A Dirge for Sabis Read online

  "Mostly," Sulun said. It was terrible enough to face the children. But he had to walk down the hall, shake off his young escort, and walk in on Shibari in his study, accounts in arms, and stand there until Shibari, in a spindly chair at a desk piled high with codices and scrolls, realized he had a visitor.

  "Sir," Sulun said, finally, and cleared his throat.

  Shibari looked at him most carefully in a troubled way, as if he could read everything in Sulun that he possibly wanted to know today.

  "A failure?" Shibari said.

  "Not unqualified," Sulun said.

  "Not unqualified." Shibari sighed and shook his head.

  "Four firings and accuracy, sir—"

  "Accuracy where? Expensive fire tubes, apt to explosions? Four strikes at the barbarians and an explosion wreaking havoc in our own lines?"

  Sulun squared his shoulders. "Still four to one, sir."

  Shibari's mouth stayed open.

  "That's the way a soldier put it to me, sir," Sulun said.

  "Zeren. Zeren's a mercenary." Disgust came through: the old-line aristocrat against paid soldiers, against foreigners, against a world quite, quite changed from honest, honorable ways. "Blow up one crew, hire another—I suppose that's very easy in Zeren's accounting. I tell you—"

  The door opened. Mygenos insinuated himself through the door. "My lord."

  "Come in," Shibari said, and Sulun folded his arms protectively across his account book and regarded Mygenos with a scowl. Memi's father. Mygenos the wizard. Mygenos the very well-fed, sleek, and comfortable wizard. Mygenos never had to beg for funds. Even if a house was in Shibari's financial straits, it paid its wizard, and paid two of them if it could afford it—the best wizards it could find.

  If he's so damn good, Sulun thought, not for the first time, why is the house in this mess?

  But of course he didn't say that. He bowed to Master Mygenos. Mygenos bowed to him with a frown that became a sweet, unctuous look the instant he turned his face Shibari's way.

  "I'm very sorry," Mygenos said smoothly. "I was in the garden."

  "Master Mygenos asked to be here," Shibari said. "He's quite concerned about this for another reason."

  "My lord." Another bow in Shibari's direction, a straightening of the body, and a folding of the arms when he looked Sulun's way. "I hope you'll understand, Master Sulun, I bear you no personal ill will, all our differences aside. It's priorities, and I can't advise my lord to pour more resources down this rat hole, granted, granted you've made minor progress with your fireworks—"

  "Not fireworks, Master Mygenos. The salvation of this house, Master Mygenos, and the Empire."

  "The damnation of this house, Master Sulun! I must be blunt with you; you are a liability! I am a professional in my trade; I assure you I understand the principle of risk and reward, and in that professional capacity I have to advise my lord that the risk, in your case, is constant! I have a considerable ability, Master Sulun, I would say a very considerable ability. I serve this house with no help, no relief, and I extend my abilities to all my lord's enterprises, which encompass an extraordinary range of territory. I do not mind the sleepless nights and the magnitude of the burden, but likewise I must advise my lord when a disproportionate amount of my effort is drawn away from critical matters, by an enterprise which involves a very poor return on a very high expense—not only of money, Master Sulun, but of my energies! In short, you are exhausting me, Master Sulun. I cannot cover the things that truly affect the welfare of my lord against all his purposeful enemies, and against the pirates at sea and the chances of weather. All these things, I say, are my responsibility; but I am being drained by your enterprise, Master Sulun, which, even if successful, is years away from any useful application. It is a luxury, Master Sulun, for a time less dangerous and less critical to our lord. I protect you as I can—I cannot avoid protecting, considering the possibility of lawsuits and loss of life and limb which could be ruinous to this house—"

  "I hope your protection of our lord is more effective!"

  "I am a wizard, Master Sulun, not a blacksmith! If your devices are grossly flawed, I am doing all I can to prevent loss of life and property! If you will work with firepowder, you can expect I will concentrate my primary effort on preventing your device working destruction on the city and on this house, and then I will worry about your personal safety, and then I will worry about your personal pride and the integrity of your abominable instrument! But I prefer not to continue to do so!"

  Sulun waved his account book. "I require a minuscule amount of support compared to your budget, Master Wizard, and by your counsel, this house would venture nothing, run no risks, and make no profits whatsoever! For centuries, Shibari has stood for explorations and enterprises the monuments of which decorate this house, Master Mygenos, and our master is no less than his illustrious ancestors!"

  Argue with the house rhetorician, you fat-bottomed, overpaid son of an ape!

  Predictably, Shibari's color came up a bit, his shoulders squared a bit, he took a larger breath and looked a half a hand taller.

  But he still looked like a worried man.

  "I never implied otherwise!" Mygenos was shouting. "I also know our master is not a fool like some I could name! He's been entirely too generous, and you trade on his good will! I wonder where a good part of this money is going!"

  "Enough!" Shibari said. "Enough!"

  Sulun folded his arms again and bowed. Mygenos bowed.

  "I will support this, three months more," Shibari said. "And then I'll see."

  "My lord," Sulun said fervently, with another bow.

  "My lord!" Mygenos protested. "I feel I have to talk frankly here about due compensation! I've refused offers of a third again what you pay me! And this tinkerer supports a staff of apprentices, diverts your smithy to his own work, appropriates materials, entertains mercenary soldiers and gods know what other hangers-on with funds that I'm sure don't appear with the morning dew!"

  "Three months," Shibari said, with that jut of his aristocratic jaw that meant Interview Ended.

  "My lord," Sulun said, another time around the courtesies. "Thank you."

  "My lord," Mygenos said.

  And outside the door, in the marble hall with its goddesses and its bronze ship: "You son of a whore," Mygenos said. "You'll cross me once too often."

  Ordinarily a man was afraid of wizardly wrath. A man worried about accidents.

  This wizard, on the other hand, was Mygenos.

  "Somebody'd better be seeing to this house's welfare," Sulun snapped, nose to nose with him. "You don't look like you've spent many sleepless nights, Mygenos, or missed any meals lately!"

  He really shouldn't have said that, he thought on the way back to the estate storerooms, searching through his belt and the leaves of his little account book for the list he was sure he had brought somewhere about his person. Damn! If he could keep track of things . . .

  But a man only got a few good openings with Mygenos. And wizards, they said, couldn't hex against their own work. He was right, he was going to succeed, he was going to do everything he promised, and the very fact that he didn't break his neck going down the steps, for instance, argued that, like it or not, Mygenos had no power to harm him.

  Very complicated thing, magery. A natural philosopher was quite glad just to keep the wizards all in balance so that good science worked.

  * * *

  Omis held the burin steady with a block of wood and the pressure of his hand while Doshi worked the leather strap that spun it, back and forth, drilling the bolthole. Sawdust made clouds in the light of sunset streaming through the window.

  A simple repair on the worktable this time. The aged legs had gone; too much hammering and sitting on it. Sulun tucked himself up in a chair in a sunny patch, working on his notes and his sketches while the repairs proceeded.

  "Here, let me," Zeren said, pushing Doshi aside. With the blacksmith holding the drill steady this time and Zeren's strength pulling, sawdus
t poured, making a little pile on the dirt floor.

  And proliferating in the air. Sulun wiped his nose and sneezed suddenly, convulsively.

  "Bless!" said Yanados, worriedly looking up from her grinding and mixing. Not only sawdust smell permeated the room—there was also sulfur.

  "Umm," Sulun said, and wiped his nose again. "If that's old Mygenos ill-wishing me, all he can manage is a tickle."

  "Don't joke!" Yanados gulped.

  "Mygenos is the joke," Sulun said. "Poor Memi. The poor child used to be a nice kid." Another pass of his arm across his nose. "She looked like a scared rabbit."

  "Old Myggy didn't take it real well," Omis said, "that it was his precious daughter dropped the poppers in the cistern."

  "Wonderful bang," Yanados said. "Tremendous echoes."

  "Water tasted of sulfur for a month," Doshi said.

  "Memi's changed," Sulun said. "Gods know what he did or what he said. That son of a bitch. Fortunately Shibari didn't listen to him. One of my better—"

  The door banged open. Arizun ran in, gasping for air, stirring up a cloud of sawdust. light from the window showed him as pale as his olive complexion could get.

  "Sulun!" he panted, and stabbed a finger toward the door. "The word just came—down the river. A ship got in! Shibari's ship was lost—pirates got it! The cargo, the ship—everything!"

  "Gods," Yanados said. "Shibari's creditors—"

  "They'll eat him alive," Zeren said.

  "His whole household will go up on the block!" Yanados said. "What will that mean for us?"

  Sulun found himself on his feet. In his mind he saw the ravening creditors running through the house. "They'll strip the laboratory," was the first thing he thought of.

  "Nine hells, they'll do worse than that," Zeren said, grabbing his helmet. "They'll seize all the household slaves, too—and gods help the servant who can't prove he's a freeman. I've seen it happen!"

  "Oh, gods!" Omis howled, diving for the door. "Vari! The children!"

  "And his forge," Yanados exclaimed, scrambling after him. "He can't carry that away and hide it! All his tools—"

  "Save what we can," Doshi gasped, hiking up the long skirts of his tunic and following. But Sulun was out the door in front of him.

  Chapter Three

  Only Arizun remembered to latch the door behind them. Their little party went skittering up the street, right turn at the main avenue, up the hill toward Shibari's house at the best speed they could make. Zeren led the pack for the first few streets, but by the time they reached Shibari's walls, Sulun passed him.

  They scrambled to a halt as they sighted the front doors and saw the small but noisy mob gathered there—assorted moneylenders, peddlers' agents, even a cloth merchant or two, all waving pieces of parchment and yelling angrily at the closed wooden doors, while a pair of city guardsmen were glumly hammering on the panels with the butts of their swords.

  "Gods," Zeren muttered. "Let me get to the guards, and I can hold off the looting for a while." He turned to face the rest of the interrupted party. "There must be a back door. Take it. Get in, grab everything you can, get out again, and hide until the vultures are gone. And hurry." He turned back toward the crowd at the gate, spread out his cloak so that it flapped behind him like vast red wings, and marched off at his best parade ground strut toward the guardsmen at the gate.

  Sulun and Omis traded glances, then turned back and slipped around the corner of the wall. The three apprentices tiptoed after them.

  Beyond the corner lay a narrower street, fronted with small shops that backed against Shibari's wall. A dozen shops down, a narrow alley zigzagged between the outer buildings and appeared to end at the wall. Little light reached here, even by day, and in the deepening dusk the whole alley was clotted with shadows, but Sulun's pack knew the way. Down to the wall they ran, quietly as they could, and ducked under the side eaves of the offside shop. A blank wooden door stood there, almost invisible in the dark, featureless save for a knothole close to the top. Sulun reached up, poked two fingers through the hole, and scrabbled for the latchstring beyond it, choking off a curse as he missed. Arizun glanced about to see if any of the neighbors had noticed, but the surrounding buildings were silent. In the desperate quiet they could hear the yattering noise from the front gate, topped off by Zeren's voice bellowing about "—must prevent unlawful disposal of property and any possible bloodshed." The crowd howled furiously in return.

  "Hurry!" Omis whispered, dancing from foot to foot.

  Sulun's fingers found the latchstring, and pulled. The unseen latch released and the door creaked open. Sulun almost fell through, onto the rising stairs. He felt for the uneven plank steps in the dark and scrambled up them, the others crowding close behind.

  The stairs opened out onto the shop's flat roof, beside the peeling wall. A few steps further on, a line of hand- and footholds climbed to the wall's top, some ten cubits higher.

  Someone was already up there. A small, curly-headed child in a smudged tunic straddled the top of the wall, feeling for a toehold on the near side.

  "Tamiri!" Omis shoved Sulun aside and reached up for the little girl. "Come to Papa, darling."

  Tamiri squeaked with joy, dug her toes into the footholds, and scrambled down the wall as nimbly as a monkey. "Daddeee!" she squealed, throwing herself into Omis's burly arms. "Mommy's down there trying to get Mido to climb up, but he won't 'cause he's too scared, and Mommy's got her hands all full of the baby, and there's all the bundles of our clothes and things—"

  Sulun was already clambering up the wall, Arizun and Yanados right behind him.

  "Vari!" Omis wailed below them. "Help her! Get the -children!"

  Doshi plucked Tamiri out of the blacksmith's arms. "I'll watch her," he promised. "Go on over. Bring back a rope, and we'll pull up the bundles from here."

  "Good thought!" Omis levered himself up the wall after Sulun's party.

  At the top of the wide wall, each of them paused in turn to look down into the grounds below. Directly ahead lay the tall hedge that cut off all sight and reach of the kitchen garden from the main formal gardens; under its shelter scurried house slaves and free servants, running for boltholes, trampling the planted onions in their haste. The formal gardens on the other side of the hedge stretched empty and silent save for the drifting noise from the front gate. Further ahead loomed the whitewashed bulk of the house, equally silent and empty, like a fresh corpse awaiting the descent of the blowflies. Brief flickers of firelight from the front windows gave the only hint of life remaining inside.

  "But where's Shibari?" Sulun wondered. "Where's his family?"

  "Who knows?" Yanados grunted, swinging off the top of the wall onto the hand- and footholds below. "Let's get down and grab what we can."

  "Sulun!" wailed a familiar voice directly below, over the sound of a baby squalling. "Come help! And where's Omis?"

  They looked down, and saw Vari standing at the foot of the wall, buxom and pretty as ever, but more flustered and disheveled than they'd ever seen her. She was surrounded by lumpy bundles tied up in hastily knotted sheets, clutching the baby, with two-year-old Mido clinging to her skirts like grim death and whining to be picked up. Sulun wondered how on earth she'd managed to get this far with all that, and how she'd expected to get everything over the wall once she reached it.

  "Vari!" Omis shouted. "Wait right there, love! I'm coming."

  He started climbing down the wall after Yanados. Sulun and Arizun scrambled after him.

  At the wall's foot, Omis managed to clutch and kiss Vari for only a moment before she shoved the baby into his arms and ordered him back up. Yanados and Sulun grabbed up bundles. Arizun ran to the gardeners' shed and came back with a small coil of thin rope. Omis carried the baby and the rope's end up the wall, handed them over to Doshi, and scrambled back down while Yanados tied on the first bundle. Vari took up the howling two-year-old and climbed the wall with him. Omis would have followed, but Sulun grabbed his sleeve.

 
; "The equipment!" he panted. "Your tools, mine, everything we don't want the creditors to get—"

  "Gods, gods!" Omis groaned, "How do I carry off a forge and an anvil?"

  "Take what you can. I have to get—"

  "Sulun!" Doshi yelled down from the top of the wall. "Look at the house! The front windows—look!"

  They all turned, looked, and froze.

  The second-story windows toward the front of the house flickered with far too much firelight for lamps, torches, or braziers. Thickening smoke rolled out of them, followed by a cloud of sparks. The first tips of flames peeped above the window ledges, too widespread, far too many.

  "Oh gods, my books!" Sulun ran for the house. "My patron!"

  The others pounded after him, dodging fleeing servants, trampling more rows of onions.

  At the kitchen door they had to fight their way through a mob of escaping cooks and scullions to get in. Once past the kitchen they split up, Omis running for his forge, Sulun and his apprentices heading for their workshop. The fire hadn't reached this part of the house yet, but the smell of smoke grew heavier in the air. Arizun and Yanados yanked the curtains off the wall brackets and spread them on the floor. Sulun grabbed armloads of books and threw them onto the curtains.

  "Books, notes, sketches, models," Yanados panted, tying the first loaded curtain into a bundle. "What else?"

  "The tools, the lenses . . ." Sulun looked about him. Damn, no, he couldn't take the lathe: too heavy. So much was too heavy, too big, too cumbersome for three people to carry out, much less over the wall—but much of that was replaceable, even cheaply. Shibari could . . . "Shibari! We have to find him!" Gods, to be patronless in this city was the ninth hell. "Get the bundles out. I'll find Shibari."

  Sulun dashed out the door and down the long corridor that led to the Family's part of the house. If he could reach Shibari, help him escape the horde of creditors with the family coffers, the master could set up elsewhere—possibly overseas, more likely up in Jarrya, under another name. The household would be smaller but still intact, still capable of maintaining a small host of craftsmen, and Shibari would be grateful to those loyal servants who had helped him. They could get back to work on the Bombard Project within a few months, with luck.