The Death of Nnanji (6 page)

Trader genes detecting the evasion, she frowned at him. “Does Vixini know?”

“No. Addis is usually to be found in Vixini’s shadow, but right now Vixini is up to his neck in sutras. Swordsmen in relays are shouting them in both ears. I’m putting him up for promotion at the assembly.”

“Vixini? That’s ridiculous. Even Nnanji must have been older than that when he reached Third.”

“Not much older. When I found him, he was a three-footed Second. The Goddess and I turned him into a hotshot Fourth in two weeks. Vixini is not living up to his potential, so I decided to push him a bit.” That was as good an excuse as any. To confess that Wallie himself was suddenly feeling mortal and vulnerable would not be politic.

“Why, for the gods’ sake? A Third must be able to lead a troop. Can you imagine any battle tested, likely married, swordsman taking orders from a boy?”

“Easily,” Wallie said. “Men don’t talk back to someone half a head taller than themselves and half a chest wider.” Not even one as amiable and soft-spoken as Vixini.

Thana studied him for a moment, then said, “You had a very narrow escape this morning, didn’t you?”

Blast the woman! She sometimes seemed to read minds.

“Yes I did. And I am determined to find out who was behind it.”

He didn’t mention the inexplicable uncut diamond in his bed, for he considered messages from the gods to be confidential. They were always obscure. The demigod had warned him fifteen years ago that a mere mortal could never understand divine motives, because the multidimensional games the gods played were infinitely more complicated than any human politics and, from some points of view, not games at all.

“I’m worried about Addis,” Thana said. “He ran off this morning without his bodyguards. I worry about him when he does that. He’s not just the liege’s son, he’s also a very vulnerable and naive youth. There are predators out there.”

More telepathy!

“I saw him soon after I saw you,” Wallie admitted. “Yes, he was with Vixini at that time. And I thought exactly what you just said: he’s too vulnerable. I sent him off to get some lessons in unarmed combat. He won’t need them if he becomes a swordsman, or a priest, but until then they might save his life.” Knowing Swordsman Helbringr, Wallie was confident that Addis was already much less vulnerable than he had been when he left home that morning.

Thana was glaring. “You didn’t think to ask my permission first? He is my son!”

“And he’s the heir to the Tryst, Thana. That makes his safety my concern too.”

“And it makes his attendance today to welcome his father home a lot more important than your abominable lessons!”

Not when there were assassins around it didn’t. “No. I agree with you that this skipping out by himself has to stop. I would never humiliate an adolescent by having him beaten like a slave, but Addis is not going to forget today’s lesson. So it will be doubly valuable.”

Thana compressed her lips and said nothing. She never admitted defeat.

In a moment she shouted at the children to be quiet. Her tension was understandable, in that she was on her way to meet a husband she had not seen in almost two years. Restarting their marriage would require tact and adjustment, but she had married Nnanji for his potential, not his sensitivity. Given the primitive state of birth control in the World, she must realistically expect to bear another child within a year.

“Lady Mother?” piped little Tomisolaan. “Why is that mountain on fire?”

The procession was up in the bare brown hills now, good only for rearing cattle and horses. A bend in the road had brought them a fine view over the great bronze city and the wide silver River beyond it. Today the mountains of the RegiVul range were free of clouds, misty blue ghosts in the fall haze.

Wallie turned to look. “There should be two…”

But there weren’t two peaks smoking. One volcano had erupted about the time Lord Tivanixi had summoned the Tryst of Casr in the name of the Goddess. The Tryst had been aimed at the sorcerers, devotees of the Fire God, and the eruption had shown his displeasure. A second eruption had followed soon after Wallie had stepped down in Nnanji’s favor, and both peaks had smoldered on and off ever since. They must have had earlier names, but they were known to the swordsmen as Black Top and Red Top—ostensibly from the color of their rocks, but more likely from respective shades of Shonsu’s and Nnanji’s hair. The peak still smoking was the first, the southern one, Black Top. The other, presumably, was dormant—or extinct.

Wallie glanced back to Thana. She was a practical and hardheaded, almost cynical, woman, but the World ran on superstition. Even Wallie looked for omens in a way he never had before he became Shonsu.

Nevertheless he said, “They stop and start all the time. Don’t lose sleep over it.”

Thana stopped biting her lip long enough to say, “But when did this happen? We should have been told, or at least you should.”

Yes, plenty of people would have told Wallie if they knew of the change: Jja, Vixini, Horkoda, and more. If the news was widely regarded as a significant sending from the gods, he should have heard. Thana seemed to be treating it as such. She looked positively scared, not at all like her usual unshakably confident self. That was not the Thana Wallie knew. Or the change might have just happened today, in which case the gods’ message might be urgent.

“They come and go,” he said easily. “I expect volcanoes need time off too. By the way, have you ever heard of a high-rank swordsman named Mibullim?”

She shook her head.

“Nnanji sent a message from Quo last night about a Seventh by that name, and none of us have ever heard of him.”

“Falcons?” As usual, Thana had hit upon the most likely explanation. Not all pigeons made it home to their boxes safely.

Some earlier message about Mibullim had undoubtedly gone astray.

Or Mibullim of the Seventh himself had gone astray.

Or the sorcerers who ran the pigeon post were censoring the Tryst’s mail, and that was the most worrisome possibility of all.

“If you two don’t stop that, I’ll tell your father about you!” Thana yelled for the third time in the last two hours.

As before, the threat worked, at least momentarily. Nnadaro could have only vague memories of Nnanji, and Tomisolaan none at all, so Thana was turning him into a bogeyman for them. Then the band struck up again, praise the gods!

“That’s my cue,” Wallie said thankfully. “Excuse me.”

He opened the door and jumped out. The swordsmen all looked tired, dusty, and bad tempered, but he would willing have changed places with any of them to have escaped that carriage ride. He waited for his men to catch up, leading his horse. He took the reins, mounted, and rode forward.

Nnanji’s procession was in clear view, but still a mile or so ahead. Wallie urged his horse to a canter, intending to intercept. He soon estimated that Nnanji had about four hundred swordsmen with him, two-thirds of them on foot, which explained why their progress had been so slow. Most of cavalry must be Lord Boariyi’s guard from Quo, not Nnanji’s. He traveled mainly by ship, and horses were reluctant sailors.

Hearing hooves behind him, he glanced back, to see Adept Filurz spurring after him, uninvited. Having much less of a load to carry, his horse was having little trouble catching up with Wallie’s. And Wallie slowed down, because he had just realized what his bodyguard had seen and now proceeded to shout to him.

“My lord! There’s too many of them. Who are all those men?”

Far too many. The Quo-Casr road was home ground. Nnanji never took an escort of more than a score when he rode this trail, and usually fewer. Four hundred? If Shonsu’s hair had not been tightly clipped in a ponytail it might have stood straight up. This morning he had escaped assassination literally by a miracle. A simultaneous attack on Nnanji would have made perfect sense to whoever was behind it. And a simultaneous attack could never be organized when Nnanji was weeks away, roaming the World; only when he was at either Casr or Quo. That explained the timing.

Filurz drew level and rode alongside. “If those’re Lord Boariyi’s men, it’s the whole Quo guard, my lord. Why? And if they’re not, then who by the gods’ balls are they?”

“I don’t know. Let’s work it out. If Nnanji was attacked at the same time I was, and died, then surely Lord Boariyi would have sent a pigeon to tell us, as soon as there was light enough to fly.” Unless the sorcerers were behind the plot and were suppressing the mail. If the procession were a cortege it would be flying black flags. Or perhaps not, if Boariyi did not want the assassins to know their attack had succeeded.

One rider had detached himself from the company and was headed to meet him.

“Unless the big man’s behind the killing,” Filurz growled, still mulling pigeons.

“I can’t believe…” Yes, Wallie could believe, if barely. Boariyi had been leader of the Tryst before him. The priests had tricked him into accepting Shonsu’s challenge, which he need not have done, and Shonsu had won by the narrowest imaginable margin, in a duel the minstrels still sang about.

Boariyi had accepted that decision. He had been a tower of strength in the early days and ever since. He had extended the Tryst’s boundaries almost as much as Nnanji himself had done, until about five years ago, when he had expressed a desire to settle down, and Nnanji had appointed him reeve of Quo. He had served faithfully there, too. But had he nursed a secret resentment all these years? Did he feel that Shonsu had tricked him out of the leadership and then, when he’d decided he didn’t want it, given it to his oath brother Nnanji instead of back to the man who’d won it fair and square? That was not how it had looked to Wallie, but Boariyi would not have been human had he not seen it that way sometimes.

If both Nnanji and Shonsu had died in the night, Boariyi would have a very good claim to the leadership now. If Shonsu had died, then Thana would certainly have brought all three of her children along to meet their father and the killer could have made a clean sweep of all other claimants.

“If you’re right, adept, then I ought to have been organizing a state funeral instead of a celebration. But that isn’t how Lord Boariyi would do it if he were a traitor. He’d have brought his cavalry to Casr at the gallop to take command of the Tryst.”

Filurz was shielding his eyes against the sun’s glare. “I think that’s Lord Boariyi his own self out in front, my lord.”

“You’re right,” Wallie said with a rush of relief. “And that’s not the act of a traitor, either. How many people know where Swordsman Helbringr took the boy for his lessons?”

“Just me and Master Horkoda, my lord.”

“Remember he’s Nnanji’s heir. If the liege dies, that kid could claim to own the seventh sword, although his mother would have to hold it in trust until he makes Third. That sword could be a poisoned legacy if ever there was one. If there’s more trouble, you may have to race back to Casr and put a wall of steel around Addis.”

“Yes, my lord.”

The lone rider was indeed Boariyi, now recognizable by his basketball-player height and the way his stirrups almost touched the ground. Although he had filled out since the days of the immortal duel and was even developing the start of an unsightly paunch, he was still a mighty fencer, as Wallie well knew from their last test with foils, some ten or twelve weeks ago. Boariyi was a curious combination of cynic and puritan. He shared Nnanji’s obsession with honor and serving the Goddess, and yet he regarded the mundane world with a disparaging eye. Soon Wallie saw with dismay that he was carrying something on the saddle in front of him, a long, thin something rolled up in a rug. A something like a sword.

All three riders reined in. None bothered with salutes.

Boariyi lifted the edge of the rug to show one end of the contents. Yes, the long thin something was a sword in a scabbard of finely tooled leather. The hilt was silver, shaped like a griffin clutching a huge sapphire.

“For you, Shonsu,” he said. His oversized mouth twisted in a wry smile. “Our liege ordered me to give you this.”

Chapter 6

Surely Nnanji would never part with the seventh sword while he lived?

“He’s dead?”

“No, he’s alive, but he’s taken a nasty wound. Very nasty.” Boariyi glanced uneasily at Filurz, a middle rank listening to high-rank discussion.

Wallie ignored the hint. If he couldn’t trust the chief of his own bodyguard, whom could he trust? “Carry on. What happened?”

“Take this before I change my mind.”

With a strange mixture of longing and revulsion, Wallie took the package. Fifteen years… long time… He still dreamt of the days he had worn that most perfect weapon. He didn’t draw it, just laid it across his his saddle as Boariyi had carried it, still in its cover.

“What happened?” he repeated.

“He was billeted in the room next to mine. You know it; you’ve slept there. Middle of the night, I was awakened by a scream. I grabbed up my sword and ran in. The assassin was just scrambling out the window. I got her. I had no choice: it was strike or let her escape.”

“Dead?”

“Dead. I ran her through. A woman, hit from behind! Don’t tell the minstrels.”

The two Sevenths eyed each other for a long moment.

“You want my sword?” Boariyi said, still bitter. “Go ahead: disarm me, take me to Casr for trial. You must have a scapegoat. Of course I had to kill my accomplice so she couldn’t testify against me.”

“You talk like a shithead. If that was what you’d been up to you’d have given me this trinket sharp end first.” Not necessarily! If Boariyi were the traitor, he would not have expected to see Wallie alive. He would be winging it now, trying to find out how much was known, what had happened to the other assassin.

“If not me, then who? These things must take time to prepare. Who outside the Tryst knew he was coming?”

“All Casr did,” Wallie said, “so I suppose all Quo did too. He’s never been gone so long, so they could have set this up half a year ago. How badly is he hurt? Is he going to live?”