The Bronze of Eddarta (11 page)

I smiled. “I’m not going anywhere,” I said. “And I’d rather watch you. Who’s winning?”

“Me,” growled the biggest man, who was missing one ear and several teeth. “You can watch. Quietly.”

I nodded, and moved closer. It was a fast game, with rules that were slightly different from those I had learned from Bareff and Liden during my short stay with the Sharith. I became so completely absorbed in the action of the
mondeana
, the dicelike playing pieces, that I was surprised by a light touch on my shoulder.

I turned around to face a very small man, while the clatter and hooting at and around the dice table crashed into absolute silence.

“I’m Obilin,” the little man said. Then he hit me in the stomach.

It was a sharp, high-powered jab of surprising power. He delivered it with his left hand, and I saw his right get ready to swing at my head as I doubled over. I let my knees fold, so that I dropped clear to the floor, moving faster than he expected. Then I swung my body to my left, catching Obilin’s midriff on my shoulder, and heaved myself upright again, sending the little man flying into the air. While I took short, quick breaths to try to get back my wind, I watched Obilin right himself in the air and come down on his feet.

Chairs scraped away from the table behind me, and I heard the clinking as the coins and mondeana were gathered up hastily.

“Wouldn’t you rather do this outside?” I suggested. “Not much room to move around in here.”

The smile was still there, and I heard a soft, whispery laugh that made my skin crawl.

“Good,” he said. “No questions. No complaints. Immediate grasp of the situation. Very good, Lakad.

“But, to answer your question, no, we’ll stay here. A fighter has to be aware of his surroundings, as well as his opponent, don’t you agree?”

One minute he was standing quite still, nearly ten feet away from me. Suddenly he was on top of the table next to me, a kick heading for my chin.

I ducked aside, grabbed for the moving leg, missed it, grabbed for his balance leg, but it was already gone. He was on the floor on the other side of the table, bouncing.

You certainly are a fast mother, Obilin
, I thought at him, as I hit the floor to dodge his two-fisted dive across the table.
And smooth
, I added, as I watched him somersault down the narrow aisle between tables and come up on his feet, facing me.
How can you judge distances so well?

The answer occurred to me almost immediately.

Because you’re not distracted by defending yourself, that’s how. You stage these fights in here to keep your opponent a safe distance away from you. Your game is all offense, Obilin
, I realized.
Let’s see what happens when you’re cornered.

The other men in the room were reclining on the benches against the walls. If I’d had time, I would have been surprised that they weren’t calling bets back and forth, or encouraging one of us. But they were quiet, and I noticed that only long enough to be glad for the chance to give my complete attention to Obilin.

He came at me again, aiming his right arm and using the inertia of his self-propelled body to add weight to the intended blow. I stepped aside with the intention of snagging him and pinning him down—but he had anticipated me. His right hand missed me, but his left hand came up out of nowhere and slammed the side of my head, and sent me reeling. I let myself go loose, and I groped for support from a nearby table, lowering myself to the bench. Obilin closed in, the smile unchanged on his face, his short stature towering over me where I sat. Then he made his first mistake.

He grabbed my head with both hands, to steady it as a target for his knee. I let him begin the knee jab, but then I snapped my head up, grabbed that upraised leg, and yanked with all my strength. Obilin was
very
quick; I felt his body register the danger the moment I touched his leg, and he tried to brace himself to resist. But that hard pull brought him down, with his legs scissored around the bench. I had time to deliver one sharp, backhanded blow before he slipped away from me, rolled, and stood up.

The smile still looked the same. It still scared me.

“Well done, Lakad,” he said. “You impress me. Still, the true test of a fighter is in his sword work, wouldn’t you say?” He held out his hand, and someone slid a sword, hilt-first, across the nearest table to me. I left it there.

“Well, Lakad?” he said, gesturing at the sword.

Suddenly, I wanted to laugh.
Didn’t I watch this scene in a pirate movie with Burt Lancaster?
I wondered, a little hysterically. Then I looked at Obilin’s face, and a new thought chilled me. That smile was genuine, and reflected real pleasure, real anticipation.

I stopped being scared, and started to dislike Obilin. A lot.

I picked up the sword, just in time to block his first blow. He was fast, but not really strong. As long as I could anticipate him, and get a block up in time, he couldn’t touch me. But the very speed of his attack kept me backing away, and on the defensive.

Same game plan
, I realized.
All offense.
I realized something else, looking into the small man’s grinning face.
The way to get hired on around here isn’t to beat this guy. If I win, he’ll hate me. On the other hand, if I lose badly, he’ll have no reason to hire me. I need to show some capability, and then lose. And somehow, in the process, stay alive.

That last seemed to be the hardest part, because there was no doubt that Obilin was sincerely trying to kill me. If I
gave
him an opening …

I had backed up against a table, and suddenly the chance I needed was there. He brought in a low slash and, instead of blocking it, I jumped the blade and scrambled up on the table. On my knees, I had the advantage of extra striking room in a downward swing, and for an instant, Obilin was defending himself against the overhead attack.

Then he did what I expected; he grabbed a leg of the table and heaved, to knock me off balance. I fell off, banging my shoulder on the stone-paved floor, and when I stopped rolling, I felt a sword point against my throat.

The smile was still there. “You’re hired,” he said, and put away his sword.

I spent the next couple of hours getting acquainted with the area and with the rules, courtesy of a wrinkled old man who seemed to be a butler-type person for the barracks. He issued me a sword—to be used until Sendar came off duty and returned my own (Thymas’s)—and delivered all his information in a bored monotone, eyes and voice aimed into the air above my left shoulder.

My quarters were surprisingly comfortable—one large room, divided into sleeping and visiting areas. The duty roster was complicated, but not hard to live with. A series of shifts (six hours on, six off) for three days, then one full day off. Meals were served in a community room, except on your day off Then, if you requested it, a woman would serve your dinner in your rooms, and stay with you through the night.

So that’s what Sendar meant by the “extra benefits” to be had by working for Pylomel.

“The High Lord is very generous,” I said to the old man, whose name was Willon. “Who do I ask for this extra service?”

“The High Lord ain’t got much to do with it,” Willon said, looking straight at me, finally. “You ask
me
when you’re ready.”

“Ah-huh. And how much do I pay
you?
” I asked.

“Not a zak,” he said. I must have let my skepticism show, because he got defensive. “Oh, I get paid, all right—a portion of what they get. And
before you ask
, you don’t pay them, either. The Guard has a friend who really appreciates the work we do.”

Suddenly, it all made sense. “Would this friend’s name be Gharlas?”

The old man peered at me suspiciously. “How’d you know that?”

I shrugged. “I may have just come into town, Willon, but I know how to keep my ears open. And,
before you
ask, my mouth is shut.”

“Good,” he said, with an emphatic nod, and the matter was closed. “You’ll be on the supper shift this evening, so you best take a short rest.”

I did, in fact, lie down on the fluffy pallet for a few minutes. But I was too restless to sleep.

So far, I had been able to control the execution of our plan, at least to some extent. I had been very lucky, too—I was well aware of that. But I had been the one taking action, and I had felt a sense of confidence, knowing that success or failure were, for the moment, entirely my responsibility.

Now it was different. The next step was Tarani’s play. I felt a different kind of confidence in her, a sureness that she would do whatever was necessary. But not being able to
see
what she did was like an unreachable itch.

Finally, I went into the common room. I watched the mondea game for a little while, sat in for a few rounds. But I kept feeling more and more restless, and finally had to excuse myself and walk around. I found myself in the court between the barracks and the “back door” of Pylomel’s home.

Tarani/Rassa was coming through the entryway, followed by two slaves who were loaded down with bolts of cloth.

She gave me a strained smile, and I grinned back in relief. She was totally unsurprised to find me waiting for her.

So that’s what a mild compulsion feels like!
I thought.
That paralysis Gharlas laid on us in Dyskornis must have been something different—a blocking, rather than a forcing. But he was able to compel Thymas
, I remembered, and shivered in sympathy for what the boy must have suffered.
I’m glad that kind of power scares Tarani.

I felt another mental nudge, and moved out into the courtyard so that my path intersected Tarani’s. Her hand caught my arm, and I fell into step beside her while I watched a shadowy, semitransparent version of myself move past and out of the way. I pulled my arm through her fingers until I could hold her hand, and I squeezed it, hoping the pressure would give her some reassurance.

She was trembling, but I was at a loss to guess whether it was the strain of the illusion—two illusions, now that I was “invisible”—apprehension about the situation, or anticipation of meeting her mother. I kept close to her, exactly beside her, hoping that I was minimizing the effort she needed to keep the illusions intact.

Instead of following the well-marked pathway which led to the front door of the huge house, Tarani and I followed an extension of the courtyard to a small door in the back of the building—the servant or merchant entrance. As we approached the doorway, the guard stepped aside to let a small man come out into the court. I had no difficulty recognizing Obilin. He grinned widely when he saw Rassa, and deliberately took a stance which blocked the entry.

“So you’ve made the wise choice, after all, Rassa?”

Tarani stopped, and her hand tightened in mine.

“The only choice I have made is to obey the summons of Zefra, who has asked me to design a gown for her for the Celebration Dance. Please, let me pass by.”

“Why, of course, dear dressmaker,” he said, stepping to our right and waving the entourage through with an elaborate bow. But his grin never faded, and as Tarani passed him, one lightning-quick hand closed on her arm. He leaned close to her and whispered: “But you don’t think, for a minute, that you will leave here again before the High Lord gets what he wants, do you?”

“My concern now is what the lady Zefra wants. Release me.”

He did, and it was a good thing. There have been few times in my life when I wanted so badly to hit somebody. But I realized, as Tarani and I walked carefully through the doorway into the High Lord’s home, that it wasn’t Obilin I wanted to hit.

I finally pinned down the source of the uneasiness that had plagued me since Tarani and I had assumed the identities of Rassa and Yoman. I had had the feeling that both of them had been running away from something specific. Now it seemed so simple that I wondered why I hadn’t figured it out before now.

The talk I had heard last night had been full of complaints against the High Lord’s habit of appropriating any woman among his landservants who caught his fancy. It was only a now-and-then sort of thing, apparently, or resistance to it would have been more cohesive. But the women never returned to their homes.

Rassa had met with Zefra frequently, so that Pylomel would have had many opportunities to see her and be attracted by her unusual beauty. There had been some warning of his interest, and Yoman had made the choice to leave his entire life behind, in order to save his daughter from that fate. Yoman didn’t tell us that Pylomel was his landpatron—perhaps he feared we would guess the situation and back out on the plan which promised him and his daughter a better chance of escape.

So Yoman had sacrificed two strangers for his daughter’s safety. Try as I might, though, I couldn’t blame him. The face I
really
wanted to smash was Pylomel’s.

Inside the entryway, Tarani pulled me aside and gestured to the two slaves to go ahead of us. They went, walking with a quiet acceptance of their burdens which seemed less stoic than merely resigned. Tarani sighed softly as we started to follow them. I looked at her, and I put my arm around her for support while we walked through a labyrinth of hallways.

I feel like a white rat
, I thought, hopelessly trying to keep track of the twists and turns in the route we covered. It seemed as though every High Lord since Harthim had added his own shape and taste to the building. I had a vague sense of remaining near the garden side of the house, and I was sure that we were on the second floor, but I also knew it would be hopeless to find our way out again without help.

I hope Zefra is on our side
, I thought.

Finally, the slaves slowed and stopped. Tarani straightened up, and only our hands touched as we passed the slaves to stand in front of a large double door. There was a guard on either side of the door; I felt naked and exposed, and I thought:
If
Tarant’s illusions can hide me when I’m face-to-face with these guys, they can do anything.