Read Online The Death of Nnanji by Dave Duncan - Free Book Online

climbed in the window. Since she didn’t, how did she get a dagger into the liege’s bedroom?”
    Boariyi flashed his cynical smile again. “That was a puzzle at first. But his aides identified it as his own knife, the one he carried in his boot.”
    Another shock! Knives and concealed weapons in general were strictly forbidden by the sutras. Wallie had allowed them in the earliest days of the tryst, during the war against the sorcerers, but Nnanji had promptly forbidden them again. News that he had gone back to carrying one was virtually proof that he had encountered sorcerer trouble.
    “Then it may not be a conspiracy. She might have been acting alone?”
    “That would certainly be a relief,” Boariyi said.
    Wallie found even that comment grounds for suspicion and wanted to scream and smash something. He would not have described the big man as a close friend, but he had trusted him implicitly and worked with him amicably for fifteen years. Inevitably, though, the least whiff of treason in the air poisoned everyone and everything. No face looked honest, all words were suspect.
    To lie to Boariyi now would be futile, for everyone in Casr knew the truth. If he was innocent he would be insulted, and if he was guilty he would be alerted to the fact that he was still a suspect.
    “It would, except that a girl climbed up to my balcony not long before dawn. She brought her own knife.”
    “Great Goddess! Did you catch her?”
    “Jja caught her by biting her leg; very effective.”
    “Then you can question her and get to the bottom of this?”
    Damn! Another suspicious question. “I hope so.” Then Wallie realized that Boariyi, too, was holding something back. He had not been surprised enough to learn of the second assassin. “Tell me about Lord Mibullim.”
    That was it. Boariyi nodded slightly in appreciation, as if they were fencing with words. “A friend of my youth. We apprenticed together in Wrou. He joined a band of frees, I remained and worked my way up to being deputy reeve. Then the Goddess fetched me to Casr for the Tryst. I haven’t seen him since the day he made Third.”
    “But you expected to see him?”
    “No. Nnanji expected to. He’d sent Mibullim ahead with two Fourths and a couple of Thirds. They were bringing you orders to muster the largest force possible, but they never reached Quo. There’s been major bloodshed in the south. Nnanji narrowly escaped an ambush, several ambushes in fact. This morning his luck ran out.”
    “Things begin to make more sense, then.” Wallie had always been surprised at how little resistance the Tryst had met as it expanded. Nnanji had predicted that a great many swordsmen, perhaps even a majority of them, would welcome it as a cure for the widespread corruption and incompetence in their craft. Mostly he had been right, at least until now. In most places the discipline and the return of honor that the Tryst promised had been welcomed, or at least accepted without a struggle. Now, Wallie had thought that the Tryst had grown too huge and powerful to defy. But bad odds had never stopped wars starting up back on Earth.
    “Things look bloody,” Boariyi said, “swordsmen being slaughtered wholesale.”
    “Sorcerers behind it, you mean? I guessed that when you said Nnanji had gone back to carrying a knife.” Swordsmen didn’t massacre swordsmen. They challenged them to duels, one on one. Only sorcerers would resort to mass violence.
    “It looks like sorcerers with swordsmen allies. And thunder weapons again.”
    Venal swordsmen with sorcerer allies had always been the ultimate nightmare scenario, the dogs ganging up with the cats.
    The long procession had halted to await the two Sevenths’ arrival. They rode along the column to the litter, near the center. The eight slaves carrying it had been allowed to lay it down. A relief team of eight more bearers stood behind them, and it was clear that the man in charge was a short, thick-shouldered Fifth, whom Wallie