by Glen Cook
“Well, I’m telling you. To march. Ravelin’s in for rough times. The signs are there. And I don’t need to be watching you and everybody else too.”
“You’re wrong. But I understand.”
Varthlokkur continued demonstrating his trick to Ragnar while they argued. The wizard occasionally glanced at Oryon. The soldier shivered each time he did.
“You may not need a regiment after all,” Oryon muttered at one point, nodding toward Varthlokkur.
“Him? I don’t trust him either. We’re just on the same road right now. Innkeeper. What’s the tally here?”
“For you, Marshall? It’s our pleasure.”
“Found me out, eh?”
“I marched with you, sir. In the war. All the way from Lake Berberich to the last battle. I was in the front line at Baxendala, I was. Look.” He bared his chest. “One of them black devils done that, sir. But I’m alive and he’s roasting in Hell. And that’s the way it should be.”
“Indeed.” Ragnarson didn’t remember the man. But a lot of Wesson peasants had joined his marching columns back then.
They had been stout fighters, though unskilled. “And now you prosper. I’m pleased whenever I see my old mates doing well.” He often found himself in this situation. He had never learned to be comfortable with it.
“The whole country, sir. Ten years of peace. Ten years of free trade. Ten years of the Nordmen minding their own business, not whooping round the country tearing up crops and property with their feuds. Marshall, there’s them here that would make you King.”
“Sir! For whom did we fight?”
“Oh, aye. That was no sedition, sir. The only complaint could be raised ‘gainst Her Highness is she’s never wed and give us an heir. And now these strange comings and goings of a night, and rumors.... It worries a man, Marshall, not knowing.”
“Excuse me,” Ragnarson told his table mates. “Sir, I’ve just had a thought. Something in the kitchen....” He placed his arm round the innkeeper’s shoulders and guided him thither.
“You whip up something. A dessert treat. Meanwhile, tell me what you don’t know. Tell me the rumors. And about these comings and goings.”
“Them others?”
“Not to be trusted. The boy’s all right, though. My son. Too bull-headed and big-mouthed, maybe. Gets it from his grandfather. But go on. Rumors.”
“Tain’t nothing you can rightly finger, see? Not even really a rumor. Just the feeling going round that there’s something wrong. I thought you might ease my mind. Or say what it is so’s I got the chance to be ready.”
“Makes two of us. I don’t know either. And I can’t nail anything down any better than you. Comings and goings. What have you got there?”
“Tain’t much, really. They don’t stop in here.”
“Who doesn’t?”
“The men what travels by night. That’s what I calls them. From over the Gap. Or going over. Not many, now. One, two groups a month. As many coming as going, two, three men I each.”
“You seen them in the daytime?”
“No. But I never thought they was up to no good. Not when they skulks around in the night and skips the only good inn ten miles either way.”
“Do they come by on the same nights every month?” Ragnarson’s brain was a-hum. Thinking he might be on the enemy’s track raised his spirits immensely.
“No. Just when they gets the feeling, seems like.” “How long has it been going on?”
“Good two years. And that’s all I can tell you, excepting that some went past this morning. After the sun was up, too, come to think. Riding like Hell itself was after them. “Less they steals horses up the line, they’s going to be walking by now.”
“You said....”
“I never seen them by light? Yes, and it’s so. These ones just showed me their backsides going away. Three of them, they was, and I knew it was the same kind ‘cause of the way they just went on by.”
“What’s that got to do with it?”
“Everybody stops here, Marshall. I picked this spot the day we dragged ourselves back through here after we chased that O Shing halfway to them heathen lands in the east. It’s right in the middle of everywhere. Gots water and good hayfields.... Well, never mind the what do you call it? Economics? People just stops. It’s a place to take a break. You stopped yourself, and it’s plain you’re in as big a hurry as them fellows this morning. Even people what has no business stopping do. Soldiers. A platoon going up to Maisak? They stops, and you don’t hear the sergeants saying nay. Just every body stops. Except them as rides by night.”
“Thanks. You’ve helped. I’ll remember. You can do something else for me.”
“Anything, Marshall. It was you made it possible fora man like me to have a place like this for himself....”
“All right. All right. You’re embarrassing me. Actually, it’s two things. We go back out, you put on a show of what a good choice of dessert I made.”
“That’s it?”
“No. It starts when we leave. You never saw us and you don’t know who we were.”
“True enough, excepting yourself, sir.”
“Forget me too.”
“Secret mission, eh?”
“Exactly.”
“It’s as good as forgotten now, sir. And the other thing?”
“Don’t argue with me when I pay for my meal. Or I’ll box your damned ears.”
The innkeeper grinned. “You know, sir, you’re a damned good man. A real man. Down here with the rest of us.”
Ragnarson suffered a twinge of guilt-pain. What would the old veteran think if he found out about Elana and the Queen?
“That’s why we followed you back then. Ain’t why we joined, I grants you. Them reasons you can figure easy enough. Loot and a chance to break our tenantcy. But it’s why we stuck. And there’s plenty of us as remembers. The hill people too. Some of them comes in here of a time, and they says the same. You go up on the wall over there in Vorgreberg City sometime if n you got trouble, and you stomp good and hard and you yell ‘I needs good men’ and you’ll have ten thousand before the next sun shows.”
He only wished it were true, dire as tomorrow smelled.
“You marks me, sir. There’s men what never marched in the long march, and men what even missed Baxendala, but they’d come too. They maybe wouldn’t have the sword you said they should have, because swords is dear, and everybody wanting one, and they wouldn’t have no shields, except as some makes ‘they own out of oak in the old way, or maybe green hide, and they wouldn’t have no mail, but they’d come. They’d bring they rakes and hoes and butchering knives, they forge hammers and chopping axes....”
Ragnarson sniffed, brushed a tear. He was deeply moved. He didn’t believe half of it, but just having one man show this much faith reached down to the heart of him.
“The hill people too, sir. ‘Cause you done one thing in this here country, something not even the old Krief himself could do, and, bless him, we loved him. Something not even Eanred Tarlson could do, and him a Wesson himself and at the Krief’s ear.
“Sir, you gave us our manhood. You gave us hope. You gave us a chance to be men, not just animals working the lands and mines and forges for drunken Nordmen. Maybe you didn’t mean it that way. I don’t know. We likes to think you did. You being down in Vorgreberg City, we judges only by what we seen in the long march. Coo-ee, we gave them Nordmen jolly whatfor. didn’t we sir? Lieneke. I was right there on the hill, not fifty feet from you, sir.”
“Enough. Enough.”
“Sir? I’ve offended?”
“No. No.” He turned away because the tears had betrayed him. “That’s what I wanted. What Her Majesty wanted. What you say you’ve got. Down there in Vorgreberg, it’s hard to see. Sometimes I forget that’s only a little bit of Kavelin, even if it’s the heart. Come on now. Let’s go. And remember what I said.”
“Right you are, sir. Don’t know you from the man in the moon, and I’ll gouge you for every pe
nny.”
“Good.” Ragnarson put an arm around the man’s shoulders again. “And keep your eyes open. There’s trouble in those riders.”
“An eye and an ear, sir. We’ve got our swords in this house, me and my sons. Over the door, just like it says in the law. We’ll be listening, and you call.”
“Damn!” Ragnarson muttered, fighting tears again.
“Sir?” But the Marshall had fled to the common room.
“What do you think?” Ragnarson asked, referring to the creamed fruit he had helped the innkeeper prepare. “Mixed. A trick my mother used to pull when I was a kid.” And then, to Oryon, “Colonel, I don’t think I’m as frightened of High Crag as I was.”
“I don’t understand.”
“I thought of something when we were mixing the fruit. You know my old friend? Haroun?”
“Bin Yousif? Not personally.”
“Five, six years ago he published a book through one of the colleges at Hellin Daimiel. You might read it sometime. Your answer is there.”
“I’ve read it already. Called On Irregular Warfare, isn’t it? Subtitled something like The Use Of The Partisan In Achieving Strategic As Well As Tactical Objectives. Excellent treatise. But his own performance discredits his thesis.”
“Only assuming he has failed to do what he wants. We don’t know that. Only Haroun knows what Haroun is doing. But that’s not the answer. Now, innkeeper, the tally. We have to get going.”
Somehow, now, the future looked a lot brighter.
TEN: Lord of Lords
“It’s a whole new world, Tarn,” said Tran. The forester couldn’t stifle his awe of Liaontung.
“What’s that?” Tam asked their escort, an old centurion named Lo. Tam and Lang were as overwhelmed as Tran.
“Ting Yu. The Temple of the Brotherhood. It was there before Shinsan came.”
Lo was their keeper and guide. Their month in his care hadn’t been onerous. An intimate of Lord Wu and a senior noncom of the Seventeenth Legion, Lo had been a pleasant surprise. He was quite human when outside his armor.
“Where do you live, Lo?” Tam asked. “You said you had your own house that time we visited the barracks.”
The boy’s curiosity invariably amazed the centurion. He had never married, and had had no childhood himself. He knew only those children in legionary training. “It’s not far, Lord.” With a hint of embarrassment, “Would it please you to visit. Lord?” Behind his embarrassment lay a gentle, almost defiant pride.
Tran sipped tea and shook his head as Lo showed them his tiny garden.
“What’s this one?” Lang asked, fingertip a whisker off the water.
Lo leaned over the pool. “Golden swallowtail.” Sadly, “Not a prime specimen, though. See the black scales on this fin?”
“Oh!” Tam ejaculated as another goldfish, curious, drifted from beneath the lily pads. “Look at this one, Lang.”
“That’s the lord of the pool. That’s Wu the Compassionate,” Lo said proudly. “He is purebred. Here, Lord.” He took crumbs from a small metal box, dribbled a few onto Tarn’s fingertips. “Put your fingers into the water-gently!”
Tam giggled as the goldfish sampled his fingerprints.
Tran studied the exotic plants surrounding the pool. There was a lot of love here, a lot of time and money. Yet Lo was a thirty-year veteran of the Seventeenth. Legionnaires quailed before him. But for an intense loyalty to Lord Wu, he could have become a centurion of the Imperial Standard Legion, Shinsan’s elite, praetorian legion.
What was Lo doing breeding goldfish and gardening? Obviously, Shinsan’s soldiers had facets outsiders seldom saw.
Tran wasn’t happy. The revelation made it difficult to define his feelings. Soldiers shouldn’t stop being sword-swinging automatons and start being human....
Liaontung was a nest of paradoxes and contrasts. Once it had been the capital of a small kingdom. A century ago Lord Wu and the Seventeenth had come. Liaontung had become an outpost, a sentinel watching the edge of empire, its economy militarily dependent. Reduction in enemy activity had drawn colonists, then merchants. Yet the military presence persisted.
The Tervola, with their vastly extended lives, under the Princes, were patient conquerers. Take it a week or a century, they pursued operations till they won. They knew they would outlive their enemies. And no foe had their command of the Power.
Wu’s latest foes, the Man Chin, were gone. The frontiers of his domains had drifted so far eastward that the Seventeenth soon would have to relocate. Liaontung would change, becoming less a border stronghold.
Lord Wu himself was an enigma. He could slaughter an entire race without reluctance or mercy, yet his subjects called him Wu the Compassionate.
Tran asked why.
“To tell the truth,” Lo replied, “it’s because he cares for them like a peasant cares for his oxen. And for the same reasons. Consider the peasant.”
Now Tran grasped it. The poor man’s ox was his most valued possession. It tilled his earth and bore his burdens.
“No,” Lo said later, when Lang wandered too near a city gate. He gently guided them toward Liaontung’s heart, Wu’s citadel atop a sheer basaltic upthrust. It had been a monastery before Shinsan’s advent.
Lo was the perfect jailor. He kept the cage invisible. Soon Tarn had few opportunities to stray. Lord Wu directed him into intensive preparation for Tervola-hood and laying claim to the
Dragon Throne. Lo remained nearby, but seldom invoked his real authority.
Tarn’s principal tutors were Select Kwang and Candidate Chiang, Tervola Aspirants destined to join Shinsan’s sorcerer-nobility. Both were older than Lo, and powerful wizards. Kwang had but a few years to wait to become full Tervola. His destiny was guaranteed. Chiang’s future would remain nebulous till the Tervola granted him Select status.
His chances were excellent. Lord Wu was a powerful patron.
The Tervola of the eastern legions, including Wu, also contributed to Tarn’s education. He was the child of their secret ambitions.
Aspirants, usually the sons of Tervola, were selected for their raw grasp of the Power, and advanced by attaining ever more refined control.
Tarn stunned his tutors.
He learned in weeks, intuitively, what most Aspirants needed years to comprehend.
His first few tricks, like conjuring balls of light, amazed Lang and Tran.
“His father is a Prince Thaumaturge,” Lo observed, unimpressed.
Time marched. Tarn’s magicks ceased being games and tricks. And, despite the swiftness of his progress, his instructors grew impatient, as if racing some dread deadline.
“Of course they want to use you,” Tran responded to an unexpectedly naive question. “They’ve never hidden that. Just don’t let them make you a puppet.”
“I can’t stand up to them.” Kwang and Chiang had shown him his limitations.
He could best neither, though his raw talent dwarfed theirs.
“True. And don’t forget. Be subtle. Or suffer the fate they plan for your father.”
Blood began to tell in a growing need to dominate.
“Lord Wu,” Tarn once protested, when the Tervola was his instructor, “can’t I go out sometimes? I haven’t left the citadel for months.”
“Being O Shing is a lonely fate, Lord,” Wu replied. He set his locust mask aside, took Tam’s hands. “It’s for your safety. You’d soon be dead if the agents of the Princes discovered you.”
Nevertheless, Tarn remained antsy.
The roots of his malaise lay in his treatment by minorfunctionaries. They granted honors mockingly, treated him as O Shing only when Wu was present. Otherwise, they bullied him as if he were a street orphan. Till Tran cracked a few skulls. The persecutions, then, became more subtle.
When Tam was promoted to Candidate-nominee the bureaucrats tried separating him from his brother and Tran. He threw a fit, set his familiar on his chief tormentor, one Teng, and refused to study.
Wu finally
intervened. He permitted Tam to retain his contacts and interviewed everyone who came in daily contact with Tam. Many left with grey faces. Then he summoned Tam.
“I won’t interfere again,” he said angrily. “You have to learn to deal with the Tengs. They’re part of life. Remember: even the Princes Thaumaturge are inundated by Tengs. Only men of his choler, apparently, become civil servants.”
There was something about Wu that Tam had, hitherto, seen in no one else. Maturity? Inner peace? Self-confidence? It was all that, and more. He awed Tam as did no other man.
The bitter years began when Tam was fourteen.
Treacheries took wing. Double and triple betrayals. A wizard named Varthlokkur destroyed Tarn’s father and uncle, Yo Hsi.
Lo brought the news. “Pack your things,” he concluded.
“Why?” Lang demanded.
“The Demon Prince had a daughter. She’s seized his Throne. It means civil war.”
“I don’t understand,” said Tam, gathering his few belong-ings.
“You, you, get packing,” Lo snapped at Lang and Tran. “The Throne, of all Shinsan, is up for grabs, Lord. Between yourself and Mist. And she’s stronger than we are. The western Tervola support her.” More softly, “I wouldn’t give a glass diamond for our chances.”
“She’s that terrible?”
“No. She’s that beautiful. I saw her once. Men would do anything for her. No woman like her has ever lived. But she’s that terrible, too, if you look past her beauty. Lord Wu believes she conspired in the doom of the Princes.”
“Why involve me?” Silly. This was the deadline Kwang and Chiang had been racing.
“You’re Nu Li Hsi’s son. Come on. Hurry. We have to hide you. She knows about you.”
It was all too sudden and confusing. Willy-nilly, tossed by thewhims of others, he fled a woman he didn’t know.
O Shing was, Wu believed, the strongest Power channel ever born. But he hadn’t the will to back it, nor the training to employ it. He had to be kept safe while he grew and learned.
“Oh, lord,” Tam sighed. They were three miles from Liaontung. The band included Lo, Chiang, Kwang, and a Tervola named Ko Feng.