A Tale of the Five Hundred Kingdoms, Volume 2

by Mercedes Lackey

  The throne was not only on a dais, it was inside a kind of enclosure that was twice the height of the throne itself, gilded on the inside. The effect would be to make both the throne and its occupant seem larger and more important. Katya wondered what the Katschei had looked like. Had this been his idea? Had he been a wizened little thing, or the opposite? She had the feeling he had been small and wizened, and very self-important.

  There were two niches for guards behind the throne, in the two rear corners of the room. Because of the enclosure, the one guard on duty could not actually see the throne itself. But Guiliette would have to be very careful when crossing the floor between the wall and the throne. There was no real way to approach it without being in the guard’s line of sight at some point.

  Alas, that the Wili could not fly! It would have been so much easier if she had been able to drift in the rafters among the battle banners, and float down into the enclosure. There would have been a point where she was exposed, but not nearly for as long.

  She slipped out of the minstrel’s gallery and down the stairs to get to the corridor, for although she could pass through the floor, to do so would mean she would fall from the ceiling. It wouldn’t hurt her, but it might make a noise. The guard would be watching the door, of course, but he might not be watching the wall, so that was why she was going to pass through the stones.

  Guiliette had already checked the niche in the wall; that was easy for her, and accomplished just in the same way that she found the secret passageways and three other hiding places. It had, alas, been empty, but at least they hadn’t had to go through all the rigmarole of sitting on the throne and finding and pressing nearly invisible jewels in order to check it.

  So once Guiliette was out of the minstrel gallery, they waited. And waited. There was no sign of the Wili. Katya began to get impatient, then alarmed. What could be going on?

  Then Lyuba chuckled throatily. Katya glanced at her sharply.

  “Look at the floor,” the Wolf maiden whispered. “Halfway between the wall and the throne.”

  It took Katya a moment to see it, because the stone of the floor was full of irregularities, and because she wasn’t sure what she should be looking for. But then, finally, she made out something, as transparent as a jellyfish, moving along the stone. It was the Wili, who had plastered herself flat to the floor and was crawling toward the throne, taking advantage of the stone to hide her, and the fact that the guard was keeping watch for someone standing or walking, not crawling. This would be why she was taking so long, of course.

  “Oh clever!” Katya breathed. “Good for you, Guiliette!”

  “Does it seem to you that we are becoming more clever all the time?” Yulya asked. “I mean, I feel cleverer. Not that I’m getting overconfident! But I do feel much cleverer than I was before, and I know I’m thinking of more solutions to things by myself.” Then she frowned. “Or do you think it’s all The Tradition? Is there a Path for this sort of thing? Will I stop being clever when I am back with the flock?”

  She really had changed. Katya nodded. “I suppose that being clever is like anything else. If you do a lot of thinking, especially thinking for yourself, you get better at it. I honestly don’t think The Tradition is helping us much here, if at all. It can’t—there’s no Path for this. I think this is all us. I think that we are all getting better and better at finding solutions for problems.”

  “Really?” Yulya sounded rather happy about that. “Oh good. I’ve been thinking that I’m tired of having people think of answers for me.”

  Katya smiled. “You’re a different girl from the one that was abducted. Yes, a cleverer one. I think you should be proud of that, Yulya.”

  You won’t have to depend on anyone else to tell you what to do after this, she thought. “It wouldn’t hurt to show your sisters how to reason things through, when you get back.” She chuckled. “You’re going to be the flock leader now, you realize this, don’t you?”

  Yulya giggled a little, embarrassed. “I probably will. There wasn’t one after Oksana was married. She always was the truly clever one—”

  Remembering that story, Katya said wryly, with her eyes still on the crawling Wili, “Not all that clever. Not when that husband of hers caught her by stealing her swan-cloak.”

  Yulya flushed a little. “Well…some of us suspect that was no accident. She had been saying for a while that she was tired of the flock and wished she could go somewhere alone. We couldn’t understand it—why wouldn’t she want to be with the flock? And of course, when she did get a chance to escape, she came straight back to us, but—”

  “But she knew very well that husband of hers would follow. And she knew he’d find a way to get her back. Right? If he hadn’t guessed she was his wife by her hands, she’d have found some other way to show him.”

  Guiliette was almost to the throne. The guard still hadn’t spotted her—

  Wait—

  He peered in the direction of the Wili and stepped a little out of his niche, frowning.

  Lyuba writhed into Wolf form and was off like a shot before Katya could say anything. Katya clutched the sill of the screen and held her breath. What on earth was the Wolf maiden up to? She wasn’t stupid—she might not always think quite like a human, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Lyuba loped into the room, tail wagging, head high, and dragging her feet just a tiny bit to make the same sort of sound that the Wili might, when crawling. The guard relaxed.

  “So it was you I heard out there! Doing a run?” he asked. And he grinned, which made Katya relax. Evidently Lyuba had been making herself popular among the guards.

  Lyuba transformed back into human shape. “By the Leshii, this place is like a cage! Worse, a cage in a cage, with all that desert out there! I don’t know how you humans stand it! Yes, I was doing a run, is there anything you’d like fetched up from the kitchen?”

  “A flask of water—I think the days are getting hotter, this throne room was like an oven earlier,” he replied, taking out a handkerchief and wiping his brow. “Eh, it’s a good job, but this is a damned odd place.”

  “You need to look into some other sort of uniform if you are going to keep serving this fellow,” Lyuba observed, eyeing him critically. “I never have understood all the cloth you humans burden yourselves with, but in this place, friend, that is insane. Look at you! All wool! Even sheep know not to grow much wool in the desert!”

  The man tugged at the collar of his tunic and grimaced. “I’ll take it up with the Captain, Loobie, you have a point. Of course—” he looked around carefully “—I know I can count on you not to spill this…we might not be serving him much longer. Captain doesn’t like some of what he’s been hearing out of the Jinn’s mouth. Little things like ‘when you’re all my slaves, there will be no complaining.’ Our term is up in a fortnight, and I think he’s looking at another job.”

  Lyuba grimaced; by now, Katya saw, the Wili had reached the throne and was well under cover of the enclosure.

  “Well, you know,” the Wolf maiden said, “you might look into Copper Mountain. I understand the Queen sometimes takes mortal mercenaries to guard the doors. And with this Jinn on her doorstep, she’s likely to be thinking hard about just that. You could do a lot worse. The pay is good and she’s not the sort to fly off the handle and start something you have to finish.”

  The guard shook his head. “No, not for us. I’ve seen what the Jinn can do when he’s angry, and we have no defense against that. No, he’s looking south, into the human Kingdoms. Ordinary soldier work, that’s the thing for us. No more mucking around with magical types. There’s some things that no amount of pay can compensate for, and seeing the Jinn burn up that Rusalka, you can’t help but wonder what he’d do if you crossed him.”

  The Wili was crawling back along the floor, faster now, since Lyuba had the guard’s attention.

  “Well, fewmets. I don’t like being in a cage, but some keepers are better than others, and you lot weren’t bad.” Lyuba lo
oked melancholy. “I like you fellows and that’s a fact. Don’t at all mind running errands for you, you’re not all growls and hatefulness just because you’re guards. I hate to think what’s going to replace you.”

  “Probably more like him,” the guard replied, with sympathy. “We’re getting the idea that the bigger he gets, the more of his own kind he’ll have working for him instead of us plain old mortals. Sorry, Loobie. You’re a good girl, and I wish we could take you with us. You’d make a great Company mascot. We could put your picture on the banner and everything.”

  Lyuba chuckled. “I would, wouldn’t I? I could run dispatches, scout, get in behind enemy lines, cut through their horse lines and turn their mounts loose, then chase them off, and when I wasn’t doing all that, scare the crap out of new recruits when they get too full of themselves.”

  “All that and more.” The guard laughed, and Lyuba laughed with him. Katya marveled. It was very clear that Lyuba had been making a lot of friends among the guards. Clever of her, for certain.

  “Well let me run you that water, before you pass out.” With another bizarre writhing of her form, Lyuba became a Wolf again, and dashed out the door. About that time, the Wili glided quickly into the minstrel’s gallery. “Nothing,” she said. “The hole was empty.”

  “Well that just means we won’t have to deal with the throne room. That is not a bad thing,” Katya pointed out as Lyuba dashed into the throne room again, tossed the waterskin she was carrying in her mouth into the air with a flip of her head, and waited for the guard to catch it. It was quite a performance, and clearly one she wasn’t doing for the first time. With a bark and a tail wag, she dashed out again.

  A moment later she was back with the rest of them. She jerked her head sideways toward the door; Katya nodded, and they all headed for safer areas. They were courting discovery in the minstrel’s gallery.

  As they entered a more public corridor, Yulya stopped. “I can’t bear it anymore. My curiosity is eating me alive, and has been since you joined us. Lyuba, how do you transform and still have clothing?”

  The Wolf turned around, and writhed into the girl again. She was laughing. “I’m not,” she said. “It’s an illusion. I’m really absolutely bare. People see what they expect to see, and they don’t expect to see a naked woman running about. Oh, I do wear clothing when I’m going to stay human for a while, but if I’m transforming a great deal, I don’t bother. Go ahead, try to see through the illusion now that you know.”

  Katya’s eyes widened, as she did just that, and realized that Lyuba was telling the truth, because there she was…wearing…nothing but air.

  Now, this was hardly shocking to her, since most of her father’s subjects tended to be very cavalier about clothing. But Yulya—

  Sure enough, Yulya gave a little squeak and hid her eyes. Lyuba transformed back again. But she was still laughing, Wolf-fashion, jaws wide and tongue lolling, as she ran off.

  * * *

  While the others pooled their information and tried to figure out where to look next, Katya was in the stable, consulting with Sergei. “It’s not in any of the hiding places you mentioned,” Katya told the Horse. “So if you were a Jinn, where would you hide a bottle? You don’t want to destroy it, I presume.”

  “A smart magician would make sure that destroying the bottle would do something bad to the Jinn,” Sergei replied. “I think we can assume that any magician wise enough to confine a Jinn is going to be sure to take that sort of precaution with the bottle.”

  Katya sat down in the straw of the Horse’s stall, just under the manger, with her back to the wall. “Just out of curiosity—why would anyone put a Jinn in a bottle if they are so dangerous? And if you have to imprison it, why put it in a bottle? Why choose something that can be opened again? That doesn’t make a great deal of sense to me. I’d imprison him in a crystal or a sealed box and drop it into the deep part of the ocean.”

  Sergei tilted his head to the side and one ear flopped over. “Good questions, both. Hmm, well…I assume that you can’t simply destroy a Jinn. The Katschei was supposedly Deathless only because he took steps magically to make himself invulnerable. He wasn’t really a spirit. And most of the creatures we think of as being ‘spirits’ are really quite mortal, they just live a very long time. The Queen of Copper Mountain is one of those, and so are the Baba Yagas. Then on the other hand, you have the Rusalkas that are ghosts, your Guiliette who is the same…and I presume, the Jinn. Pure spirits can take on a physical form, but they don’t need it. And you can’t really destroy them. In the case of a ghost, you can send them on to—whatever fate awaits them, or like the Jinn, you can confine them, or drive them away. But you can’t destroy them. So if you want to be rid of them, you need to imprison them.”

  “Hmm.” She thought about that. “All right, then why put them in something that can be opened? What possible reason could you have for not dropping the thing into a volcano or the deepest part of the ocean?”

  Sergei blinked at her.

  “Mercy,” he said softly.

  Her eyebrows rose. “Mercy? What, in the name of the good saints, do you mean by that?”

  Sergei’s eyes softened, and for once, there was nothing sarcastic, ironic, or comical about his tone. “These are creatures that cannot be destroyed. You can’t allow them to run about loose, because of all the damage they can inflict. They are, simply put, a menace, and they do need to be confined where they can’t hurt anyone. But they are also thinking beings, things that can reason and are aware of their own existence. Yes, they have chosen paths of evil and harm. But don’t they deserve a chance to repent and reform?”

  Katya opened her mouth, then shut it again. This was a question to which she really had no answer. “Can they?” she finally asked. “Repent and reform, I mean. Just listening to this one, it doesn’t seem likely.”

  “I don’t know. I don’t know much more than you about Jinn. But the one who put him in a bottle obviously thought so.” The Horse sighed. “I’d rather err on the side of mercy, myself. I might be in need of some myself one day, and it isn’t only Fortunate Fools who get back what they give to others.”

  She considered this. “Could you find the City of Brass?” she asked. “I know you’ve found a lot of other places, probably more unlikely than that, like the Well of the Water of Life and Death.”

  “Probably. It wouldn’t take me long to get there if I knew the way. But since I don’t know the way, I don’t think I can get there and back with help from the lawful Jinni in time to help us.” His ears drooped with obvious regret. “It was a good idea though. I wish you’d thought of it sooner.”

  “That wasn’t what I was thinking—or actually I was. If we lose, I think you should go there and get these lawful Jinni to help you, help Father, because we simply can’t allow this one to keep destroying the forest with his desert.” She bit her lip. She didn’t want to think about losing, because if they lost…Sasha would probably die. Not only that, but she might die if the Jinn thought she was too much trouble to keep alive. In fact, she would rather be dead, because she didn’t want to think of having to go on without Sasha. The very thought felt like a spear in her heart. “But if we win, the Jinn will be back in the bottle and no matter what we did with it, there would be a chance that someone would find it and open it again. So I want you to take the bottle to the City of Brass and the Jinn’s own people. If anyone will know what to do with him, you would think it would be them.”

  “Good idea,” Sergei said, brightening. I will do just that.” His ears came up. “I promise.”

  “Now, help me think, here. If you were a Jinn, where would you put such a bottle?” she asked.

  “I would want it some place where ordinary mortals couldn’t touch it. Someplace where, however, I could. That would be—in a fire?”

  She frowned. “Hot as it is, there are no fires anywhere around the Castle—” No—that wasn’t quite true! “—except the kitchen!” she all but shouted. “The bread ove
ns!”

  Sergei picked up his ears even farther. “Is it late enough for them to have been banked?”

  “Should be…can you tell if I am going to alert him by moving his bottle?” she asked. “I’ll have to take it out of the oven to read what is on it.”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “Go get the rest. I will meet you at the kitchen door.”

  “The rest” were not hard to find; all of them were sitting disconsolately around their shared room. They all must have been pinning their hopes to the throne room. When she explained her idea, life came back to all of them.

  “We’ll stand guard!” Lyuba said, as the bear-girl nodded.

  “I’ll watch for trouble coming from outside,” Guiliette said bravely. “If the Jinn comes, I might be able to delay him.”

  “Huh…” Klava said, and then grinned. “Oh, I have such an idea!”

  “What?” The sparkle in her eyes made Katya think that it was probably a very mad idea—and in this case, the madder, the better.

  “Come on! No skulking, no hiding! Everyone laugh and talk! We’re making cakes!” She seized Magda by the hand and hauled her out the door, laughing and chattering more than enough to cover up Magda’s astonished silence.

  “Oh yes!” said, of all people, Guiliette. She clapped her hands and began to giggle, in a little silvery laugh, and glided out the door after her. Whatever Klava had thought of then dawned on Marina, who also laughed, grabbed Lyuba, and ran after. The rest followed, though it was clear that most of them had no idea why they were making so much noise. Still, Klava seemed certain of her idea, and both Guiliette and Marina had also figured out her plan and liked it, and that was enough for Katya.

  The mob of young women streamed down the corridors, occasionally meeting with some of the Jinn’s hired guards. To each of them, Klava cried merrily, “We’re making cakes!” and somehow this pronouncement turned puzzled and suspicious looks and even frowns to indulgent smiles.