In Dыsarra, watching his scrying glass, Haggat decided that this was an ideal opportunity for his next planned event. He gestured to his waiting acolyte, who hurried off to tell a priest, especially trained for this coming performance, that it was time to begin.
A moment later, in the King's Inn, something flickered at the edge of the overman's vision. He whirled, startled, his hand already on the hilt of his dagger, since the table's presence would have made it difficult for him to draw his sword.
The glinting had not been, as he had first thought, the gleam of firelight on metal. There was no one behind him. The flash of light had come from something he could not identify, a blurry redness hanging in mid-air and glowing faintly.
It hovered at the level of his eyes, perhaps a foot wide and a foot and a half in height, a blot of color against the dark background of the taproom.
This, obviously, was magic at work. He kept his hand on his dagger, though he knew ordinary weapons would probably be useless against whatever it was. Various possible origins for the thing passed through his mind. It might be a manifestation of Bheleu, come to reclaim him with or without the sword. It might be a sending of the council of wizards that had sought to destroy him, as a menace to the peace of Eramma, three years earlier. It could be something the Forgotten King had contrived, for reasons of his own, or it might have been sent by the cult of Aghad as part of its revenge upon him.
He had, he thought, made altogether too many enemies in his life, and too many of them possessed of supernatural power.
The blot was changing as he watched; it swirled and roiled about, not like smoke or even liquid, but as if it were made of flowing light. It grew, and shadows appeared within it.
Red was Bheleu's preferred color, but that was the bright red of fire or fresh blood; this thing was of a duller, browner shade, like blood that had dried. The King was the King in Yellow, but could, of course, use any color he chose; the council wizards had employed a wide variety of spells. Still, Garth found that he associated the unhealthy hue of the thing with Aghad.
As he realized that, the thing suddenly resolved itself into an image. It was a face, a not-quite-human face, twisted and sneering, with curving fangs protruding from its upper lip. Garth stared; he knew he had seen it, or one like it, somewhere before.
He glanced around; the Forgotten King was paying no attention to this manifestation, nor to anything else for that matter, but the tavernkeeper was staring in horror. The other customers had departed.
Garth turned back; the apparition was still there, hanging motionless, as if waiting.
"What are you? Why are you here?" Garth demanded. "Speak, O vision, and explain yourself!"
The face grinned and replied, "Greetings, Garth. It is good to see you so untroubled that you can share a drink and pass the time with this doddering old fraud." The voice was a low rumble, lower than any human voice and not easy to understand; it spoke with an accent unlike that of Skelleth, but one that Garth had heard before.
"Who are you?" Garth asked.
"Do you not recognize me? Have you never seen my likeness?"
"You are familiar, but I cannot place you."
"Ah, so, feeble a memory, and in an overman! It is scarce three years since you invaded my home and destroyed my altar."
"Aghad!" Garth remembered now where he had seen that face; it had appeared on the small, carved idols sold in the Dыsarran market. The accent, too, was Dыsarran.
"You do remember! I am flattered!"
"Filth!" Garth spat. He did not give any serious consideration to the possibility that this might be the god himself; he was quite sure that it was some sort of trickery contrived by the cultists. He shifted, so that the table would not impede him, drew his sword, and rose to his feet.
"I had feared that you would be displeased by my paltry attempt to return the favor you did me, but I suppose you must have tired of your bitch years ago. Perhaps you would like to thank me for freeing you of her?" The thing grinned again.
Garth's sword came up and slashed through the image in a single smooth motion. It cut a narrow swath through the ethereal substance of the thing, but the speaker did not seem perturbed. In fact, it did not seem to notice his action at all. Garth had hoped for some sort of magical feedback.
"I notice that you haven't troubled to bury her; were you planning to feed her to your warbeast? You need not fear for its health; we used no poison. Nothing that could harm a warbeast, at any rate; we did not want to hurry her death. She took quite a long time to die; we found it very enjoyable. Would you care to guess whom we plan to kill next?"
Garth growled low in his throat and slashed at the image again, striking vertically this time. The sword passed through without resistance, leaving the floating image divided into quarters, but still unconcerned.
"You're not guessing, overman," the voice rumbled. "Will it be another of your wives? One of your children? Your cousins, or your uncle? Your friends on Ordunin's City Council? Perhaps the next won't be an overman at all; maybe we'll kill one of your friends here in Skelleth. The old man might do for a start. Or perhaps we might take the best of both worlds and kill your traitorous comrade, Galt the swindler. Will you guess, overman? Will you guess, or will you just wait and see?"
Garth hacked at the thing again, splitting it further and leaving six fragments. The face was no longer clearly visible; the edges of each segment were blurred, and the whole image seemed to be distorted.
It grinned and vanished completely, with a sound of fading laughter.
Garth stared at the empty air, then looked about, seeing no sign of any further supernatural manifestation. The sword still in his hand, he announced, "Hear me, Aghadite scum! I have had my fill of you. You owe me a life for my wife's death, and a hundred more for the manner of it. I swear that I will find you and destroy you, wherever you may hide. I will return to Dыsarra, smash your temple, and grind it into the dust. Your magic will not protect you; your god will not save you. I swear this, by everything I hold dear."
There was no answer but the silence of the almost-empty tavern.
CHAPTER SEVEN
After a long, wary moment, Garth finally admitted to himself that he could do nothing more immediately. He sheathed his sword, flexed the bruised knuckles of his right hand, and sat down again.
The apparition's words rankled, particularly the remarks about leaving Kyrith's corpse untended. One didn't bring a cadaver into a taproom, however, and he had hoped that the Forgotten King might resurrect her; that had seemed more important than providing the body with an appropriate rest.
He glanced at the Forgotten King. The old man wasn't going anywhere; Garth could come back here later if he decided he had to speak with him further. Without any more conversation, he rose and marched out the door. The King said nothing and made no move to stop him.
A crowd had gathered in the market, clustered about Kyrith's body. Garth was tall enough to see over their heads and noted that they were maintaining a respectful distance. A young boy had clambered up on the base of the statue that stood near the center of the market, a statue that had once been a young thief who had been petrified by a basilisk by the order of the previous Baron of Skelleth.
The crowd's presence irked Garth; it did not seem fitting that these members of an inferior species should cluster around Kyrith's remains like a pack of wolves around a dead warbeast. "Get away!" he bellowed. "Go home, all of you!"
Startled, the townspeople's faces turned toward him, but no one moved to depart until he picked up two women on the northern fringe, one in each hand, grasped by the shoulder, and placed them off to either side. They backed away, rubbing where his hands had gripped, and the rest of the villagers backed away as well.
"Go home!" Garth bellowed again; he drew his sword for emphasis, and people began vanishing into houses and down streets. A moment later no one remained in the square but himself and Saram, both standing over Kyrith's body. Koros stood nearby, as it had stood since its arrival in the market, the copper gull gleaming dully on its back.
Saram watched Garth closely, waiting for him to speak.
The overman spent a few seconds staring down at his dead wife's face. It was sinking in that she was really dead, gone forever. She had always been his closest companion in Ordunin, much more so than his two remaining wives; he regretted, now, that he had spent so much of the last few years away from her.
Word would have to be sent to Ordunin. She had kin there, not just her sister and co-wife Myrith, or her other co-wife Lurith, but two brothers and a few nephews and nieces. At last report, her mother was still alive. Kyrith alone, of Garth's wives, had no children; Garth had regretted that before, but now it seemed almost comforting somehow. Fewer people would grieve over her loss.
The overmen of the Northern Waste were not much given to elaborate ceremony and did not bother with funerals after the human fashion; since most had no belief in an afterlife of any sort, there was no religious necessity for them. The custom was, rather, to combine the disposal of the body with the division of property, whether by the reading of a will or by adjudication. The body itself was ordinarily sunk in Ordunin's ocean or buried in more inland regions, without fanfare, once the. property settlement was announced and no doubt remained of the subject's identity and death.
That would not be appropriate here, Garth decided. Shipping the body home would be difficult and unpleasant, and the people of Ordunin would think it wasteful and eccentric, at the very least. Holding the reading of the will in Skelleth would seem equally bizarre to all concerned, since, save for himself, none of her heirs were present or likely to turn up; to the religious and sentimental humans, it might well seem callous and disrespectful.
There was certainly precedent for separating the ceremony from the burial; overmen who died at sea were simply tossed overboard, and the ritual of legacy was performed later on shore. A death in a foreign land, it seemed to Garth, would follow the same pattern. He would see the body interred in Skelleth, and Kyrith's other family would hold the ceremony in Ordunin, without either Garth or the corpse.
To keep up the dignity of his species among the humans of Skelleth, Garth knew that some sort of ceremony; though perhaps not a real funeral, would be in order. He would have to devise something.
For the present, however, there was no hurry. He knew that humans waited as much as two or three days before burning or burying their dead. He wanted to use that time to consider how best Kyrith's memory might be honored. He recalled what he had heard of human customs and broke the silence by saying, "She must lie in state."
Saram had been waiting for some such indication of Garth's plans. "I will have a bier prepared immediately, in my audience chamber," Saram said.
Garth nodded, and the Baron hurried away.
Once in his house, Saram summoned the nearest courtiers he could find and sent them to locate an appropriate platform and fine cloths to cover it.
He knew that running errands for the overman would not help his image as an authority figure, but he didn't much care. Garth was, after a fashion, a friend, and he had just received a terrible blow; one had to forgive him for failings of etiquette under the circumstances. Saram did not resent being manhandled and ordered about. He knew that he would behave no more politely or rationally if his own wife had been murdered.