The Secret Texts Read online

  They were the clothes he’d prepared before he left the islands to attend this wedding. The brocade robe was lined with hidden pockets, and each of those pockets carried in it a packet of powders useful for the casting of spells, or a talisman already spelled for a specific purpose. He slid a hand into what looked like a decorative slit and felt along the beads embroidered just beneath the edge for a particular pattern. When he found it, he pulled out the silk bag tucked into the pocket beside it.

  He opened the drawstring on the bag and pulled out a charming gold brooch—the design was a playful fox kit done in intaglio, surrounded by the seven ruby stars that stood for the seven major islands of the Imumbarra Isles, on a background of hundreds of tiny incised stars indicating the uncounted lesser islands. It was a very good copy of an official piece of jewelry, and the spell it bore had cost him a solid week of work, and more than a little of his own blood.

  He affixed it to the central panel of his robe, and felt the wall of magic he’d created come to life. He smiled. The spy—sitting on the other side of that cunning peephole—would now see nothing more than what he’d been seeing and what he expected to see: a man getting ready to go to an important function. Dùghall’s double would appear to putter around the room, riffling through documents, perhaps writing one of the endless correspondences that made up diplomatic life, but doing nothing noteworthy. Dùghall, meanwhile, went to another wig box, lifted the wig from the stand it sat on, and took the stand, dumping the wig back in the box. The stand, a head-shaped bit of carved wood, came apart in his hands when he moved a carefully disguised slider in the right jaw to expose a hidden recess, and pressed fingers simultaneously into that recess and against the left ear.

  He’d hidden his divining tools inside: a bowl and stand for catching blood, a mirror for the flames, two powder brushes, sulfur sticks and warding powders, and a bloodletting kit he’d designed himself after wearying of the pain he got when cutting himself with even the best knife. He sat cross-legged on the floor and set the divining tools up, then fixed one of the hollow thorns into the glass vial, wrapped a rubber tourniquet around his forearm, and plunged the thorn into the first vein that rose to the surface, wincing as he did. Still not the most comfortable of methods, but infinitely preferable to the knife.

  Blood spurted through the thorn into the bowl. When it covered the bottom, he marked the first circle of his blood on the mirror, letting it drip out in a neat, perfectly narrow line from the tip of the thorn. Then he sprinkled the warding powders into the cup, struck one of the sulfur sticks to make a flame, and lit the powders. While they burned, he hurried through his opening incantation with the speed of long practice.

  A sympathetic fire sprang up along the circle of blood, and he drew a glyph within it that indicated the past. Then he murmured the name of the Dokteerak paraglese, and focused on the last time he saw the man at the party the night before. Dùghall dripped a little blood onto the mirror every time the flame began to burn low; he watched as the enemy paraglese talked with the Sabir emissary about his Family’s destruction. He tried to follow the Sabir emissary back through the streets of Halles to wherever he was hiding, but magic blocked him from seeing the man once he was well away from the Dokteerak House.

  It didn’t really matter. What mattered was that he’d confirmed every word of what Kait had told him. The Dokteeraks and the Sabirs were in alliance, and the Galweighs were their target.

  Chapter 7

  Stolen horses made for uncomfortable riding. Hasmal cursed every ill-gaited strike of the beast’s hooves on the stone road, and every nervous bolt at the sudden eruption of birds from shrubs or children from hovels. The horse, he had no doubt, belonged to none other than Brethwan, the Iberan god of celibacy and sex, of pleasure and pain, and of life and death—and was a harbinger of pain and death, and probably, if the state of his testicles was any indication, of long-term celibacy. Hasmal’s sores had sores, and he hurt so much that taking short breaks to walk on the ground and lead the accursed animal no longer gave him any relief.

  Which would teach him to live in a country watched over by Iberish gods, instead of the good Hmoth gods a man knew he could depend on. Would Vodor Imrish have permitted him to steal such a foul beast? No, no, and never.

  Hasmal intended to get himself to someplace where the gods had a sense of decency about them—where he didn’t constantly have the feeling that they were laughing at him or playing clever tricks at his expense. He heard the humans who still hung on in the Strithian lands had congenial gods, if amoral . . . but perhaps gods who approved of thieving and whoring wouldn’t look with too cold an eye on a Falcon, even one so far from where he belonged. So he would go to Strithia, then—a place enough like another world to suit his needs, yet still within his reach. A hundred leagues southeast to Costan Selvira, he could book working passage aboard the first ship leaving harbor for Brelst. Once in Brelst, he could sign himself aboard a riverboat going up the Emjosi River; traveling upriver, the boatmen always needed extra hands. Had he wanted to travel downriver, he would have had to pay passage, so luck favored his enterprise already. The less a thing cost, the more dearly Hasmal loved it, and the better he considered the omens regarding it.

  And as soon as he was across the border into Strithia, he’d be safe. The woman who was his doom was Familied, he would bet his life. He was betting his life. She was probably Galweigh, if he’d read the woven pattern of her silk dress right, and she certainly stood well up the ladder of social rank. She wouldn’t throw all that away by crossing the Strithian border to come after him.

  Thus engaged in his thoughts, he allowed himself to forget the pain his razor-backed mount caused him; more importantly, he allowed himself to forget that he rode the Shatalles Forest Road. The former might have been a blessing, but the latter nearly became his death.

  He trotted the execrable excuse for a horse around a sharp curve in the road, and suddenly men dropped out of the trees that tangled their branches across the road like a canopy—and the men held knives and wore rags and desperate expressions. His horse panicked and reared. Hasmal, because he was a poor rider and inexperienced, fell to the road. And just like that, a knife grazed his throat and all he could do while his horse galloped back the way it had come was sit very still, trying hard not to breathe too deeply.

  “Your money,” the man with the knife at his throat demanded.

  “I have none,” Hasmal said.

  Several of the thieves laughed, and one said, “You ride a horse, don’t you? Your clothes are new and very fine, ain’t they?”

  And the thief with the knife at his throat said again, “Your money.”

  Hasmal swallowed hard, wishing he had taken the time to build a shield of nonseeing around himself before he left Halles—but that would have taken hours, and she might have come for him before then. For that matter, he should have made himself a permanent shield talisman long ago . . . but he had always had tomorrow for such luxuries, and too many things to do today. So the talisman had gone unmade, and now he stood in need and helpless.

  “I swear,” he said, “I swear on my own soul that I have no money. Not so much as a dak.” And he thought of the bit of money he’d had, and of his precious magical supplies and his book, and his other clothes, all of it at that moment galloping away on the back of the damned horse. “I stole the horse,” he said in a burst of honesty, then added an inspired lie. “And the clothes, too.”

  The men laughed at him, and the one with the knife at his throat said, “He thinks he’s hid it too good for us. Strip him—we’ll find it soon enough.”

  Four thieves held his arms and four his legs, and three more began pawing at his clothes. The one with the knife at Hasmal’s throat snarled, “Don’t tear his clothes, you pigs. I want them.” Then he leaned in close to Hasmal and said, “Even if you swallowed your money, I’ll find it.” His smile was evil.

  Hasmal sweated and shook. He had no chance of winning free of the thieves, no matter how hard he
fought. They held him tightly and they didn’t relax their guard or assume that because they outnumbered him he wouldn’t fight. They were careful and cagey, and acted with a unison and a precision that spoke of long practice at their work. They were going to find out he had nothing on him, and then they were going to gut him to see if he’d swallowed his gold as some men were said to do before setting out over dangerous roads. And when they discovered he really did have nothing, the truth would come too late to benefit him.

  One of the thieves finished going through his clothing. “Nothing on him.”

  “I reckon I’ll have to gut you, then.” The men who held Hasmal tightened their grips, and Hasmal stiffened and squinched his eyes shut.

  “Everything I had in the world took off with that damned horse,” he gasped. He expected the sharp fire of the knife in his belly at any instant, but nothing happened. He cautiously opened one eye and found all the thieves staring at him.

  The one who had been on the point of gutting him said, “You piss-brained idiot. Everything you had was on the horse? Everything? What were you going to do if you were thrown?”

  Hasmal said, “I didn’t know the damned things were so hard to ride.”

  The thieves guffawed then, and their leader shook his head and said, “I almost believe you now . . . almost . . . ’cause who else would be so stupid that he wouldn’t keep hisself anything in case of he lost his horse, excepting a man who never had hisself a horse?”

  One of the other thieves said, “Look at the raw spots on his legs. Looks to me like he really ain’t never rid a horse before.”

  Hasmal felt a moment of hope. He was naked, he had nothing, but if they didn’t kill him, he might always find clothes to steal and food to eat and a place to sleep, and, given time and a few materials, he could spell himself some protection, find work . . .

  But his hope died at birth. “Still want to gut him?” another one asked, and the leader said, “For what? To get blood all over my new clothes? Just hang him and be done.”

  “Why hang me?” Hasmal asked. “Just let me go. You don’t need to hang me.”

  “And let you go and tell a mess of guardsmen where we met you? Or how many of us they might catch out, if they came looking? I reckon not. We’ll stretch your neck until you won’t tell anyone anything. That’ll do for our needs.” He turned to his men. “Tie him and bring him.”

  “Bring me?” Hasmal kept hoping that something might break his way; if they weren’t going to hang him right away, perhaps he would get a chance to escape.

  “If we strung you beside the road,” the leader said in a surprisingly patient voice, “we’d as well as tell the roadsmen this was where we was. We’ll take you into the woods a ways and do you there.” His voice said, No hard feelings; this is just the job.

  Hasmal couldn’t find it in himself to be understanding.

  They walked a long way, dragging Hasmal between them—at one point, one of them explained without being asked that they had to walk so far because if the smell blew out to the road, that could sometimes bring down the authorities, too. He didn’t say the smell of the corpse, but he didn’t need to.

  Hasmal realized that he was a walking dead man. He sagged at last, and quit hoping for an opportunity to present itself. He allowed himself to be dragged forward. He was sure he had ceased caring. Then he heard singing. He thought at first he heard the voices of the karae, prematurely beginning the dirges that would accompany him into the Darkland; however, the karae only sang into the ears of the dead, never the living, and several of the thieves had started at the sound.

  “Boesels?” someone whispered.

  Boesels were supposed to be great hairy man-eating forest creatures that lured travelers to their deaths by pretending to be humans. Hasmal wouldn’t swear that no such creatures existed—after all, he had seen stranger things with his own eyes—but he had never heard of one being taken in civilized lands. And he’d never heard of them singing.

  “Hunters, I think,” someone else suggested, keeping his voice down, too.

  But the refrain of the song reached them then, and with it the sweet minor-key piping of a stick-flute.

  “Khaadamu, khaadamas, merikaas cheddae

  Allelola vo saddee.

  Emas avesamas betorru faeddro

  Komosum khaadamu zhee.”

  “It’s not either,” the leader said. He grinned like a leopard come upon unguarded goats. “That’s Gyrus, by ’Coz, and the first goddamned bit of luck we’ve had all day.”

  Luck for the thieves—half-luck for Hasmal. The song was haunting, the singer’s voice a rich and vibrant baritone that ached with pain and loss, but the only way Hasmal could have regretted hearing it more would have been had the thieves already hauled him by his neck up into a tree when it started. He knew at the same time that he had been granted both a possible reprieve from death and a likely sentence in hell.

  When the thief had said Gyrus, he’d meant Gyru-nalles: the notorious Gyru-nalles, members of an entire race devoted to thievery of a high and organized order; known from the ends of Ibera to beyond as traders of horses and dogs and stones and rare metals; reputed as liars and pickpockets who claimed to have once been kings of all Ibera; and most importantly, whispered in the dark of night and behind the safety of barred doors as stealers of children and young women and handsome boys, as slavers with no scruples about where they acquired their human merchandise and no quibbles about where they sold it, or for what purpose. Men who dealt with the Gyru-nalles—unlicensed buyers who would buy unpapered, untaxed slaves—would do so, Hasmal thought, only because they wanted their slaves disposable. Hasmal knew worse deaths existed than hanging, and were he sold into the ungentle care of the Gyrus, he thought himself likely to meet one of those deaths at firsthand.

  Not that he had any choice in the matter. The thieves dragged him forward again, and at a harder pace than before, and the leader began to whistle: a long, falling note, two short, sharp rising notes, and a trill. He repeated the call three times more as they hurried forward, and the fourth time added a bit of what sounded like birdsong, though Hasmal was city bred and couldn’t begin to guess what bird that call might have imitated. When the thief fell silent, from the trees around them Hasmal heard movement where he had heard nothing before. A man stepped out from behind an enormous ficus—he was pale-skinned, blotchily freckled, and light-eyed. Red hair in hundreds of tight braids hung to his waist, and he wore his mustache braided, too, and tipped with gold beads. He smiled and gold teeth flashed in the forest gloom. He was a Gyru-nalle for sure. Hasmal would have wept if he hadn’t thought doing so would make things worse for him. None of the other Gyrus who surrounded them stepped into view, but Hasmal knew they were there. And that they had arrows pointed straight at his kidneys, no doubt.

  The Gyru hugged the leader of the thieves and said, “Tra metakchme, baverras ama tallarra ahaava?”

  The leader laughed and clapped the Gyru on the back. “Allemu kheetorras sammes faen zeorrae llosadee, vo emu ave. Haee tahafa khaarramas salleddro.” He tipped his chin toward Hasmal. “Tho fegrro awomas choto? Hettu!”

  Hasmal had caught a fair amount of that exchange—Gyrus traded antiquities, and he’d been hearing them selling to his father since he was old enough to walk. Shombe was not a tongue Hasmal ever thought he would hear while he was the merchandise being discussed, but then life was like that. The Gyru had said, roughly, “Well met, you hoary bastard, and what have you brought to trade me?” And the thief, in dreadful pidgin Shombe, had answered, “My brother, I found the most marvelous slave wandering on the road, and no one to claim him. So what will you give me? Come and let’s trade.”

  The Gyru sauntered over and stared down at Hasmal, and his eyebrows rose and his lips pursed. He walked around Hasmal, studying him from all angles, came back and crouched in front of him, snorted with disgust, and subjected Hasmal to the sort of concentrated visual inspection that would have made a stallion blush. At last he stood and turned
to the thief. Still in Shombe, he said, “Well, he isn’t bad, I suppose. He has some muscle to him. I can’t sell him to the dowagers, though, because he’s hung like a gnat, and the boy-market won’t care much for him, either, for the same reason.” The thieves giggled and laughter echoed from the trees where the Gyru’s allies hid. “About the best I can hope for is to sell him as a laborer, and those don’t go for much.”

  The thieves’ leader glanced over at Hasmal. “He says he likes you,” he said. “He says if you futter any women, they will still be virgins afterward. He thinks owning you might give him a market in miracle babies.”

  Hasmal didn’t see any reason to let anyone know he knew what the Gyru had actually said. In Iberan, he replied, “Lucky, then, that no one is trying to sell you. I don’t imagine dickless eunuchs would be worth anything to that market.”

  The head thief glared at him, though the other thieves—and a few of the Gyrus—laughed. The head thief turned his back on Hasmal and said, “Give me eight ros?”

  The braid-haired Gyru rolled his eyes and held up two fingers. “I could see my way to give you two.”

  “That eats donkey dung. I want seven anyway, for all my trouble in getting him here.”

  The Gyrus laughed again and the one who bargained shook his head. “You want seven ros for that? Phtttt! I’ll give you four, but I’ll be lucky to sell him for that.”

  The thief raised his eyebrows. “Maybe miracle babies ain’t worth much right now,” he said to Hasmal in Iberan. “He wants you cheap.” Then in Shombe to the Gyru, “I’ll take six ros . . . and you’re stealing my eyes and the food from my mouth to get him for a bargain like that.”

  The Gyru grinned. “I can’t steal what you don’t own. You can be lucky we don’t take the lot of you and sell you all—I think that one is more a freeman than any of the rest of you. But because I like you and because we’ve done some business before, I’ll buy your problem from you. For four and a half ros. No more.”