the windowsill into a roll in the room, coming up to my feet solidly, my only regret that there was no audience.

  I would bow, though. Just for the practice.

  I smiled. No use waiting any longer.

  I took the first step, the rough bark painful beneath my feet, thighs straining, and pushed hard with calf and thigh, moving myself into the second step. My arms fluttered for balance and found it as my speed increased, the second step becoming a two-footed bound as I bent at the knees, then put my whole body, from neck to toes, into a push that sent me into a flat arc toward the window, the world rushing by.

  I caught the edge of the windowsill and pulled myself over into a tuck, but I over-rotated and my hands slipped from the sill.

  I slammed down on the marble floor.

  Hard.

  * * *

  7

  Fall

  IT WOULD HAVE been convenient if the world had gone away for a while, while I lay there, breathless, in pain.

  But it didn’t, and eventually I found that I could breathe again, if not particularly well, nor with anything resembling comfort. Slowly, gingerly, I tried to move, then thought better of it. I think I had cracked my head on something—probably the floor—but it had been after I hit; I had reflexively curled properly. If Refle had walked in on me, he certainly would have been within his rights to draw his sword and pin me like a beetle against the floor, and he probably would have done it.

  But the door was closed, and it remained closed, and after no more than a few centuries of shock and pain I was able to roll over on my side and then to my belly, and then to get my hands and knees under me.

  My back and shoulders were a mass of bruise and pain. I’d definitely cracked my heel and head against the floor, and my left shoulder hurt too badly even to try to move it.

  But, amazingly, I didn’t think I’d broken anything. While I resented the amount of my life that practice took, one of the nice things about the upkeep of an acrobat’s body is that well-developed muscles can protect the body against certain kinds of damage, and it seemed that being slammed against a stone floor was among those kinds of damage.

  I vaguely remembered doing some of the right things: tucking my chin down toward my chest to protect my head, slapping back with my arms to suck up some of the motion into my chest muscles, slamming my feet down so that my feet and legs would drink up some of the rest, arching my back just a trifle so that my spine would bend instead of snap.

  Even when the mind is clumsy, the body remembers, and an acrobat has to learn how to fall.

  As Gray Khuzud always said, an acrobat also has to learn how to get up after a fall.
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  With a grip on a nearby workbench and a superhuman effort I stood, wobbly as a baby, hurting as much as an old man.

  Pain or no, I had to finish up here. My coil of rope lay in the corner; I almost blacked out as I picked it up and slung it around my shoulder, but I held on.

  If Refle was going to dispose of the evidence, the obvious place was his forge. The forge, a hulking monster of steel and stone, stood waiting in a corner, the coals banked, the ankle-straps of the bellows neatly coiled.

  Large as it was, it still didn’t look big enough to be the source of swords and armor plate, but I really didn’t know enough about the process, and was neither likely to learn nor there to learn.

  I took a piece of metal and poked at the ashes.

  Nothing; just banked coals, waiting for air and fuel to bring them to fiery life.

  Over against the opposite wall, two racks of spears and one of swords stood waiting. I couldn’t tell whether they were waiting to be repaired or waiting to be run through some peasant’s belly, but I expected that they’d do for either.

  I scratched at my own belly, although the motion hurt.

  I hefted one of the swords, the wooden grip warm against my fingers. I hadn’t ever held a sword; it’s not something that peasants, acrobat or no, do a lot of.

  It seemed strangely light for its size, perhaps compared to the knives we used in the act. I always thought of them as remarkably heavy things, but this weighed about as much as a juggling wand, perhaps less.

  The balance was wrong for my hand, or maybe not—the sword seemed to want to slash through the air, but my aching body definitely didn’t want to slash anything through the air, or move quickly at all.

  I wasn’t here to play with swords; I put it back.

  A rack of miscellaneous weapons hung on the wall—a pair of battigs, a daw, three small maces, and a dozen truncheons: leather-wrapped rods, suitable for smashing bones when you didn’t want to kill, or wanted to kill slowly, by crushing bone after bone. Any of them could have been the one he had beaten me with, but all of them looked new, the leather polished to a high shine, the wrist-thongs unworn.

  Refle was a diligent worker, either as a would-be assassin or as an armorer. Or both.

  Battered worktables, covered with all sorts of devices, lined the adjacent wall. I took a quick inventory.

  There were weapons in recognizable states of assembly or repair—Refle seemed to be in working on the lock of a coward’s bow—some of the items were clearly tools, and there was one table with half a dozen stone pots about the size of preserves pots, each containing an oily liquid.

  I didn’t think they contained preserves, and I didn’t stick in my finger to check what it was. There are some things you don’t need to know.

  Nothing there, but what had I expected? A box, neatly labeled “EVIDENCE NECESSARY TO PROVE I AM GUILTY OF A COVERTRY. (signed) REFLE”?

  I went to the wardrobe next.

  It was larken-built; the sides and doors were made of thousands of separate apparently randomly shaped pieces of wood, some as large as a thumbnail, some as small as a splinter, each one carefully glued into place. Like all of the best larken-built work, there was no evidence of the glue used to hold it all together—the pieces were individually beveled in from the surface.

  They do larken woodwork in many of the domains, but this wood had the burnished redness of Agami mahogany. A friend of mine in Agami was the daughter of a woodworker, and this seemed much like what I had seen in her father’s shop, except that this was huge—there would have been enough room inside for Large Egda and me not only to stand, but to play a game of lopses while we stood.

  I slid my finger down the front of the door, looking for a catch.

  Agami woodwork, be it larken-built wardrobes or apparently simple pine boxes or wall panels, tends to have hidden catches, and often several abditories. The Agami woodcrafters are tricky: one or another of the pieces of wood actually conceals the catch, and the hidden, spring-loaded metalwork is so finely made that it can be worked simply by pressing on the proper place, or places in those with more complex lockwork.

  I guess I must have pressed on the proper place, because the wardrobe door swung open, sliding smoothly and silently on lacquered bone hinges.

  My heart beat painfully hard as I stepped inside, over a pile of blankets and tarpaulins, pushing past hanging cloaks and robes, looking for a specific hooded cape.

  Coats, tunics and capes hung inside; some of the capes were hooded, but most were filigreed or embroidered, except for one that was decorated with silver-thread edging.

  Not one of them was the plain black cape that Refle had worn when he had beaten me.

  No luck there; I’d try for the gloves. The first drawer I opened was empty; the second was filled to overflowing with gloves. I guess the hands of the members of our beloved ruling class are always cold.

  I had been looking for a cape and gloves. There were enough gloves here to satisfy Evva Ugly Hands of the children’s tales, but none of them was the plain pair that I remembered. It probably shouldn’t have surprised me, but I had been counting on finding the evidence. Properly confronted with the clothing he had worn, Refle might have made a break, or perhaps if he had found the cape and gloves missing from the place where he had concealed them, he might have had to sue for peace.

  That would have been fine. I wasn’t exactly eager to forgive him for trying to beat me to death, but if it was the choice between that and his finally succeeding, I was willing to be the forgiving type. A peasant, even an acrobat, has no need for the sort of pride that gets a kazuh warrior challenged.

  Time to go.

  I was halfway out of the wardrobe when a key snicked in the lock, and the hall door started to swing open. My heart thumping loud enough to hear, I was barely able to swing the door back toward me, closing it almost fully, leaving just enough of a crack to see through.

  Closing the hall door behind him, Refle stalked across the armory, a canvas bundle under one arm, a leather roll of tools under another. He set the tools down, then turned to lock the door behind him, all the while muttering something to himself, something I tried to catch but couldn’t.

  I pulled the wardrobe door closer to me, not quite daring to shut it. For one thing, it might have made a telltale click; for another, I wasn’t at all sure I could work the lock from inside.

  That would be less than wonderful.

  There was a rustling, and a clumping, and then some creaking noises.

  I pushed the wardrobe door open a fraction, to see him over at the forge. He was pumping it up, his right foot in the bellows strap, whipping the bellows into a hot fury, although there was nothing in it to heat.

  And then he carefully, gently, opened his canvas bundle, and laid a black cloak and a set of gloves on top of the fire, and worked the bellows even harder, maniacally.

  I watched as he burned the cloak and gloves, then stirred the ashes.

  He left; I heard his key snick in the lock.

  I poked at the ashes.

  Nothing.

  Oh, the poker turned over a scrap or two of cloth, and I was able to dig deep and find a small piece of very well-charred leather, but Refle had been thorough; certainly nothing large enough to be recognizable remained.

  I knew that he was guilty, but I couldn’t prove it. I slammed my fist down on a table, then regretted it immediately, both for the noise and for the pain it caused me.

  Thanks to Refle and to my own clumsiness, I had taken two serious beatings in as many days ...

  ... and there wasn’t a thing I could do about it.

  It was dark outside, and the show would be starting soon, so I doubled the rope around a beam, and then climbed down to the ground, pulling the rope after me.

  I had time for a quick dinner before the evening show, but I wasn’t really hungry.

  Injuries happened not infrequently among members of the troupe, with the decided exception of Gray Khuzud himself, who always seeme
d immune to both disease and damage. Not the rest of us: every once in a while, Sala would slip off her rope, or Evrem would get a minor bite, or Enki Duzun would twist an ankle, someone would come down with a fever, or come down with a cold and lose their sense of balance. Fevers were usually minor, although we could never really forget that it was a fever that had taken Davana Escabay, Enki Duzun’s mother and mine, shortly after Enki Duzun’s birth.

  So the company was used to substituting; it didn’t even count as an improvisation.

  Under the light of hissing lanterns, Fhilt and Enki Duzun split my opening, rolling onto the sand in parallel cartwheels that blended swiftly into a duet tumbling act that Large Egda joined as catcher and thrower.

  Even from the third-floor window, it looked good. Their three sizes, from little Enki Duzun to Fhilt to Large Egda, played off each other, making their double shoulderstand appear even taller than it really was, and Enki Duzun’s fall, land, tuck-and-roll even cleaner, more impressive. Three oiled bodies twisted and moved in the flickering light, and then left the sand to loud applause.

  The musicians just kept up, the lead silverhorn purring out a complex, if uninspired, set of scales.

  Sala was next. Instead of watching her, I tapped at the highwire, rewarded by the right twang. Nice and tight, which was good, considering how Enki Duzun planned her transition from the floor act to the sky act.

  I thought for a moment of crossing the wire over to the platform so I could go up into the rigging and check the trapeze. The argument I would have given Gray Khuzud would have been that, what with Sala and Evrem doing a duet down in the sand, in the light, nobody would be looking up in the dark at the wire for a simple crossing. But we had already checked out the traps earlier, and Gray Khuzud had told me that I was just going to do support for this show, and to keep out of trouble.

  So I stayed there.

  One of the Eresthais patted my shoulder, gently enough that it didn’t even hurt.

  “In just two days, Kami Khuzud, we will be back on the road, and by the time we reach Bergeenen, you’ll be back in the show.”