Sorcerer's Moon

by Julian May

  Kilian allowed himself a superior simper. ‘Alas, sire. The creation looks not much like an insect to me, especially with that dangling bit of tinsel. Would a fish really be fooled?’

  The king’s massive head lifted. His eyes, sunken in fatty folds, nevertheless had clear whites and gleamed with cunning; he looked more than ever like a ravaged but still menacing lion. ‘Tell me, Lord Chancellor. What do you think might happen if Conrig Ironcrown chose to acknowledge little Casya Pretender as royal heir, rather than my own son, Crown Prince Valardus?’

  ‘He would never dare!’

  ‘So you say. And you are so much wiser than I…Or are you?’ Somarus let loose a raucous guffaw.

  Kilian sat back and took refuge in his cup of wine. What in Zeth’s name had got into the king? He’d always been fairly tractable before, even in his cups – a valiant barbarian not overendowed with wits, content to let most knotty matters of state be dealt with by his betters. Had Duke Azarick Cuva planted this all-too-plausible doubt in the king’s mind? Were the peer and his cohorts finally attempting to undermine Kilian’s influence?

  Somarus said, ‘Now observe: I wind the gold tinsel about the bug’s abdomen in wide turns, investing my simulacrum with splendid gleaming bands. The end of the gold I tie down with twists of thread, then move on to the final touch of authenticity.’

  ‘Sire, again to the point. You mentioned that another piece of information was confided to you at dinner by the Sovereign –’

  ‘To hell with the Sovereign!’ Somarus blared, surging up suddenly from his chair, eyes ablaze and great flabby body quivering with pent-up rage. Kilian was now certain that the monarch was pissed as a newt. ‘And to hell with you, too, wizard, who dare try to play me like a farthing whistle! You think I’m an untutored savage, thickheaded and led as easily as a bull with a ring in his nose. But you’re wrong, and soon I’ll no longer have to put up with your chivvying and false-hearted blandishment. In my dreams, I’ve seen a great change coming. I’ve seen Didion free!’ He began to tremble more violently and his engorged features turned nearly purple.

  Kaligaskus rushed up. ‘Majesty, Majesty – be calm, lest you damage the handiwork you’ve so nearly completed! It’s going so well. One of the best angles you’ve ever made.’ He took firm hold of the king’s thick arm and pressed him back into his seat with surprising strength. ‘Now then. Breathe deep, take a sip of the water of life – then back to the task.’

  Somarus relaxed and the lurid flush faded from his face as Kilian sat frozen in place. Dreams? What dreams? Great God, had the royal dolt’s mind finally come unhinged, or was something more sinister afoot? In either case, action would finally have to be taken…

  Kaligaskus was obviously well able to cope with his master’s seizure. After helping him to drink and blotting the royal lips with a silk kerchief he withdrew, leaving Somarus huffing slowly with his eyes shut. In a few minutes the king came to himself once again and spoke in a voice as calm and rational as before the attack overcame him.

  ‘Hmm. Yes. It’s time to finish up and retire. Observe, wizard! With these scissors I snip a bit of stiff feather from a goose-quill. I lay it over the furry thorax, behind the bead-head, and bind it down with more turns of thread. When trimmed short, thus, the feather simulates the cape-like wing case of the waterbug.’ He pushed the dish containing the dead insect toward the chancellor. ‘See for yourself.’

  ‘The thing is half-decayed,’ Kilian muttered in distaste. ‘I cannot discern –’

  ‘Not decayed, but partially digested by the fish. I told you, the insect was taken from the belly of a brown trout. And this is the very essence of the new angling: to discover what the large fish truly eats, not proffer it any old thing and hope to catch it by chance. A trout of noble size doesn’t savor balls of cheese or bits of bread. Such regal swimmers may sometimes take worms or other soft bait, but they are not its preferred food, only what thoughtless man thinks to offer. This dead bug in the dish, so loathsome to us, lives in obscurity on the floor of streams and pools and is only rarely seen by human beings. Yet we can be certain Lord Brownie thinks it supremely delicious.’

  Rather unsteadily, Kilian Blackhorse rose to his feet. ‘Majesty, perhaps we can speak again tomorrow.’

  Somarus’s smile was beatific and his eyes seemed focused upon another, better world.

  ‘So I complete my small, satisfying task, making three knots in the binding thread and snipping it off neatly. My artificial insect is done, a perfect fish’s breakfast. With it, a man may truly match wits with a worthy prey. True, the great brown trout may be more easily netted – or even snagged in the flesh with cruel gigs. But conquering him with this dressed angle that I myself have fashioned…what a simple joy. What a triumph of duplicity!’ He began to giggle softly. ‘Do you doubt me, Lord Chancellor? Come a-fishing with me on the morrow, and I’ll prove my point.’

  ‘Thank you, Majesty, but I am called to more pressing matters.’ And Kilian thought: God’s Blood, was ever a schemer in high places given less likely regal clay to mould?

  They bade each other goodnight, and the one who slept most sweetly was the half-mad king.

  The rain pelted Castlemont’s lower fortified enclosure, where wagon-train drivers, pedlars, and other wayfarers of low estate found shelter for the night in a barnlike guest-hostel at the foot of the knoll crowned by the main keep. The building had a central stone hearth that provided warmth and a means whereby travelers might cook their own food, but few other amenities. Saddle mounts, draft animals, and livestock belonging to guests were hitched to ranks of posts or confined in large pens open to the elements. The beasts were furnished with mangers of cheap hay and troughs of water that now overflowed in the relentless downpour.

  Rusgann Moorcock squatted at the edge of the fire, sparing a brief sympathetic thought for her drenched mule, and finished her supper of toasted bread, sausage, and dried apples. Rain falling through the roof’s chimney-opening was beginning to quench the middle section of the heap of burning pine logs, producing choking billows of smoke. Some of the other guests were already coughing and shifting to more salubrious positions.

  Sipping from one of her flasks of cherry brandy, she thought wistfully about her comfortable bedchamber back at Gentian Fell Lodge. Even though she had plenty of money, she hadn’t dared to seek better accommodation in Castlemont’s famous keep. She would have been too conspicuous. Here inside the dreary hostel, no one paid any particular attention to her and she was finally beginning to relax…in spite of the fact that the hunt for her was definitely on.

  She was certain now that her escape from the Lord Constable’s hideaway had been discovered and her movements traced to the tavern in Beorbrook Town. Earlier in the day, when she came to the summit of Great Pass, the border guards were questioning travelers about a tall woman wearing a red headcloth, a many-colored shawl, and a long white apron, who traveled afoot. Her description had undoubtedly been broadcast far and wide by Vibifus, the unsavory hireling wizard who resided at the hunting lodge and served as its windvoice.

  Fortunately, before purchasing the mule, Rusgann had once again put on her magicker’s disguise. (It had also earned her a small discount from the superstitious stable owner.) On the way up the pass, she’d attached herself to one of the many trains of supply-carts headed for the Sovereign Army encampment, telling the teamsters she was afraid her mule might go lame and strand her on the steep road. The men offered to see her safely to Castlemont if she’d conjure good luck for them. She promised to do that, for what it was worth, and shared her brandy and repertoire of naughty songs with them as well.

  Later, when a suspicious soldier at Great Pass garrison challenged her and demanded to know her business, she slumped in the saddle and gabbled senselessly and sniveled until one of the carters stepped up and claimed she was just his batty old grandma, heading home to Didion. The guard had shrugged and waved her on…

  ‘All to bed now!’ declaimed the hostel keeper, who had begun t
o shoo away the few people still gathered about the hearth. He frowned at Rusgann and said, ‘Will you hire a pallet, mistress? Two farthings.’ He held up a limp tube of sacking, skimpily filled with straw.

  And no extra charge for the fleas! she thought. All the same, she paid for the miserable mattress and carried it into a far corner. She pulled off her stout boots, unrolled the good woolen blanket she’d brought from the lodge, and lay down with her head pillowed on her saddle. On one side of her was a snoring cattle-drover who stank like he hadn’t bathed in a year; on the other was a young peasant couple with a softly whimpering baby.

  If she left very early tomorrow, she might reach Boarsden by evening. The friendly carters had told her that both town and castle would be in a state of turmoil because of the great gathering of nobles, warriors, and hangers-on. As yet, she had no notion of how to find Prince Dyfrig without giving herself away.

  I’ll think of something, she thought. I won’t let my lady down.

  In a brief moment of apprehension, she wondered how Maude fared back at Gentian Fell. Lord Tinnis had to know of Rusgann’s flight by now. The report of it, bespoken by the wizard Vibifus, would have been passed on to the constable at Boarsden by one of the staff windvoices. But surely Tinnis would never punish the Princess Dowager for the escape of her lowborn friend. The man loved Maude to distraction.

  No, Rusgann reassured herself. There was no danger to her dear lady – only to herself, as she’d known from the beginning and freely accepted. But she’d see the precious letter placed in Prince Dyfrig’s hand or die trying.

  She pulled her damp hat down over her face and closed her eyes. Something half-remembered nagged at her mind like a mouse nibbling maddeningly inside a wall, out of reach; nevertheless it was no time before she drifted off to sleep.

  Over by the dying fire, the hostel-keeper stood with hands on hips, staring thoughtfully in her direction.

  For Tinnis Catclaw, Constable of the Realm and chief enforcer of the laws of the Sovereignty, there would be no rest at all that night. He stood at the window of his tower-room in Castle Boarsden, and his unseeing eyes streamed with hot tears.

  It had finally happened, as he knew it must one day. The runaway wench could have only one purpose: to effect the release of her captive mistress – probably by carrying some appeal to the Princess Dowager’s son Dyfrig, who was now an adult and a belted knight with legal status before the law.

  Perhaps Rusgann Moorcock would be captured before achieving her goal, but Tinnis could hardly count on it. The woman might already have passed on the secret to someone – perhaps when she stopped in Beorbrook Town. If the earl marshal’s people went up to Gentian Fell to investigate, they must not find Maudrayne.

  Tinnis Catclaw’s lofty position, his fortune, and his very life depended on it.

  ‘I must order it done,’ he groaned, ‘even though the very thought tears the heart from my body.’

  Wiping the tears from his face, he opened the door leading to the corridor outside his chamber and shouted for his captain of the guard, Sir Asgar Beeton, to fetch his chief windspeaker at once.

  Deep in the Green Morass, alongside a wilderness game-trail that led from the Raging River to Black Hare Lake, Dyfrig Beorbrook felt himself come suddenly wide awake. His companions still slept like dead men, huddled together for warmth.

  Earlier, thickening clouds had blotted out the light of the stars and forced his party to halt their forced march back to civilization. Vra-Erol Wintersett, the resolute military windsearcher, had wanted to press on regardless, using his farseeing talent to lead the others through the pitch-dark forest. But the trapper Calopticus Zorn stubbornly balked at walking blind with only a hand on another man’s shoulder to guide him; and Stenlow, Dyfrig’s equerry, was nursing a bad heel blister. So they’d made a simple bivouac beneath an oilskin lean-to, intending to continue when the sky cleared or at daybreak, whichever came first.

  Dyfrig had fallen into a profound and dreamless slumber almost instantly. None of them had rested properly since leaving the Raging River, so anxious were they to reach the lake villages where they might obtain horses and hasten their journey to Boarsden and the Sovereign.

  The prince was unsure of what woke him. The boreal woodland was silent, enshrouded now in dense mist, but not quite dark. Off to his right, spruce trunks were faintly silhouetted against a fuzzy greenish glow, like the foxfire of rotting wood or the corposants of marshlands. As he studied this phenomenon in perplexity, another insubstantial shining cloud sprang suddenly into being on his left hand. Then a third appeared out of nowhere, immediately in front of the open lean-to. All three of the radiant patches were about a stone’s-throw distant.

  Could they be spunkies?

  He felt his skin crawl. The intelligent nonhuman beings properly named the Small Lights were not normal denizens of the morass, but frequented areas further south, and eastward into Moss. Long years ago, Conjure-Queen Ullanoth was said to have summoned enormous legions of the tiny bloodsucking fiends to assist Prince Heritor Conrig in his daring land assault on Didion’s capital city.

  But spunkies glowed gold or white, not green.

  With each passing moment the shining enigmas brightened. Soon he could discern that within each nimbus were two distinct sources of illumination, paired orbs of emerald, slowly coming closer, growing larger.

  Three sets of huge eyes glowing in the mist.

  Dyfrig’s heart leapt with terror. He opened his mouth to cry out and rouse his companions, but found he could make no sound.

  You will not speak aloud. You will not move. You will answer our questions soundlessly, through your thoughts. Do you understand?

  He couldn’t help it: a raspy cry escaped his lips.

  BE SILENT, HUMAN! Speak through your thoughts. Are you too stupid to understand?

  ‘No.’ He said the word and heard himself say it, but knew that it had come mutely, from his mind. ‘I understand, and I’m not stupid. You’re a Morass Worm, aren’t you!’

  The creature did not answer the question. Why have you dared to invade our lands? Who are you? Are you allies of our ancient foe, the Salka?

  The prince saw one pair of shining eyes rise slowly. The sinuous body of an enormous creature materialized as it approached, reared up, and finally halted some four ells away, looking down at him from more than twice the height of a tall man. Its head was ornamented with webbed frills and mobile tendrils, triple-crested, perhaps covered with close-fitting feathers or oddly marked fur. Its profile was wolfish rather than froggy like that of the grotesque Salka; but its teeth were equally huge, glassy daggers nearly six inches in length. It squatted on powerful hindlegs while holding its forelimbs at its sides with the sickle-sharp claws turned inward, as if indicating that it intended no harm. Because of the swirling vapors, Dyfrig could not see how long the creature’s body might be; but it seemed to have a thick tail, rather like a lizard.

  Or a dragon…

  Answer me, human. Who are you and why are you here? Have you come from her who made the promise to us?

  ‘My name is Dyfrig. I am a prince of my people. I’m here with my four companions seeking information about the Salka invaders. They are our enemies – just as you say they’re yours. The Salka want to kill all humans and seize High Blenholme Island for themselves.’

  All of it? The entire island and not merely this part? The worm seemed surprised.

  ‘Yes. It’s their stated intention. We’ve been fighting off Salka attacks for years along the coast. Their latest invasion from the north almost caught us by surprise. We gathered a great army of warriors to oppose them. When their advance suddenly halted, our leaders were puzzled. They didn’t know if the monsters had suffered some disaster – or if they were only biding their time before moving ahead again.’

  The worm’s long tongue, forked and black, emerged from its mouth and flicked its lips.

  WE were the disaster that befell the Salka! This foolish horde had apparently forgotten that
we dwelt in the morass, and shared the island with them and with certain other entities in the time before the Old Conflict. It was pointed out to us that we could overwhelm the Salka if we fell upon them in a certain way – and so we did. Now we have driven them back into the sea. We presume we will now be allowed to live in peace, as she promised us.

  Dyfrig managed to grin. ‘We found a track made by one of your people, and a broken tooth, and wondered if you were responsible for the Salka retreat.’

  You know the truth. So leave this morass and never return. This is part of the agreement.

  ‘You have my solemn word, as a prince of my people, that we will go away. All of my race owe you a great debt of gratitude for stopping those evil brutes. We might not have been able to defeat them and their sigil sorcery if you hadn’t intervened.’

  The worm threw back its terrible head and uttered a voiceless howl. We spit upon sigil sorcery! We spit upon all abominable users of sigils! We spit upon the Great Lights who tempt Ground beings to exchange pain for power!

  Taken aback, Dyfrig could think of no response. What was the creature talking about? But before he could put the question, the Morass Worm abruptly dropped to all fours, extended its neck, and uttered a soft vocal hiss.

  But that will be resolved in the New Conflict that is to come. For now, I command you to quit our lands and never come back. Do you intend to obey me?

  ‘I’ve said I would.’ The prince replied with dignity. ‘We were already hastening to leave – but darkness and fatigue forced our halt. My friends are tired and sore. If you’d be kind enough to let them sleep until daybreak, I’d count it a courtesy.’

  The fierce head inclined graciously. They may sleep. So may you.

  Dyfrig’s smile was rueful. ‘I’ll probably lie wide-eyed. You’ve frightened me half to death, you know.’