Fel-Holdt arose to play devil’s advocate. He said bluntly, “I deem that skyship to be impregnable. What say you all to this?”
They glumly agreed.
“Since this truth also applies to the other, the blue sphere,” he continued, “we’ve no choice but to send our royal family to a hidden place until we can find a way to deal with this spawn of ghast. Why say you?”
Again they agreed.
But Caronne arose to reject any idea of sanctuary. “My place,” he announced flatly, “is here! At the great battle of Dunguring, I left our castle to lead Marack’s armies against the enemy. But that was an all-or-nothing engagement When our Lord Commander, together with our Collin, then sought out the Dark One in his dread land of Om and destroyed him, I was forced by circumstances to guard our center, just here, against those of you who’d become mind-possessed.
“So must this be again. While the king lives and is at Glagmaron Castle, though he be in the deepest dungeon, then Marack, too, is not dead. If I am slain here, why then I’m also martyred, as is our country, likewise. In. any case, if I live and am here and am oppressed, opposition can then be rallied. … I’ll leave the particulars for such a strategy for those best equipped for it Coffin!” he called sharply. “What say you to this riddle within a riddle? Those from the skyship say they are our ancestors, the very ones you’ve described as having been destroyed on that other beauteous world; while we, or our fathers were being magicked here, across the heavens. Are they our ancestors? And if so, what shall we do now? I’ve an observation, if you will: If these are indeed the sons of our forebear; of those who destroyed their world ia the long ago, I can now understand how it could be. For I say to you all that whatever they are or were, they are no longer such. Tis they who have degenerated. And ‘tis we who have grown!”
He’d put his finger on it! Proving the Adjusters’ principle that leadership bestows upon all leaders some modicum of knowledge that they’d otherwise not have. Though such is not always the case, it was most certainly proven here, with this king of Marack….
I arose. “Sire and lords,” I called, “to claim such ancestry is one thing; to prove it another. I’ve seen what you’ve seen. And I say that our king speaks truly: that in the flesh this may be so. But in their conduct, which opposes all that we hold dear, it is truly they who have degenerated.”
I got a burst of applause for that. “However,” I continued when the acclaim died, “the problem we must deal with now is to find a solution to the whole, else we and all that we know will perish.”
I then paused to draw a deep breath and say dramatically, “We have a weapon, sirs, that these usurpers do not. It is weaker, true. But!” and I raised a hand to stay their instant enthusiasm, “if it is properly organized it can help to win the day. This weapon is the magick possessed by our witches, warlocks and sorcerers. But, and I repeat, it must be organized to be effective.
“It is in this respect, then,” I continued, “that I now ask permission to leave this very night with such of my student warriors as will accompany me, and with sufficient lords of this council, inclusive of our master strategist, Fel-Holdt, to rally the northern kingdoms against the enemy. We should find no problem in this last, my lords, since the remaining enemy ships will most certainly have landed at Corchoon, in Kelb; Janblink, in Great Ortmund; Rheen, in Ferlach, and at Saks in Gheese.
“I also ask that our Princess Murie Nigaard be allowed to accompany me, her betrothed. For it would not be wise to leave both the king and the princess in the hands of our enemy.”
I’d meant to continue, but Murie arose to yell: “Hey, Col-lin! Though ‘tis true that you’ll be my lord, ‘tis also true that I’ll remain your princess. And so ‘tis I, sir, who’ll have the final say here. Now do you list me well and do not take me wrong… . Those from the skyship are men and should therefore be dealt with as such by you and our Lord Fel-Holdt, in your way. I, in the meantime, will deal with them in mine! There are many ways to win a battle, sirs. The stakes are high. I therefore choose to stay and with my person to delay them, to buy time to organize this struggle. And that, Collin, is the way it will be.”
I was struck momentarily dumb. It was the one thing I’d not expected to hear. Indeed, so conditioned had I become to full possession of that nubile and delightfully rewarding body that any suggestion as to its real ownership and real purpose had simply been written out of my thinking. In effect, and completely unknown even to myself, I’d long since lost any measure of balance and maturity in that most delicate of areas—jealousy!
The effect now was an instant redness to cloud my eyes and to rage inside my head so that I called out, “But my lady, you fantasize, at best. One cannot control these creatares. Indeed, ‘twould be presumptuous to attempt to—considering the risk.”
With the redness had come a series of indelible strobes, each of them showing Murie with Tarkiis. And each of them, born of my own quite wicked imagination, was so graphically specific as to make me literally grind my teeth in impotent fury. It was uncanny! Especially, since there was still a part of me that recognized the schizoid nature of my thoughts. In all my thirty years I’d never felt a streak of jealousy in the accepted sense; nor had I ever lost my—as Hooli would say, in Terran archaic—cool. Why now, the small sane part of me wondered, this nonsense, this paradigm of childish pique?
And there she stood, my fairy-tale princess, and in the exact stance that so epitomized her total personality: hands on hips, booted legs apart, and with her elvish eyes hard on me, challenging. She ended the quite weird tableau herself by simply bouncing her golden bangs, frowning and saying easily: “Hey, Collin. I think I can!”
Her words were a flatted sword smacking my chest. My reply was choked; I was actually trying to swallow my words before I said them, because I knew better. My saner side lost. I heard myself saying foolishly, “Murie. Hear me. I’ll not allow it!”
To which she replied between clenched teeth. “My lord. You will allow it!”
There are a myriad of shibboleths, procedural methods in protocol, customs, rites, whatever, and all of them within the accepted mores of any developing society. … I now stood mutely within that absolutely silent hall, for I knew full well that in Marack, I’d just broken every one.
I drew a deep breath, focused in and seized hard upon myself. I held for seconds, creating the proper rhythm until the red left and my heart stilled. I then said quietly to all that silence, “Sire. My Princess. My lords. I ask your pardon and deeply apologize to all of you. Our Princess of Marack is right and I am wrong. It is, sirs, that I’d thought too much upon my own needs and too little on the problem at hand. So let it be. I will now, if you wish, withdraw myself as the leader of this project, or continue, as this council will decide. One way or the other, I remain at Marack’s service.”
The silence persisted. To my rear Rawl coughed, deliberately or nervously. It came as the loudest crash of thunder.
The king himself arose finally to hold each of the fifty with his eyes and say—and there was some amusement in his voice—”Well now, so much for youth. If we’ve learned nought tonight but that our Collin, too, is human, we’re still the gainer. Yet, the time grows short, Sir Lenti; as you yourself have warned us (he’d called me by my Marackian name). We await, therefore, a continuance of your, discourse.”
I nodded, breathed deep again and continued as if nothing had happened. “We will go first,” I told them, “to Gortfin Castle. For, if I recall correctly, it is there that the Lady Elioseen, greatest of witches, sorcerers, warlocks and the like in all the north, is still imprisoned. I’m even reminded that ‘twas she who spiritied myself, my comrade, Sir Rawl Fergis, and her niece, the Princess Murie Nigaard, from the Glagmaron highroad to Castle Gortfin in those far days before Dunguring; beginning thusly, the war of Marack against Kelb and the Dark One’s hordes from below the River-Sea.
“I’ve heard nought of her since Dunguring, ‘cepting that she’d been put in the care of six of
her kind, for only that many, enjoined, could stay her power. I propose, my lords, to use Elioseen’s magick now in the interest of all Fregis. If the price we pay is her freedom, why then it should be little enough in the face of what we might lose without it … What say you all? I think ‘tis the proper path—that we work with the Lady Elioseen, on the one hand to organize all Fre-gis’s magick against these sky men, and on the other, to reorganize our own disbanded forces to oppose in every way the new evil that’s come upon us.
“In this regard,” I warned them, “there’ll be many like the merchants of this afternoon, who’ll turn against us for power and gold. Such men work quickly to prove themselves to their new masters. In the case of the merchants and the others they hinted at, it could be only hours before they have armed men in the field against us. Which means that we must move to nip that in the bud, and instantly.”
Per-Looris interrupted, his voice barely a whisper. “Collin,” he said. ” Tis obvious, regarding our Lady Elioseen, that you know not whereof you speak. Her power was in some ways greater than that of the Dark One. You must understand that other than the twenty-thousand troops, there were twelve, not six of us who went against her at Gortfin. And I assure you, sir, we’d still not have won except for a surge of great power from an unknown source. Twas because of that alone that we won and she lost. To free her now, young lord, whatever her pledges, is to risk a darkness to easily rival that of Tarkiis.”
I smiled sadly. “Nay, good sorcerer. You may know your Elioseen. But / know such as Tarkiis well. I doubt she could equal him with all her tricks. Now I’ll ask you sir: Is there a witch or warlock, aside from the Lady Elioseen, who can do what she did: deliver the princess, myself, Rawl and the good Dame Malion across two hundred miles of space with but the snap of a finger?”
“There is not.”
“Yet ‘tis precisely that magick that well need. My Lords.” I turned to face the council. “There’s an old saying: Better the devil we know than the one we don’t. I’ve never seen His Majesty’s sister; never talked to her. I deem it appropriate now that I do so. I’m bound to think that at heart she’s Marackian and that she will recognize our mutual peril. As for after, well sirs, I cannot begin to match her powers here. But I can exile her to where her words can wreak no harm on anyone.”
The king seized his head in both hands and groaned. “She’s my sister, Collin. I swear, I’ve never sought her death.”
“Nor would I seek it,” I told him quickly. “There are other worlds, my lord, like this one—as our princess, Per-Looris and the others can now attest. She could be happy there.”
“So be it then. How say the rest of you?” He lifted his head to show a face quite gray and weary.
They agreed and we discussed it some more until it was generally understood what we would do and how we’d do it. We then pledged solemnly that no single word of what we’d decided would pass our lips outside this chamber—on pain of death!
We were to leave immediately after sup, which was beginning that very minute, with tureen-laden platters being marched in from the kitchens. A thing to remember: though the sky is collapsing around him, a true Fregisian will never refuse a proffered meal; nor will he allow extraneous happenings to interfere in his pleasure in it We’d even begun to relax somewhat. For now at least we had some idea what we would do; no real plan, true. But it was something to believe in. Moreover, I’d kept a few aces up my sleeve which could speed things up considerably, if I could get them moving.
My prime concern was the sphere, not the ship. I half believed that with a modicum of luck we could take the ship. The sphere, however, was something else. The sphere had destroyed a starship, and a starship was indestructible!
Murie had joined me for sup. She sat close, sad-eyed and quiet, while most around us, in defiance of the morrow, had even become a bit merry. She’d been that way, I’d noted, since the name of our Lady Elioseen had first been introduced. I tried to comfort her, touched her when I could, along with other surreptitious intimacies. At first I’d thought she had second thoughts as to staying. But when she could stand it no longer what I suspected to be the true reason, surfaced … She said hoarsely, “My Lord. What have you heard; what do you know of my aunt, the Lady Elioseen?”
“Very little,” I said lightly, though I knew what everyone else knew—that Elioseen was one of Marack’s true beauties.
Keeping a straight face, I refilled our glasses and raised mine to pledge Rawl who was seated across the table. He raised his own glumly. The reason? Caroween had agreed to stay with Murie. “For the same purpose,” she’d told my shieldman. “Our cause demands it I, too, am a princess, and will soon be queen in Great Ortmund. Tactics, my good father told me, are but the tools of the trade. Tis strategy that’s the art. What’s best-for Marack,” she reasoned, “is therefore best for Ortmund.”
He couldn’t argue with that; indeed, that wasn’t what was troubling him. The strategy was his bete noir. For she had yet to define it clearly….
Murie, thinking my thoughts had wandered, pinched me to get my attention, as was her way. “My aunt,” she informed me, “is more than a sorceress. She’s an enchantress, too… . Tis said that all men who see her love her.”
I raised my eyebrows, perversely happy to see that she was as jealous as I had been. And, I thought smugly, with less reason! Well now, my love, I mused inwardly, here indeed is a game that two can play. To her, I said, “Well mayhap shell find me not so vulnerable.”
“Just mayhap?”
“Hey, Murie. I’d be even less so had I a certain dimpled tummy within reach to distract me.” I placed a probing hand beneath the table and walked my fingers all around upon the delightfully velvet covered object in question.
From habit, she squirmed deliciously, though a deep frown had touched her forehead. Still she made no move to thrust me away. She said intensely, “I know her, Collin!”
“How could you not. She’s your aunt.” I let my eyes wander again to show disinterest. “My father’s a full twenty-five years her senior, Collin. She’s your age. Tis said that her birth was a miracle of Wimbely. Her mother died of it.”
“That young? And with such power? It makes no sense, my love. I’d accept an aging facsimile of our good Per-Looris. But at age thirty, and the greatest worker of magic in all the north?”
I too frowned. All games aside, I wondered, had the Dark One had a hand in it? There was something here that I didn’t like at all….
“She was born with it, so ‘tis said.”
Fel-Holdt signaled then that the time of departure was near. He’d sent two daring young warriors down the castle’s number one secret passage—it surfaced at the foot of the cliffs on the west road circling Glagmaron city. Their task: to contact the wardens of the king’s dottle herds to the north. We’d need four dottles per rider, for we would each ride straight through to Gortfin, a distance of over two hundred miles. There would be a picked company of two hundred swordsmen and fifty of my best student-warriors. Fel-Holdt, by this time, would have also selected some two dozen lords and knights who were bone-loyal to the king and skilled in all manner of leadership. The lords and swordsmen, plus half of my students, would ride with Fel-Holdt; the rest with me.
Therefore the need of two hundred and fifty dottles on the river-road to take our people around the city to the herds; while I and mine rode directly through it to attract the attention of whatever forces our merchants would have had time to amass. I’d told the others that any attempt by the merchants would be perfunctory at best; designed more to capture one or two of ours as both a present and a source of information to Tarkiis. They would send maybe twenty or thirty; this, to attack what they would presume to be but a dozen or so couriers—and I had a plan to upset even that.
Fel-Holdt’s signal had meant that his men would soon be starting out, which meant that my group too should get ready.
A burst of hard rain literally churned the slabs in the outer courtyard, like a great wate
rfall. Lackeys came running to curtain the windows with heavy tarps. All around us the candles guttered as if touched by the whispers of corpse-men.
Murie was saying, with a certain ill-hidden testiness, “Well, then. I doubt not but that you’re looking forward to a new conquest”
“That ‘I be looking? By the gods,” I said meanly in reply, ” ‘tis not I who suggests that you dally here with that buff-furred, murderous manikin. You think to bend him to your wishes? You’ve thought wrong. He’ll eat you up, my lady, and that’s a fact”
Damn! I was talking again when I should be listening. What, I wondered, had happened to my Adjuster training? A single elvish eye looked up to measure me; this, from where her cheek touched her chest. She said demurely, moving queen to check, “Well then, my love, the joust will not lack for pleasant moments, will it? Til tell you now that few women in all Marack would reject advances from so comely a person.”
I went instantly cold and stiff, the wrong defense against such teasing. She felt it instantly. I countered. “You are my love, Murie. But I’ll play no games with you. Do what you wiH when I am gone; in the name, as you put it, of ‘saving Marack.’ But spare me the details. I’ve no stomach for them. In the meantime, I’ll check out your Lady Elioseen.”
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