The Death of Nnanji Read Free Page A

collector, always a night-soil collector.
    “What does he want to be?”
    “A sorcerer!” Vixi wrinkled his nose in disgust. To a true swordsman, anyone other than a swordsman was trash, but sorcerers were the lowest of the low. Although the Treaty of Casr had formally ended the age-old feud between the two crafts, neither side trusted the other a hair’s-breadth. Wallie could not imagine Nnanji tolerating his firstborn becoming a sorcerer.
    Although Vixini and Addis were very different types, they were also lifelong pals. In effect, Nnanji was emperor of the World and Shonsu vice-emperor. They were very different types, too, but the loneliness of power had thrown them and their families together. They had no peers. Anyone else they befriended always wanted something: if not a job, then favors, justice, or revenge. It was rare for both of them to be in town at the same time, so they acted as father substitutes for each other’s children. Those children had played together and grown up together. Vixini and Addis were bonded for life.
    “What does his mother say?” Nnanji could be as stubborn as a mountain. Only Thana might budge him when he had made up his mind about something.
    Vixini pouted. “She says he has to be a priest.”
    What Thana wanted, Thana usually got.
    “Why do you have to ask me for miracles at breakfast?”
    His stepson grinned, suddenly looking more like a heavyweight cheeky kid than a potential man-killer. “To give you the rest of the day to deliver.”
    “You faith is so touching I feel quite weepy.” Wallie glanced up at the sun. Nnanji had been at Quo last night. Never one to waste a moment, he was probably halfway to Casr already. He was quite capable of taking one glance at his adolescent son and blurting out that he must be sworn in by nightfall. Or he might just accept Thana’s suggestion without argument. Once he had made a decision, he would have no way to back down without loss of face, and face mattered to him much more than it did to Wallie. The most important thing now was to keep father and son apart for a couple of days, so Wallie would have time to play peacemaker.
    “Go and find Addis and tell him to… No, bring him to me, at the lodge. I’ll find a way to keep him out of sight for a while.”
    “Yes, my lord!” Vixi grabbed a couple of bread rolls and shot away, leaving the assassin’s pole hanging forgotten against the wall.
     
    Wallie regretfully gobbled the rest of his meal and summoned his bodyguard. Traditionally the swordsmen’s guild had been exclusively male, the only exceptions being the “water rat” swordsmen of the trading ships, of which Thana had been one. Almost the only thing on which she and Wallie agreed was that they disagreed with that policy. In a sense her thinking came from a different world, just as his did, because on the trading ships even the civilian sailors knew how to wield swords. Between them they had persuaded Nnanji, so the swordsmen’s craft was no longer segregated and a fair number of the younger swordsmen were female. The same word served for both sexes in the language of the People, although when Wallie thought in English, as he still did sometimes, he had to remember that a swordsman could be a woman. As he walked out the gates of his palace that morning two of the six at his back were. Their leader, Filurz of the Fourth, marching at his side, was male.
    The ancient city of Casr had never spread upstream farther than the temple, because the water there was too shallow for ships. When the original lodge building in the town, already in sad disrepair, had proved inadequate to house the Tryst, expansion beyond the temple had been the obvious move, so Wallie had not been surprised to discover that all that land had recently been acquired by Swordsman Katanji, Nnanji’s plutocratic brother. The Tryst had been forced to pay a premium price for it, but had done so without argument because Katanji was also its treasurer. Nnanji,