The gems were real.
I knew. I had not boarded prizes among the battlesmoke for the glory of it. I had been to a London jeweler and had handled the gems, precisely against that need.
I held a fortune in my hands.
“Hurry,” I said, and thrust the gems in a fold of cloth within my breechclout. Around my waist was buckled the broad leather belt of the steel-meshed warrior. We padded down corridors known to Gloag. He carried a billet of wood. I would not much like to stop that with my cranium.
On Gloag’s tough dun-colored hide, over his left shoulder blade, I had noticed a brand-mark, the solid block- lettered outlines of the Kregish letters for “C.E.” Natema would not disfigure the slave maidens who attended her and whom she would see every day, and to my infinite relief Delia, having been in the kitchens only for a day, she told me, had not been branded. As the princess’
potential lover and then a corpse, I, too, had not been branded. We made sure that not a scrap of emerald green cloth remained of the fancy clothes in the material we chose for our new clothing. I slung a short scarlet square from my shoulders as a cape, and I forced Gload to do likewise.
He knew his way with unerring accuracy, and I had navigated my way from the roof garden to my room, and so now I navigated my way alongside Gloag until we reached a narrow, dusty, cobwebby, flang-infested corridor low in the palace where water seeped oozing through the cracks between the massive basalt blocks of the walls on one hand. We would have a better chance at night, when the twin suns have set in their riot of topaz and ruby and, if we were lucky, with a little cloud to drift between the first of the seven moons. Like any sailor, once I knew the state of tide or moon I kept that information continually turning in my head, ready at any moment to bring forth the exact state of either. On Kregen, there were seven moons with their phases to consider; but I was automatically sure that I could tell when the darkest period of the night would occur.
Accustomed to long periods on duty without food, I was concerned over Delia; but then Gloag astonished us all by producing a length of loaf, somewhat limp and bent, and a handful of palines he had kept over from the previous meal I had smuggled to him. We ate with a gusty hunger, not leaving a crumb. Given the circumstances the rest of our escape was not overly difficult. We crawled through a stinking conduit and postern. Gloag was a superb scout. We swam the canal, stole a skiff, rowed in the dim light of three of the smaller moons passing low overhead. The nearer moons of Kregen have an appreciable motion. To escape from the city would be out of the question without an airboat, and even then the city wardens would patrol the air lanes. I asked directions, discreetly, of slaves, and Gloag it was who discovered the exact whereabouts among the islands of the enclave of Eward. I was taking a desperate gamble; but I had a card to play.
The city would be up over the escape of slaves, particularly from the ruling House, and we might simply be handed straight back. But I did not think so. Eward and Esztercari were at daggers drawn. We rowed quietly up to the stone jetty where men in the powder blue livery of Eward escorted us to an interview with the Head of their House. I had acted with arrogant authority, letting the guards see the tangible reality of my presence. A Vovedeer can be as autocratic and dictatorial as any other man who commands men, when the need arises.
Our interview was informal and pleasant. Wanek of the family of Wanek of the Noble House of Eward reminded me of no one more vividly than Cydones of Esztercari. Both men contained that gaunt obsessive drive for power. He sat in his powder blue robes, hand on fist, listening. When I had finished he called for wine, and slave girls to care for Delia.
“I welcome you to Eward, Dray Prescot,” Wanek said, as we sat down to the wine and a meal. The suns were breaking in golden and crimson glory patinaed with a paler green fire in the dawn above the rooftops. “My son, the Prince Varden, is away at this time. But I shall be honored to help you. We are not as the rasts of Esztercari.” His fingers gripped his chin, whitening about the knuckles. “This union between their princess and the puppy Pracek you speak of is serious.” And then he began a long discourse on the tangled power politics of the city.
The General Assembly sat continuously. Never was there a break in their deliberations and debates and legislation. There were four hundred and eighty seats in the Assembly. In the city there were twenty-four Houses, both Noble and Lay, so that the average number of seats per House was twenty. Some, like Esztercari, boasted more, twenty-five, the same number as Eward. But the pressures came from alignments of power, alliances and pacts between House and House so that a party might always have the majority vote. When I marveled at the stamina of the Assemblymen Wanek laughed, and explained that only the seats counted. Anyone from a House could sit in the seats reserved to his House in the Assembly. Only the number of seats conferred the power; the men who sat in them came and went, continuously, often on a rota basis, like our system of watches at sea.
“And the Esztercari carry the weight, the alignments, and Cydones Esztercari is Kodifex of all Zenicce!”
Clearly, this was the source of the rancor in Wanek of Eward. Clearly, in his eyes, he should be Kodifex, the acknowledged leader of the most powerful coalition.
Then I saw another of the interesting facts of life in Zenicce. A bent, wizened, bearded fellow in the gray breechclout of the slave was summoned and he, with a delicacy marvelous to see, removed the brand-mark from Gloag’s shoulder. He would have heated his irons and branded Gloag afresh, with the entwined “W.E.” but I prevented him.
“Gloag is free,” I said.
Wanek nodded. “Evidently, you and Delia of the Blue Mountains are free, Dray Prescot, for you are not branded. And so therefore must be your friend, Gloag.” He motioned the brand-remover away. “I will have his skin doctored. The scar will not show.” He chuckled, an unlikely sound, and yet fitting in context. “We are old hands at removing brands and substituting our own, in Zenicce.”
His wife, upright, stern, yet still bearing an unmistakable aura of vanished beauty shining about her motherly virtue, said gently:
“There are about three hundred thousand free people in Zenicce, compared with seven hundred thousand in the great Houses. Of course”-she gestured with one ivory-white hand-“they have no seats in the Assembly.”
“They live on islands and enclaves split by avenues,” said Wanek. “They ape our ways. But they are merchants and tradesmen, like ourselves, and sometimes they are useful.”
I had the sense not to remark that from his words one might assume those in the Houses might not be free. Within the Houses all those not slaves were free with a freedom denied to those independent free outside.
Toward the center of the city the river Nicce divided once more in its serpentine windings to the sea and left a larger island than any other in the complex of land and water. On this island was situated the heart of the city-the buildings of the General Assembly, the city wardens’ quarters, administrative buildings, and a mind-confusing maze of small alleyways and canals off which opened the souks where anything might be bought or sold. The noise was deafening, the colors superb, the sights astounding and the smells prodigious.
After a time when it seemed that Wanek and his wife had nothing better to do than talk to me, Wanek asked, most politely, if he might inspect my rapier. I did not tell him I had taken it from Cydones Esztercari. He took it with a reverence strange to me-he could have bought and discarded a thousand like it-and then his mouth drooped.
“Inferior work,” he said, looking across at his wife with a small smile. She tut-tutted, interested in her husband’s occupation.
“Krasny work. But the hilt is fashionable although too cluttered with gems for a fighting man.” He shot a look at me as he spoke. I rubbed my fingers.
“I had noticed,” I said.
“We Ewards are the best and most renowned sword-smiths in all the world,” he said, matter-of-factly.
I nodded.
“My clansmen obtain their weapons from the city, as needs they must; we do not care who fashions them provided they are the best we can buy-or take.”
He rubbed his chin and handed the rapier back. “The weapons we make for sale to the butchers and tanners, who sell them to you for meat and hides, are never rapiers. Shortswords, broadswords, axes-rapiers, no.”
“The man who owned this is not dead,” I said. “But he is probably still doubled-up and vomiting.”
“Ah,” said Wanek of Eward, wisely, and asked no more. The talk drifted. I suppose they, like a number of persons in authority, did not realize that other people were tired when they were not. The hated name of Esztercari cropped up again, and I learned they were the leading shipowners of the city. That figured. Then Wanek’s wife said something almost below her breath, about the damned butchers stealing what was not theirs, and murder, and then I heard a name spring out, hard and strong and resounding. Strombor, was the name.
I believe, now, that then, when I first heard that name it rang and thundered in my ears with a clarion call-or
