The Death of Nnanji (29 page)

Stirrups really needed boots, but he’d run barefoot all his life until about half a year ago, so he still had leather soles of his own. Having his hands free was a big help, and even his horse was happier having a rider who made sense.

The first rays of dawn shone pink and then gold on a line of icy peaks far to the south. Without a doubt that must be RegiKra, the sorcerers’ lair.

The sun climbed higher and grew relentlessly hotter. The heat and glare were brutal, with not a single patch of shade anywhere. They ate their rations and emptied their canteens. They passed at least two water holes without stopping. By then both men and mounts were exhausted, all except Capn, who seemed to be made of steel.

He had his reasons, however much the horses complained. He knew where he was heading, and reached it when the sun was halfway up the sky. Once it had been a lonely ranch station or mining camp, located where a steep-sided natural pit held a small, greenish pond, which now contained two bloated mule corpses. The buildings had been recently burned, but might have already been ruined when that happened. One small shed had been left standing, although not quite upright. It might be inhabited by snakes and scorpions, but all that mattered was that it would provide shade. Addis staggered in on his own feet. He was asleep before he hit the floor.

The sun was not very high before Vixini realized why those canteens had been left where they would not be overlooked during a hurried departure. The Mule Hills weren’t much more than a gently rolling plain, but there were no signs of people anywhere, and no shade.

Knowing what a cruel load he was for a horse, he had brought a spare; putting the lamed pair back in Soo out of their misery had bothered him more than killing the sorcerers. Although the long gash in his right forearm wasn’t deep, it had bled a river, and it kept throbbing. Bandaging it with one hand and some teeth had taken forever, and even then it had still bled for quite a while, although he thought it had stopped now. Blood had soaked both the bandage and his kilt, and some had even run into his boot. Still, bleeding might have been a good thing, if there had been poison on the blade. Damnable sneak sorcerer!

He wondered about Ryad and Ryon. He had looked for them, but they had gone, having most likely fled as soon as the first sorcerer fired his pistol. He hoped the Goddess would reward them for the help they had given him.

The trail was fairly obvious, marked by the passage of many horses not very long ago. He hoped that he might see some houses when he got farther away from Soo. He might even see some wild herds galloping. He liked watching good horses running. Their motion itself was beauty, like good swordsmen fencing.

He drained his first canteen and threw it away. Only later did he realize how foolish that would seem if he did find a place where he might have refilled it.

“It looks like a trap,” Lord Yoningu said, lowering his telescope.

Triumph
was hove to just off Soo, gently rocking in the current. Three other ships were coming into view behind her and another three were due before evening. The Tryst was a day late in arriving, having lingered at Ivo to load up lumber, tools, and every decent dinghy it could buy.

“You mean the ladder?” Wallie asked. “That’s a welcome mat.”

“Suspicious!”

“It’s so suspicious that I wonder if it may be even be genuine. But I’ll grant you that sorcerers do like ambushes and booby traps. Maybe the killers have gone and there are survivors?” But if sorcerers were in possession of the ruins, a landing party would be sitting ducks.

Behind him on the poop deck stood half a dozen middle ranks. The main deck was packed with Thirds, all staring at the remains of Soo and muttering angrily.

“Standing here scratching our armpits won’t solve anything,” Yoningu said. “Let’s lower a boat, send in scouts. I’ll lead.”

“My privilege.”

“With respect, no it isn’t, my liege. Lord Nnanji may have died weeks ago. If you get holes shot through you, the whole Tryst will fall apart.”

Yoningu was right, of course. However much Wallie felt he ought to be first man up that so-suspicious ladder, it would be a stupid decision. “Then not you, either. We’ll pick a good Fourth to captain the boat and specify a junior to go up the ladder first, some kid who deserves promotion and never quite makes it. We’ll promote him later under sutra 1139, ‘for courage in the face of the enemy.’”

And so it was done. The designated hero scrambled up the ladder and survived. The Fourth and the rest of the swordsmen followed. In a few minutes they signaled the all-clear.

Vixini was virtually asleep in the saddle when his horse began to limp. He reined in and dismounted.

“Need another change, do you, old fellow?” It was a bad sign when a man began to talk to animals. It was a worse sign when he discovered that the poor brute had shed a shoe. He had switched mounts several times, and the other was just as weary as this one. He was so exhausted he could barely stand, and he was lost. The trampled droppings that had marked the trail for him were no longer to be seen on the endless, rolling brown grassland. His last canteen was close to empty.

He hobbled the spare horse, although it wasn’t likely to go anywhere. Then he removed the lame one’s saddle, led it a short distance away, and ran his sword into its heart. He lay down beside it and constructed the best lean-to shade he could with the saddle and its corpse.

He went to sleep wondering if he would ever wake up.

By the time Wallie clambered up the ladder with Yoningu at his heels, two dozen swordsmen were searching the ruins and others were hard at work improvising a dock out of the surviving piles and the lumber brought from Ivo. At the top he was saluted by Adept Sevolno.

“No one left alive, my lords. Men, women, children, dogs, cats and a couple of horses, all dead. It must have happened several days ago.”

One of the other ships was bringing half a dozen priests and priestesses to care for the dead.

“Any deaths more recent?”

“Yes, lord. Very recent. Did you notice the blood on the ladder? And look at this one.” He pointed to a dead sorcerer Third only a few feet away. “Someone came up the ladder and flaking near cut his head off. A swordsman, and a strong one.”

He was wrong about the intruder climbing the ladder, because on the way up Wallie had noticed footprints showing that someone—a person with very large feet—had climbed the bank, using the remaining masonry as a staircase. He walked over to the corpse, took up the fallen pistol, and sniffed. It had been fired. So the swordsman had killed the sorcerer, but had himself been wounded. The bloody hand prints on the ladder were his, and the ‘he’ in question had certainly been Vixini. However much Wallie tried to tell himself that there could be other explanations, he could not believe that. He asked the awful question as casually as he could.

“Any dead swordsmen?”

Sevolno had guessed what he was thinking. “Found three so far, my lord, but all have been dead some days. All Thirds, although there’s not much left of them but boots and hair. None of them an especially large man, my lord. The inhabitants may have managed to take a few of the attackers with them, or perhaps these were the reeve and his men.”

“Show me.”

With Yoningu trailing behind, Wallie followed Sevolno on a grisly tour of the corpse-littered village. Most bodies were so bloated by heat and ravaged by scavengers that it was hard to tell what sort of people they had been in life. In some buildings there had been a last stand, and the packed remains had been burned to blackened bones by the subsequent fire. The swordsmen lay out in the open, recognizable by their trappings. Vixini was not among them.

“I doubt if Soo had more than one resident swordsman,” Wallie said, “or none at all. The inhabitants would have been trying to fight back with clubs or pitchforks. Yet look at all the blood, see?” The clay where they lay was black. “All three of them bled to death. I’d like to think that these were members of the attacking force who mutinied rather than slaughter women and children, and were consequently put to death by their less squeamish comrades. See that they are returned to the Most High with military honors.”

“Aye, my lord. Now over here…” Sevolno led the way to one of the frontage buildings. “One of those canons you described, my lord. Glad they weren’t alive to shoot at us with that! And a fourth dead sorcerer, dressed for his funeral. See the marks on his throat? He’s been throttled, my lord. I can’t find any wounds on him to account for the blood. Lot of blood.”

But there was a smear of blood on the blade of the dagger lying half underneath him. So had whoever had lowered the ladder been wounded here, and by that dagger, not the pistol? Seriously worried now, Wallie prowled around. He soon identified the cartridges of gunpowder, and the fuses leading to them. At that point he ordered everyone else out and explored the building by himself. He had not been at all surprised to discover that it had been mined. Back before the treaty, the sorcerers had used electrostatic generators as burglar alarms: touch the door handle and you got fried. In this case they had used gunpowder.

He wondered why the cannonballs had holes in them, like bowling balls. Then he found tongs, and a jar full of water with some lumps of pasty stuff in the bottom. He knew at once that it was phosphorous, which the sorcerers had formerly used to do party tricks. Pack a lump of that into a hole in the side of a cannonball, then shoot it into a wooden ship, and you’d have a cozy blaze going in no time.

The plan had been for the gun squad to fire a few shots at the incoming fleet. At that range they would have almost certainly set some of them ablaze. As soon as any survivors came ashore, though, the defenders would have lit the fuses, jumped on their horses, and ridden for the hills. An hour or so later—bang. Wallie defused the mine.

Bedding for three on the floor. Five full water bottles and three bags of food on a door at the rear. And two boots, not swordsman boots, filthy and badly crushed. How to explain those?

Once he was satisfied that the building was reasonably safe, he went out and beckoned for Sevolno to order a guard placed on the gunpowder. Fortunately the curse of cigarettes had not yet been loosed upon the World, so he did not need to warn about the dangers of smoking there. Yoningu and others gathered around.

“What else have you found?”

“Horses out back,” Sevolno said, leading the way there. “Two killed with a sword. One of them obviously damaged a leg, so maybe both of them did, and they had to be put down. Three saddles left on the rail. Maybe there were more horses, and the swordsmen who killed the sorcerers took them and rode away with them, you think?” He pointed. “Two more recently dead sorcerers over there. We may find some more if we keep looking.”

Wallie stared at the gentle brown hills behind the little town. Five canteens, three saddles, two dead horses, four bodies. It was hard to make the numbers fit. On Earth good horse country usually meant limestone, to provide calcium for strong bones, but limestone was often porous and poor at retaining water. Somewhere out there, he hoped, Addis was still alive in the hands of his kidnappers. Vixini might be only a few hours behind them, if he was still functioning. The only way to cross that griddle in midsummer would be to travel by night.

“Have you looked in the wells?” he asked.

Sevolno scowled at being found wanting. “Not yet, my lord.” He dispatched a Third with a gesture. The man ran over to the nearest well, whose windlass had been removed and, presumably, burned. Horses drank like whales and it would be easier to have wells close to these paddocks than drag water from the River. He peered down the shaft, which couldn’t be very deep, for the water table would be level with the River.

He came running back with his face almost green. “There’s something down there, my lords. I think… It may be dead children!”

Wallie nodded. River water was drinkable, but the poisoned wells would make it harder to assemble an army here, and Plo was a long way away. Every watering hole would have been treated the same way.

“How long will it take us to round up enough horses to send out a scouting party?” he asked Yoningu, who had rejoined the group. “And get them here? We’ll have to rig a derrick to hoist them out of the ships, or else clean out that ramp.”

“A week?” the Seventh said grumpily. “Four days minimum.”

“You have one day maximum. At least three horses, six better, by sunset tomorrow.”

“Aye, my lord. Who d’you think were the swordsmen who killed all these sorcerers?”

“Just one swordsman,” Wallie said. The boots were the message. He had a lump in his throat.

“One swordsman against four sorcerers armed with thunder weapons?”

“Vixini. He was enough. Funny, I used to think he was too easygoing to be a swordsman.”

“With respect my lord,” Yoningu said, “I don’t know why you bothered to collect an army. That son of yours seems capable of handling the whole war by himself. And I congratulate you wholeheartedly on his courage.”

The listeners chorused their agreement, for that was the greatest of compliments to a swordsman. Courage could only be taught by example.

Courage was not necessarily enough. Vixini had cut down two men, shot a third, and throttled a fourth. Then he had ridden off, still searching for his stolen protégé. But there was a hostile army ahead of him and he had lost a lot of blood.

By evening, Soo was almost habitable again. The priests had tidied up the bodies, giving them to the River and returning their souls to the Goddess. Swordsmen had dragged the dead animals to the river bank and disposed of those corpses too. They had also cleaned out some of the buildings well enough to make them usable as long as the weather stayed dry.

Liege Lord Shonsu was sitting on a keg outside the sorcerers’ now-deserted lair, staring glumly at the River and contemplating failure. He had begun this war in the belief that the gods were appointing him their general because he would do a better job than Nnanji. Assuming that gods did not make mistakes—while not denying that they might get outwitted or outbid by other gods—then he had either misread their message or he had just proved that he was a complete idiot. Or both. Nnanji would have gone by the sutras. While he might have lost battles against sorcerer firearms, he would not have dug himself into the bottomless pit that Wallie had.