“We must move quickly,” Murad said. “That shot will rouse the city. Out! Bring the chests.”
What with the chests and the limp forms of Bardolin and Gerrera, only Mensurado and two other soldiers had their hands free. The company filed out into the hot night, stepping over Faku’s body as though it were a pothole in the road. Hawkwood closed the old man’s eyes, cursing under his breath.
“This way. Quickly,” Murad said, leading off. The company followed him at a jog-trot, sweating and gasping ere they had gone a hundred yards. Coins slipped out of the soldiers’ pockets to clink at the roadside.
The city seemed deserted. Not a light to be seen anywhere, not a living soul on the streets. But Hawkwood was continually aware of movement, like a flickering at the corner of his eye. The place was so dark that it was impossible to be certain. He looked up to see a disc of star-filled sky above the crater-rim, and was almost sure he saw things moving in that sky, wheeling darknesses which stood out against the stars. He had the uncomfortable notion that the city was not quiet and empty at all, but teeming with invisible, capering life.
The company paused to rest in a narrow side street, the soldiers who carried the heavy chests massaging their bloodless hands. They had come half a mile maybe from the house in which they had been imprisoned, and there was still no sign of a pursuit. Even Murad seemed uneasy.
“I thought the entire city would have been about our ears by now,” he said to Hawkwood.
“I know,” the mariner replied. “Everything is wrong, strange. What happened to Bardolin’s imp, and to Bardolin himself? Why can’t he come back to us? Are we being allowed to escape because—”
“Because what?”
“Perhaps because they have what they want.”
Murad was silent for a long minute. At last he said: “It is a pity about the mage, but if you are right then we may yet get away unscathed. And after all, we bear him with us. His mind may yet return.” He would not meet Hawkwood’s eye, but scanned the massiveness of the buildings, the trees which were beginning to rear up in their midst; they were not far from the crater wall, and the narrow gorge which was their only exit.
“Time to move on.”
The soldiers shouldered their burdens once more, and the company staggered onwards. The attack came so suddenly that they were surrounded before they had seen their assailants. The night was sprinkled with raging eyes, and huge forms charged them. The quiet was broken by roars and screams and wails from a hundred bestial throats. The men at the rear died before they could even drop the chests that weighed them down.
FIFTEEN
A T the top of Undi’s pyramid was another building whose sides curved inwards towards its roof. The Gosa shifter took the imp inside, and then in a series of bounds it leapt up a narrow line of steps. They were on the roof of the structure, a square platform perhaps three fathoms to a side. There the imp was gently lowered to its feet, and the were-ape left. A grating of stone, and the opening in the platform closed behind it.
Bardolin looked up with the imp’s eyes to see the encircling pitch-night of the crater walls, and above them a roundel of stars turning in the endless gyre of heaven. There were so many of them that they cast a faint, cold light down on the city. Many of them were recognizable—it was possible to glimpse Coranada’s Scythe—but they seemed to be in the wrong positions. Even as Bardolin watched, a streak of silver lightninged across the welkin, a star dying in a last flare of beauty.
“Awe-inspiring, isn’t it?” a voice said, and the imp jumped. Instinctively it looked for somewhere to hide, but the stone platform was stark and bare, and there was nothing beyond its edge but a long fall to the pyramid steps below.
Bardolin gripped the will of the creature in his own, steadied it, held it fast.
There was a man on the platform. He had come out of nowhere and stood with the starlight playing across his features. He seemed amused.
“An attractive little familiar. We in Undi do not use them any more. They are a weakness as well as an asset. Are they still as hard to cast through as I remember?”
Bardolin’s voice issued out of the imp’s mouth. The creature’s eyes went dull as he dominated it completely.
“Hard enough, but we get by. Might I ask your name?”
The man bowed. “I am Aruan of Undi, formerly of Garmidalan in Astarac. You are Bardolin of Carreirida.”
“Have we met before?”
“In a way. But here—let me spare your trembling familiar. Take my hand.”
He extended one large, blunt-fingered hand to the imp. The creature took it and Aruan straightened, pulling. But the imp did not come with him. Instead a shimmering penumbra slid out of its tiny body as though he had dragged from it its soul. He was holding on to Bardolin’s own hand, and Bardolin stood there on the platform, astonished, glimmering in the starlight like a phantom.
“What did you do?” he asked Aruan. The imp was blinking and rubbing its eyes.
“A simulacrum, nothing more. But it renders communication a little easier. You need not fear; your essence, or the bulk of it, is with your sleeping body down in the city.”
Bardolin’s shining image felt itself with trembling hands. “This is magic indeed.”
“It is not so difficult, and it makes things more . . . civilized.”
Bardolin folded his imaginary arms. “Why am I here?”
“Can’t you answer that yourself? You are a creature of free will, as are all God’s creations.”
“You know what I mean. What is it you want of me?”
The man named Aruan turned away, paced to the edge of the platform and stared out over the city of Undi. He was tall, and dressed in voluminous, archaic robes that a noble might have worn in the days of the Fimbrian Hegemony. He was bald but for a fringe of raven hair about the base of his skull, for all the world like a monk’s tonsure. He had a beaked nose and deep-set eyes under bristling, fantastic brows, high, jutting cheekbones strangely at odds with the rest of his rather aristocratic face, as if someone had melded the features of a Kolchuk tribesman and a Perigrainian Landgrave. Hauteur and savagery, Bardolin noted them both.
“This is how I once looked,” Aruan said. “Were you to see my true form now you might be repelled. I am old, Bardolin. I remember the days of empire, the Religious Wars. I have known men whose fathers spoke with the Blessed Saint. I have seen centuries of the world come and go.”
“No man is immortal,” Bardolin said, fascinated and apprehensive at the same time. “Not even the most powerful mage.”
Aruan turned away from the dark city, smiling. “True, too true. But there are ways and means of staving off death’s debt collectors. You ask what it is I want of you, and I am wandering around the answer. Let me explain something.
“In all the years I have been here, we have seen many ships arrive from the Old World—more than you could ever have imagined. Most of them carried cargoes of gold-hungry vultures who simply wanted to claim this, the Zantu-Country, and rape it. They were adventurers, would-be conquerors, sometimes zealots filled with missionary zeal. They died. But sometimes they were refugees, come fleeing the pyres of Normannia and the purges of the Inceptines. These people, for the most part, we welcomed. But we have never encountered an Old-worlder with your . . . potential.”
“I don’t understand,” Bardolin said. “I am a common enough brand of mage.”
“Technically, perhaps you are. But you possess a duality which no other mage who has come here from across the ocean has possessed, a duality which is the very key to our own thaumaturgical hierarchy here in the west.”
Bardolin shook his head. “Your answers only provide the spur to further questions.”