The corridor ran parallel to the outer wall, then angled back into the interior of the castle. Dust was thick on the narrow floor. The torchlight they had glimpsed outside was still little more than a orange glow, though it was brighter at the turning on the left. Shaa dropped to the floor and came up in a crouch, his hand on his rapier.
Nothing stirred. “Well, you know this palace,” Shaa whispered back into the shaft. “Which direction do we take?”
Mont, who had been getting tired of being scrunched uncomfortably up the shaft behind Shaa, appeared in the opening, then lost his balance and slid free. Shaa caught him with an arm and managed to lower him soundlessly to the floor. Mont shook his head, cocked it to one side, closed his eyes, and appeared to listen. It occurred to Shaa that Mont had probably been doing the same thing in the shaft, thus distracting himself enough to make him lose his hold. Still, it was entirely possible that whatever inner tunes he was hearing might indeed make his distraction worthwhile. Mont chewed his lip and opened his eyes; they were vague and unfocussed.
“I think it’s better on the right, away from the light,” Jurtan Mont said. “Let’s go right.”
Shaa finished stowing the grapnel, loosened the iron bar in his belt, and headed down the corridor to the right.
11. THE CURSE OF THE CREEPING SWORD
“I am Oskin Yahlei,” he said. The dark figure in the dark cloak, its hood thrown back across his shoulders, looked slowly and deliberately around the room, fixing each person there with his glare. The currents of the black aura pulsed and wove in the air like spun smoke. He didn’t gaze upward through the palm tree at me, in fact seemed not to recognize my presence, and I kept very still, wishing I could even stop breathing. A heavy gold ring glittered on the middle finger of his left hand. The ring, in fact, made me think of the eye of a hurricane: the eddies and twirls of the mist seemed to circle around it, looping, streaming, billowing about in swirling coils. Somehow, in a strange way I didn’t understand, that black swirling aura seemed more bound to the ring than to the rest of Oskin Yahlei himself.
I didn’t care how this insight had gotten into my memory, whether I was tapping the outskirts of Gash’s mind or what; I was just trying to ransack whatever I did know as quickly as I could. Me, I couldn’t see an aura if it smashed me in the nose, and even if I could see it I wouldn’t know what it was, but since Gash had pushed me into this mess in the first place I had no qualms about using his knowledge to help get me out of it. Get me out of it alive, that is, a remark that all of a sudden had a lot more gut meaning than it had ever pulled up before.
Even in a time and place where the gods are real personages, and they show up on earth in the flesh to give people trouble directly, without intermediary, you’ve got to make a distinction between the actual and the mythic. Not everything you can think of is real, even if a lot of weird things happen to be. I’d always thought Death was a concept and a state, not an independent entity. Unfortunately, based on the information my mind was now finding hidden in its files, that impression had been seriously wrong.
I mentioned before that human magicians aren’t all the same. They’re differentiated by specialty, the way they handle energy, their ethical orientation toward the use of magic, all kinds of distinctions. Gods specialized, too. I’d picked that up before, but I hadn’t realized how far the differences went. The answer was, pretty far, and the Deaths were a perfect case in point.
Something there was never a shortage of were deaths, and nobody ever liked to waste a ready source of power. That was really the key. When a living creature died, its decay to the state of death released energy. The gods who were Death could tap and absorb this death-power. Pain, injury, slow dying or fast, they all gave off this energy, and some Death was usually around to take advantage of it.
If passive absorption was the whole story, who really cared; lots of phenomena are more ghoulish than that. Unfortunately, that wasn’t all, of course. It was only a small step from taking advantage of death to causing death, and just a little bit further to having some control over it too, and once you could control death, well, you could control a lot of life, too, couldn’t you.
The upshot was that even the rest of the community of gods treated the Deaths with respect, or if not respect, at least caution.
Nobody I’d heard of knew exactly how many gods there were; estimates tended to range from twenty or thirty up to a few hundred. If Gash knew, his aura wasn’t telling, and the number probably varied anyway. That didn’t matter. What might be important to me was the number of Deaths, maybe a dozen. They weren’t all equal. What the pecking order was, Gash didn’t know, except that there was one big boss over the rest.
I doubted if this Yahlei was the Death Supreme himself.
I couldn’t quite see the Death’s Death slumming around with a bunch of pipsqueak mortals, but frankly I didn’t think it would matter much whether this really was The Man or just an underling. Either way we were talking serious big-time trouble, and there I lay on the roof over his head without the slightest idea of what to do about it.
Oskin Yahlei finally fixed his gaze back on Carl Lake. Yahlei looked male enough in aspect, although for all I knew that was just a matter of affectation. “These are the best ones in your city?” Oskin Yahlei said.
“These are the only ones in the city,” Carl said, “You said you -”
“I know what I said.” Yahlei walked out into the room, and as the angle changed I saw that he was wearing a black eyepatch over his left eye. He fingered it with his hand, the hand with the ring. When the ring passed near the patch, the covering over his eye seemed to grow slightly transparent, with the ghostly shadow of skin and eye socket and swollen tissue seen dimly behind it. He lowered the hand and the image faded.
My own right hand was quivering. I glanced down at it.
The walking stick had begun to vibrate, and if I listened closely I could hear a low whine. A shock stabbed up through my palm. “Shut up,” I hissed at it, trying not to vocalize. “You’ll give us away.” The nebulous image of the sword was now visible around the stick, twirling and churning. “I’ll call you when I need you,” I added. Reluctantly the shape faded and the whine died, but my hand still felt like it was clutching something alive, like maybe the tail of a large, impatient jungle cat.
Carl Lake had turned to follow the Death as he’d moved. Oskin Yahlei scrutinized him. “Your friend, Lake, has assured me you are all reasonably intelligent,” he said, still eyeing Carl but speaking now to the frozen crowd. “If that is true, you will have realized that resistance would be impractical. It will also not have escaped notice that your active collaboration with me could benefit you significantly. Observe Lake, now considering a new career in gymnastics and contortions.”
“Indeed, yes, Master,” Carl Lake said, “my leg.” He flexed it, raising it to his chest, then did a knee bend.
Oskin Yahlei frowned. “The demonstration is appropriate, that ‘Master’ business is not. I told you I’m looking for responsible assistants, not toadies.”
Carl gave a quick nod and bow, probably to disguise how white his face had suddenly gone. “As you wish it.”
“Indeed,” Yahlei said, “yes. As you will also have suspected, your Roosing Oolvaya represents the first in a series of steps I intend to take. I will need deputies of power and knowledge to stand with me. Their power will increase and they will grow in stature, becoming aides, viceroys, governors. Perhaps -” He paused, turned and looked around the faces again. “Perhaps even more.”
Huh? I thought. (It really was my own mind thinking, for a change.) The whole world had heard legends about people who became gods, long ago and on some other continent, but it had never happened to anybody anyone knew. If what Oskin Yahlei was implying was true, though, it was possible, and he could arrange it. Even if they didn’t know he was a god, they might think he was powerful enough to do it. On the other hand, he could just be using the hint as sucker bait.