‘But master,’ said the servant desperately. ‘I must-’
‘You must be quiet!’ said Tin Char. ‘If he speaks again, gouge out his other eye!’
The servant did not speak again.
Instead, the man started to wring his hands in frustrated anguish.
Dui Tin Char waited for Froissart to proceed with the next step demanded by ritual. The drinking of the blood. But Froissart did no such thing.
‘That was well done,’ said Manthandros Trasilika, when nobody else seemed inclined to speak.
Trasilika’s ignorance was pardonable. But Froissart’s inaction was something else again. Perhaps Froissart had forgotten how to proceed. An unlikely event, for all priests of Zoz the Ancestral familiarized themselves with the rites of the closely associated Temple of Torture. Unlikely, yes, but not impossible. Or perhaps Froissart was in no condition to drink the blood. The child of Wen Endex was bleeding from a bite from a possibly rabid animal. His face had assumed an unnatural pallor; he looked shocked, exhausted, close to collapse.
One way or another, the ritual must be brought to its proper conclusion. Any other course would be blasphemy.
‘There is the matter of the blood,’ said Tin Char carefully, thinking that would suffice.
‘The blood?’ said Froissart.
‘Yes,’ said Tin Char. ‘The blood.’
‘Oh,’ said Froissart.
He picked up the big dish. He breathed the fumes of blood, excrement and urine. Sweat dropped from his chin and splashed in the unorthodox cocktail he now contemplated. The fluid trembled as Froissart’s hands shook. He opened his mouth as if to say something. Then, quite calmly, he vomited into the bowl. He stood looking at the vomit. The heavy dish started to slide in his sweat-greased hands. Froissart tried to put it down. But the dish was going, going, gone, a slosh of filth and vomit splurping over the side. Impact! The dish smashed down, spraying its contents across Trasilika’s feet.
‘Jean Froissart!’ said Tin Char in shocked surprise. ‘You disgrace yourself!’
Froissart grovelled in the mess of muck and vomit.
‘It blasphemes,’ said Dardanalti, affecting shock. ‘It sins against our faith with malice. What makes it priest? It has not the Skin.’
So spoke Justina’s lawyer, speaking of Jean Froissart with all the resources of racial hatred at his disposal. Then the lawyer dared a most unlawyerly thing. He kicked the cringing priest.
‘This is no priest,’ said Dardanalti, kicking the thing again. ‘This is a fraud.’
Dardanalti was making the greatest gamble of his life. He suspected — but was not certain — that Jean Froissart was a false priest. But he had no proof of that whatsoever. There was therefore every possibility that Dardanalti might shortly find himself entertaining five million red ants with a most extraordinary generosity, or, to detail just one of the many alternative fates which might befall him, taking his ease on a sharpened roasting spit.
Dardanalti, then, gambled with his life.
Froissart sat up.
‘I,’ he said, ‘I’m-’
Outside, someone screamed, as screams a man of nervous disposition when a dentist wrenches an ulcerated wisdom tooth from the living flesh of the gums and, gripping this trophy in a pair of rusty pliers, holds it aloft in all its gory glory.
Froissart opened his mouth.
Closed it.
Began to cry.
‘Pull yourself together,’ said Manthandros Trasilika roughly, as blubbering tears streamed down Froissart’s face, washed through his sweat then dropped to the disgraced flagstones.
‘I… I’m sorry,’ said Froissart.
Then he could no longer help himself. He broke down altogether. He wept, then smashed his head against the stones. Once, twice, thrice. Hammering his forehead against that obstinacy with full force. As if to fracture his skull.
‘A false priest,’ said Dardanalti. ‘I knew as much.’
‘No!’ said Trasilika.
But there was not one person in the room who doubted Jean Froissart’s guilt. He was an imposter. A fake. A blaspheming charlatan.
‘He — he’s mad,’ said Trasilika, speech starting to blunder as panic took grip.
‘Not mad,’ said the Empress Justina, speaking up from her torture table. ‘Not mad, but guilty. A false priest with a false wazir.’
Thus spoke Justina, effectively pronouncing Trasilika’s death sentence. For if Jean Froissart was a fraud, then Manthandros Trasilika must be a criminal imposter likewise.
‘He’s — it’s the voyage,’ said the heavyweight would-be wazir. ‘It’s, it’s the, the malaria, or rabies, the rat which bit, it bit, he’s blood, blood, he’s bleeding, he-’
Trasilika was babbling.
But Juliet Idaho was perfectly calm as he said to the Temple acolytes standing alongside of him:
‘Cut me loose.’
They obeyed. Knives they had. In moments they triced through his bonds, the neck-noose included. Then Juliet Idaho said to the nearest soldier:
‘Give me your weapon.’
Wordlessly, the soldier handed over his scimitar.
‘Stop him!’ said Trasilika in panic. ‘A blade, he’s got a blade, he’s going to-’
‘Foreign filth,’ hissed Dardanalti.
Trasilika rushed for the exit door. The acolytes met him, punched him, threw him back. He crashed into the torture table. Went down, but got to his feet again. Too late! For Juliet Idaho was already upon him. In that enclosed space, there was precious little room to manoeuvre. But there was room enough to swing a scimitar.
Trasilika’s head went bouncing to the floor. The headless body swayed. Sprayed the ceiling with blood. Then toppled. And Idaho was already moving, arm striking, blade plunging, steel ripping, fingers delving. Moments later, Juliet Idaho stood in triumph with a trophy in his fist. A beating heart. Jean Froissart’s heart.
‘Bravo,’ cried Justina faintly.
Then faint voice gave way to fainting fit.
And, at a nod from Tin Char, guards disarmed the still-panting Juliet Idaho.
‘Well,’ said Tin Char, wiping some of the much-splattered corpse blood from his face, ‘this is not a good start to the day. Nevertheless, we’ve profited from the experience. We know that Aldarch Three has victory in Yestron.’
‘We know no such thing,’ said Dardanalti, confronting probabilities with possibilities as a lawyer must. ‘Two liars we have for certain. Two shiploads of liars, possibly. But as for Al’three, why, he may be dead, and his enemies victorious.’
‘I’ll take a chance on that,’ said Tin Char, who doubted that a couple of frauds could have suborned two whole shiploads of sailors. ‘As Aldarch Three has triumphed in Talonsklavara, the time has come for the rule of the rightful to be restored to Untunchilamon. In the absence of any other appropriate candidates, I therefore declare myself wazir of Injiltaprajura.’
‘Master,’ said the one-eyed servant, venturing at last to speak again. ‘That’s what I came to tell you about. We have a new wazir.’
‘Yes,’ said Tin Char. ‘Me.’
‘But Master, there’s an Ebrell Islander in the courtyard outside. It’s got a sledge hammer. Guy, it’s called Guy, Chegory Guy. It’s got an Ashdan with it, a girl Qasaba. They-they-’
‘They what?’ said Tin Char. ‘They want to be a two-headed wazir? What madness is this?’
‘Not madness, master. Messages. They bring a message from the Hermit Crab. The Crab has declared itself the wazir of Injiltaprajura.’
Dui Tin Char gave a little moan. He remembered his last encounter with the Crab. Without laying so much as a claw upon Tin Char’s flesh, the Crab had exerted a Power which had wrenched Tin Char’s arms back further and further until both were dislocated.
‘Show them in,’ said Juliet Idaho decisively.
Two acolytes moved to obey.
In came a redskin, the heavily muscled Chegory Guy, with Olivia Qasaba beside him.
‘We’re here with a, a message,’ said Chegory, holding tight to his sledge hammer, his sole source of comfort and reassurance in this most difficult of situations.
‘Yes,’ said Olivia, in a firm though girlish voice. ‘The Crab brings pardons for those who obey. As long as… as…’