An Empire Unacquainted With Defeat (29 page)

My god, I thought. This could be me if I keep on the grog . . . . I forced honesty. I was looking at what I had been when I had committed my murders, and most of the time since.

All I could see was ugliness.

The drunk stared at me. His eyes grew larger and larger. He glanced over the crew, peered at the Old Man.

A long, terrified whine, like the plea of a whipped cur, ripped from his throat.

"Priest!" the Old Man snapped.

Priest materialized.

"This man recognizes us. Man, this is Priest. Do you know him, too? You do? Good. I'm going to ask some questions. Answer them. Or I'll let Priest have you."

The drunk became so terrified that for several minutes we could pry no sense from him at all.

He did know us. He had been a sailor aboard one of the warships that had helped bring us to our doom. He had been one of the few lucky survivors. He remembered the battle as if it had taken place yesterday. Eighteen years and a sea of alcohol had done nothing to erase the memories.

Eighteen years! I thought. More than half my lifetime . . . . The life I had lived before boarding
Vengeful D.
The whole world would have changed.

Colgrave persisted with his questions. The old sailor answered willingly. Priest shuffled nervously.

Priest had been the great killer, the great torturer, back when. He had loved it. But the role did not fit him anymore.

Colgrave learned what he wanted. At least, he learned all the drunk had to tell.

A moment of decision arrived. The old sailor recognized it before I did.

It was the moment when a man should have died, based on our record.

A black bird squeaked somewhere in
Dragon
's rigging.

"There is a ship at the wharf," Colgrave said. "Barley! The keys." Barley came. Colgrave gave the keys to the drunk. He stared at them as if they fit the locks in the one-way gates of Hell.

"You will board that ship," Colgrave told him. His tone denied even the possibility that his will might be challenged. "You will stay there, drinking the rum behind the lock those keys fit, till I give you leave to go ashore."

The watchbird squawked again. Excited wings punished the night air.

Fog started drifting in from the Estuary. Its first tendrils reached us.

The drunk looked at Colgrave, stunned. His head bobbed. He ran toward
Dragon.

"Bowman, come," Colgrave said. "You've been to Portsmouth before. You'll have to show me the way to the Torian Hill."

I did not remember ever having been to Portsmouth. I told him so, and suggested that Mica be his guide. Mica was always talking about Portsmouth. Mostly about its famous whorehouses, but sometimes about its people and their strange mores.

"You will remember," Colgrave told me. He used the same tone that he had directed at the drunk.

I remembered. Not much, but enough to show him the way to the Torian Hill, which was the area where the mercantile magnates and high nobility maintained their urban residences.

Dawn launched its assaults upon the eastern horizon, though in the fog we were barely aware of it. We began to encounter early risers. Some instinct made them avoid us.

We passed out of the city proper, into the environs of the rich and powerful. Portsmouth was not a walled city. There were no gates to pass, no guards to answer.

We broke from fog into dawn light halfway up the Torian Hill.

It was not like I remembered it. Mica's expression confirmed my feeling.

"There's been a war pass this way," he said. "Only a couple years ago."

It was obvious. They were still picking up the pieces. "Where are we going?" I asked Colgrave.

"I don't know. This's the Torian Hill?" Mica and I both nodded.

Colgrave dug round inside his rags, produced a gold ring.

"Hey!" Mica complained. "That's . . . ." He shut up.

A glance from Colgrave's eye could chill the hardiest soul.

"What is it?" I asked Mica.

"That's my ring. I took it off the wizard's ship. He said I could have it. I put it down in the ballast with my other things."

"Must've been more than just gold."

"Yeah. Must have been." He eyed Colgrave like a guy trying to figure how best to carve a roast.

He would not
do
anything. We all had those thoughts sometimes. Nobody ever tried.

Colgrave forced the ring onto a bony little finger, closed his eyes.

We waited.

Finally, "That way. The creature is there. It sleeps."

I caught the change from
he
to
it
. What had changed Colgrave's mind? I did not ask. During the climb he had become the mad captain again.

People began to notice us. They did not recognize us, but we were a piratical crew. They got the hell away fast.

Some were women. We had not laid hands on women in ages . . . .

"Sailmaker." Colgrave said it softly. Mica responded as though he had been lashed. He forgot women even existed, let alone the one he had begun stalking.

We came to a mansion. It skulked behind walls that would have done a fortified town proud. The stone was gray, cold limestone still moist from the fog.

"Bowman, you knock." He waved everyone against the wall, out of view of the gateman's peephole.

I pounded. And pounded again.

Feet shuffled behind the heavy gate. The shield over the peephole slid aside. An old man's eye glared through. "What the hell you want?" he demanded sleepily.

Colgrave dropped the cloth concealing his face. "Open the gate." He used the voice that had made Mica forget a skirt, that had driven a drunk aboard
Dragon.

The old man croaked, "Gah . . . . Gah . . . ."

"Open the gate," Colgrave told him.

For a moment I did not think that he would.

The gate creaked inward an inch.

Colgrave hit it with his shoulder. I lunged through after him, nocking an arrow. Colgrave seized the gateman's shirt, demanded, "Where us he? The thing in red?"

I do not think he knew the answer. But he talked.

Something growled. Barley eased past us and opened the mastiff's skull with a brutal sword stroke. Priest silenced a second growler.

Men charged toward us from behind shrubbery, from behind trees. They had no intention of talking things over. They had blades in their hands and murder on their minds.

Yet it was not an ambush. Ambushers do not pull their pants on as they attack.

"I don't think we be welcome," the Trolledyngjan drawled laconically.

I sped a half-dozen arrows. Men dropped. The crew counter-charged the rest.

"Do it quietly!" Colgrave ordered.

They did. Not a word was spoken. Not a warcry disturbed the morning song birds. Only the clang of blades violated the stillness.

I sped a couple more arrows. But the men did not need my help. They had the defenders outnumbered. I turned to Colgrave.

He had the gatekeeper babbling. Aside, he told me, "Lock the gate." I did.

"Come on, Bowman." Colgrave stalked toward the mansion. He left the gatekeeper lying in a widening lake of blood.

A black bird scolded from the limestone wall.

This was the Colgrave of old. This was the mad captain who killed without thought or remorse, who fed on the agony and fear of his victims . . . .

The creature in red was not going to be pleased with him.

I recovered my spent arrows, running from victim to victim so I could keep up with the Old Man. I recognized some of the dead. They had crewed the sorcerer's ship.

The thing they dreaded had overtaken them after all.

"Where are we headed?" I asked Colgrave.

"Cellars. The thing's got to be hiding under the house somewhere."

"Hey! What's going on?" A sleepy, puzzled, powerfully built gentleman of middle years had come onto the mansion's front porch. He still wore his night clothes. Servants peeped fearfully from the doorway behind him.

I never found out who he was. Somebody important. Somebody who had thought he could get the world by the ass if he allied his money and political pull with the magical might of the creature in red. Somebody driven by greed and addicted to power. Somebody laboring under the false impression that his mere presence would be enough to cow low-life rogues like ourselves. Somebody who did not know that deals with devils never come out.

He was in for a big disappointment quick. Nobody faced Colgrave down.

The Old Man grabbed him exactly the way he had grabbed the gateman. The man lunged, could not break Colgrave's hold. "The thing in your cellar. What is it?"

The man's struggles ceased. He became as pale as a corpse. "You know?" he croaked. "That's impossible. Nobody knows. He said that nobody would ever find out . . . ."

"He did? Who is he? What is he?" Aside, "Tor. Toke. Surround the house. Be ready to fire it if I call."

"No! Don't burn . . . ."

"Colgrave does whatever he damn well pleases. Answer me. Where is he? Why did he call us back . . . ?"

"Colgrave?"

"Colgrave. Yes. That Colgrave."

"My God! What has he done?"

I bowed mockingly. "They call me Bowman. Or the Archer."

He fainted.

The servants scattered. Their screams dwindled into the depths of the house.

"Priest. Barley. Mica. Bowman. Trolledyngjan. Come with me." Colgrave stepped over our host, into the house.

"Catch one of the servants."

Mica came up with one in seconds. She was about sixteen. His leer betrayed his thinking.

"Not now," Colgrave growled.

Mica, too, was reverting.

"Girl," Colgrave said, "show us the way to the cellar."

Whimpering, she led us to the kitchens.

"Barley, you go down first."

Barley took a candle. He was back in a minute. "Wine and turnips, Captain."

"Girl, I'll give you to Mica if . . . ."

Something screeched. Lamps overturned and pottery broke in a room behind us. I whirled. A black bird waddled into the kitchens.

I said, "She probably doesn't know, Captain. It's probably a hidden doorway."

Hatred flamed from Colgrave's eye when he glanced my way. "Uhm. Probably." He fingered the gold ring he had plundered from Mica's hoard. "Ah. This way."

We surged back into the front rooms. Everyone pounded panels. "Here," said Colgrave. "Trolledyngjan."

The northman swung his ax. Three resounding blows shattered the panel.

A dark, descending stairway lay behind it. I seized a lamp.

"Barley goes first," the Old Man said. "I'll carry the lamp. Bowman. I want you behind me with an arrow ready."

It would be tight for drawing, but I had my orders.

The stair consisted of more than a hundred steps. I lost count around eighty. It was darker than the bottom side of a buried coffin.

Then light began seeping up to meet us. It was a pale, spectral light, like the glow that sometimes formed on our mastheads in spooky weather. Colgrave stopped.

I glanced back up. The servant girl stood limned in the hole through the panel. The waddling silhouette of a black bird squeezed past her legs. Another fluttered clumsily behind her, awaiting its turn.

We went on. The stair ended. An open door faced its foot. The pale light came splashing through, making Barley look like a ghost.

He went on. He was shaking all over. There was nothing in the universe more deadly than a terrified Barley.

Colgrave followed him. I followed Colgrave. Priest, Mica, and the Trolledyngjan crowded us. We spread out to receive whatever greeting awaited us. Barley was a step or two ahead.

The creature in red reposed on a dark basaltic throne. The floor surrounding it had been inscribed with a pentagram of live fire. The signs and sigils defining its angles and points wriggled and gleamed. The floor itself seemed darker than a midnight sky.

This was the source of light. The only source. There were torches atop the red thing's throne, but they were not alight.

The creature's eyes were closed. A gentle smile lay upon its delicate lips.

"Kill it?" I whispered to Colgrave. I bent my bow.

"Wait. Move aside a little and be ready."

Barley started forward, blade rising. Colgrave caught his sleeve.

At the same instant one of the black birds flopped past us, positioned itself in Barley's path.

"We're here," Colgrave said softly, to himself. "So what do we do now?"

He had altered again. Once more he was the mellowed Colgrave. The old Colgrave did not know the word
we.

"You don't know?" I whispered.

"Bowman, I'm a man of action. Action begets action, till resolution . . . . My goal has been to get here. I haven't thought past that. Now I must. For instance, what happens if we do kill this thing? What happens if we don't? To us, I mean. And to everyone else. Those aren't the kinds of things Colgrave usually worries about."

I understood. Tomorrow had never mattered aboard
Dragon.
Life on that devil ship had been a perpetually frozen Now. Looking backward had been a glance at a foggy place where everything quickly became lost. Looking ahead had consisted of waiting for the next battle, the next victim ship, with perhaps hope for a little rape or drunkenness before we fired her and leaned back to enjoy the screams of her crew. Tomorrow had always been beyond our control, entirely in the hands of whimsical gods.

They had taken remarkable care of us for so long, till they slipped us that left-handed one with the Itaskian sorcerer . . . .

Here we stood at a crossroads. We had to decide on a path, and both went down the back side of a hill. We could only guess which was the better.

If we could even glean a hint of what they were. The trails were virtually invisible from this side of the crest.

"Ready your arrows, Bowman," Colgrave told me. "If he needs it, put the first one between his eyes. Or down his throat. Don't give him time to cast a spell."

"What'll your signal be?"

"You make the decision. There won't be time for signals."

We locked gazes. This was a new Colgrave indeed. Technique was my private province, but the decision to shoot had never been mine.