“He is a necromancer. This means something to you, yes?”
“All right, yeah. Necromancers are supposed to be hot stuff.”
“Indeed, yes. So consider this. Even among necromancers, Oskin Yahlei is very, very powerful.”
“Okay, so he’s very, very powerful. What else?”
“That is not enough for you? Give up this silly quest.”
“I’ve got a client who’s even more insistent than your man Yahlei,” I said. “That’s why I can’t.”
He had been trying to lag for a while, and now he stopped in his tracks. “But why? Why, yes? What is one more client for you? Will the client kill you, hmm, drain from you the aura and crush you to a husk? But Oskin Yahlei - both of us will surely die, and then the torment will have only begun. He will think the attack on him was my fault, that I had been false to him, and he will … indeed, both of us will be lucky to merely die.”
I decided not to tell Carl that Oskin Yahlei wasn’t merely a regular person-type necromancer, either, at least not yet, since he didn’t seem to know; he seemed upset enough as it was. “No he won’t, you’ll convince him it wasn’t you. Now come on, already, or I’ll let you try pleading to the stick.”
He looked around at the walking stick, remembering what it had showed about itself before, and started moving again. “Very well, fatalistic I shall be.” A few moments later we drew up to another corner, and he put his hand up for me to stop. “Carefully,” he said. “Look here.”
I eased past him and poked an eye around the edge. The street where we were now hidden was definitely an alley, about four feet wide and filled with trash; the cross street was much wider, say fifteen feet or so across. It ran east and west, roughly, with a gradual turn north at each end of my view. A few aimless street lamps pushed back little clumps of night. The lamps were like twisted drunks in the dark, shrugging off the black like blows off ravaged shoulders: it was that sort of place. Across from me I could see a large vacant lot, overgrown with trees and shrubs and surrounded by a weathered block wall. Carl had pointed down the street to the right, so I looked in that direction. Next to the lot was a two-story building of the same stone as the wall. In fact, the wall continued around the building too, its top glistening with spikes and jagged glass and sharp iron rods. The building was surrounded by pillars and ornate cornices. It sure hadn’t started life as a house; those walls were pretty thick. It looked more like a fortress.
“A former temple,” Carl whispered behind me. “The god whose tract it was fell from prominence some years ago.”
And now it was Oskin Yahlei’s headquarters. Going over the wall and in through an upper-story window, one of my favorite techniques, looked doubtful in this case. I was being forced into a decision I really didn’t want to make.
A quiet clattering off to my right turned into a small party of Guard troopers. They approached the temple and stopped. The soldiers were looking around nervously and starting at nothing; I had the feeling they didn’t like the neighborhood either. A door opened, spreading a quick fan of light across the street, and a man leaned out to hold a brief exchange with the Guard leader. The new man was visible to me only in profile, except for a sigil on his tunic that caught the light. It was new to me - a twisty purple blob with fire coming out of it. The conversation ended, and the party went through into the temple. As they did, I could see that the two members of the group in the middle were dressed in simple street clothes, had swords poking at their backs, and hands that seemed bound. Two prisoners who wouldn’t be coming out again anytime soon, it looked like.
Something was nagging me about that vacant lot next door. It was obviously part of the temple property, because of the wall, but even in the darkness it didn’t feel like a simple overgrown garden. I asked Carl.
“Certainly you realize that is the cemetery, yes?”
The cemetery, of course. Raw material for a necromancer. I really wanted to be somewhere else. Unfortunately, I wasn’t. “Carl, tell me about him.”
“Oskin Yahlei?” He sighed. “He is very powerful, but already you realize that. He approached me first two, no three days ago, demanding my allegiance. I knew little about him, excepting only his power, until your visit to me this morning. I told him your story of this barrier. He was surprised; he did not anticipate his work would become apparent at this time. Since this was evidently what was transpiring, he elected to strike against those who might spread the word.”
“He doesn’t want publicity.”
“Manifestly so. Indeed … yes, this I will say. He is powerful, but often uncertain, insecure, as though his power is in some ways new to him. As before, at my unfortunate lodgings. The energies at his command could have devastated the block and all within it, yet at the crucial moment he elected to flee. He is a dangerous foe, and the more dangerous for his unpredictability. Especially if he grows more decisive.”
I glanced around the corner again. The old temple was still there, and there wasn’t a sign of Gash in sight. He wasn’t going to bail me out. I faded back from the edge. “Okay,” I said to Carl, “Thanks. That’s very -”
I had been planning it, I’d had to. Carl was still turning his head when I laid the walking stick hard across the back of it. He sank to the ground. I ripped pieces from his shirt and tied him before rolling him under one of the less offensive piles of garbage. Then I straightened, adjusted my clothing, forced my body to assume a confident upright air I didn’t feel at all, and crossed into the street.
The wall around Yahlei’s temple had a new door in it, barred and thick as the wall and ribbed with iron. I approached, looking neither to the right nor to the left, raised my arm, and struck the door with the stick.
The door gave off a rolling hollow boom. After a moment, the small panel in the upper half slid back and an eye appeared. “I am here to confer with Oskin Yahlei,” I said. I was trying to make it sound like I had legitimate business every day with folks like Oskin Yahlei, but I don’t know how successful I was. I felt, in fact, like I was doing the dumbest thing I had ever come up with.
The eye traveled down my body, then back up. “Who is calling?” the voice of the lackey asked.
This was it. I rolled my own eye up and hoped for a reprieve. None descended. There was no way out. I steadied my voice and said, “It is I, Gashanatantra.”
12. SHAA AND MONT GO TO JAIL
Shaa and Mont dropped silently off the tail of the Guard troop and let the soldiers to whom they had attached themselves clatter off into the gloom. “I don’t like this,” Mont said.
“It’s called protective coloration,” Shaa said. “Most intelligent creatures use it.” They had progressed toward the center of the island, deep into the catacombs. Shaa glanced around, his eyebrows slightly knitted. “There must be a dungeon around here somewhere, this place feels too much like dungeon to be anything else.”
Mont, from the layout of the halls they had passed through, had a fairly good idea where the dungeon was, but he decided there was something he’d better get cleared up first. “When we find the dungeon …”
“Yes?”
“When we find the dungeon there’s sure to be some kind of guardroom -”
“Unquestionably.”
“- unquestionably, and that’ll probably be full of guards.”
“No doubt.”
“Right, no doubt. What are we going to do about them?”
“What do you think we should do about them?”
“Oh, knock it off already,” Mont said. “You’re the expert, tell me an expert plan.”