Beneath Ceaseless Skies #27 (11 page)

       
The assembly cheered, Cantiléna glared, and unfledged Eroico bounced on his toes at Imre’s side. “Father! Father!” he shouted into the din, stone arm waving gaily. When Bellico finally paid heed, Eroico cupped his hands to his mouth and said, “Please!” The Maestro looked from his son to Imre and back again before tossing his hand in resigned permission.

       
Eroico’s hymn was short, broad and grown for the close thrust, its brilliantly regal sapphire hue popular among the younger peers of the Baremescre. Imre had never seen it used in earnest. Not until Eroico, still grinning from his father’s indulgence, spun it from its sling and cut Imre across the throat.

* * *

Verse

       
After the brawl, Imre and Naldo had been seized, stripped of everything save their clothes, and dragged off to separate cells. Imre’s was nothing more than a moist and rough-hewn hollow in a cliff side, but after his weeks aboard ship, the silence was as much a comfort as if he sat wrapped in a prince’s quilt.

       
He had dozed and dreamt of a puppet show where his father’s corpse danced beneath the strings, ash vomiting from its purple lips, when footsteps outside his cell startled him awake.

       
This time two guards, both with rock arms and pernicious blades, silently escorted him from the cell into a bright, muggy afternoon. Imre blinked against the light, shook away the last clinging miasma of his dream, then followed the guards down the cliffside path onto a road that cut deeper inland. They spent a good deal of daylight walking this road, resting twice at small manors surrounded by pruned coppices, but pressing on. Soon the sea breezes faded and the southern humidity made good on its reputation. Theirs was a beautiful country—flowers blooming a dozen hues of every color, shaded by wild fruit trees with thick, broad leaves, the air alive with honeybees and tiny hovering birds. But by the time they reached the sitting garden, Imre had a mind only for the cramp in his back, the sweat in his eyes, and the late afternoon midges dying against his sticky skin.

       
The guards led him to stand before a rough semicircle of seated craggermen, behind them rippled a freshwater pond skinned by water-lily.

       
He was instantly relieved to see Naldo reclining nearby upon a pile of cushions. The Arbiter looked drawn, but his wounds had been treated and his color was good. He smiled when he saw Imre. The anxiety, though, was glaring.

       
The eight craggers that lounged upon the benches each paradoxically bore a combined countenance of languor and barely suppressed action. The grim, one-eyed man sitting in the center with the white rock arm was Bellico, and he alone spoke to Imre, albeit through Naldo’s translations. Bellico had brought his wife, one son, four other important-looking craggers, and the nut-skulled wench from the harbor road who, as ill luck would have it, was the chieftain’s daughter and heir. Every one of them bore a dimple in the flesh arm.

       
When the courtesies were done, Bellico bent his hard gaze upon Imre and asked a question.

       
“Maestro Bellico has inquired after your injuries, young master,” Naldo said.

       
“My injuries?” Imre asked. When he’d been first dumped in his cell, stoneless surgeons had examined him and, Imre was proud to see, were utterly dumbfounded. Now as then, he lifted his shirt to show Bellico and company the flesh at his side was completely mended, showing not even a scar. He drew the farce out before raising his finger. “Ah, the sword wound,” he said in mock revelation. “A trifling nick. Tell them my clan heals quickly from such things.” A crack to the skull or spine would kill him quick as the next man, but to say as much Imre felt ill-advised.

       
Naldo translated.

       
“Tell us the name of your clan,” Bellico ordered.

       
“Balgas, First of the Firstblood Houses, Lords of Adalheid and Conquerors of the Nefarious Djinn.” Imre went on to explain that nobles of the firstblood enjoyed stouter constitutions and sharper acumen than average men. When Bellico asked for a demonstration, Imre repeated every syllable of conversation the group had exchanged thus far, even the sounds of foreign Silici.

       
“Your memory is perfect,” Bellico said with a raised brow.

       
“Nearly. We forget nothing important.”

       
This led to a long back and forth between the cragger chief and the Arbiter that left Imre to his perspiration and his thoughts. He locked his fingers together in the puppeteer’s
‘ankabut
limbering drill and wondered how far his family’s reputation would carry with a cragger audience. If the stars shined any grace upon him, these folk would not be at all as merciless as this damned sodden climate.

       
He glanced around the group, whispering a bawdy sea ditty to steady his nerves while relishing the pleasant ache in his hands, and caught another pair of eyes staring back. It was Bellico’s son, and the boy started, flushed, and turned away sharply at Imre’s gaze.
Now what was that?
Imre wondered.

       
But when next their hard hosts addressed him, it was the idiot wench who spoke, and all other thoughts vanished.

       
“Cantiléna wishes to know what you do with transgressors of the law in your land.”

       
“Prison or death,” Imre said with intentional disdain. “Depending.”

       
“We also have two penalties,” the cragger woman said. “You have fouled our laws, so make your choice: payment or song.”

       
Imre had learned from Naldo what singing meant to the craggers, and wouldn’t mind a chance at trouncing this reedy trollop. But to Naldo’s palpable relief he asked, “Is this to say we can pay coin for the man we killed?”

       
The woman’s anger flashed hot. “Coin is a toy for slaves and fat foreign merchants. Never presume to trade this for the life of our kin!”

       
“You said
payment
,” Imre began impatiently, but the wench wasn’t finished.

       
“Your Sage slew our man while singing. Singing is always an honor in Silici Tarraneh. Your transgression....”

       
Naldo stopped and stared at Imre. “You are charged with insulting and humiliating the lady Cantiléna.”

       
Imre nearly choked. “What?!”

       
The woman was running fast at the mouth now. “The song... the song was hers and you stole it... humiliated her. For that you have a debt to the clan Baremescre.”

       
She sat there with her hand on the hilt of her blade, speaking as if to a pair of dogs. It was too much.

       
“So all this pageantry and gruff because I stepped in to
save
that poxy shrew, and she’s too thick to know it? Stars fall! I’m sick to rot of these wooden-brained fools, and to a hell of boiling piss with
that
mangy mongrel bitch. And tell her I said it. Tell her I wish I’d left her to have her hole ruined to mush by that doghearted, dung-filled, horse-fouling pustule.”

       
Imre cursed onward with a skill to blush a slum whore, vomiting the weeks of pent-up vehemence in one long luscious stream. He damned. He hexed. He described blisters in unseemly places.

       
And too late, he noticed the cragger boy. The one who’d been staring as Imre sang his bawdy song. The one whose eyes and mouth now grew steadily with Imre’s every unhallowed word until they sat upon the boy’s face like a trio of saucers. And then, at the height of Imre’s crusted poetry, the little mucker leaned to whisper fiercely into his father’s ear. And Imre knew suddenly that there was another translator in their midst.

       
“
Audes!
” Bellico growled.

       
Imre switched hastily from curses to apologies. But Bellico was unhearing. He leapt to his feet. He started forward.

       
Naldo grasped clumsily at Imre’s sleeve as Imre darted in front of him with naked fists raised.

       
Bellico leveled his sword.

       
Imre’s heart hove within his chest.

       
But even as he braced for the blow, a warm silence clapped down suddenly over his ears, and the dark and handsome woman at Bellico’s side snatched his gaze. She was the Theca Ariosa, Imre remembered, and she alone remained cool in the storm of hot ire, her noble-boned face placid as a moonlit dune. But it was the eyes that were fathomless, and as she stared Imre felt suddenly naked. “
Salvio, mi sentisti
,” she said, and the words were in her mouth and her gaze and under Imre’s skin, quivering like the throb before a storm.

       
When at last she turned away, Bellico was calm, the garden was quiet, and Imre nearly collapsed from the weakness in his knees, the old folk stories of demon sorcery lurching up from the dark wells in his mind.

       
Ariosa spoke to Naldo softly, kindly, and the tension continued to melt until Bellico had lowered his sword, reclaimed his seat, and folded his arms as though his outburst had never been.

       
But her words worked a different sort of change in Naldo. His lip quivered when he answered her in a voice that wavered high like a boy’s, and for the first time in Imre’s memory the old man stuttered.

       
Ariosa next addressed Bellico, then her daughter, and when they finished, the one-eyed chief was nodding, eased, but his daughter, the half-coppery bitch, only curled her lip and paid unbroken attention to her sword hilt.

       
Bellico rumbled a series of orders, and at once four of the craggers rose to leave. Only the Maestro’s family remained.

       
“What’s happened?” Imre whispered.

       
“Theca Ariosa has offered us... an opportunity,” Naldo said. “I’ve told them you will not sing; you will pay the debt.” He raised his hand before Imre could protest. “Don’t argue, Gideon. There are matters at play here that you’re not yet ready to understand. Much about these people is promising for us, and for the House. I am at all times a servant, but in this, please trust my judgment.”

       
The Arbiter had had no right to make a decision about the welfare of the House without consulting the damned
head
of the House. But Imre’s anger was for the moment trivial.

       
“Imre,” he said.

       
“What?” Naldo asked.

       
“You called me Gideon.”

       
Naldo frowned, mouth slightly ajar. Then, “Of course, young master. Forgive me.” He clapped Imre on the shoulder with his good hand.

       
When the four craggermen had left the garden, Ariosa produced two shards of jet black stone. They were wickedly jagged things, each as long as her forearm. Imre recognized them at once.

       
As did Naldo. “Theca Ariosa wishes for us to have these gifts,” he said in a strained voice.

       
One of these shards had only two days ago jutted from the bloody slash in Naldo’s back. But the look on the Arbiter’s face when he accepted the sliver of Dewberry’s blade did more than fill Imre with compassion; it worried him.

       
“The Theca promises that if we allow it, this hymn will sing for you,” Naldo told him in a faraway voice, “and will enlighten me.”

       
Imre hefted his shard and was surprised at how heavy the accursed thing was. Dewberry had flipped and swung several feet of this with the ease of a man painting.
What if I refuse?
Imre wanted to ask. But if they were giving gifts, it meant they weren’t going to kill them, and for that he could thank Naldo. He shot a glance at the harbor-road wench before reminding himself that if he died here today, House Balgas died with him.