Servant of the Empire

_

Arakasi at that moment sat in a noisy roadside tavern in the north of Neshka Province. He wore the striped robe of a free caravan drover, authentically scented with needra, and his right eye seemed to have acquired a cast. The left squinted to compensate, and also to disguise the tendency it had to water at the burning taste of the spirits reputedly brewed by Thun from tubers that grew in the tundra. Arakasi wet his tongue again with the vile liquor, and offered the flask to the caravan master he had spent the last hours attempting to cajole into intoxication.

The caravan master had a head for spirits like a rock.

He was a bald man, massively muscled, with a thunderous laugh, and a regrettable tendency to slap his companions on the back: probably the reason why the benches on either side of him stayed empty, Arakasi reflected. He had bruises across his rib cage from being' slammed against the table edge by the man's boisterous thumps.

He could have chosen a better subject to pump for information, he realised in hindsight. But the other caravan masters tended to band together with their crews, and he needed one who stood apart. To insinuate himself among a tight-knit group, and to pry a man away from his fellows was likely to take too much time. He had the patience, had many times spent months gaining the confidence of targeted individuals to gain the intelligence Mara required. But here, in the deserted northern tavern, a man with close-knit friendships would be apt to remember a stranger who asked things that a local driver would already know.

'Argh,' the huge caravan master bawled, entirely too loudly for Arakasi's liking. 'Don't know why any man would choose t'drink such piss.' The man hefted the flask in one ham fist and squinted dubiously at the contents.

'Tastes poisonous enough to sear out yer tongue.' He ended his diatribe by taking another huge swallow.

Arakasi saw another comradely slap coming, and braced his palms against the plank table barely in time. The blow struck him between the shoulder blades, and the trestle shook, rattling cheap clay crockery.

'Hey!' shouted the owner of the hostelry from behind the counter bar. 'No brawling in here!'

The caravan master belched. 'Stupid man,' he confided in a spirit-laden whisper. 'If we were of a mind to wreck things, we'd heave the tables through the walls and bring the stinkin' roof down. Wouldn't be losing much. There's webspinners in the rafters and biting bugs in the loft bedmats, anyway.'

Arakasi regarded the heavy lumber that made up the trestle's construction, and conceded that it could serve as a battering ram. 'Heavy enough to crack the gates to the City of Magicians,' he murmured on a suggestive note.

'Hah!' The burly man slammed the flask down so hard the boards rattled. 'Fool might try that. You heard about the boy who hid out in a wagon, last month? Well, I tell you, the servants of those magicians searched though the goods, and didn't find the kid. But when the wain rolls through the arches of the gates nearside o' the bridge to the island, well, this beam of light shoots down from the arch an' fries the cover off the wool bale the boy was huddled in.'

The drover laughed and hit the table, causing the crockery to jump. 'Seven hells! I tell you. The magicians' servants are all running around yelling out a warning, shoutin' death 'n' destruction. Next we know, the boy's ahowlin' loud enough to be heard clear to Dustari, and then he's sprintin' down the road back into the forest like his butt's on fire. Found him later, hiding out in a charcoal burner's shed. Not a mark on him, mind, but it was days before he'd stop crying.' The caravan master put his finger to his temple and winked knowingly. 'They scrambled his head, you see. Thought he was being eaten by fire demons or some such.'

Arakasi digested this while the caravan master took another pull from the flask. He wiped his lips on his hairy wrist and peered at Mara's Spy Master. His voice lowered to a tone of menace. 'Don't even joke about trying to cross the gate to the magician's city. Mess with the Assembly, and all of us lose our jobs. I've got no wish to end my life as a slave, none at all.'

'But the boy who tried to sneak in as a prank did not lose his freedom,' Arakasi pointed out.

'Might as well have,' the caravan master said morosely.

He drank another draught. 'Might as well have. He can't sleep for getting nightmares, and days he walks around like one already dead - still got a scrambled head.'

Lowering his voice out of fear the caravan master said,

'I hear they have ways of knowing what's in the minds of those who try to come to the island. 'Cause ''t was this prankish lad, they let him live. But I've heard tales that if you mean them harm -' he held his hand out, thumb turned down -'you find yourself at the bottom of that lake.' Now whispering, he went on, 'The lake bottom is covered with bodies. Too cold down there for them to bloat up and rise.

The dead just stay down there.' With a nod to affirm his statement, the caravan master concluded in normal tone,

'Magicians don't like to be messed with, there's a fact.'

'Here's to letting them be,' Arakasi hooked back the flask and drank in an unusual fit of pique. The assignment Mara had set him was damned near impossible. Caravans traveled only as far as the gate to the river bridge. There, the crews surrendered their reins to servants from the inner city, and each load was vigorously searched before the goods rolled forward. The bridge did not go all the way across the lake, but ended in a water landing, where inbound supplies were offloaded into boats, and inspected a second time.

Then polemen ferried them across, into the City of the Magicians.

This was the third man to relate the fate of intruders: no one infiltrated the City of Magicians, and any who tried were transported magically to a watery grave or else driven mad.

Confronted by a bleak conclusion, Arakasi sucked from the flask to fortify himself. Then he surrendered the remains of the liquor to the hairy caravan master, and slipped unobtrusively out to use the privy.

In the stinking dimness of the road hostel's privy, Arakasi studied the coarse board walls where passing caravan teams had scribbled or scratched a motley assortment of initials, derisive comments on the quality of the hostel's beer, the names of favored ladies of the Reed Life left behind in bordellos to the south. Among them was the mark he sought, done in white chalk: a simple stick figure, standing.

By the drawing's knees was what looked to be a stray line, as if the artist's hand had skipped a beat, in his haste. But seeing this, Arakasi closed tired eyes and breathed a sigh of relief.

His agent, who happened to be a charcoal burner's errand boy, had been by, and the news was good. The warehouse operation where he had nearly been netted by enemies had been out of the message network for two and half years and at long last the dyer across the street had promoted his eldest apprentice. The tradesman's son who applied for the now vacant position would be an Acoma agent. At last Arakasi could begin to rebuild his network. The warehouse had been operating solely as a business since the disaster of his near capture. The proprietor had accepted his demotion from spy to business factor with stone-faced resignation. Both he and Arakasi were anxious to start laying off various staff members and stevedores, but this could not be done in too much haste; the men were valuable, some useful as agents in some better distant post, but not if the trade house was still under enemy scrutiny. And, judging by the smoothness of the net that had nearly caught him, Arakasi dared not assume otherwise. Slowly, painstakingly, he must come at the problem from another angle. An agent at the dyer who could observe who still watched the warehouse would tell him much.

Abruptly aware that he must not spend overlong in the privy, he performed the expected ablutions and departed through the creaky wooden door. It occured to him, on unpleasant intuition, that the vacancy in the dyer's shop might not be so fortuitous, after all. If he were that clever enemy, might he not be trying to set his own agent into the position? What better way to keep watch on the warehouse, after all, since loiterers and beggars on corners were far more conspicuous as plants. ~

Chilled by cold certainty, for he believed his enemy to be as clever as himself, Arakasi cursed and spun around.

Muttering as if he had forgotten something, he barged past the drover's boy who crossed the yard toward the privy, and slammed back in through the door.

'There it is, gods be praised,' he muttered, as if misplacing important items in stinking public facilities were an everyday occurrence. With one hand he twisted a mother-of-pearl button off his cuff, and with the other he erased the head of the chalk figure and scratched an obscene mark beside it with his nail.

He hurried out and, confronted by the furious boy whose errand he had interrupted, shrugged. He flashed the button in apology. 'Luck charm from my sweetheart. She'd kill me if I lost it.'

The drover's boy grimaced in sympathy and rushed on toward the privy; he'd had more of the hostel's beer than was healthy, by the look of him. Arakasi waited until the door banged fully closed before he slipped off into the wood by the roadside. With any luck, the charcoal burner's lad would happen by within the week. He would see the altered chalk mark, and the obscenity that signaled for an abort on the placement of the agent as dyer's apprentice. As Arakasi moved soundlessly through tree needles, under an unseasonally grey sky, he ruminated that it might indeed be more profitable to have the lad who finally took the apprenticeship watched; if he was innocent of any duplicity, no harm would result, and if he was a double agent, as Arakasi's intuition told him, he might lead back to his master . . .

Later, Arakasi lay belly down in dripping bushes, shivering in the unaccustomed chill of northern latitudes. Light rain and a wind off the lake conspired to make him miserable.

Yet he had spent hours here, on several different occasions.

From this vantage point in the forest, on a jutting peninsula, he could observe both the bridge gate and the boat landing where servants loyal only to the magicians loaded inbound goods into skiffs and ferried them across to the city. He had long since concluded that a smuggled entry by way of the trade wagons was a doomed enterprise. The caravan master's tale had only confirmed his suspicion that inbound goods were also surveyed by magical means for intruders.

What he looked for now was a way to gain entrance to the city by stealth, avoiding the apparently all-seeing arch over the bridgeway.

The isle lay too far across the water to swim over to it.

From where Arakasi hid, its buildings appeared blended together into a mass of pointed towers, one of which was tall enough to pierce into the clouds. Through the ship's glass he had bought from a shop on the seacoast, he could make out steep-walled houses and looping, arched walkways that cut through the air between. The lakeshore was crammed with stone-fronted buildings, oddly shaped windows, and strange arched doorways. There were no walls and, as far as he could tell, no sentries. That did not rule out defences of arcane means; but plainly the only way an intruder might enter the city was a night crossing by boat, and then the scaling of some garden wall, or seeking some cranny to gain access.

Arakasi sighed. The job was a thief's work, and he needed a boat in a place where there were neither habitations nor fishing settlements. That meant smuggling one in on board a wagon, no easy task where inbound caravans were comprised of men who all knew one another intimately.

Also, he would require a man trained in stealth, and such were not found in honest trades. Neither problem promised a fast or an easy solution. Mara would have a long wait for information that might, in all honesty, be impossible to acquire. ,

Ever a practical man, Arakasi arose from his damp hollow and turned into the forest. He rubbed a crick in his neck, shook moisture from his clothing, and made his way back toward the road hostel. As he walked, he pondered deeply, a habit that more times than not had given rise to accurate intuition. He did not press the issue that immediately frustrated him, but pursued instead another problem, one that had not seemed significant at first, but was becoming an increasing aggravation.

Try as he might, he could not seem to get a start at placing new agents in the Anasati household. Only one operative remained active, and that one was elderly, an old confidant of Jiro's father's that the young Lord had taken a dislike to. The servant had been relegated to a position of little importance, and what news he heard was only slightly more informative than street gossip. For the first time, Arakasi wondered whether his failed attempts to replace that agent might be significant beyond coincidence.

They had appeared innocuous, certainly, each of seven tries foiled by what had seemed ill luck or poor timing: Jiro in a temper, a factor in too belligerent a mood to grant an old friend favors; and most lately, an illness of the stomach that prevented a trusted servant from making a recommendation for recruiting a newcomer.

Arakasi stopped dead, unmindful of the rain, which had begun to fall much harder. He did not feel the cold and the wet that slid in droplets down his collar, but shivered instead from inspiration.

He had been a fool, not to suspect sooner. But chance may not have been behind such a string of seemingly unrelated misfortunes. What if, all along, his attempts to infiltrate the Anasati household had been blocked by a mind more clever than his own?

Chilled to the bone, Arakasi started forward. He had long admired the enemy's First Adviser, Chumaka, whose flair for politics had benefited the Anasati since Jiro's father's time. Now Arakasi wondered whether it was Chumaka's cleverness he fenced with, as unseen antagonist.

The thought continued, inexorably: was it possible that an Anasati presence was behind the byplay at the silk warehouse? The elegance of this possibility appealed to Mara's Spy Master. One gifted enemy made more sense than two unrelated foes with equal brilliance.

Deeply disturbed, Arakasi hurried his step. He needed to get himself warm and dry, and to find a comfortable corner where he could think undisturbed. For each balked effort showed that he faced a rival equal to his best efforts.

It was distressing to consider that a connection might exist between such a man and Mara's gravest enemy, even more by the possibility that this rival might exceed his talents.

Getting a spy into the City of the Magicians was an impossible enterprise and its importance paled to insignificance before the threat posed to Mara's spy network by Jiro's adviser. For Arakasi had no illusions. His grasp of the Game of the Council was shrewd and to the point. More than a feud between two powerful families was at play here. Mara was a prominent figure in the Emperor's court, and her fall could touch off civil war.