More than anything else, Jurtan wanted to tear off looking for Kaar himself. His father was not one of the groggy people scattered around on the floor; Kaar was undoubtedly where he’d gone, and who knew what kind of trouble he’d already gotten himself into there. Jurtan figured that if his new-found ability was going to be good for anything, it could at least show Dad he could be useful to have around. Maybe Dad would even accept that you didn’t necessarily need to know how to hack people up with a sword to be a productive member of society.
But he couldn’t go, not now, not yet. It wasn’t just his hands, he could force himself to use them if he really had to - in fact, he already had. The problem was something else. It looked like at least ten or fifteen minutes before Tildy and the other former prisoners were back on their feet, and when they woke up they’d still have to deal with the soldiers. That would have been okay, if only Tildy or the prisoners could be relied upon to wake up first, but of course they couldn’t. Jurtan didn’t want to out-and-out kill the troopers and he couldn’t use his hands well enough to tie them up, so there was only one alternative. He’d have to wait and keep an eye on things himself. With a sigh, he cleared a space with one foot, settled to the floor, and leaned back against the wall.
Kaar wasn’t the only major thing nagging at Jurtan’s mind, though. Where was Shaa?
15. BIG TROUBLE
Shaa awoke. The surface upon which he was propped was irregularly heaving; another boat. His hands were manacled together on the other side of a thick post, and the post ran up through the low ceiling above his head.
Frothy water splashed outside the low window at Shaa’s right, glowing softly against the night, and fell back. Shaa took stock, glowering in the darkness. His chest hurt when he breathed. Various other locations around his body throbbed. His cloak and all the equipment beneath it were gone.
Laddered steps led steeply downward to Shaa’s deck from a hatch just forward of his post. The hatch was suddenly thrown back, introducing the face of a soldier and a hand with a sea-lantern. Shaa scowled up at him. The man grimaced back and said, “Time to say your prayers, spy.”
Shaa raised an eyebrow. “Indeed. Where are we going?”
A dark cloud seemed to settle down over the guard’s face. “Oskin Yahlei,” he muttered, and slammed the hatch.
“Huh,” Shaa said. Maybe it was a suburb.
“Uuoaah,” said a new voice, rather hoarsely, behind him.
Shaa craned his gaze back over his shoulder. Another man, also manacled, but to an eyebolt at the stern of the chamber, was raising his head gingerly off the deck.
“Good evening,” Shaa said.
“Cheerful one, aren’t you, eh?” the man said. He groaned again. “Didn’t you hear where they’re taking us?”
“Indeed,” Shaa said again. His head was wooly, he realized, clearly impairing his choice of ready vocabulary. “Perhaps I lack the appropriate referents. I take it Oskin Yahlei is a name designed to strike fear into knowledgeable hearts?”
“He’s some kind of sorcerer, one of those, eh, what ‘cha callum? - works with dead guys?”
“Necromancer?”
“Yeah, that’s the one, that’s Oskin Yahlei.” The man had pulled himself up against the aft wall, his legs sprawled across the floor and his chained arms contorted behind him. In the dim light from the open windows caked blood could be glimpsed all along one side of his face. His clothes were little more than tatters; they had not apparently been much to start with. “I knows the name, I’ve never met him, not me, not yet, but every day they comes into the cell and picks some guy and takes him out to Oskin Yahlei and the guy never comes -”
“The cell? Which cell? You are not, I take it, a political prisoner?”
“Me, politics? Eh, hah, never touch politics, not me. Whadda you take me for?”
“A thief,” Shaa said, “hopefully.”
“Nah, not me. Me, I burn down buildings. Why you asking?”
This is not helpful, Shaa thought. “If you were a thief, you could have picked these locks and gotten us out of here.”
“Oh. Hey, that’s a good idea! Uh ... you’re not a -”
“No.” Yet again the problem of extrication devolves on me, Shaa thought, so what else is new.
“Oh,” said the arsonist. “Eh, so like I was telling you, every day they takes some guy to Oskin Yahlei and we never sees him again. This time it’s me, and you too.”
Raw material for a necromancer, what a delightful conclusion to the day. Let this be a lesson, Shaa thought; the next time early retirement is offered, I should take it. Enough with these crummy adventures.
The slap of the waves changed as the boat pulled up to a pier, the deck rolling more erratically as the hull responded to the reflections of water against the dock pilings. Shaa and his companion were dragged through the hatch and up a series of ladders to the street, and were hurried off, hands still chained, under ever-watchful guard. The men on the boat had handed them off to an escort that had been waiting for them at the dock. This new party was made up of a dozen or so men from the regular militia, and one other man who seemed to be in overall charge. Under this man’s cloak, his jacket bore the same unfamiliar device Shaa had spotted earlier in the day, the purple pretzel; possibly it was the sign of Oskin Yahlei’s own personal retainers. As near as Shaa could figure it, they were heading north and west, toward the hills around the north wall.
Shaa’s chest was still hurting, in a dull deep ache with sharper patches on the surface, and that was starting to worry him. The electric blasts he had taken from the tentacled conjured thing might have done him lasting damage. Because of the nature of his curse - one of his curses - Shaa was forced to be especially protective of the structures in his chest; what he needed now was a rest cure, but that was an unattainable luxury. He would have to be very careful, and very lucky, and hope that he didn’t have to deal with too much magic in the near future.
The procession turned left onto a empty street that ran parallel to the north wall and just south of it. Through the overgrown shrubbery on a vacant lot to the right, in fact, Shaa could see the massive blocks of the city wall. A rundown building came after the empty lot, and then a stone wall crowned with spikes. They approached the tall door in the wall.
The man wearing the sigil of the pretzel rapped on the door. A panel in the top part slid open, another servitor peered out, a few whispered words passed back and forth, and then the door swung heavily inward. A short path led across a narrow courtyard to an ornate stone-front building. The gate behind them closed, and then one of the large double doors to the building ahead of them rotated open, its top lintel twice Shaa’s height. Yet another door, equally as tall, blocked the inner exit of a small entry-hall or vestibule.
Beyond the inner door the function of the building suddenly became clear. An auditorium opening ahead and to the right, its ceiling stretching the long two stories to the building’s roof, had once been the worship-room of a temple. It had not been a major temple, as such things went, but the signs of altars and hangings and other similar apparatus were still visible as lighter shapes against the soot-worn walls. The place certainly hadn’t been a house, especially considering the neighborhood; this area of the city had never been the place people went to build their mansions. The left edge of the auditorium, more of an aisle really, became an actual hallway ahead and toward the rear of the building. On its left wall were a set of smaller but equally ornate double doors, now closed, but flanked on either side by pretzel-wearing guards. Another half-dozen guards were scattered around the temple. The Yahlei man who had accompanied Shaa’s party from the waterfront spoke to the sergeant of their Guard escort. The sergeant did not seem pleased.