The Heretic Kings (25 page)

The were-ape limbered off at speed, its free hand bounding it forward whilst the short back legs pushed out, a rocking movement which seemed to gather momentum. Bardolin saw that his familiar was being taken towards the stepped pyramid at the heart of the city.

They passed other creatures in the streets: shifters of all kinds, nightmarish beasts that reeked of Dweomer, warped animals and men. Undi at night was a masque of travesties, a theatre of the grotesque and the unholy. Bardolin was reminded of the paintings in the little houses of worship in the Hebros, where the folk were still pagan at heart. Pictures of hell depicting the Devil as master of a monstrous circus, a carnival of the misshapen and the daemonic. The streets of Undi were full of capering fiends.

He should withdraw now, leave the imp to its fate and slip back into his own body, rejoin the others and warn them of what was waiting for them outside the walls of the house in which they were imprisoned. But somehow he could not, not yet. Two things kept him looking out of the imp’s eyes and feeling its terror: one, he felt nothing but stark fear at the thought of abandoning his familiar, and with it a goodly portion of his own spirit and strength; the other was nothing more or less than sheer curiosity, which even in the midst of his fear kept him drinking in the sights of the nocturnal city through the imp’s eyes. He was being taken to someone who perhaps knew all the answers, and as Murad hungered after power so Bardolin thirsted for information. He would remain in the imp’s consciousness a little longer. He would see what was at the heart of this place. He would
know
.

“W HAT can he be at?” Murad demanded, pacing back and forth. The room was lit only by a few tiny earthenware lamps they had found among the platters and dishes, but the burning match of the soldiers glowed in tiny points and the place was heavy with the reek of the powder-smoke. Bardolin lay with his eyes open, unseeing, as immobile as the tomb carving of a nobleman on his sarcophagus.

“Two foot of match we’ve burnt, sir,” Mensurado said. “That’s half an hour. Not so long.”

“When I want your opinion, Sergeant, I’ll be sure to ask you for it,” Murad said icily. Mensurado’s eyes went as flat as flint.

“Yes, sir.”

“It’s dark out,” Hawkwood said. “It could be he’s waiting for the right moment. There are probably guards and it’s only an imp, after all.”

“Sorcerers! Imps!” Murad spat. “I’ve had a belly-full of the lot of them.
Brother
Mage indeed! For all we know he could be in league with his fellow necromancers, plotting to turn us over to them.”

“For God’s sake, Murad,” Hawkwood said wearily.

But the nobleman wasn’t listening. “We’ve waited long enough. Either the mage has betrayed us or his familiar has met with some mishap. We must get out of here unaided, by ourselves. Sergeant Mensurado—”

“Sir.”

“—I want that door down. Two men to carry our slumbering wizard—Hawkwood, your seamen will do. We’ll want as many arquebuses ready as possible.”

“What about Gerrera, sir?” one of the soldiers spoke up, pointing to their fever-struck comrade who lay on his litter on the floor, his face an ivory mask of sweat and bone-taut skin.

“All right. Two more of you take him. Hawkwood, lend a hand there. That leaves us with seven arquebuses free. It’ll have to do. Sergeant, the door.”

Mensurado and Cortona, the biggest men in the company except perhaps for Masudi, squared up to the hardwood double doors as if they were an opponent in a fight ring. The two men looked at each other, nodded sombrely and then charged, leading with their right shoulders.

They rebounded like balls bounced off a wall, paused a second, and then charged again.

The doors creaked and cracked. A white splinter line appeared near the hinges of one.

Three more times they charged, changing shoulders each time, and on the fifth attempt the doors sagged and broke, the beam which had closed them smashed in two, their bronze hinges half dragged out of the wall.

The company hesitated a moment as the echo of the crash died away. Cortona and Mensurado were breathing heavily, rubbing their bruised shoulders. Finally Hawkwood raised one of the earthenware lamps and peered out into the gloom of the foyer beyond, in which they had met the old man Faku and his helpers. The place was deserted, the door to the street closed. The night seemed eerily silent after the jungle noise they were used to.

“There’s no one here, it seems,” he told Murad. He lifted the lamp this way and that. There was a stone staircase at the back of the big room. The running water of the pools had stopped except for an occasional drip. Shadows wheeled and flitted everywhere like restless ghosts.

“Now what?”

“We’ll search the other rooms,” Murad said. “Mensurado, see to it. It may be that the imp is lost somewhere upstairs or nearby. And that Kersik woman may still be around.”

Mensurado led a trio of soldiers upstairs.

“I don’t like it,” Hawkwood said. “Why leave us unguarded? They must have guessed we were capable of breaking down the door.”

“They are magicians and sorcerers, every one,” Murad said. “Who knows how their minds work?”

They heard the boots of Mensurado and his comrades clumping above their heads, then snatches of talk, and finally a cry, not of fear, more of surprise.

Hawkwood and Murad glanced at one another. There was a flurry of voices above, the thumping of feet and heavy things scraping across the floor.

Mensurado came running down the stairs. “Sir—take a look at this.” He was holding a handful of coins.

Normannic gold crowns. On one side was a depiction of the spires of burnt Carcasson, on the other a crude, stylized map of the continent. Bank-minted money belonging to no kingdom in particular, but used in the great transactions between kings and governments. Coins such as this bribed princes, bought mercenaries, forged cannons.

“There are chests and chests of the damned stuff up there, sir,” Mensurado was saying. “A king’s ransom, the hoard of a dozen lifetimes.”

Murad bit into one of the coins. “Real, by God. There’s chests of the stuff you say, Sergeant?”

“Hundredweights, sir. I’ve never seen anything like it. The treasury of a kingdom could not hold more.”

Murad threw aside the coin; it fell with a sweet kiss of metal on stone. “Everyone upstairs. Leave Gerrera and the mage here for the moment. I want every pouch and pocket filled. You shall each have your share, never fear.”

He and Mensurado had a glitter in their eyes that Hawkwood had not seen before. As they left the room Hawkwood bent down beside the motionless Bardolin and shook him.

“Bardolin, for God’s sake wake up. Where are you?”

No answer. The old mage’s eyes remained wide open, his face as immobile as that of a corpse.

It sounded as though cascades of coins were being poured over the floor upstairs. Sharp blows as someone attacked a chest, splintering wood. Hawkwood felt no urge to join in the greedy festival. He loved gold as much as the next man, but there was a time and a place for it. As Mihal left his side to chance his luck upstairs, Hawkwood curtly ordered him back. Both Mihal and Masudi looked at him imploringly, but he shook his head.

“You’ll see, lads. Nothing good will come of this gold. Me, I’ll be happy to get out of here with my skin intact. That’s riches enough.”

Masudi grinned ruefully. “You can’t run with your pockets full of gold, I’ll warrant.”

“Nor eat it, neither,” Mihal added, resigned.

The soldiers began staggering downstairs, pockets bulging. They had even stuffed coins down the front of their shirts, giving themselves rattling paunches. Four of them were bearing two wooden chests between them. Murad descended last, holding up a lamp and seeming a little dazed.

“We’ll come back,” he was saying in a low voice. “We’ll come back with a dozen tercios one day.”

“I’d rather we had the tercios now,” Hawkwood rasped. “If you want to leave this place, we’d best be going at once. There’s no telling when that Gosa and his creatures will be back.”

“I am not unaware of the need for urgency, Captain,” Murad snapped. “What we carry away with us here could outfit an entire flotilla of ships, and can you imagine the backing I could call on when it became known that the Western Continent was stuffed with gold? We could bring an army here, and extirpate these monsters and sorcerers from the land for good.”

“It’s gold, yes, but minted in the form of Normannic crowns, Murad,” Hawkwood said. “Did you think of that? What are they using it for, if not to spend in the Old World? We know nothing about what is going on in this land, or how it affects the Ramusian states at home.”

“We’ll find out another time,” the nobleman said. “For now, all I want is to get clear of this place. Mensurado, the door. You men, pick up Gerrera.”

Lumbering, rattling and clinking, the soldiers gathered themselves and prepared to leave.

But the door opened before Mensurado got to it. A black-skinned figure dressed in white stood there. The old man, Faku. His mouth opened.

A shot, amazingly loud in the confined space. Faku was hurled back out of the doorway.

“One less sorcerer,” Mensurado snarled, and reloaded his arquebus with practised speed.

“We must move quickly,” Murad said. “That shot will rouse the city. Out! Bring the chests.”

What with the chests and the limp forms of Bardolin and Gerrera, only Mensurado and two other soldiers had their hands free. The company filed out into the hot night, stepping over Faku’s body as though it were a pothole in the road. Hawkwood closed the old man’s eyes, cursing under his breath.

“This way. Quickly,” Murad said, leading off. The company followed him at a jog-trot, sweating and gasping ere they had gone a hundred yards. Coins slipped out of the soldiers’ pockets to clink at the roadside.

The city seemed deserted. Not a light to be seen anywhere, not a living soul on the streets. But Hawkwood was continually aware of movement, like a flickering at the corner of his eye. The place was so dark that it was impossible to be certain. He looked up to see a disc of star-filled sky above the crater-rim, and was almost sure he saw things moving in that sky, wheeling darknesses which stood out against the stars. He had the uncomfortable notion that the city was not quiet and empty at all, but teeming with invisible, capering life.

The company paused to rest in a narrow side street, the soldiers who carried the heavy chests massaging their bloodless hands. They had come half a mile maybe from the house in which they had been imprisoned, and there was still no sign of a pursuit. Even Murad seemed uneasy.

“I thought the entire city would have been about our ears by now,” he said to Hawkwood.

“I know,” the mariner replied. “Everything is wrong, strange. What happened to Bardolin’s imp, and to Bardolin himself? Why can’t he come back to us? Are we being allowed to escape because—”

“Because what?”

“Perhaps because they have what they want.”

Murad was silent for a long minute. At last he said: “It is a pity about the mage, but if you are right then we may yet get away unscathed. And after all, we bear him with us. His mind may yet return.” He would not meet Hawkwood’s eye, but scanned the massiveness of the buildings, the trees which were beginning to rear up in their midst; they were not far from the crater wall, and the narrow gorge which was their only exit.

“Time to move on.”

The soldiers shouldered their burdens once more, and the company staggered onwards. The attack came so suddenly that they were surrounded before they had seen their assailants. The night was sprinkled with raging eyes, and huge forms charged them. The quiet was broken by roars and screams and wails from a hundred bestial throats. The men at the rear died before they could even drop the chests that weighed them down.

FIFTEEN

A T the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.

Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-night of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable—it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe—but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.

“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.

Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.

There was a man on the platform. He had come out of nowhere and stood with the starlight playing across his features. He seemed amused.

“An attractive little familiar. We in Undi do not use them any more. They are a weakness as well as an asset. Are they still as hard to cast through as I remember?”

Bardolin’s voice issued out of the imp’s mouth. The creature’s eyes went dull as he dominated it completely.

“Hard enough, but we get by. Might I ask your name?”

The man bowed. “I am Aruan of Undi, formerly of Garmidalan in Astarac. You are Bardolin of Carreirida.”

“Have we met before?”

“In a way. But here—let me spare your trembling familiar. Take my hand.”

He extended one large, blunt-fingered hand to the imp. The creature took it and Aruan straightened, pulling. But the imp did not come with him. Instead a shimmering penumbra slid out of its tiny body as though he had dragged from it its soul. He was holding on to Bardolin’s own hand, and Bardolin stood there on the platform, astonished, glimmering in the starlight like a phantom.