The A'Rak Page 2

  "Won't you all go and . . . game or whatever?" I burst out at them. "Leave me to concentrate! If you spot him, come and tell me—I'll be working straight west down yon largest promenade, the glyfrabble and runewreckers lairs first. What do you need that for, Raschle?!" I noticed that Raschle had wrapped a cubit of log-chain round his forearm and covered it with his sleeve. I'd just previously seen Olombo tuck an ironwood short-knout in his breech-waist, and a brass knuckle-frame in his pocket. The two of them traded a quick, hooded glance, and shrugged. My wiry pullers, Bantril and Shinn, glum, short-spoken men of the tundra stock, turned away when I looked at them. Had Bantril there strapped something to his ribs beneath his doublet? "Will you all leave me to collect myself, please?" I cried. "To concentrate?"

  I watched them go. They seemed to confer before diverging in pairs to either side of the boulevard, and leaving my view.

  I quaffed one more goblet of wine. I sighed. Unclenched my hands. I practiced some affable smiles, which I hoped would facilitate my inquiries in this city of scoundrels. Then I set forth.

  The boulevard was an endless procession of lounges and parlors and lairs all tiaraed and spangled in lamps—their mere monikers galled me: The Gilded Palm, Odds Bodikins, Pelf's Paradise, The Portly Poke, The Deck and Die. Smiling affably, I asked passers-by which were the glyf-trick and rune-swindle dens, and was answered with japes and affronts.

  Stepping in this place and that, I amiably conferred with various greeters and doorkeepers: with pomaded panders, mustachioed shills, rouged catamites in kohl and ringlets, powdered ponces, and leering ganymedes—for whose facetious impertinences I thanked them, smiling affably.

  At length I learned to descry—through street windows—the red felt tables for rune play, and the racked arrays of glass statuettes that were glyfs. Now, speaking less, I hunted through the dens themselves, overstepping here the vomitus of a gamester overtaken by surfeit, sidestepping there the blind assault of a gamester in fury, or ducking under the wild, begging embrace of a gamester just ruined.

  Until, wonderfully, there he was, my son, at a rune table, suavely directing the coins his ring of bettors vied to place. My dear, grave Persander, look at him: coolth itself amid chaos he was, his shoulders at last their full breadth now (my father's shoulder's, as I had foreseen, not his father's)—his brows' brooding jut in place too now, giving his eyes the shadowed private look I'd long seen they'd grow to. And his ears! The last of that dear, boyish blatancy was gone now. They hugged his head sleekly, a man's, my precious little boy's no more!

  He saw me, stood staring, then signalled a colleague to stand in for him, and came over to me. His face stayed impassive (already a gambler's) but he walked straight to me and hugged me without hesitation.

  I hugged him hard. "My precious son! I've intruded! No! I've inexcusably thrust in, interrupted, embarrassed you. . . ."

  "Mother! I rejoice to see you. I'm completely delighted!"

  And then I could see that I had embarrassed him, though he was covering very smoothly. How could this not embarrass him? I asked myself, but even so it stung me. He mustn't be pawed by his mother here where he worked his profession! Oh heavens forbid! I stood a bit away and smiled as if he were a dear friend. It felt false and I felt miserable, but also a mite irritated now. "We are commissioned to North Hagia, our carrack put in here. I had to see you and to . . . show you my affection."

  "North Hagia? Big Quay?" He seemed to disapprove. It irked me, seemed mere contrariety. Belatedly I saw it was the A'Rak, the danger he minded. It made me glad. I was starting to reassure him when a big, ruddy fop in wide fleecy muttonchops and a toga of silver fur placed a proprietary palm on my son's shoulder. "Riddler! I have coin here, Sirrah, riding on your felt! I'm engaged and I'm not having riddlers switched on me, do you think me an infant? That I don't know it's bad luck? If you are indeed employed here, come get thee back to work!"

  "Sir," said Persander coolly, gracefully lifting the man's hand from his shoulder with one twist of his wrist, "you are incorrect, and impo—"

  "Impolite," he was undoubtedly going to say. I afterwards recalled in perfect detail that moment when I interrupted, and did the unforgivable for a mother—stepped in to defend my son, as if he couldn't do it himself! I tried to stand still, stay silent, and almost managed, but when my son addressed this flatulent money-sack as "Sir," my outrage wouldn't stay down.

  I cut Persander off, stepping up to the gamester: "How could he think you to be an infant?" I asked him as loudly as possible, "A big, oily, odorous rump of roast such as yourself? If you are so desperate to disgorge your coin, go and dump it in the jakes, man! You look doubtful but trust me—the notion's just new to you. Try it, and you'll love it! You're moron enough to love gaming, are you not?"

  "How dare you, you abusive bitch! I won't stand for this!" The cry was the cue for the oaf's retainers, no less than three hefty knout-and-dirk veterans, and they trotted forth.

  At this point things converged, and the situation instantly bloomed into a disaster. Persander, dropping suavity, shouted, "Stand them down!" and cleared the hilts of his shortsword, discreetly strapped crosswise against the small of his back. Too late, for here out of nowhere—how did they happen to be here?—were Raschle and Olombo convergent on the knoutsmen, and Bantril and Shinn emerging miraculously from somewhere behind me, closing on them as well. The den's own thumpers, meanwhile, were closing round us almost as quickly.

  Thanks to the tranquillizing effects of sudden collision, the brawl was resolved well short of blades. The sum of it was that the gamester's retainers had between them, at a guess, a round dozen broken ribs, their toga-ed rump roast had a lovely plump purple face I'd fisted him, and, unfortunately, Raschle had a broken arm. Our nuncial status spared us detention for damages. Enough that we were marched under arms back to Plectt's ship, which set sail under compulsion a few hours after. What ensued for Persander I knew would be severe professional embarrassment at the very least. The fracas divided us and we had no further moment together.

  We set Raschle down at Kadastra in the Aristoz Chain, the western boundary of the Shallows—saw him lodged and leeched till we came back for him. In Hagia we must hire a spear to be at strength for our commission. We crossed the eastern Agon in a tennight, and my bitter self-reproach and sadness made it a dreary crossing for me.

  Shipping bound up the Haagsford River lies at anchor near her estuary and waits till sunrise brings the prevailing onshore breezes that offer easy conveyance inland to Big Quay. When our caravel hoisted sail we made part of a pretty little flotilla of vessels moored before the rivermouth—the gamut of Southern Agon merchantmen we seemed: aft of us, a brace of little Samadrian caiques, big-ruddered with lateens of bossed hide, running leather goods, likely; off our bows a great wallowing galliot, high-castled fore and aft, an Ingens bulk freighter shipping—who knew?—anything suited to warehousing till a rise in prices; the high-riding schooner at point of the pack, with her tall tiers of swollen sail, had likely traversed the open Agon (whose crazed gales she was rigged for) and if from Kairnheim, her cured beeves were likely discharged back in the Ephesions, and she came to Big Quay to fill her hold with something warehoused there; in the main, the smaller fry—a half dozen frigillae, yare as water-skaters; a triad of Pythnian curvottes, their bowsprits carven in the nefrits, spaalgs and djoons of traditional Astrygal iconography—carried, as our own grocer did, consumables to bustling Big Quay's populace. The grander craft came on business from half the world away, and great fortunes in a dozen nations rode with them.

  The river, abloom with our sail, swept in long, stately reaches all gilded with morning, and the country was piled up in lovely, green-brocaded hills on either bank. Beneath all this beauty, though, I was already feeling a stirring and twitching—like a venomous something you suddenly sense shares the bedclothes you've just snuggled under.

  I chided myself I had known Hagia's history, as most do. Why was I suddenly fastidious? Is not a Nuncio unlike all others i
n having particularly sworn ". . . to honor the custom, the canon, the creed of all peoples whose soil I tread upon . . ."?

  Portly shipmaster Plectt—whose oiled ringlets and groomed, perfumed chinlet of beard had delayed me but briefly from developing quite an affection for—slouched at the port rail beside me. "Your teeth are on edge, my dear Nuncio."

  "What?"

  "Those two little knots of muscle declare your jaw to be politely but definitely clenched."

  "Well, I'm . . . anxious perhaps. . . ."

  "Dear Lagademe. You are the most upright, excellent, and intransigent of women! The bare thought of this nation's gods revolts you. But wait and watch. You have not yet begun to abhor. Just past this next bend here. . . ."

  Big Quay's name was, for most of its history, a gross overstatement, of course. Time out of mind it had been a rural backwater, the terminus of three convergent inland highways, where the gleets-wool from a number of Hagia's countless inland valleys naturally concentrated before shipment abroad—and not far abroad—to the neighboring Astrygals, mainly. Ambitious locals had built a few "warehouses," big sheds of plank and shingle, no more. These shed owners, a bumpkin elite, dabbled in buying the shearings they stored, and brokering lots off-season, but they seldom did more than break even at best. Now we rounded that bend, and I confronted what those plank sheds, and little docking piers on crooked pilings, had grown to.

  A tumult of looming structures it was, an extravagant abundance of architecture. The effect was heightened by the strict niche the city's civic core nested in, for Big Quay was backed by a wall of crags, and stood snugly bracketed between these and the river, as thronged with masts and sail as the city was with steeples and domes, pylons and porticoes, pinnacles, turrets and towers. Their density gave all those grand and individually impressive buildings an air of competitive jostling, of standing on their toes to be seen. The quay, two miles long, was a rampart of massive, seamlessly masoned ashlar, fronted by a phalanx of imposing warehouses of the same costly stone. This quay—a Big Quay in truth today—was like a second river of sailors and teamsters and navvies and merchants and factors and freightwagons and cargo cranes . . . for all I could see of its length, every foot of the grand wharfside swarmed.

  Big Quay was rightly enough named now, past a doubt, now in its Age of Gold, its Age of A'Rak.

  Plectt espied his grocers' factor; the man flourished two signal flags bearing the house's blazon (a loaf and sausage, en gardant), to mark the berth secured us, whence another carrack—riding high and unladen—was just then being towed out to open water by the little galleys—abristle with oars—locally known as dockers.

  In this last little interval before I set foot in the metropolis, I found I could imagine quite clearly that little, early-days Big Quay, all weeds and weathered wood. How had it been on that fateful day near two centuries ago, when that monstrous being had first revealed himself, and proposed his epochal Covenant to those rustics with their few sheds of wool? Just how had that awesome colloquy come upon them, those homely entrepreneurs in fleeces and jerked mutton? Spiderthought is directly known, not heard; it comes rippling right up one's spine. Had Grandfather A'Rak crept near in the night, crouched watching and weighing them a while . . . ? Spied on them counting their stock, securing their flimsy doors against night . . . ?

  It now seems clear that from the first the A'Rak had been bargaining for security in the long term. Sly puppeteer, from the outset he'd seen how to conjure a populous nation from a sleepy pastoral people—how to swell the size of his flock, generation after generation. Gentlemen . . . Gentlemen, do not be alarmed. I am A'Rak, a visitor to your lovely hills. Did you know that beneath them, I have found many rich veins of purest gold . . . ?

  The widow Pompilla was to meet us on the Quay in front of the Maritime Museum, and here Plectt, when his crew had his cargo's offloading well in hand, conducted us. We, with our quickshaw in tow, would be known to our client before she to us, and accordingly we made ourselves visible, but a half hour's self display amid the morning throng produced no Dame Pompilla in widow's weeds. For a twenty-night running she had engaged to be standing the watch here on the morning's dockings, the herb-haag had told us, and we were here within three days of term.

  "Leave your men here, Lagademe. I'll show you the Fane," offered Plectt. This seemed needful, some sense of the cult our commission involved us with. I did not wish our point of delivery to be the first A'Rak-temple I'd ever stepped into. The temple here of course was the grandest of all of them, and the one where we were to lodge the deceased was an outlying, more rural shrine, but all the fanes had in common the occasional presence of the A'Rak, or of one of his numberless spawn, and I felt the need to have some sense of what that meant.

  The way to the A'Rak Fane lay up towards the foot of the crags, the city's civic and fiscal core. The broad boulevard we followed was fronted with shops whose opulence ascended with the slope, while the grand homes of prospering merchants yielded to the manses of magnates and the Count Houses and 'Changes with their pilastered and friezeworked facades and their traffic of phaetons jockeyed by liveried lackeys, disgorging—amidst flurries of footmen—peruked financiers.

  The A'Rak-Fane seemed more stronghold than temple, a mighty octagon in plan, a faceted dome of massy stone—except for great eight-sided windows of dark-tinted glass, set high in each facet of the walls. Its entry yawned between huge pylons, the massy doors—bas-reliefed brass—standing open. Plectt stopped just short of the doors, and embraced me farewell. "I'm back to the Shallows this same noontide."

  "You won't show me inside?"

  He glanced at the yawning doors with a grimace of loathing. "I'm ignorant of the cult, by choice. What they call the altar, you know . . . it's a pit. The mouth of a shaft." He gave a comic shudder. "The god, you see, or one of his many spawn, can actually attend his service—could emerge, don't you see, should he choose. It's not done, of course, as a rule . . . but I never go in, the bare idea repels me. Goodbye my dear, upright Lagademe, noblest of Nuncios!"

  Seen from inside, those grand windows were wheels of murky red, black, and amber; they filled the great domed space with a sanguinary gloom, complicated by diaphanous silken hangings that made a labyrinth of the interior; though transparent, the silks lent a wavery, visionary ambiguity to the sanctum, whose great wheel of pews gently vortexed down to a raised dais at its hub. From the atrium just within the brazen doors, my eyes were just level with the top of that dais, where some half-dozen priestly figures (their common feature of costume a white silken shawl fringed with dangling silken braids) stood symmetrically arrayed round the platform's rim. All of them faced the center of the dais, while one standing foremost—in leathern headgear octagonally tiaraed—intoned incomprehensible liturgy. Their gazes were bent, and their chief's intonations were directed, downwards, towards the stone they stood on, where I could now envision what I could not see from my vantage, the "altar" that was the mouth of a shaft.

  The pews were mostly empty. There were perhaps some hundred folk scattered among them. It occurred to me that this murky, webby interior was meant to soften an emptiness that was probably more the rule than the exception here. The ceremony didn't lack impressiveness. The chief priest's intonations were blurred by echoes, but the echoes could be heard falling away deep underground where the gods laired, and this lent the liturgy a most somber gravity.

  I began to step down a little deeper into the pews, and just as I did so the priest's voice seemed to falter, and his posture, for several heartbeats, seemed paralyzed. A quietly dramatic moment, I found it, and when his voice resumed there was a quaver in it that seemed to say something had changed in this vast vaulted interior. Indeed, was there not a most subtle tingle of presence now, in the air around me? Weren't the sparse congregation faintly stirring, sensing the same?

  In the end, I could not be sure, and a moment more saw the service concluded. The little troop of priests filed down the stairs off the dais, and thence up the aisle
, their passage sending a gentle swell, like soft breathing, up through the gauzy silk dangling around them and caressing their shoulders. I retired to a coign of the atrium, out of the way of the dispersing worshippers (prosperous looking burghers, in the main) to watch the priests pass nearer at hand.

  It was thus I chanced to witness something that piqued my curiosity extremely. The chief priest stationed himself near the great doors, and urbanely murmured to those of his congregation who paused to murmur some parting exchange. I thought the atrium vacant when, at last, the priest turned away toward a corridor that appeared to lead to an annex of sacerdotal apartments. But just as the priest vanished into this corridor, a tall, lean figure of decidedly undevout appearance stepped soft-footed out from behind a pillar: bony-face, broken-nosed, black hair clubbed in thongs down his back (up from which peeked a sword-pommel—a three-quarters blade, no doubt, hid in his doublet), this lanky shape lithely and soundlessly followed the priest into the corridor, out of my sight.

  The more keenly my curiosity gnawed at me—and I stood there unable to move for the longest time—the more sternly did my Nuncial duty upbraid me. Our commission, half paid in advance, commanded my fullest energies on the instant. If a Nuncio is anything, she is someone who does not step aside from appointed paths—someone whom the seduction of branchings and by-ways can never beguile. Sternly remembering myself, then, I went to rejoin my crew.

  |

  NIFFT I

  I am sure you are familiar with the tradition, Dear Shag, that Grandfather A'Rak, and all his issue, great and small, instantly know thieves for what they are—can smell them, is the common expression, which I for one find offensive. Who knows by what arcane sensitivity these alien beings identify the members of my guild?