by Glen Cook
The Matayangans were under the sleep spell, but not deeply. Varthlokkur muttered irritably. Why were they not all snoring like the next to dead?
The Disciple was not asleep at all. They found him sitting up, drowsy, on a western-style camp stool, at a little table. He was trying to write by feeble mutton-tallow candle light. His space retained every bit of smell the candle produced. He evidenced no surprise when he saw Haroun. “You’re back.”
“I am. Come. It’s time to go.”
“I will not cooperate.”
“All right.”
Varthlokkur joined them. “I can’t push them into a deeper sleep. Don’t argue with him. Just get him moving.”
The Disciple gaped. He did not recognize the wizard. There was no reason he should. But he had not seen this demon with a companion before, nor could he imagine the Evil One having an accomplice who would tell him what to do.
Haroun moved closer, ready to gag and bind the Disciple.
Yasmid, yawning, sleepily confused, pushed in. “I keep hearing voices, Father… Oh! What…? You?” She froze.
Haroun stopped moving. How weak a sleep spell had the wizard cast? Varthlokkur grumbled, “Maybe it’s the geography. It happens where the ley lines are warped. Or they might be partially immune.”
Haroun was not listening. Even a blind shaghûn could smell this truth. “We have to take her, too.”
“What?” The wizard was at work on the Disciple because Haroun had lost focus.
“She’s pregnant. My responsibility. I can’t leave her…”
That stopped the wizard cold. He shivered, shook his head. “Fate takes some damned strange channels. All right, do what you have to, but do it now! Do it fast! We’re still slipping back on time.” He nudged El Murid, who was now grinding to the conclusion that his situation was worse than he had thought.
Haroun told Yasmid, “You have two minutes to get anything you can’t leave behind. Don’t argue. You know what will happen if you stay. Nothing will save you. Nothing will save our child. So move. Now. The wizard is in a hurry.”
“The wizard is in a hurry, indeed. But the wizard has family, too, and understands the compulsions. Will she run screaming if I relax the sleep spell?”
“No.” He hoped. He looked his wife, his love, the daughter of his lifelong enemy, in the eye. “Get what you can’t live without.”
Yasmid’s eyes closed as Varthlokkur did something. She bobbed her head. Now she had the emotional freedom to be embarrassed. She did not turn away immediately, though. Haroun grew as frustrated with her as the wizard was with him.
As he started to bark, she said, “Neither Father nor I can manage without the Matayangans.”
“What?”
“I don’t know why you came for him. Not to kill, obviously. He would be dead and you would be gone. So you have some use for him. But he won’t be useful if he doesn’t have the Matayangans to manage him and care for him.”
Varthlokkur looked like a man who needed a good shriek and a chance to fling furniture. “Get moving!” Haroun’s voice was soft but adamant and intense. “Now!” He turned to the wizard. “What can you do?”
...
The Matayangans followed Haroun, Yasmid, and El Murid through the portal, single file, as fast as the device could transfer them. Varthlokkur watched and scowled, shuffled nervously, hearing noises develop as people elsewhere stirred. It was no longer possible to do this unnoticed. Radeachar could not remove the portal unseen. There was no longer any point to repairing the slashed tent roof so the mystery of the Disciple’s disappearance would deepen.
Worse, Old Meddler would have what he needed to assemble a portrait of the plot shaping up against him. He had all the tools available to his enemies, and more. He would be able to research this event, decipher its meaning, then would move because of the forces he saw ranged against him. He would strike soon because he was weak, now, and dared not delay seeing to his own protection.
Impatience moved the wizard again. He had to get back to Fangdred. There was much to be done yet to engineer even a chance of brushing away an assault by the Star Rider.
How much was the slight, secret advantage of having the Old Man and Ethrian worth? How much headway had Mist made getting into their minds and memories?
Varthlokkur did not feel optimistic as he placed a foot on Phogedatvitsu’s behind and shoved the bulky man into the portal, hoping all of him made it through.
He looked up at Radeachar. “Now you. We’ll leave the portal. They may not understand what it is.”
The Unborn soared up and away, refusing.
That needed consideration, Varthlokkur reflected. He had a prejudice against portals himself. An outright dread, really, but he would do what he had to do.
He could not recall the last time Radeachar had refused an instruction—if ever it had.
Did it know something? Or did it just share his fears, magnified?
Questions had to wait.
He stepped in, heart in throat, frightened child inside sure that he would not arrive at the other end.
As he did that, tent staff discovered that the Disciple was not in his quarters. The foreigners were missing, too. The Disciple must have gotten away and they were hunting him through the tent again.
There would be no distress till the portal was found. The mood, then, was baffled consternation. No one knew what it was, or what it meant.
...
Mist watched bin Yousif arrive, unhappy but apparently not emotionally crippled. A woman followed, badly frightened. She latched onto bin Yousif. Her movements were strained. She was in considerable discomfort. Damn! She was pregnant? Definitely not smart at her age.
The object of the operation followed, wearing a dimwit look like the one so often seen on Ethrian. He was thoroughly confused. He had no idea about transfer portals.
Brown men followed the Disciple at precise intervals.
Mist approached bin Yousif. “Is this an evacuation?”
“Something like. I could not go without Yasmid. She says she and her father will fall apart without the fakirs to keep them together. We had wasted too much time to argue. We can get rid of them here if they are actually useless.”
Mist turned to her garrison commander. “Kei Lin. Feed these people, get them into civilized clothing, and have them physically examined.” She turned back to bin Yousif. “How many more?”
“Just the wizard and the monster.”
“And the wizard has arrived,” Varthlokkur announced, having appeared in time to hear the question. “I’m the last. Radeachar won’t risk the transfer stream. Instead, it will go scouting in the northern desert.”
She asked, “Can you explain all this?” Making a sweeping gesture.
“Hasn’t the King done so already?”
“Why should I believe him?”
Haroun whispered a translation to his woman.
Mist smiled broadly. Fortune had dealt her a royal flush. She had the Disciple and his daughter. There would be no one to hold that movement together, now. And she had the only serious Royalist claimant to the Peacock Throne. His successor was now a scatter of cracked bones.
She said, “We need to move on quickly. We got a fix on our target at the scene of the murders…”
Varthlokkur had a finger in front of his lips. He whispered, “His mother hasn’t been told.”
“All right. Once we get to Fangdred?”
He nodded.
“I have Scalza, Eka, and Nepanthe trying to track the villain. He doesn’t seem concerned. Maybe he doesn’t care if we watch. More likely, though, he doesn’t know that we can watch.”
“That would be a benefit of the Winterstorm. The magic is different. He doesn’t understand it.”
Mist saw him shiver with a sudden suspicion that he might be deluding himself. That old villain had seen the Winterstorm up close. He had every reason for an abiding interest.
She said, “Kei Lin, one more thing. I want these people free of l
ice, nits, mites, and fleas before we move. Understand?”
He did not, but, “As you wish, Illustrious, so shall it be.”
...
Scalza, with Ekaterina’s assistance, had gotten a scryer locked onto the Star Rider’s horse. “I started out trying to fix it on him… Ouch! Eka!”
“That’s for taking credit for something you didn’t do, Worm.”
“Yeah? All right. Eka did the brain work. And she’s the first one I’m gonna boil in lead after I take over the world.”
Which jest ignited an uncomfortable silence. One did not joke about such things amongst the mightiest faces of the Dread Empire. That reeked too much of possible wickedness.
Eka said, “He’d trip over his own mutant feet and fall in the cauldron himself if I wasn’t there to look out for him.”
That helped, but only a little.
Red-faced, Scalza focused on his task. “Well, anyway, we couldn’t lock it on him. He has some kind of protection that keeps that from happening. So we tried to lock onto the Horn thing because he’s always got that with him. Same thing, so we tried his horse and that worked.”
Varthlokkur said, “It’s an insoluble problem with no satisfactory answer. Knowing where the horse is doesn’t tell us why the rider went there and it doesn’t tell us what he’s doing.”
Mist asked, “Can the Unborn keep an eye on him?”
“It could. But he would notice. That would cost me my best tool.”
“Is he really that powerful?”
“We don’t know, do we? And that’s the point. There’s no telling what powers and resources he has. We do have someone who can tell us, though. Don’t we?”
Among the mob jammed in there were Mist’s mind specialists. The senior of the two stuck to the Old Man, talking softly, studying every move he made on the shogi board. His associate focused on Ethrian and Nepanthe, often involving the boy in a puzzle that required him to manipulate wooden blocks in different shapes and colors. After hassling her brother some more Ekaterina went to watch Ethrian fiddle with those. She had trouble not helping but Ethrian was getting lazy, counting on her to make things easier for him.
The specialist let her do nothing but offer encouragement.
She had it bad for someone just getting into the high drama phase of a girl’s life. Were Ethrian normal her imagination would not have pushed her into such strong fantasies. His obsession with Sahmaman would have sucked the life out of that.
Ekaterina was brighter than the quietly smart, shy child she pretended. She was more introspective than most girls her age. Further, her little brother was the only child she knew. She owned an unusually adult outlook. That included an appreciation of her own emotional landscape. It headed off nothing before it happened but did make it possible for her to analyze and understand after the fact.
She was scared that the real, secret Ekaterina could become one truly frightening adult.
Meantime, she had her crush on her cousin and it was all she could do to keep that hidden and manageable.
Manageable she managed, but, hidden, not so much. Everyone with eyes and a brain sniffed that out.
The puppy love amused everyone. Folks were kind enough not to torment her, Scalza being the exception. Little brothers have obligations.
The specialist who focused on the Old Man said, “We can now touch the level we needed to reach to get the information you want, Illustrious. If I put him into a deep trance he’ll do the rest.” He had been preparing the Old Man for hypnosis since he had arrived. The Old Man’s memory problems were not the result of physical damage. The emotional scarring, though, was serious.
Mist said, “I’m counting on you, Academician Sue.”
“I understand. We need to talk about the desert people, too.”
“Desert people?”
“The ones the wizard brought. Neither Lum nor I speak their language. The only available translators are bin Yousif and the sorcerer. The former is marginally capable because he spent time in one of our prisons—unfortunately Lioantung. Those people have an accent so thick they practically speak their own dialect, which he then butchers with an accent of his own.”
“I see.”
“And I’m not confident of the wizard’s translations. He’s your ally, Illustrious. You know him best. Is his agenda at variance with ours?”
“I ask myself frequently. And I can’t give you a definitive answer. My guess is, he’ll be reliable so long as the greater threat exists. He’s put himself square on target for that one, possibly deliberately.” She looked round, did not see Varthlokkur. He had said nothing about leaving so must be somewhere in the castle. He should not be gone long. He hated leaving outsiders unsupervised in his space. Mist wished he would stay where she could keep an eye on him. “Do the best you can. I’ll find an interpreter you can trust.”
She looked around again. Scalza was focused on the Star Rider, Nepanthe on events in Kavelin. Ekaterina was beside Ethrian, who had abandoned his puzzle in favor of watching the shogi wars from behind Lord Kuo. When did Wen-chin do any work? She seldom caught him in the act but he was always caught up.
The game ended. Victorious, Lord Kuo abandoned his seat. Ethrian and Ekaterina crowded in opposite the Old Man. Eka began resetting the board.
Old man and boy shared a conspiratorial grin.
Scalza called, “Mother, I need you here.”
...
A man with a donkey herd and saddle horses to wrangle ought not to be able to manage much in the way of stealth. Donkeys did not present the nasty challenges offered by camels and mules but they did harken to a unique drummer, in a dimwitted sort of way. They needed close care and inspired supervision. So how could the killer of a king stay out of sight for so long?
Old Meddler was baffled.
Eventually, he decided that someone must be masking the killer from afar. After operating on that premise a while, though, he changed his mind. Even disguised, all those animals would leave a big scat trail and a route stripped of greenery.
The old devil decided that he could not find his man because his man was not out there to be found. He was no longer on the move.
Old Meddler had existed in this world for millennia, and in another for ages before that. His mind was a clutter of ten thousand times the memories of the oldest mortals around. Outside the moment and task at hand that could be a sink of confusion, a cat’s cradle of memories mixed and tangled, fragmented and partially lost. He sometimes enjoyed crystalline recollections of events two thousand years gone but modern memories eluded him even when he knew they were there. Till he actually saw it, and considered it from up close, he did not remember the Imperial watchtower.
There were donkeys and horses at a pool in the shade of the tower. They had stripped every plant. The killer was nowhere to be seen.
A faint, almost echoing call came on the breeze, drifting down from the battlements. He looked up, expecting to glimpse a pale white child’s face. That left him frowning. Why did he think that?
He probed the spell suite that had drawn the killer to the tower. He had done good work back then… He remembered the place now.
His mood collapsed.
He had not shut everything down once he finished manipulating the boy who would become the King Without a Throne.
Troubling, that. An inexcusable lapse. He should review all his recent work, though the blunder was harmless enough—except to the rare traveler who wandered into range of the haunting call.
He tried to get to the tower from above, as in the old days, but his mount shied off. It refused two further attempts. Could it sense something that he did not? Though unlikely, the chance should not be ignored. Silly to force something dangerous.
Could someone have converted the tower into a deathtrap? Improbable, but improbable death had stalked him a thousand times. Death had her eye on him now, and was sharpening her claws, he was sure.
It was the season to indulge in a psychotic level of caution.
&n
bsp; He brought the winged horse to earth near the pool. The donkeys still carried their travel packs, the horses their saddles. The killer had become too entranced to take care.
He did not ease their burdens himself, though it would have taken but a moment to have the Windmjirnerhorn deliver fodder and grooms of a golem kind. The idea never occurred.
Obviously, the killer had been taken by the tower. No mystery, that.
A conjured haunting, crocheted from true, wicked ghosts captured and constrained to carry out targeted missions, could endure indefinitely. Numerous such infested the world, many this same devil’s handiwork, abandoned in place once he finished using them.
The old being looked at that ruin, then at his mount. Not a long walk but a walk nevertheless. So much easier just to drop in from above.
Easier. But a stubborn beast made the walk a must. Was there a real threat? Come to think, the original setup made its victim circle the tower several times before the entrance revealed itself. Was the animal just being difficult? Why start at this late date?
He walked. His patience did not last. After one circuit, with his soles and legs aching, he settled onto a boulder and fingered valves on the Windmjirnerhorn while trying to think how best to avoid further exercise.
He spied the dark gap of the entrance, groaned. So. He had to go on in like a regular victim.
He got up. He limped. He ached. How much longer must he endure before his parole finally came through?
†
CHAPTER
TWENTY-SEVEN
WINTER, YEAR 1018 AFE:
SPIRALING IN
“I didn’t get much sleep last night,” Ragnarson announced. “My own fault. I wanted to catch up on the real story around here.”
He sat at the same table he had used for small conferences before he went out east. Inger used it for her own meetings. This morning’s gathering was the biggest there since soon after Ragnarson’s disappearance. The Queen and her main henchmen were present. So were Aral Dantice, Michael Trebilcock, Ozora Mundwiller, and Kristen Gjerdrumsdottir. The tension was less than expected despite Bragi’s prior assertion that the meeting would continue till he was satisfied that their conflicts had been resolved.