The Face of Chaos tw-5 Read online

  Needs must when the devil drives. Samlor's great shoulders braced the pole against the cliff face, not the shelving bottom. Foam echoed back from the rocks and balanced the surge that had tried to sweep him inward with it. In that moment of stasis, Samlor shot the punt forward another twenty feet. Then the surf was on him again, his muscles flexing on the ten-foot pole as they transferred the sea's power to the rock, again and again.

  Samlor had launched the punt at sunset. By now, he had no feeling for time nor for the distance he had yet to struggle across to his once-glimpsed goal. He had a pair of short oars lashed to the forward thwart, but they would have been totally useless for keeping him off this hungry shore. Samlor was a strong man, and determined; but the sea was stronger, and the fire in Samlor's shoulders was beginning to make him fear that the sea was more determined as well.

  Instead of spewing back at him, the next wave continued to be drawn into the rock. It became a long tongue, glowing with microorganisms. Samlor had reached the tunnel mouth while he had barely enough consciousness to be aware of the fact.

  Even that was not the end of the struggle. The softer parts ofth& rock had been worn away into edges that could have gobbled the skiff like a duckling caught by a turtle. Samlor let the next surge carry him in to the depth of his pole. The phosphorescence limned a line of bronze hand-holds set into the stone. The powerful Cirdonian dropped his pole into the boat to snatch a grip with both hands. He held it for three racking breaths before he could find the strength to drag the punt fully aground, further up the tunnel.

  The tunnel was unlighted. Even the plankton cast up by the spray illuminated little more than the surfaces to which it clung. Samlor spent his first several minutes ashore striking a spark from flint and steel into the tinder he carried in a wax-plugged tube. At first his fingers seemed as little under his control as the fibres of the wooden pole they had clutched so fiercely. Conscious direction returned to them the fine motor control they would need later in the night.

  By the time a spark brightened with yellow flame instead of cooling into oblivion, Samlor's mind was at work again as well. His shoulders still ached while the blood leached fatigue poisons out of his muscles. He had been more tired than this before, however. The very respite from wave-battering increased the Cirdonian's strength.

  With the tinder aflame, Samlor lighted the candle of his dark lantern. Then, carrying a ten-gallon cask under one arm and the lantern in the other hand, he began to walk up the gently rising tunnel. The lantern's shutter was open, and its horn lens threw an oval of light before him.

  The tunnel was not spacious, but a man of Samlor's modest height could walk safely in it by hunching only a little in his strides. He could not imagine who had cut the passage through the rock, or why. Scraps - a buckle, a broken knife; a boot even - suggested that the smugglers used it. Samlor could imagine few circumstances, however, in which it would pay smugglers to off-load beneath the surf-hammered corniche rather than in the shelter of the cove. For them, the tunnel might be useful storage; but the smugglers had not built it, and in all likelihood they had as little knowledge of its intended purpose as Samlor did, or Hort.

  Samlor set down the cask at what he estimated was the halfway point along the tunnel. The cask had been an awkward burden in the narrow confines, and its weight of a talent or more was as much as a porter would be expected to carry for even a moderate distance. Because it used muscles in a way that the punt had not, however, the hundred yards Samlor had carried the cask were almost

  relaxing.

  The only thing certain about the escape he hoped to make in a few hours was that he would have very little time. Now the Cir-donian set the cask on end and drew his fighting knife. The blade was double-edged and a foot long. It was stout enough at the cross-hilt to take the shock of a sword and was sharpened to edges that would hold as they cut bronze, rather than something that its owner could shave with. Samlor had razors for shaving. The knife was a

  different sort of tool.

  He set the point at the centre of one of the end-staves, using his left hand to keep the weapon upright. The butt cap was bronze, flat on top, and a perfect surface for Samlor to hammer with the heel of his right hand. The blade hummed. The beechwood cracked and sagged away from the point. Working the knife loose, Samlor then punched across the grain of the other four end staves as well. The line of perforations did not quite open the cask, but they would permit him to smash his heel through the weakened boards quickly

  when the need arose.

  He was more aware than before of the lantern's hot shell as he paced the rest of the tunnel's length. He could hear someone above him when he reached the end of the tunnel. The susurrus could have been anything, wind-driven twigs as easily as the slippers of a guard on the floor above. There was a sharper sound to punctuate that whispering, however; a spear grounded as the man paused, or the tip of a bow. The stone conducted sounds very well, but it conducted them so well that Samlor could not get a precise fix on where the guard was in relation to the trap door. For that matter, the caravan-master had no idea of how well the upward-pivoting door was concealed. It might very well flop open in the centre of the room above.

  The good news was that the sounds did not include speech. Either the guard was alone, or the party was more stolid than the random pacing seemed to suggest.

  Samlor needed more information than he could get in the tunnel. There would be no better time to learn more. He shuttered his lantern and slid the worn bronze bolt from its socket in the door jamb. There were stone pegs set into the end wall as a sort of one-railed ladder. Samlor set his right foot on the midmost, where his leg was flexed just enough to give him its greatest thrust. His right hand held the dagger while his left readied itself on the trap door. Then the Cirdonian exploded upward like a spring toy.

  As it chanced, the door was quite well hidden in an alcove, though the hangings that would once have completed the camouflage were long gone. There was no time to consider might-have-beens, no time for anything but the pantalooned Beysib who turned, membranes flicking in shock across his eyes. He was trying to raise his bow, but there was no time to fend Samlor away with the staff, much less to nock one of the bone-tipped arrows. Samlor punched the smaller man in the pit of the stomach, a rising blow, and the point of the long dagger grated on the Beysib's spine in exiting between his fourth and third ribs.

  The Beysib collapsed backwards, his motion helping Samlor free the knife for another victim if one presented himself. None did. The nictitating membrane quivered over the Beysib's eyes. In better light, it would have shown colours like those on the skin of a dying albacore. The blow had paralysed the man's lungs, so that the only sound the guard made as he died was the scraping of his nails on the stone floor.

  Samlor slid the body back through the trap door, from whence its death had sprung. He hoped the victim was not a friend of Hort; he sympathized with simple folk looking for solace apart from the establishment of such as Lord Tudhaliya. But they had made their bed when they stole a child from the House of Kodrix.

  The temple had been a single, circular room. It was roofless now, and its girdle of fluted columns had fallen; but the curtain wall within those columns still stood to shoulder height or above. That wall had been constructed around only three-quarters of the circumference, however. A 90° arc looked out unimpeded on the waters of the cove, which lapped almost to the building's foundations.

  And out at the mouth of the cove, its hull black upon the phosphorescence through which sweeps drove it languidly, was a trawler. The vessel's sail was furled because of the breeze that began to push against the rising ride when the land cooled faster than the sea.

  There were sounds outside the temple. Mice, perhaps, or dogs; or even tramps looking for at least the semblance of shelter.

  More likely not. Nothing Hort had said suggested that the ceremony planned for tonight would be limited to the boatload who had carried Star to Death's Harbour. Not all the Setmur would be
involved, but at least a few others would slip in from the greater community. The tunnel was as good a hiding place as could be found; and if the guard had been placed in the temple, it was at least probable that Star would be brought to it by her captors.

  Samlor slipped back the way he had come. He set the tip of the Beysib bow between the edge of the trap door and its jamb. That wedged the door open a crack, through which Samlor could hear better and see; and be seen, but the lights would be dim against discovery, and the alcove was some protection as well. Then Samlor waited, with a reptile's patience, and the chill certainty of a reptile as well.

  The firstcomers were blurs bringing no illumination at all. Shawls, pantaloons like those the guard had worn, sweeping nervously through Samlor's field of vision. They chattered in undertones. Occasionally someone raised a voice to call what might have been a name: 'Shaushga!' The corpse stiffening at Samlor's feet made no reply.

  Then a hull grated on the strand. There were more voices, and more of the voices were male. Water slopped between shore and hull as at least a dozen persons dropped over the trawler's gunwale. Then the temple floor rasped beneath the horn-hard soles of barefooted fishermen. A tiny oil lamp gleamed like the sun to light-starved eyes.

  In the centre of the open room, a Beysib in red robes set down the burden he carried. It was Star, had to be Star. She was dressed also in red. Her hair had been plaited into short tendrils so that the blaze above her forehead seemed to have eight white arms.

  'I don't want to,' the child cried distinctly. 'I want to go to bed.' She refused to support herself with her legs, curling to the pavement when the Beysib set her down.

  The man in red and a woman as nondescript as the others in a brown and black shawl bent to the child. They spoke urgently and simultaneously in Beysib and a melange of local dialects. The latter were almost equally unintelligible to Samlor for the accent and poor acoustics. The man in red held Star by the shoulders, but he was coaxing rather than trying to force her to rise.

  The trawler had been crabbed further into the cove so that Samlor could no longer see it from his vantage point. The Cir-donian held his body in a state of readiness, but at not quite the bowstring tautness of the instant before slaughter. There would be slaughter, nothing could be more certain than that; but for the moment, Samlor continued to wait. There were ten, perhaps twenty, Beysib within the temple wall at the moment. Some of them were between Star and the hidden door. That would not keep Samlor from striking if the need arose, but there was at least a chance that some of those now milling in the room would spread out if the ceremony began.

  Star had gotten to her feet. She was pouting in the brief glimpse Samlor had of her face as she turned. He could not imagine how anyone had taken Star for the maid's daughter. Even the set other lips was a mirror of Samlane's.

  The Beysib chattering ceased. Their feet brushed quickly to positions flanking the temple opening. It was much as Samlor had hoped. Star stretched her hands out, palms forward, towards the cove. The man in red was still with her, but the woman had joined the others just outside the building. Star began chanting in a bored voice. The syllables were not in any language with which Samlor was familiar. From the regularity of the sounds, it was possible that they were from no language at all, merely forming a pattern to concentrate nonverbal portions of the brain.

  Samlor tensed. He had already chosen the spot through which his dagger would enter the kidneys of the man in red. Then, suddenly, Lord Tudhaliya's troopers swept into the gathering with cries of bloody triumph.

  The security forces might have intended to take a few prisoners, but as Samlor bolted from his hiding place, he saw a woman cut in half. The trooper who killed her had a sword almost four feet long in the blade. His horizontal, two-handed cut took her in the small of the back and bisected her navel on the way out.

  The troopers had approached dismounted, of course. Even so, they had shown abnormal skill for cavalrymen in creeping up among the ruins. There was no way of telling how many of them there were, but it was certainly more than the squad that had made the arrests that morning. Lights began to flare, dark lanterns like Samlor's own still hissing in the tunnel below.

  The red-garbed Beysib bawled in horror and tried to enfold Star in his cloak, as if that would serve as any protection from what was about to happen. Samlor smashed the Beysib down with the dagger's hilt to his forehead, not from mercy, but because the point might have caught and held the weapon for moments the Cirdonian did not have to lose. Samlor grabbed the screaming child by the shoulder and spun for the tunnel mouth.

  A Beysib cavalryman leaped from the crumbling wall. He was aiming a kick at Samlor's head.

  The angle was different, but too many camels had launched feet at the caravan master for Samlor to be caught unprepared. The boot slashed by his ear as he pivoted. The Beysib's sword was cocked for a blow that the fellow had to hold until he landed, or he risked lopping off his own feet. The long weapon did nothing to keep the Beysib's momentum from impaling him on the Cirdonian dagger. Samlor slipped the hilt as it punched home. He tossed Star to the trap door and rammed her through as he jumped in himself.

  When Samlor tried to bang the stone door to, a Beysib sword shot through the gap and kept the edges from meeting. Instead of tugging against the springy steel, Samlor let the Beysib's own pull open'the trap again. Samlor lunged upward through the opening. Before the sword could be transformed once more from a pry bar into a weapon, the Cirdonian had buried his boot knife in the trooper's throat.

  The sword dropped into the tunnel as Samlor shot the bolt which closed the door. The last thing the caravan-master had seen before stone met stone was the face of Lord Tudhaliya turned to a fright mask by fury and speckles of blood. The Beysib noble was lunging to take the place of his dying trooper. His outstretched sword sang against the marble even as the bolt snicked home.

  'Come on. Star, I'm your uncle!' Samlor shouted as he grabbed the nearest handful of the child. He did not particularly care whether she obeyed or even understood, for there was no time now to wait on a four-year-old's legs. He let the Beysib sword lie, because he needed his right hand for the lantern. Its unshuttered light seemed shockingly bright in the closeness. Samlor ran bent over, the girl under his arm as the cask had been when he came from the punt.

  Even as Samlor's heels hit the floor on his second stride, hands and sword blades wrenched the bronze latch into fragments. A file of Beysib troopers with lamps and swords plunged into the tunnel behind Lord Tudhaliya.

  Samlor's plan had been based on the assumption that his sudden assault would startle the gathering of fisher-folk and give him the thirty seconds or so that he needed to block his escape route. This security troop was as well-trained as any force the Cirdonian had encountered, and they were already primed to rip open hiding places. Presumably Tudhaliya thought he was after fugitives from the ceremony, but that mattered as little to him as it did to Samlor.

  The Cirdonian smashed open the cask and kicked it over. The naphtha gushed across the stone, darkening it, and began to flow sluggishly back in the direction Samlor was fleeing. Samlor dared not ignite the fluid until he was clear of it. He took a stride and another stride, ignoring Star's wailing as her shoulder brushed the tunnel wall. The Cirdonian turned and flung his lantern towards the naphtha. Lord Tudhaliya batted the light back past the fugitives with the flat of his sword.

  Then the second Beysib trooper stumbled over the cask and banged his own lamp down into the naphtha. The tunnel boomed into red life. It singed Samlor's eyebrows, even though Lord Tud-haliya shielded the Cirdonian from the worst of it.

  The Beysib noble pitched forward. Samlor ran for the boat, clutching the child now in both arms. The capering fire threw their shadows down the tunnel ahead of them.

  Samlor set Star in the stern of the punt and began shoving the vessel back towards the water. The sea had retreated since he dragged the punt out of it. While Samlor thrust at the boat, he glanced back over his shoulder. Th
e blazing petroleum was creeping down the slope of the tunnel. Just ahead of it, his clothes afire but a sword gripped still in either hand, came Lord Tudhaliya. The swordsman's hair and flesh stank as they burned, but there are men whom no degree of pain will turn from a task. Samlor recognized the mind-set very well.

  The Cirdonian still had a push dagger sheathed on his left wrist, but it was as useless against this opponent as the knives he had left in bodies cooling on the temple floor. Samlor snatched up the punt pole, sliding it forward in his grip. As Tudhaliya feinted with his left sword, Samlor thrust the pole into the centre of the Beysib's chest. With enough room to manoeuvre, Tudhaliya would have avoided the clumsy attack. Instead, his sluggish reflexes bounced him against the tunnel wall, and the end of the pole knocked him back into the spreading flames.

  The Beysib stood up. Samlor poked at his groin, missed, but caught his opponent in the ribs with enough force to topple him again. Tudhaliya's swords snicked from either side, inches short of where Samlor gripped the pole. Chips flew, but the pole was seasoned ash and as thick as a man's wrist. Samlor thrust himself away, and the Beysib recoiled on to his back in the fire.

  The naphtha sucked a fierce breeze from the tunnel to feed its flames. The glare flickered now around Tudhaliya's face, as instinct forced him to breathe. There was no help in that influx, only red tendrils that shrank lung tissues and blazed back out of Tudhaliya's mouth as he finally screamed.

  'My sweet, my love,' Samlor whispered as he turned back to the girl. 'I'm going to take you home, now.' The punt's flat bottom jounced easily over the stone as if the executioner's death had doubled the rescuer's strength.